I Don't Remember President Rumsfeld

In a column that reminds me of David Brooks' efforts to put a nominally independent spin on right-wing talking points, Ross Douthat criticizes President Obama's second term foreign policy record. All sixteen months of it. Douthat isn't going to cut Obama any slack:

His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure....

But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld.

Why should this President be graded "on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld", as opposed to on a curve set by George W. Bush? The buck stops at the White House, unless you're a Republican in which case it stops with the Secretary of Defense?

Douthat's principal conceit is that, "balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy". By "usually", he apparently means "recently", as his examples are Jimmy Carter ("the Camp David accords"), George W. Bush ("his AIDS-in-Africa initiative"), Bill Clinton ("chasing Middle Eastern peace") and Richard Nixon (opening doors to China) and... one-term President George H.W. Bush with something that's not really a foreign policy initiative as it is a matter of watching events unfold ("closing out the cold war"), although I suspect Douthat means to attribute that to Reagan. To the extent that you want to credit Reagan's foreign policy with helping to end the cold war, it's difficult to see how his second term policy was materially different from his first term policy. I can't help but notice, also, that Douthat makes no mention of the Clinton Administration's success facilitating the peace process in Northern Ireland, instead implying that Clinton is among those presidents who has no clear victory. He also makes no mention of Ronald Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon, or his rapid withdrawal after the barracks bombing, or of George W. Bush's inabilty to prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia, and its subsequent actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

One big problem with Douthat's conceit is that he looks only at what he sees as the "big accomplishment", even if it relative terms it's a small one or a failure, while ignoring the lists of horribles that can be found in the choices of pretty much every president on his implied list. There's no reason to believe that, a decade or so from now, a pundit as generous as Douthat is toward Republican presidents won't be able to find a second term accomplishment by President Obama that's at least as impressive as Bush's AIDS initiative. Further, why is it a good thing that presidents, frustrated by their inability to achieve their domestic agenda, shift their focus to the international scene? If it's possible to attend to both the domestic and the international, go for it. But if it's not, or if focus on domestic issues is "too hard", a President should nonetheless buckle down and do his primary job before trying to build a legacy on foreign policy issues.

In listing what he describes as Obama's foreign policy failures, it's no surprise that Douthat wants to limit our consideration of G.W.'s fingerprints. Even granting that Douthat recites, "His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era", and concedes that "many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003", to put it mildly that's a remarkable understatement.

• Libya - Douthat implies that the so-called Benghazi scandal is a Republican confabulation, but complains, "The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area". That's not an unfair assessment, but the question becomes, "What should we do about it". The chaos is not considered a sufficient threat to U.S. or European foreign policy interests that any western nation is interested in intervening. Is Douthat arguing that Obama should have left Qaddafi in power, better to keep the humanitarian disaster we know than to risk one we don't know? He does not seem to be arguing that the U.S. should send enough troops to occupy and pacify the region, for however many years that would take. What's left? Also, how does Obama's Libya record and its fallout compare to that of Ronald Reagan, who unsuccessfully tried to kill Qaddafi, or George W. Bush, who along with Tony Blair spent years promoting Qaddafi as a poster child for the success of the "War on Terror"?

• Syria - Douthat complains, again not without justification, that the Obama Administration has not kept its implied promise to use military force to remove Assad from power, upon it being established with reasonable certainty that he used chemical weapons. Except Douthat is not endorsing the prevarication that the world does not take the U.S. seriously any more because we didn't invade Syria, and goes on to state, "I’m glad we don’t have 50,000 troops occupying Syria" -- as if we could occupy Syria with only 50,000 troops. The military estimated a short-term need for 75,000 troops just to secure Libya's weapon stockpiles.

• The Holy Land - Douthat complains that John Kerry's Israel/Palestine peace initiative has failed. I'm not sure that many people other than John Kerry expected the initiative to be a success. Douthat himself deems the failure "predictable" and... it was. George W. Bush had a number of peace initiatives directed at the Middle East that were far more ambitious than anything President Obama has endorsed. His father attempted a more coercive approach to advancing a peace accord. Clinton spent years hosting superficial peace talks before his last-minute effort to achieve agreement on the big issues helped contribute to a complete collapse of the peace process. But the fundamental problem is with the leaders of that region, and the last leader who seemed courageous enough to press for a bona fide peace deal was assassinated in 1995.

• Iraq - Douthat complains that "the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing", as if this is a new thing. Who would have thought, after all, that replacing a largely secular Sunni regime with a much more religious Shiite regime would lead Iraq to become friendlier with Iran... except for anybody who knows anything about the Middle East? The failure Douthat attributes to Obama? a suggestion that the "White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place." That's not actually what the article linked by Douthat states. The author indicates that U.S. officials did not receive guidance from the Obama Administration about how many troops they wanted to leave behind, but that's attributed to ambivalence, not indecision. The article also suggests that the Obama Administration was not in fact ambivalent, but that "The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible". Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, on the other hand, who was negotiating over troop levels, is explicitly described as indecisive. Douthat admits, "I sympathized with the decision to slip free of Iraq entirely", and he attempts no argument that the Middle East would be better off had the U.S. maintained a troop presence in Iraq.

• Afghanistan - Douthat complains that "", never mind that he's speaking of a first term decision by the President, or that if he's followed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at all he should know that there are enormous differences between the two nations and the nature and purpose of the respective "surges". Douthat seems to have little understanding of Afghanistan, complaining, "even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay". Let's imagine that the U.S. took a few holds barred approach to occupation and modernization of Afghanistan, as the Russians did during their years of occupation. Did that make the Taliban go away? And if we're bringing first term decisions into the discussion, here's a doozy. For that matter, was Ronald Reagan's effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan a foreign policy success, in that the USSR withdrew, or should we look at what subsequently happened in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and contemplate whether it was one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of all time?

• Russia - Douthat complains that "the 'reset' with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis, as if there was something that the U.S. could reasonably have done to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. This is the same Putin who, as previously mentioned, invaded Georgia under G.W.'s watch. Expressing a willingness to start afresh with Putin is not something that can be achieved unilaterally.

• Iran - Although Douthat suggests that the Obama Administration could still achieve a "paradigm-altering achievement" with Iran, he simultaneously complains that those efforts could "unsettle[] America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain". So it's the same situation G.W. Bush failed to resolve, but with the added caveat that any promising effort, and perhaps even a breakthrough agreement, could simultaneously be a failure. Perhaps that's not such a bad perspective on significant foreign policy issues, as blowback from even well-intentioned efforts can be harsh, but it seems like an absurd standard to impose on the President, particularly in light of Douthat's failure to acknowledge that the presidents whose second term accomplishments he finds to be most impressive all made foreign policy decisions that resulted in severe, negative consequences for the country.

Douthat goes on to qualify the Obama Administration's successful operation that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden by asserting that the success of the mission "has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence". It's the sort of footnoting he's not willing to do for any other President, some of who can be credited with foreign policy failures that had much more profound and direct negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy interests. More than that, does Douthat believe that it's the killing of bin Laden that resulted in the "Islamist terrorism's resurgence"? That the Obama Administration shouldn't have pursued that mission? And, wait a minute, the blog post linked to support Douthat's allegation of the claimed "resurgence" doesn't even support his position, instead pointing out how difficult it is to hunt for terrorists and has resulted in U.S. security difficulties for government personnel in Yemen, that the U.S. issues regional security alerts when there is an "uptick in the fight against Al Qaeda in Yemen", and questioning the value of drone attacks.

From my reading, all Douthat's equivocation does is reaffirm that his goal is not to analyze Obama's foreign policy records, but to put a slightly centrist spin right-wing talking points. To be a "reasonable voice" by alluding to G.W. Bush's disastrous Iraq policy and distancing himself from the most ludicrous right-wing allegations directed at the President, and then to explain why none of that distance matters while hoping that his readers don't recognize his overt partisanship. If any lesson can be drawn from Douthat's analysis, it's that six years from now, no matter what larger consensus is drawn from the Obama Administration's foreign policy record, we can anticipate that some number of partisan pundits will offer tear-downs of the foreign policy records of the incumbent President and, if the President is a Republican, that they're apt to try to pick even the smallest of cherries from President Obama's record to try to paper over his acknowledged failures. Meanwhile, I would rather a second term President keep his eye on the domestic situation as even a small but significant foreign policy success does not overcome the rank incompetence of an administration that ignores or inflates an economic bubble that, upon bursting, almost takes down the world's economy.

Collective Action - Aspiration vs. Reality

Charles Lane wrote a column recently in which he complained that "collective action" is overrated:

[T]he gist [of Mancur Olson's argument] is that large numbers of people do not naturally band together to secure common interests. In fact, the larger the group, the less likely it is to act in a truly collective manner.

As Olson explained, the interests that unite large groups are necessarily of the lowest-common-denominator variety. Therefore the concrete benefits of collective action to any individual are usually small compared with the costs — in time, effort and money — of participation. “Free-riding” is a constant threat — as the difficulties of collecting union dues illustrates.

By contrast, small groups are good at collective action. It costs less to organize a few people around a narrow, but intensely felt, shared concern.

Lane suggests that Olson's thesis is supported by the existence of lobbyists and "special-interest groups that swarm Congress", seeking favorable legislation. He also speaks as if this is a new thing, or that the recognition of diverse interests and competing factions didn't arise until Olson published his 1965 book.

I agree with the general thesis that, the larger the group, the more difficult it is to achieve consensus, and that the difficulty compounds as you try to achieve consensus on a greater number of issues or across a broad range of subjects. Lane is also correct that factions tend to look out for their own self-interest, "whether or not success comes at the larger society’s expense". Lane is correct that groups that self-select for a specific purpose (e.g., to lobby Congress for a favorable tax law, or a protectionist regulation that protects them from competition) can be effective at advancing their agenda. They tend to be even more successful when they are well-funded.

However, he runs into trouble when he attempts to turn his critique of collective action into a critique of stable democracies and, more specifically, the Obama Administration. Turning to a later book by Olson, Lane argues,

His paradoxical, and deeply depressing, conclusion: Political stability is a curse of sorts, because, over time, stable societies accumulate interest groups, with all the distortion and complexity that breeds. “On balance,” he wrote, “special-interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income . . . and make political life more divisive.”

Lane diagnoses the United States with that "British disease", with too many factions looking out for their own self-interest, with the result that the bargaining table is "too crowded to agree on the problem, much less a solution."

But if we step back for a moment, the foundation of the Lane/Olson "British disease" thesis is weak. First, Britain's fall from its status as a dominant world power followed the collapse of colonialism and its involvement in two world wars. Over that same period the U.K. underwent a massive social transformation. Its likely that the social transformation did lead to a greater number of voices vying for the attention of Parliament, but Britain's decline began long before, under a class-based power structure that was far less responsive to many of those voices, so it's difficult to even find a meaningful correlation, let alone causation. To focus on an increased number of "special interests" while ignoring the economic drivers of Britain's shrinking influence is to miss the forest for the trees.

Further, if it is in fact true that older democracies become ineffecient due to their being overwhelmed by a proliferation of special interests, where can we find the modern, nimble democracies not yet weighted down by faction? France's Fifth Republic? Greece passed its most recent Constitution in 1975 - what should we make of that? Which of the democracies borne of the fall of the Iron Curtain are exemplars of the efficiency and lack of faction that Lane attributes to long-term stability?

In criticizing the President, Lane also misses the entire point of appeals to unity and collective action. It's not that the President is lacks "realism". It's that he, like every President who came before him, recognizes that you don't unify the people or inspire the type of solutions Lane claims he favors by telling the people, "We're hopelessly divided by faction, we have no chance of solving tough issues, so 'every man for himself,' 'good luck and thanks for all the fish.'" The notion of the people as a collective, pulling together, is part of the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Divisions among the citizenry, and the need to nonetheless pull together, have been part of presidential rhetoric from the time of George Washington:

Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

Lyndon Johnson:

This is one nation. What happens in Selma and Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American. But let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists. As we meet here in this peaceful historic chamber tonight, men from the South, some of whom were at Iwo Jima, men from the North who have carried Old Glory to the far corners of the world and who brought it back without a stain on it, men from the east and from the west are all fighting together without regard to religion or color or region in Vietnam.

Jimmy Carter:

With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.

I suspect that Lane has been thinking about the issue of faction and how it impedes government action, and has a better column hidden somewhere inside his head, but made the poor choice of trying to build his case based upon a flawed thesis about the "British disease", presidential rhetoric that is consistent with that of every other president, and the conceit that the concept of faction and competing interests is relatively new to politics. Lane also overlooks the dark side of faction, with its "us versus them" thinking, and although he acknowledges "", he elides from his column any mention of wedge issues and the manner in which political factions and parties attempt to create and exaggerate differences between groups in order to prevent political change or progress. Sometimes it's the rhetoric Lane criticizes, that of unity and common interest, that allows for the type of change he claims to endorse.

Lane betrays his actual complaint when he engages in the language of his own faction, that of the Very Serious Person:

But the president’s paean to collective action lacked Olson’s realism. The question is not just how much more government we need or want, if any. It’s also how much more government we can afford, in light of its purposes and given the risks Olson identified — which have already materialized in the form of unsustainable but politically untouchable entitlement programs.

The question for Lane, though, is not how much government we can afford, because his faction is unconcerned with how government could provide the same level of service at a substantially lower cost. Were Lane to break out of the groupthink of his faction he would acknowledge (as has his paper) that the only government "entitlement" that is projected to be unsustainable is Medicare, while Social Security can be made sustainable for the indefinite future with relatively modest changes. Fixing Medicare? Lane's own newspaper doesn't think the problems are all that difficult to fix, but it's also telling that Lane isn't advocating the immediate, significant cost savings that could come from emulating the better national health insurance plans of other western democracies.

At the end of it all, Lane does a pretty good job of evidencing his larger point, that it's difficult to find solutions when people won't look past their self-interest. He grouses that the President isn't sufficiently serious about entitlement reform while failing to admit that President Obama keeps offering Reagan-style Social Security reforms that will keep its books in balance, despite the howls of factions on the left. He similarly ignores the fact that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) attempts to improve the quality of Medicare while reducing costs, and that its cost-saving measures would be stronger but for the obstructionism and demagoguery of the Republican Party. And of course, he fails to note that Obama was ready to enter into a "grand bargain" with the Republicans on taxes, spending and entitlements but... the Republicans walked away from negotiations.

I can't argue with Lane's feelings - we would all feel better if the government stopped listening to anybody else, and honed in on what we, individually, believed to be in the best interest of the nation. I guess it needs to be said: that's not realistic.

Thomas Friedman Pulls His Asbestos Undershorts Out of Storage

In simple terms, following the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, three positions emerged on what should happen in the Palestinian lands Israel captured during the war:

1. "Get Out Now" - the position taken by then-M.K. Uri Avnery, that Israel should resist the temptation to try to significantly adjust its borders and settle the territories, and end its occupation as quickly as possible, lest it be drawn into a long-term occupation from which it would become increasingly difficult to extract itself.

2. "We All Know What Will Happen" - the position taken by much of the world, that the length of the occupation was a distraction and that eventually the two sides would reach an agreement creating a Palestinian state on most or all of the occupied territories, with some amount of border adjustment and land swapping.

3. "Dig In" - the position taken by certain Israeli politicians and generals, that they should set up a context for annexation of great swaths of the occupied territories, and to make it politically difficult for future leaders to agree to any borders approximating the Green Line, or perhaps to any concession of land at all.

During the years leading up to the second Intifada with its associated rash of Palestinian suicide bombings, Thomas Friedman fell into camp #2. He had a tendency to lecture both sides about the outcome that he viewed as inevitable, while hewing to a form of centrism that both sides in the conflict seemed to view as insufficiently sensitive to their concerns. It was a big picture view, one that avoided the need to address the complexity of actually getting to a final resolution. Following the collapse of peace talks, and more so 9/11, it's not so much that Friedman fell into a different camp, so much as he backed off his prior tendency to lecture Israel.

Prior to his retreat from the issue, Friedman's suggestion that Israel was not offering enough, that trying to change facts on the ground was a fool's errand, that the two sides should put aside feelings and history and accept the invevitable, earned him the enmity of people who disagreed with him. Needless to say, as you move toward people who hold more extremist views the reaction to Friedman became correspondingly shrill and hostile. Over the interim, open hostility toward Friedman seemed to diminish, but his critics have long memories. With this reengagement of the conflict, it's time once again for the asbestos undershorts.

I was thus a bit surprised to see Friedman be this direct:

Israeli friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.

Ever since Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, there has been a sense that presidents have an obligation to try to mitigate or end what was once deemed the Middle East crisis, to help Israel maintain its democracy, borders and Jewish character while ending years, turning into decades, of Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. Friedman correctly states that the American public is demanding that the President focus on domestic concerns, as well as international conflicts that directly involve or threaten the U.S., and correctly states that in this context (as in pretty much any other) negotiations work best when the participants in a negotiation invite a mediator to help them polish off an agreement as opposed to when the mediator is asked to start negotiations by dragging the two sides to the table.

But I think Friedman misses some important components relating to why the issue has diminished in the minds of the U.S. public, and why pressing for negotiations is not a priority for the president. First and foremost, U.S. domestic concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was driven in large part by intensive news coverage. During the 1980's, it was not at all atypical for the evening news to sound like this: "Now news from the Middle East. A riot broke out in Ramallah when..." ar "a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem café...." Between Israel's security measures, changes in Palestinian leadership, and the significant number of other Middle East crises, conflicts and wars, that's no longer what Americans hear. Israel-Palestine has dropped considerably from the top spot of Middle East crises that the Americans want to resolve.¹

On the other side of the equation, a persistent effort to depict Muslims as irrational actors with whom you cannot negotiate, and who can't be trusted to follow a deal to which they agree, has eroded support for negotiations among factions that might otherwise press the President to become more involved. If, as certain Israeli leaders have argued, there's no one to talk to and no way to reach a meaningful agreement, why go there? Some raise similar arguments about Israel and leaders like Netanyahu - if there's no reason to believe that Netanyahu has the will or that he could get the authority to carry out an agreement involving the evacuation of Israeli settlements, why pretend that there can be a real negotiation - the gulf between what he can offer and what a Palestinian leader might accept may be too broad to bridge. Also, while Clinton might have been persuaded to provide funds to help Israel compensate Israeli settlers who had to leave their homes as part of a final deal, the present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that Congress would presently provide such a subsidy.

The conflict has reached a point at which there's little upside for a President in seriously engaging settlement. George W. Bush created a model of non-serious engagement, window dressing, and President Obama was not helped by his early effort to restart negotiations. If I were Obama and Netanyahu proposed that I attempt to mediate the conflict, and invitation I doubt Netanyahu is at all inclined to offer, and Abbas was willing to participate, my response would be simple. "No problem. Send me your maps of your proposed final borders and we'll start from there." Negotiations with no maps? What do they say about trying the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result?
---------------
1. David Ignatius wrote a recent column outlining what he sees as the President's foreign policy priorities - China, Iran, Afghanistan, then "the Middle East" which he subdivides into "the metastasizing Syrian civil war, solidifying democracy in Egypt and rehabilitating a broken Israeli-Palestinian peace process". I'll grant that Afghanistan is in South Asia, albeit bordering the Middle East, but last I checked Iran was part of the Middle East. By Ignatius's measure, that would make Israel... a distant number four on the list of Middle East priorities, and number six on his global list?

Ignatius suggests that in the Israel-Palestinian conflict Obama should engage in "a round of secret contacts to build up the local players who can be America’s partners for peace". Putting aside for the moment that if Ignatius knew about them, they wouldn't be secret, is he serious? These secret contacts would presumably be on the Palestinian side, so... is he talking about Hamas? Is Ignatius offering a plan or a fantasy?

The Debt Deal as Continuing Political Theater

Paul Campos attempts to find a silver lining in the debt deal, but in so doing he reminds me of how seriously we take this type of political theater. Although there are some who argue that the deal harms the President, it would appear that his primary goal was to make sure that there was not a repeat performance of this debacle prior to the 2012 election. But then what?

The 2012 election will have one of two outcomes: Either Obama will be reelected or a Republican will become President. Do you recall the noise that Ronald Reagan made about Jimmy Carter's deficits before taking the nation's debt to unprecedented levels? Do you recall G.W. "joking" that he hit a "trifecta" and was thus free to deficit spend as he pleased, while Dick Cheney argued that deficits don't even matter? If President Obama does not win reelection, we'll return to Republican business as usual. The Republicans in Congress will set aside their obsession with balancing the budget in favor of attempting to buy votes. Serious cuts in Medicare? In Social Security? Budget cuts that may drag down their President in 2016? Get real. We're more likely to get the proud announcement of an unfunded, multi-trillion dollar "Medicare, Part E."

But what happens if President Obama is reelected? Then we are again faced with one of two realties: Either the Democrats control Congress, or the Republicans control one or both chambers. Realistically speaking, it's going to be the latter. The Republicans, with all of their sound and fury about government spending and the need for budget cuts, agreed to this deal to postpone identifying the actual cuts for two reasons: First, they couldn't identify and agree upon enough cuts to hit the arbitrary figures they kept tossing around, and second because they wanted to avoid having to take responsibility for cuts that will inevitably be very unpopular with motivated blocs of voters. Recall, the principal targets for Republican budget cuts are Social Security and Medicare. It's possible that they will insist, through the latest iteration of a deficit commission, that deficit reduction occur only through budget cuts. It's possible that, through lockstep partisanship and obstructionist tactics, they'll force a budget cutting bill through Congress. It's even possible that the President would sign the bill. The Republicans will then have to go to the polls attempting to blame obviously partisan, Republican-driven cuts on the other party's outgoing President. I don't see that the voters at issue are going to fall for that one.

Oh, and the special interests? Health insurance companies, long-term care facilities, doctors and hospitals, all of whom profit enormously from the status quo (even as they squawk about the alleged inadequacy of Medicare reimbursements)? You expect them to sit quietly by the sidelines as the Republicans slash hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare and the ACA? This Congress cannot bind future congresses - if they don't like the constraints of this legislation, they can and will change it. And the pressure to do so will be intense.

Here's something else to ponder: The best possible outcome would be for this new deficit commission to succeed where prior deficit commissions failed, and to actually come up with a viable long-term plan for the budget and economy that could be supported by both parties. Right now the left is expecting that the commission will principally target entitlements, something that is inevitable given that entitlement growth is significantly higher than inflation, while doing too little to generate new revenues (i.e., raise taxes). If it's impossible to come up with a fair and sensible plan to get Medicare spending and spending growth under control, we're doomed. We can wait and hope for a miracle, but there's no reason to believe that we're going to produce a new form of medical treatment or a new approach to medical care that is going to transform the bleak financial picture arising from the cost of treating chronic medical conditions and terminal disease, of "old age". But as we all know, it's not going to happen. Given a choice between responsible governance that could cost them reelection and running the nation into a brick wall, most members of Congress will choose the latter.

So this commission will fail and the Republicans in Congress will plot their next move not on policy but on elections and reelection: Who is in the White House, how much of a price will they pay for cutting entitlement spending, will it serve them better to return to their "business as usual" of running up the nation's debt to heights they know to be unsustainable (then complain and obstruct in their usual fashion when a Democrat is elected to clean up their mess). For a Republican President, after all, two wars, a recession and a national disaster (e.g., the collapse of the financial industry) is anything but cause for austerity - it's a "trifecta".

Balanced Budget Cowardice

Back in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan ran against the "tax and spend" Democrats, decrying Jimmy Carter's budget deficits. He then got elected, cut taxes, vastly increased government spending and the situation got so far out of control that he signed onto a tax increase. The budget deficit did not come back under control until Bill Clinton's Presidency, which due to a variety of factors (including the dot com bubble) produced a significant budget surplus. Republican partisans argued it was horrible to have a budget surplus, that paying down the nation's debt "too quickly" would result in disaster, and that the best thing to do would be to slash taxes for the wealthy and run the deficit back up. Oh, sure, they offered self-serving projections to indicate that the budget would remain in balance, but their manipulations were obvious - passing tax cuts that expired after ten years, for example.

While the Republican Party was cooking the books to defend this scheme the economy was souring, so you got their "tax cuts are good for any economy" argument - if the economy is strong, tax cuts keep it strong; if it's faltering, tax cuts will help it bounce back; if it's in recession, tax cuts will get us out of recession. The Bush Administration then launched two unfunded wars, Medicare Part D, and... let's admit it, G.W. Bush and his Republican majority spent like drunken sailors. G.W. tactfully described the nation's difficulties and tragedies as his having hit "the trifecta", and he and his party proceeded as if they had carte blanche for deficit spending.

No, I'm not arguing that the Democrats have played no role in the nation's deficit spending. I'm not even going to argue that Republican hypocrisy on the issue is somehow morally culpable. People can look to the facts and see, very easily, that both parties like to spend money. They can also see, without ambiguity, that the Republican Party has no sense of fiscal responsibility. But which party's presidents were in office during the worst run-ups of the nation's debt? It's not even a close question.

Every decade or so, the subject of a federal "balanced budget amendment" comes up. The appeal is simple - pretend that the nation's budget is equivalent to a household budget, pretend that the government's borrowing money in U.S. dollars, a currency it controls, is equivalent to a nation borrowing in a foreign currency or to household debt, pretend that deficits can never serve a useful purpose, and insist that a balanced budget amendment will magically cure all that ails the nation. It's a superficial, dishonest argument - even if you don't judge the federal politicians who demand a balanced budget amendment by their actions, it's very easy to find sound economic reasons why arbitrary caps on government spending, balanced budget requirements at the federal level, and you can look around the world to see what austerity programs are doing for the economies of nations like Ireland and the U.K.

Given the spending record of everybody in Congress, it's not really a surprise that the GOP is handing off their attempt to resurrect the issue to a freshman Senator. Make the tea partiers happy, pretend to be doing something, advance a bunch of policies favored by wealthy supporters, and once again pretend to care about deficit spending. Pretend it's bipartisan because, predictably, Democrats from conservative states and the usual array of opportunists will sign on. And best of all, submit the concept in the form of a non-binding resolution, just in case things go terribly wrong and it actually passes. (The goal here, after all, is not to actually be bound by these restrictions.)

But at the end of the day, the Republican Party knows that while beating the drum on budget deficits can get a segment of their base worked up, and can help them gain votes of people who (unbelievably at this point) continue to judge them by their words instead of their actions, the issue is a loser for them. Were they to win an amendment, they would have to slash and burn pretty much every spending program - and with limits on spending based on GDP we would have to further slash the budget every time the nation entered a recession. Let's not forget, folks, that a big part of the reason the present deficit is so bad is because the economy shrank. The best way to cover that gap is not to cut spending - it's to grow the economy - and repeated rounds of budget cuts during a prolonged recession can reasonably be expected to worsen and prolong that recession. The proposed amendment would also tie the government's hands in times of emergency. Want to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or conclude that it's necessary to bail out the financial industry to prevent a depression? Too bad, so sad? It's extremely difficult to believe that a U.S. Senator doesn't know how idiotic it would be to impose a balanced budget amendment with no exceptions; it's also obvious that once you include exceptions you'll see them exploited in every budget cycle.

There are measures that could be much more easily passed than a balanced budget amendment, such as a system of automatic tax increases that would be triggered by a deficit in the prior year. There is no reason why the Republican majority in the House of Representatives couldn't pass such a measure right now. If they are going to pretend to care about the deficit, but pull the standard political line that they're too spineless to actually do anything about it, believe me - calls from people like the Koch brothers threatening to work to defeat their members in the next election if they trigger a tax increase is pretty much all the incentive they'll need to find their missing backbones.

But really, if the Republican Party truly is convinced that balanced budgets are a national priority, and that balancing the budget every truly is a necessity for the welfare of the nation, they don't need an Amendment. They don't need legislation. They simply need to decide, as a party, that they have a balanced budget policy and that they're going to stick to it. They can declare that, starting in fiscal year 2012 (or 2014), no Republican who signs onto a budget that involves deficit spending will stand for reelection (or that the deficit will be reduced by 25% per year over four years, followed by balanced budgets, with a similar consequence for violation). They can hold that if a Republican in federal office signs onto a budget in violation of that commitment, that person will face a primary contest and that the primary opponent will be supported by the Republican Party, with not a single endorsement or dollar flowing to the incumbent who broke their commitment to balanced budgets. They can then do just as they've promised, shutting down the government whenever necessary. It'll be an ugly process, but "everybody will thank them for it in the end," right? (Yeah, right....)

Nah, it's easier to pretend to care about deficits, and much easier to talk about balanced budget amendments, while continuing to spend like there's no tomorrow. Consequences? Individual consequences? Those are for suckers.

Update: Paul Krugman offers a capsule summary of deficit spending starting with Reagan.

Update 2: Ezra Klein describes a bizarre example of Senatorial budgetary cowardice:

The letter that Sens. Michael Bennet, Mike Johanns, and 62 of their colleagues sent President Barack Obama asking him to support comprehensive deficit reduction is an odd document....

There are a lot of letters and statements about deficit reduction flying around, but precious little legislation. If the 64 senators who signed this letter wanted to write and vote for a bill, that’d be a pretty “strong signal.” But for 64 senators to instead write letters about how someone else should be making affirmative noises about deficit reduction, well, read closely, that’s a signal of a very different kind.... Obama could be doing more to move public opinion, but on this issue, the empowered actor is the legislative branch, not the executive branch. And the legislative branch should begin acting like it.

A Simple Quiz For Richard Cohen

Who said the following, when, and in what context?

• Settling Israelis in administered territory, as is known, contravenes international conventions, but there is nothing essentially new about that.

• Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them.

The first quote is Moshe Dayan, in a 1968 memo proposing massive settlement in the occupied territories. The Second is Ariel Sharon in 1998, displaying concern that a peace deal with the Palestinians might result in the loss of Gaza, before he woke up to the demographic consequences of Israel's territorial claim to that region. For people like Sharon, from the start the purpose of the settlements was to frustrate the peace process and to create "facts on the ground" that would prevent the return of most or all of the occupied territories to a Palestinian state. Richard Cohen appears to understand this, flatly asserting,

[Israel's settlements] are all, under international law, illegal.

So let's move to part two of the quiz. What U.S. Administrations were responsible for each of the following statements, and when were the statements made:

1. The [Government of Israel] is aware of our continuing concern that nothing be done in the occupied areas which might prejudice the search for a peace settlement. By setting up civilian or quasi-civilian outposts in the occupied areas the GOI adds serious complications to the eventual task of drawing up a peace settlement. Further, the transfer of civilians to occupied areas, whether or not in settlements which are under military control, is contrary to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

2. The expropriation or confiscation of land, the construction of housing on such land, the demolition or confiscation of buildings, including those having historic or religious significance, and the application of Israeli law to occupied portions of the city are detrimental to our common interests in [Jerusalem]. The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the June war, like other areas occupied by Israel, is governing the rights and obligations of an occupying Power. Among the provisions of international law which bind Israel, as they would bind any occupier, are the provisions that the occupier has no right to make changes in laws or in administration other than those which are temporarily necessitated by his security interests, and that an occupier may not confiscate or destroy private property. The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by the immediate needs of the occupation.

3. Substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under the convention and cannot be considered to have prejudged the outcome of future negotiations between the parties on the locations of the borders of states by the Middle East. Indeed, the presence of these settlements is seen by my government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbors.

4. U.S. Policy toward the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is unequivocal and has long been a matter of public record. We consider it to be contrary to international law and an impediment to the successful conclusion of the Middle East peace process.

5. The Reagan Plan states that ‘the United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transition period (5 years after Palestinian election for a self-governing authority). Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlements freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be fee and fairly negotiated.

6. The United States believes that no party should take unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be reached through negotiations. In this regard the United States has opposed, and will continue to oppose, settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 which remain an obstacle to peace.

7. [T]he settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a Palestinian state is inconsistent with the Oslo commitment that both sides negotiate a compromise.

8. Our position on settlements, I think, has been very consistent, very clear. The secretary expressed it not too long ago. He said settlement activity has severely undermined Palestinian trust and hope, preempts and prejudges the outcome of negotiations, and in doing so, cripples chances for real peace and prosperity. The U.S. has long opposed settlement activity and, consistent with the report of the Mitchell Committee, settlement activity must stop.

The answers? 1. The Johnson Administration, 1968; 2. The Nixon Administration, 1969; 3. The Ford Administration, 1976; 4. The Carter Administration, 1980; 5. The Reagan Administration, 1982; 6. The George H.W. Bush Administration, 1991; 7. The Clinton Administration, 2001; 8. The George W. Bush Administration, 2002. Again, while he appears ignorant of the details, Cohen appears to grasp the gist of things, admitting,Cohen argues that, from a Palestinian perspective,

As for the average Palestinian, settlements are a poke in the eye. The construction of each one means yet another piece of his land has gone over to the enemy and cannot be a part of a Palestinian state. It is an in-your-face reminder of impotency, of the inability to control life or fate -- and of a baleful history that has seen nothing but defeat.

Although I doubt he has a sufficient grasp of the history of the conflict to have passed either quiz, Richard Cohen has expressly admitted that Israel's settlements are illegal and an impediment to peace, a position superficially consistent with the position taken by every U.S. Administration throughout the entire history of the occupation. The settlements have resulted in vast areas of the occupied West Bank being declared off-limits to Palestinians (the blue and red areas are exclusive to Israelis; the Green area represents an occupied portion of Hebron, with about 20,000 Palestinians under martial law for the benefit of about 400 radical settlers), with their lands criss-crossed with "settler only" roads, roadblocks and checkpoints:

But it's Richard Cohen, so you can't expect that anything logical will flow from his pen. Although he admits the settlements are illegal, an impediment to peace and a deliberate thumb in the eye of the Palestinians, Cohen argues that the religious and ideological importance of the settlements justifies dictating to the Palestinians, up front, that "some, regardless of legality, are going to stay". He makes no call for any sort of reciprocal land swap. For Netanyahu, whose government he has already described as perpetuating an illegal enterprise, Cohen complains that the settlements have "enormous symbolic value" and that for a minority of Israelis "settlements have enormous religious and ideological importance". It was thus "a major concession" for Netanyahu to (sort of, but not really) freeze the expansion of the settlements for ten months as a prerequisite for peace talks.

So you have a clear legal picture: Cohen sees the settlements as illegal. You have a clear consequence of continued settlement activity, with Cohen recognizing that each brick laid makes the possibility of achieving peace more remote. You have the consistent position of every U.S. Administration that the settlements are an impediment to peace and cannot be allowed to interfere with the peaceful resolution of the crisis. And you have an Israeli Prime Minister who says, "Screw you, even if the peace talks crash and burn we're going to go right back to expanding the settlements."

So, in Richard Cohen's mind, who is to blame? The party he describes as committing an offense against peace? Of course not. The party that is losing its prospect of statehood as a result of that intransigence? Not unless it results in the end of peace talks. What about the mediator who is trying to bring the two sides together to reach a peace deal? Yes, obviously the mediator is at fault, even though his position is 100% consistent with that of his predecessors and even though he has done nothing to create the problem:

Obama, too, has to husband his credibility. He foolishly demanded something Israel could not yet give. It was bad diplomacy, recalling neither Metternich nor Kissinger but the ol' professor and his question about the inept Mets ["Can't anybody here play this game?"].

Cohen apparently doesn't understand the difference between "can't" and "won't", and doesn't actually care about the consequences to peace of taking "no" for an answer. It is tragic that imbeciles like Cohen are given prominent positions where they can advance counter-factual arguments that undermine the peace process and perpetuate the crisis. But, as they say, welcome to America.

The Price of the Iraq War

I don't know whether to praise Anne Applebaum for acknowledging the huge price that the U.S. has paid (and continues to pay) for the Iraq War, or chide her for continuing to insist that it could turn out to be sunshine and lollipops. I do think it's fair to observe that nowhere among the prices she has listed will you actually find a dollar figure. The war has drained trillions from the treasury, and the bills keep coming. To quickly hit Applebaum's points, she believes that among the casualties of the war are,

1. America's reputation for effectiveness;
2. America's ability to organize a coalition;
3. America's ability to influence the Middle East;
4. America's ability to think like a global power; and
5. America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.

As with the dollar cost of the war, the impact of the war on Iraqis goes unmentioned.

I find many of Applebaum's points to be unpersuasive. In terms of America's reputation for military effectiveness, the initial war was a success. The mistake was embracing the notion that it would be quick and easy (not to mention free) to occupy Iraq and reinvent it as a right-wing utopia and corporate grab-bag. Tyrants may not be trembling that the U.S. will attempt such a project in their nations after they are deposed, but they know that we can depose them.

In terms of the impact on coalition-building, the war can't be said to have had any appreciable effect. The war was unpopular with most of our allies, and coalition-building was difficult even before the war began. To the extent that the war "", that's his own fault, he managed to serve as Prime Minister for another four years (considerably beyond the term he negotiated with Gordon Brown when he became party leader), and if he's crying on the way to the bank his tears are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

In terms of Georgia, if the lesson to a nominal coalition member (and by that I mean no offense to Georgia, a nation that lacked the capacity to contribute more substantially to the war effort) is that their participation won't inspire the U.S. to militarily back them if they provoke a war with Russia, I would have to call that a good thing. Truly, if building a coalition is nothing more than promising a return greater than the investment - in Applebaum's words, "economic or diplomatic benefits" and "special American favors" in exchange for a small commitment of troops - we are going about it the wrong way. When Applebaum complains, "'Iraq' is part of the reason there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan", she displays amnesia - the Afghanistan war started first. To the extent that the effort to maintain a coalition in Afghanistan has suffered due to Iraq, it is much more because of the Bush Administration's change of priorities and diversion of resources from the Afghan war.

As for "why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran", sure, having launched a war in Iraq on the basis of its possession of WMD's and coming up empty, it's harder to convince other nations to follow us into a potential war with Iran over WMD's we concede that it does not possess. At best that has to do with having demonstrated the limits of our nation's intelligence on the state of other countries' weapons programs, and at worst it's because the exaggeration of the threat of Iraq has damaged our credibility - but either way, the outcome was avoidable. If Applebaum is speaking not just of an initial war but of a prolonged occupation, even as the effort to democratize Iraq continues to wobble, few are eager at repeating the experiment in a nation with about twice the population and four times the land mass.

In terms of influencing the Middle East, the Bush Administration made no serious effort to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. It instead tightened the U.S. embrace of Israel. I'm not sure if Applebaum believes that to be good or bad, but it was foreseeable. She claims that the war increased the price of oil, and snipes at war opponents, "this was supposed to be a 'war for oil,' remember", but she misses the boat there as well. Even if we assume that she has never heard of the Carter Doctrine, and even if we view the war proponents who believed that the war would significantly reduce the price of oil and undermine the finances of the Arab oil states, she surely can't have missed that the war in Iraq did remove a potential threat to the world's oil supply. (Memories of the first Iraq war.) It would be naive to have imagined that launching a war in Iraq would flood the world with cheap oil, but it's no less naive to pretend that oil played no role in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Applebaum refuses to reconsider her support of the war and, although she concedes a high price with no basis to yet declare victory, she offers a defense of her stance by way of anecdote,

Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai - who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that "it's too soon to tell."

If we were to assume that the anecdote occurred, our interpretation of the comment perhaps tells us more about us than about the speaker. Had, for example, G.W. made that comment during a debate, it would have been framed as a gaffe, a mistake, a reflection of ignorance. Had Al Gore done the same, it would have been equivocation, pointy-headedness, waffling. But when framed through the idea of a Chinese leader who is presumed to take an exceptionally long view of history, the statement is viewed as deep and meaningful.

Odds are if it actually occurred it was because of a translation error, Zhou Enlai's misunderstanding the question, or his providing a murky answer because he didn't know enough French history to know that the revolution had occurred almost two centuries before. But under any interpretation, it won't take two centuries for us to learn the impact of the Iraq war or, as Applebaum's own column reflects, its impact on the United States.

Masculinity and Temper Tantrums

There's a concept known as sang-froid, the maintenance of composure, level-headedness, and coolness under stressful or difficult circumstances, that is often depicted in movies as the height of masculinity. Think Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - sure, he may be under live fire in a war zone, but that's not going to stop him from surfing. Think of pretty much any action movie - the hero faces adversity and gets mad, but keeps his cool - there's no point in a tantrum. It doesn't look good on camera and does nothing to even the score. This is anything but a novel or rare interpretation of masculinity.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; ...

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

When most people are responding emotionally to a situation, a commonly invoked idiom is, "Let cooler heads prevail."

President Obama has sang-froid. In spades. His coolness has resulted in any number of right-wing attacks on him for "not showing enough emotion". As if he would seem more Presidential if he were displaying barely-controlled rage. Me? I got enough of play-acting under G.W. Bush, and I'm perfectly content to have a President who both acts like a grown-up and treats the electorate as if it's comprised of adults.

Parker apparently sees herself less as an analyst, taking facts, creating novel arguments and presenting them to the public in her bi-weekly column, and more as part of an echo chamber:

Many people seemed to have a hankering for one particular emotion: Not the Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" kind but the "Take-BP-Behind-the-Woodshed-and-Make-Them-Pay" kind. They wanted an action figure in the hyper-masculine mode, not George W. Bush but the Terminator.

In fits and starts, Obama had given it to them. He wanted to know "whose ass to kick," he told us. He wanted them to "plug the damn hole." Press secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that in discussions with Obama he, indeed, had "seen rage from him."

Then the president gave his Oval Office speech. And the collective reaction was, "That's it?! Where's the outrage?!?!"

Arnold Schwarzenegger was well-cast as The Terminator because he was big, intimidating, and had not yet learned to convey on-screen emotional range. Earth to Kathleen Sullivan - The Terminator is an android. The Terminator has no emotions. In Terminator II, the android was frozen by liquid nitrogen - you don't get much colder than that - and yet he managed to (dare I say) keep his emotional cool (because he didn't have emotions). You could hardly ask for a better illustration of sang-froid as evidence of masculinity, yet Parker's not sufficiently self-aware to recognize the contradiction. Meanwhile, back in the real world where the real Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually in politics, how often does he engage in public blow-ups or tantrums when things aren't going his way?

With due respect to Kathleen Sullivan's yearning for the "boil" of George W. Bush, it seems that President Obama's ability to keep his cool is more consistent with Presidential tradition. Sure, we have stories of past Presidents who would explode into anger at their aides - behind the scenes - but that wasn't the face they put forth to the public. Which presidents in recent history didn't present a calm public face in response to crisis? Bill Clinton? George H.W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? I'm not sure that Parker's either presenting the vindication of G.W. or the condemnation of Obama that she imagines when she, in effect, holds G.W. and Richard Nixon out as paragons of the appropriate display of anger.

If we're honest about perceptions of public displays of anger, as a society we tend to recognize a male form - the inner beast escapes and wants to "break something" - and a female form - "hysteria", "histrionics", the "hissy fit" - etymology, L. hystericus "of the womb". It's sexist, and truth be told the biggest difference often appears to be that men are for the most part more capable of outwardly directed violence. But in the context of Presidential behavior it's all spin.

Had Obama been reacting to things more angrily, you can fully expect that the very same voices that have been demanding "more anger" would be denouncing him as excessively emotional, unbalanced, out-of-control. And you can expect that columnists like Kathleen Parker would pick up on those themes to argue that the conduct she presently contends evidences a "testosterone deficit" would in fact make him more masculine than his "inability to control his anger". Sang-froid would once again be a masculine attribute, while the "boil" of G.W. would be pushed into the background as somehow different or irrelevant to similar behavior by Obama - but I would not be surprised by comparisons to Nixon.

Political Hypocrisy

Offering up a defense of his friend, Mark Souder, Michael Gerson writes,

Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity and that less sensual vices also can be disturbing. "The sins of the flesh are bad," said C.S. Lewis, "but they are the least bad of all sins....

Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

By "moral conservative", Gerson apparently means the class of conservative that wants government to regulate and legislate moral issues - people like his friend, Mark Souder, who was a big-time advocate of the war on drugs and "abstinence-only" education. It's Souder's "abstinence-only" video that is the source of most of the mockery that Gerson deplores. He's also opposed to abortion rights, the funding of family planning education, and gay marriage. It would seem that much of his political career was dedicated to attacking the sins of the flesh that Gerson now tells us, at least in the context of his defense of his friend, aren't that bad.

Fair enough. If politicians like Souder de-emphasize their moral crusading, they will be less susceptible to accusations of hypocrisy or to having their world collapse due to their own moral failings. But in the absence of moral crusading, what's the point of electing somebody like Souder? In terms of his political career, isn't his railing on the moral weakness of others the very thing that made him special? Take that away, and how much is left? Souder may well be a poster boy for "There, but for the grace of God, go I," but if he didn't internalize the lesson (or decided that there was no political benefit, and perhaps even political peril, in espousing a less judgmental brand of politics) what makes his downfall the wake-up call that Gerson (now) believes "moral conservatives" need?

Gerson introduces the concept of the "moral liberal", not in the sense that you might have previously encountered the phrase - a political liberal who espouses moral values - but apparently as a neologism for "libertine". He's using a pretty standard "hollow man" argument, as the vast majority of people on the political left see absolutely no contradiction between living moral lives and having the government stay out of our bedrooms.

To advance his argument, Gerson uses the broadest possible conception of hypocrisy. Yes, we all hold ourselves and others to standards that, try as we might, we sometimes fail to meet. There's a sense in which that is hypocrisy, but what we're addressing with people like Vitter (and John Ensign, Henry Hyde, etc.) is something different. We're talking about people who are happy to condemn, and profit from their condemnation of, the moral failings of others not as they struggle to live moral lives or atone for past transgressions, but without caring that they are applying a double standard. I'll give Souder the benefit of the doubt - he got caught fooling around and he resigned from office. What are we to make of Ensign?

So step back and ask, what's being mocked? If Souder was mocked only for having an affair, assuming he truly believes in marital fidelity and makes a sincere effort to be faithful, Gerson has a point. If Souder was being mocked for sitting next to somebody with whom he is having an active affair, in front of a camera, and lecturing the world about the importance of sexual abstinence outside of the institution of marriage, there's a colorable case that he's a hypocrite of the second sort - the type who doesn't believe the message he's preaching.

When Gerson calls on us to show mercy to Souder, to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his sincerity, he does so within the context of knowing Souder and considering him to be a friend. But he overlooks two things: First, that most people lack the context to know that we're only dealing with "moral shoddiness, laziness and frailty", and not with a guy who deliberately applies a double standard and advocates for principles and causes he does not actually believe. Second, that although there's nothing wrong with defending a friend, and it can be a good thing to come to the aid and defense of a friend in need, it's not ordinarily a difficult thing to do. The difficulty is demonstrating that same grace and mercy toward somebody you don't know, even to somebody you don't like. Even if that person is Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. We all have room to grow.

Who Said "Conservatives" Can't Be Funny?

This column is funnier than the column it attempts to explain - Dennis Prager, a radio talk show host, offered his brand of parody, suggesting that Jimmy Carter responded to the Lord of the Rings trilogy by condeming the movie, attributing statements such as,

"Who knows what might happen if enough young people start thinking that war is an option, or that some people or countries can be labeled 'evil,' or that there is something noble about a soldier who kills for a 'just' cause?"

Although it seemed obvious to me that Prager was trying to be funny, his only overt notice was at the conclusion of his piece, "This story is fictional, but not false."

Now he reports receiving feedback from four groups: (1) those who thought he was funny, (2), those furious for his false attribution of various statements to Carter, (3) those who didn't recognize the joke, and thanked him for bringing Carter's comments to light, and (4) those confused about the last line, asking "What part of your column was fiction?". Prager explains that the last line was meant to label the piece as a parody, as was the false news service line he used. He then compares himself to Bill Safire, who has parodic, fictional conversations with public figures in his columns (without this type of confusion, presumably, by virtue of being a better writer). Then he complains that he has never and would never falsely attribute quotes. But this is the funny part:

Jonah Goldberg, an astute observer of contemporary life, actually excerpted my column, "Jimmy Carter: 'Compassion for Mordor,'" on his National Review Web site.

Yup. How's that for astute. Goldberg's readers set him straight.

Okay, this part is funny, also - Prager complains about those who did not understand his final line - declaring that he, like "Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and other great writers revealed great truths through fiction, and I guess everybody should have realized that he kept such rarified company. (I wonder if poor Bill Safire felt the sting of not being referenced in that list of great writers.) He of course concludes with an overt attack on Carter as "deeply morally confused about good and evil, who damaged his country as president, and who hurts it today." Um... I guess if you're as self-important as Prager, or as he now demands to be called "Shakespearevsky", you have every right to judge.

(Incidentally, if you found the original piece to actually be funny, please speak up.)

Comments