Progress in the Arts

From Geekzine:

One of the first pornographic images I ever saw was a spread of Dorothy getting gang-banged by the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow. It was crude smut, nothing more than titillation created for its shock value. And when my mother discovered it hidden under my bed, it was deposited in the trash. It wasn't a new idea. The Tijuana Bibles of the '30s and '40s were full of similar images: Betty Boop giving head; Lil' Abner sporting a healthy hard-on; Popeye impaling Olive Oyl on his spinach-strengthened member. In one of my favorites Donald Duck buggers Mickey as the Disney mouse squeals, "Tee-hee, Donald, that tickles so good." These eight-pagers were the lowest form of comics, anonymously created and distributed. The sub-genre continues to this day. Do an image search of Marge Simpson for examples. It's pornography at its most common: unoriginal and mindless.

The writer's Lost Girls (which will be published tomorrow) is a beautifully perverse graphic novel that elevates the pornographic tale; it is a bold, and rare, story of uninhibited sexual fantasy that succeeds at titillating as well as enlightening. It is sensually drawn by Melinda Gebbie, Moore’s wife.

As in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore combines characters of the late 19th century and early 20th century for an epic adventure, except this time the adventures are sexual. The heroines from The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan meet as adults in an Austrian hotel in 1913, shortly before World War I. Dorothy, fresh off her Kansas farm, is a nympho in silver shoes; Alice is a world-weary lesbian; Wendy is a housewife trapped in a boring marriage. They romp with one another and tell their tales, sexually charged versions of the stories we associate with each character. In Wendy's case, Peter Pan is a male prostitute who seduces her and her brothers. Alice submits herself to the sexual dominance of the "Red Queen." Dorothy’s sexual awakening begins when she masturbates while caught up in a twister.

Moore explores a wide range of sexual fantasies. There are tales of pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, homosexuality, orgies, sadomasochism. In one of the many stories within the story, a Victorian family shares more than tea and crumpets, and the man of the house punishes his wife and two children by administering a rousing dose of anal sex. In defense of his lurid tale about the family (and of Lost Girls itself, one imagines), the hotel manager, declares, "They are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence." It's a dirty book, no doubt; yet it still manages to paint an enchanting, fascinating world where the mind is free to roam.

The hotel manager later declares, "Pornographies are the enchanted parklands where the most secret and vulnerable of all our many selves can safely play." It’s a fitting description for Lost Girls, and only someone of Alan Moore's wild genius can pull it off. He wonderfully balances both ends of the smut/erotica spectrum, at times tipping toward the merely titillating, and then leaning toward that delightful world of exploration and discovery. Lost Girls is one of the most important works of pornography of our time and another example of the graphic novel as a powerful literary medium.

Here's what this lovely couple looks like.

Post-Bushist foreign policy

Anatol Lieven, in the latest issue of Prospect:

If therefore both party establishments are wedded to the basic lines of the present US course, what are the chances of successful domestic revolt against this course? Since the present line is adhered to be the bipartisan establishment, it follows that any revolt against it would have to enjoy massive support from ordinary Americans, and in particular from the most important political constituency and political bellwether, the white middle classes of the "heartland." It would therefore have to appeal to the core traditions of this constituency. In this context, that means a mixture of intense nationalism with deep distrust of foreign entanglements – a mixture dubbed "isolationism" by the imperial elites, though by no means fairly.

The Left faces immense obstacles in appealing to the heartland. Its cosmopolitan traditions and above all its hostility to religion make it culturally very alien to the world of the suburbs and small towns of middle America. It is also wedded to its own version of liberal interventionism. If I have to listen to another American anti-Bush liberal damn the war in Iraq and then advocate US military intervention in Darfur I may eat my beard. This is both intellectual and electoral folly: intellectual, because there are no rational grounds for believing that a US military which has failed so badly in policing one bitterly-divided Muslim society would play a successful role in another. Electoral, because you cannot successfully appeal to ordinary Americans to reject a war for which at least some justification could be manufactured in terms of defending America, and then ask them to support another war for which there is no argument from national interest at all.

A much more hopeful prospect in the long run lies in a combination between the moderate realists and a populist revolt in the heartland against the costs of empire. Indeed, this would seem to me virtually inevitable sooner or later. As soon as it becomes clearly apparent to the White middle classes that a continuation of present levels of military spending and foreign policy activism requires the abolition of key middle class entitlements – social security, Medicare, mortgage relief and so on – mass pressure for a withdrawal from present levels of engagement will become overwhelming. This will happen all the sooner in the context of an economic recession, or if another war makes the reintroduction of conscription a real possibility.

Neocons then and now

I am just finishing up Westad's magisterial The Global Cold War. Here is his summary account of the results of Reagan's neocon-inspired interventions in Central America:

The effects of the Central American war for the region were dreadful. In Nicaragua it left 30,000 dead (as historian William LeoGrande points out, relative to the population this was more than the United States lost in the Civil War, the two world wars, and the Korea and Vietnam wars combined). The country had over 100,000 refugees and an economy with inflation out of control and massive unemployment. In tiny El Salvador the effects were even worse; 70,000 dead, death squads roaming the countryside, villages destroyed, lives shattered. While the brutality of the El Salvadoran civil war surpassed anything seen in the recent history of Latin America, US efforts at imposing change -- with assistance costing around 1 billion dollars in military aifd and three times as much in economic aid -- had little effect: in 1990 more than 90 percent of El Salvadorans still lived in poverty.

Funny how the neocons seem to get the same results wherever their policies get imposed. What's that old saw about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Westad continues with how this all went down at home:

Within the United States the wars also had serious effects, although not in terms of human lives. The Reagan administration's attempts at defying Congress in supplying funding to the Contras led to the Iran-Contra Affair, which hurt the neoconservative agenda with the public and inside the White House. The fact that Reagan's people had sold weapons to the Iranian Islamist regime and used the proceeds of that transaction to fund the counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua was a bit too much even for Reagan's supporters to swallow. Together with the antiwar movement and Congressional resistance against the war, the Iran-Contra Affair contributed to a distinct reduction in the administration's appetite for foreign internvetions toward the end of its final term in office. Its worldview, though, stayed intact: the Cold War was a conflict between good and evil, in which the United States was on the side of the angels.

Pulverizing the countries they believe their are liberating, contempt for Congress and other quaint domestic political niceties, an unshakable faith in their own moral righteousness... eerie, isn't it?

"With Friends Like These" Dept.

Joe Scarborough, Fox News broadcaster and former GOP Congressmen, noting that the preppies are headed for the exits:

These days, the mere opening of Mr. Bush's mouth makes many GOP loyalists shake in their tasseled loafers.

Codebreaking

Flickr:

Though I might encode the "empowered self-photographing naked woman" ideology into my images, other people might not decode it as such....

Michael O'Leary on current British airport security

Michael O'Leary, CEO of Europe's biggest budget airline, Ryanair:

If we're under attack from bottles of water and luggage and ladies cosmetics, why are you allowing them down the [London] Underground. Why are you allowing them on Eurotunnel?

We are not in danger of dying at the hands of toiletries... these measures are giving the terrorists and extremists an unbelievable public relations success [by imposing such massive disruption to UK air travel]. They must be rolling around the caves of Pakistan laughing.

A new phase for Small Precautions

Small Precautions is getting a renewed lease, but this time under different management terms. Instead of disquisitions on topics of the day, I'm going to limit myself to simply quoting, with no comment, interesting quotes from my readings -- and usually not on the Web.

Successful first-strike wars?

I was casting over in my mind this morning as to when was the last time one country initiated a war with another and had things turn out remotely like what they expected. In other words, when the Bush regime was considering invading Iraq, how much were they relying on a totally exceptional outcome?

Let's go backward in time:

• Eritrea attacks Ethiopia, 1998. In May 1998 a few Eritrean soldiers entered the Badme region along the border with Ethiopia, resulting in a fire fight between the Eritrean soldiers and the militia and security police they encountered. Eritrea, claiming that several Eritrean officials had been murdered, invaded Ethiopia with a large, mechanized force. The results? Ethiopia declared "total war," and proceeded to conquer a sizable chunk of Eritrea (though this result was eventually overturned under the terms of a 2004 U.N. Settlement). In the meanwhile, several hundred thousand soldiers were killed and over a million refugees were created. No doubt the response throughout Eritrea today is, "Mission Accomplished!"
• Iraq invades Kuwait, 1990. We all know how this one worked out for Saddam, not to mention the 200,000 dead Iraqis and Kuwaitis. As Tony the Tiger says, Grrrrrreat!
• Israel invades Lebanon, 1982. In June 1982, responding to Abu Nidal's assassination attempts against Israeli diplomats and continued PLO artillery fire from Southern Lebanon, Israel invaded Lebanon. The result? To be fair, this invasion was probably considered a limited success from a strictly military point of view, since it weakened the Syrian armed forces and destroyed the PLO's military and political infrastructure in Southern Lebanon. One must weight this against the 17,000 dead Arabs the war also created, most notably including a massacre of several thousand civilians (at Ariel Sharon's behest) at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which no one would dispute was disastrous for Israel's public and diplomatic standing. The war is also considered the major catalyst for the creation of the Iranian and Syrian supported Hizbullah organization, which replaced the vanquished PLO in Southern Lebanon. The occupation would continue for 18 years, resulting in a steady drip of Israeli casualties, before ending in 2000 with Barak's unilateral withdrawal, itself widely considered a humiliation for Israel.
• Argentina invades the "Malvinas," 1982. In April 1982, possibly to unify a domestic polity on the verge of civil war, Argentine military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri ordered the invasion of the Malvinas, also known as Falklands, an island chain off the coast of Argentina that had long been sovereign British territory, though claimed by Argentina. Results? Initially, the occupation was a success. However, after a month of preparation, the British mounted a fierce amphibious assault which eventually repulsed the Argentinians from the islands. The Argentines sustained over 1750 casualties, and over 11,000 prisoners. What's more, the humiliation resulted in a wave of protests by human rights and war veterans groups, culminating in the resignation of Galtieri, paving the way for the establishment of Argentina's current quasi-democracy. For the Argentine military junta, "Mission Accomplished!"
• Iraq invades Iran, 1980. The war began when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, following a long history of border disputes, hoping to seize control over the resource-rich province of Khuzestan (or Arabistan, as the Iraqis called it). Results? The conflict saw early successes by the Iraqis, but before long they were repulsed and the conflict stabilized into a war of attrition that would last eight years, cause a million casualties, cost a trillion dollars, and result in not one inch of territory trading hands. Mission Accomplished!
• The U.S.S.R. invades Afghanistan, 1979. After a Marxist coup in 1973, Afghanistan quickly began to fall to pieces, as Kabul attempted to impose a cultural revolution and lost control of the countryside. Amid a confusing set of events that (including the covert Soviet assassination of their own corrupt and illegitimate client, Hafizullah Shah), the Soviet Army decided to seize direct control over Afghanistan. Results? The Soviets were no more able to control the countryside than Shah and his cronies had been, and became involved in a long war of attrition that over the next decade would result in 14,000 Soviet troop deaths, and perhaps a million dead Afghans. The Red Army's combination of brutality and ineffectiveness delegitimated the last remaining functional institution of the Soviet state, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. For the Russians, Mission Accomplished!
• Egypt and Syria invade Israel, 1973. The so-called Yom Kippur War began when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise joint attack in the Sinai and Golan Heights in October 1973. The Egyptians and Syrians advanced during the first 24–48 hours, after which momentum began to swing in Israel's favor. By the second week of the war, the Syrians had been pushed entirely out of the Golan Heights. In the Sinai to the south, the Israelis managed to isolate, and probably could have captured or destroyed, an entire Egyptian army. Results? By the time the armistice was declared on October 26, the Arab armies had sustained 50,000 casualties, and lost more than 2000 tanks and 400 airplanes. Moreover, the attack galvanized the Israelis into redoubling their military investment (including into nuclear weaponry) and increased the rate at which Israelis committed to settling Jews in the West Bank. For the Arabs, Mission Accomplished!
• U.S. invades Cuba, 1961. Bay of Pigs. The facts of the disastrous invasion are well known. But on the results side, it's worth noting that the Cuban Missile Crisis was also a direct downstream result of the botched invasion. And fourty-five years later, Castro is still in power. Mission Accomplished!
• North Korea invades South Korea, 1950. Determined to reunify the Korean peninsula by force, and confident of their tactical and strategic superiority, North Korea under homocidal moonbat Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea in June 1950. Initially the fighting went North Korea's way, but when a U.S.-led United Nations coalition intervened in September, the tide turned, with the U.N. troops driving the North Koreans back past the 38th parallel, and then continuing northward. Only surprise intervention on the North Korean side by Mao's China saved Kim's bacon. The results? Here's how wikipedia sums it up:

600,000 Korean soldiers died in the conflict according to US estimates. The total, including all civilians and military soldiers from UN Nations and China, was over 2 million deaths. More than a million South Koreans were killed, 85% of them civilians. According to figures published in the Soviet Union, 11.1% of the total population of North Korea perished, which indicates that 1,130,000 people were killed. In sum, about 2,500,000 people were killed, including north and south together. More than 80% of the industrial and public facilities and transportation works, three-quarters of the government offices, and one-half of the houses were destroyed. The war left the peninsula permanently divided with a garrisoned pro-Soviet, totalitarian led state in North Korea and a pro-American semi-free (though not always democratic until the late 1980s) republic in the South. American troops remain in Korea as part of the still-functioning United Nations Command, which commands all allied military forces in the ROK - American Air Forces, Korea, the Eighth U.S. Army, and the entire ROK military. The DMZ remains the most heavily-defended border in the world.

• Germany invades Poland (and others), 1939-41. This one too need not be elaborated, since it's the archetype of evil. Results? Here, here, and here. For Aryans everywhere, Mission Accomplished!
• Bolivia invades Paraguay, 1932. Border skirmishes had been ongoing since the late 1920s in the sparsely populated Chaco border region, which was thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) to be rich in oil. This culminated in an all-out war in when the Bolivian army attacked a Paraguayan border garrison in 1932. The result? A disaster for both sides. Bolivia's European elite force-drafted the large Indian population into the army, and Paraguay responded by fomenting nationalist fervor the region's Indians and mixed population, and resorting to guerrilla tactics. Over 100,000 people died over the next two years. A ceasefire was negotiated in 1935, and eventually Paraguay was awarded three-quarters of the region. For Bolivia, "Mission Accomplished!"
• Japan attcks Manchuria, 1931; China, 1937; United States, 1941. Again, I'll spare you the details, but the result for the Japanese? Five million dead Japanese, the nuking of two of their cities, and an occupation by a foreign power that is now in its seventh decade. For Japan, "Mission Accomplished!"
• Germany invades Belgium/France, 1914. Clearly the worst military miscalculation in history, a result of a fatal mix of secret alliances, militarism, imperial ambition, jingoistic stupidity, and inbred decision-making elites. But the results are worth repeating: Tens of millions dead, the dismemberment of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, and the Leninist seizure of power in Russia. For all the Central Powers, and indeed for European civilization itself, "Mission Accomplished!"
• Germany invades France, 1870. Ah... we finally got one! Bismarck initiated the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, proceeding to humiliate the French army and nation by conquering Paris in a matter of weeks. The result? The consolidation of the German empire, including the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine from France.

Some people may note that I've cheated a bit with this list, excluding certain events like colonial occupations (e.g. the German occupation of Nambia in 1904; Japan in Korea in 1905; Italy in Ethiopia in 1935) as well as various interventions into civil wars (which occurred variously, esp. in the 1990s: NATO in the Balkans, U.S. in Haiti, Uganda in Rwanda; see also Vietnam in Cambodia in 1978, though this example is complex and problematic). But these seem to me to be exceptions that prove the rule. Let me concede, therefore, that it is perhaps possible to achieve success if you invade a country that doesn't have any form of modern social or military organization, under conditions where any form of brutality is permissible (e.g. the colonial examples); and perhaps one can succeed in invading a country if the goal is to stop an ongoing full-scale slaughter, since stopping the slaughter can provide immediate legitimacy for the invader.

But it's something totally different when you decide to wage a war of choice against a more-or-less modern enemy in which there is no obvious pressing demand for an invasion: that just simply hasn't worked our well for over a century.

In other words, when George Bush decide in mid-September 2001, at the behest of his neocon advisors, that the time had come for the United States to initiate a war with Iraq, the Bush administration was basically under the impression that it could overturn about 130+ years of recent history. Hm, cue: "reality-based community" mockery.

Dialecticalizing the proverb about the the first casualty of war

Describing the mentality of a leader who declares his society to be in a state of permanent war, Michel Foucault thirty years ago made the following pungent observation about such a person’s sense of truth:

In this general struggle of which [the leader] is speaking, he is inevitably on one side or the other. He is caught up in the battle, has adversaries, and is fighting to win. No doubt he is trying to assert a right; but it is his right that is at issue—and it is a singular right that is marked by a relationship of conquest, domination, or seniority: the rights of a race, the rights of triumphant invasions or millennial occupations. And while he also speaks about the truth, he is speaking of a perspectival and strategic truth that will allow him to be victorious.

This view of truth is not the sort, Foucault goes on to say, that legislators or philosophers

have dreamed of: standing between the adversaries, at the center of and above the fray, imposing an armistice, establishing an order that brings reconciliation. [Rather] it is a matter of establishing a right that is stamped with dissymmetry and that functions as a privilege that has to be either maintained or reestablished; it is a matter of establishing a truth that functions as a weapon. [Emphasis mine]

I think that this quote is worth pondering as one considers not only the Bush regime's relationship to the truth, but also its attitude toward the role of legislation and reconciliation in the process of waging war.

This perspective on the Bush regime’s relationship to the truth, I believe, is the only way to make sense of statements like, "We don't torture." These guys regard the idea of universal objectivity as an illusion or a trap; for them, rather "truth" is simply a weapon in war in which they seek unconditional victory.

(Note that Foucault is not saying, simply, that war destroys truth, but rather that war, especially when warfare is perceived as constitutive of society, creates a condition in which truth becomes defined as that which is necessary to win the war. It's also worth noting that Foucault doesn't have a particular problem with this perspective on truth, which he regards as less insidious than the scientific pretentions to universal and unimpeachable authority. Science claims that the truth is what it is; the warrior-leader subject can recognize that losing a war can potentially disinstantiate his understanding of the truth.)

Niall Ferguson's apologist history of the future

You may have noticed Niall Ferguson's dark "'What if?' History of the Future of Iran-U.S. Relations." Fergsuon's essay is, in essence, an answer to the imaginary history essay question of the future: "In 2007, Iran-U.S. relations deteriorated to the point where these is a nuclear exchange. How did this happen?"

What's most striking about Ferguson's scenario is how many right-wing cliches he manages to embed in his narrative: a stalwart, misunderstood American Republican leadership; a Chamberlinite domestic opposition in Britain and the U.S.; a heroic Ariel Sharon, laid tragically low at the moment he was most needed; a pusillanimous Continental leadership; an opportunistic Russian and Chinese leadership; and of course (always!) those fanatically malevolent "Middle Easterners." Indeed, one is tempted to say that the main purpose of the essay is less to guide any kind of critical thinking about current foreign policy than it is to promote the continued operational usefulness of these cliches.

Had I the time, I'd be tempted to write the progressive counterpoint to the same scenario. Imagine how someone informed by a different politics than Ferguson might come up with a totally different narrative: one in which the Bushist declaration of Iran as part of an "Axis of Evil" in 2001, coupled with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, was perceived in Iran as a de facto declaration of war. (Michael Ledeen would be quoted as idiotic-instigator-in-chief in this scenario.) The historian might then show how this de facto declaration spurred in the Iranian leadership a desperate search for a defensive posture capable of warding off the U.S. military threat, inevitably leading to the reactivation of a previously dormant drive to build a nuclear device. The historian might also note that the U.S. occupation of Iraq by (inadvertently) empowering of the fundamentalist Shiite majority in Iraq, also precipitated a radicalization of Shiite religious energies in Iran, eventuating in the election of a militant and aggressive millenarian to the Iranian Presidency.

This same historian might also note that the fact that the U.S. policy in the Middle East was driven by a the most secrecy-obsessed Presidency in the history of the country had led to a globally widespread suspicion of the American's regime's motives, magnifying the difficulty of presenting a globally united front against Iranian proliferation. The fact that terrible domestic policies were finally being perceived by the American public had resulted in a wounded and ineffective leadership by America in 2005-2007, causing that leadership to respond to its weak negotiating position by ratcheting up its rhetoric of war, further exacerbating the negative dynamic in Iran, and further isolating it from what might otherwise have been sympathetic Western opinion.

Yes, one can certainly imagine such a scenario. And a good deal more plausible as a history it would be, too. But of course, that's not Ferguson's project; rather, his project is to provide advance neocon spin for the oncoming world-historical catastrophe that the neocon ideological project may be bringing down on all our heads. What Ferguson's article is really represents, in short, is an attempt to deal with the neocons' calamitous PR problem: whatever happens in the Middle East over the next couple of years, it's going to be exceedingly difficult to try to pin the blame for the catastrophe on anyone else. But Ferguson's trying, good man.

A modest voting proposal on Alito

Since it appears that the Dems are not going to do the right thing and stand up for the principle that SCOTUS nominees must specifically answer questions about precedent -- in other words, that they are going to allow the "Ginsburg principle" to continue -- they can at least do the smart political thing: to vote against Alito as a block. Let him become the first SCOTUS nominee ever to win a seat without a single vote from the opposition -- and then relentlessly run against Republican judicial extremism when the inevitably atrocious decisions begin to come down from the Court....

Improving the SCOTUS nomination process

I can't understand why the Democrats aren't standing up for the principle that a nominee should not under any circumstance be allowed to duck questions. This is a simple principle that every American regardless of ideological stripe ought to be able to respect. The message ought to be something like this:

A SCOTUS nominees get a lifetime appointment to determine the meaning of the laws of this country, a position of enormous privilege and responsibility. The American people deserve a nominee whose beliefs and values are both well-known and aligned with theirs. If a nominee refuses to say exactly -- EXACTLY -- what he makes of current legal interpretations, then he or she shouldn't sit on the Court.

The Democrats should seize the moment to stand for the principle that a nominee's refusal to answer questions about whether particular past decisions were rightly or wrongly decided automatically earns a "No" vote.

In short, every nominee should have to answer straight-forwardly whether they think (to take a random sampling) Griswold, Roe, Bush v Gore, Kelo, Heart of Atlanta Motel, Nebbia, Wickard, Lawrence, or Grutter were rightly decided. If not, why not?

Here's a suggestion: what if the Judiciary Committee were to make it a tradition that each Senator on the committee is allowed to name a single case from the past that SCOTUS nominees would be expected to comment on -- essentially, to write an opinion on the case. This would be part of the preparation work that a potential nominee would be expected to do -- a basic test of whether they are competent to do the job.

Withough question, such an assignment would provide the truest window into the actual legal thinking of any particular nominee. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone could make a principled objection to this proposal.

I'm back...

I'll be posting occasional comments, and more links, not so much on top headlines, as on things that are being left at a rolling boil on the back burner. For example, here's a little piece of news that ought to strike terror into anyone holding a lot of dollar-denominated assets: Chinese central bankers are apparently planning to trim exposure to the dollar.

My first writely doc

Taking time off from blogging has been a relief, as I've disappeared into the world of a new job. I've also been playing a lot more with Web 2.0 applications, and noticing how many of these technologies are converging. For example, this entry is being typed on Writely, which is designed to post automatically to blogger (and a number of other blog engines). The on demand revolution is also spurring a convergence -- perhaps blurring would be a more accurate word for it -- happening between consumer and corporate applications, which I would never have anticipated even a couple years ago.

Rolling back the twentieth century, redux

I had a couple of people take me to task for allegly exaggerating when I said that the goal of the so-called conservatives in this country is to roll back the twentieth century. And then once in a while, you actually get a chance to point out a smoking gun, as yesterday for example at Volokh.

What's particularly scary about this posting is that it is basically an attack on Scalia from the right. Money:

conservative judicial originalism is currently in a state of crisis, precisely because of Justice Scalia's "fainthearted" originalism. If Justice Scalia, originalism's supposed great champion, is unwilling to overturn or even go out of his way to distinguish as anti-originalist opinion as Wickard v. Filburn (holding that growing grain on one's own land for consumption on one's own farm can be regulated under Congress' power to regulate "interstate commerce"), then what is left of originalism?

One could say that it's simply "too late" to reconsider sixty-two year old precedents like Wickard. But why sixty-two year-old precedents, and not thirty-two year old precedents (i.e., Roe v. Wade)? Scalia's fainthearted originalism begins to look a lot like, "I got into this business to overturn Warren Court decisions, and I'll use originalism as tool to that end, but I'm not especially interested in reconsidering New Deal precedents."

And these people say they don't want legislation from the bench? Why don't they just work on repealing the Social Security Act through legislation, instead of trying to have it declared unconstitutional? Oh, wait...

Cheney resigning?

Rumors fly at US News about Cheney's imminent resignation.

Maybe PS was right!

Bias and "House Effects" in Presidential Job Approval polls

Beautiful visuals on Bush's long, slow slide to presidential oblivion, and how the different polling shops measure it.

Also usefully contains counterpoint data from the Clinton presidency. It was a bit of a surprise to me to see how, other than the stumble out of the gate, Clinton's approval ratings got steadily and consistently better over virtually the entire course of his Presidency.

Suicidal statecraft

Zbigniew Brzezinski describes George Bush's legacy in apocalyptic terms. It is debatable whether the final historical verdict will be as dire as Bresesinski implies, is no doubt correction in his fundamental assessment:

More than a reformulation of U.S. goals in Iraq is now needed, however. The persistent reluctance of the administration to confront the political background of the terrorist menace has reinforced public sympathy among Muslims for the terrorists.

It is a self-delusion for Americans to be told that the terrorists are motivated mainly by an abstract "hatred of freedom" and that their acts are a reflection of a profound cultural hostility. If that were so, Stockholm or Rio de Janeiro would be as much at risk as New York.

Yet in addition to New Yorkers, the principal victims of serious terrorist attacks have been Australians in Bali, Spaniards in Madrid, Israelis in Tel Aviv, Egyptians in the Sinai and Britons in London. There is an obvious political thread connecting these events: The targets are America's allies and client states in the deepening U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.

Terrorists are not born but shaped by events, experiences, impressions, hatreds, ethnic myths, historical memories, religious fanaticism and deliberate brainwashing. They are also shaped by images of what they see on television, and especially by their feelings of outrage at what they perceive to be a brutalizing denigration of their religious kin's dignity by heavily armed foreigners. An intense political hatred for America, Britain and Israel is drawing recruits for terrorism not only from the Middle East but from as far away as Ethiopia, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia and even the Caribbean....

In a very real sense, during the last four years, the Bush team has thus been dangerously undercutting America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.

To be sure, since America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, yet for a while, even a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise a constructive global influence.

Flaying away with a stick at a hornets' nest while loudly proclaiming "I will stay the course" is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.

But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation.

So long, and thanks...

I've decided to put the blog on ice for a while. Mainly for lack of time, but also because I get the the feeling that the country is, at last, awaking from our long, national nightmare. Let's just hope it's not too late.

It's been fun, and thanks for all the feedback.

(I may post occasionally, so keep sending me stuff!)

NYT is full of it

The Daily Kos has the goods on how the New York Times seems to be covering up its own complicity in conspiring with Bush regime to discredit a critic of the Bush regime, with regard to the Plame affair. As anyone paying close attention to the Plame affair has doubtless grokked, war-abettor-turned-jailbird Judy Miller is a suspect in this case, not a victim.

Miller sat in jail for three months because she figured that this was better than admitting she helped out a CIA agent -- an offense punishable by a much longer sentence than the maximum of eighteen months one can get for Contempt of Court. After three months in the can, she's apparently realizing that jail really sucks, and now is hoping that Prosecutor Fitzgerald will see her in a forgiving light, especially since she is "discovering" that she had "additional notes" from the June 2003 conversation with Scooter Libby.

What's really disgusting is the way the Times has continued to insist, as a matter of editorial policy, that this is out and out a first amendment issue, where the sanctity of the press's freedoms is the only issue at stake in the whole matter. Every single article reporting on the Plame affair has been blatantly skewed to this point.

It's enough to make you start sympathizing with the wingnuts about the Times.