Just a Little Bit of Torture?

Via Charles Pierce, I found Jonah Goldberg's unimpressive defense of the use of torture. Goldberg opens,

For a long time I resisted the word “torture” when discussing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against high-value captives in the War on Terror. I don’t think I can do that anymore.

Let's be blunt, here. There's only one reason somebody like Goldberg would shy away from the use of the word "torture" and it's because he's a coward. The facts were out there. The Senate report adds some shocking details, but if you weren't willing to call "torture" by its name until you learned that it may have involved hummus, you were either choosing not to look at the facts or you were scared of alienating your patrons and followers. In his new defense of torture, Goldberg makes clear that he believes the techniques we knew to be involved in "enhanced interrogation" were torture:

What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it “psychological torture” or something to that effect, but such qualifiers don’t get you all that far.

So, then, he's a coward.

Goldberg immediately walks back from his concession of the obvious:

It’s true that torture is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. Everyone can agree that hot pokers, the rack, and the iron maiden qualify. But loud music, sleep deprivation, and even waterboarding? At first, maybe not. But over time, yes. Torture can be a lot like poison: The dosage matters.

To me, that paragraph seems internally inconsistent. The initial argument is that there can be sincere disagreement over whether certain practices constitute torture. But rather than advancing that argument, Goldberg switches to one of degree -- that certain techniques only become torture if they're applied in a repeated or prolonged manner. Goldberg's on the record here. If he has scruples, they're newly discovered:

Within this broad range, arguments over what is or is not torturous are to be had. The most debated technique is “waterboarding,” which terrifies its recipient into believing he is drowning. Apparently, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded until he gave us a bounty of information. Technically, the McCain amendment would ban such treatment.

Goldberg knew at that time that Mohammed was waterboarded repeatedly, yet he had no problem suggesting that waterboarding might not actually be torture and that it should not be prohibited. Goldberg also displayed an inability to comprehend the moral and legal issues behind torture:

But, as Charles Krauthammer notes in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, there’s reason to believe even McCain would endorse a “sliding scale” that would allow the Khalid Mohammeds to get roughed up under certain circumstances. In other words, McCain makes the sorts of distinctions mentioned above–he just doesn’t want them written into law. Indeed, under the “ticking time bomb” scenario, McCain believes the president should willfully break the law McCain has authored. That’s a pretty Kerryesque position: He’s for it, except when he’s against it. So much for absolutism.

Krauthammer proposed banning torture but with exceptions that would subsume the rule -- he would allow for torture in the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and for what he calls "slow fuse" suspects such as Mohammed. Even if you don't follow Krauthammer's definition of "ticking time bomb" so broadly as to include a situation where the enemy has captured a soldier, the difficulty of its implementation should be obvious: If you don't know what information a suspect has until after you torture him, you're going to end up torturing people who have no information, who may have been deliberately fed misinformation for you to elicit, and who you presuppose are going to lie to you. You, as a torturer, also don't know either if or when the lie becomes the truth.

You risk getting an avalanche of information that buries the truth. You risk getting several versions of the truth, with amendment or new "details" added at every turn simply to get the torture to stop. In a non-ticking time bomb scenario, such as a soldier's being held hostage, you may have the luxury of repeatedly returning to your suspects to torture them again and again, until they give you better information... assuming they have it. But in an actual ticking time bomb scenario, you won't know if you have the right person, you won't know if you're getting accurate information, and you may in fact end up chasing red herrings of your own creation rather than following valid leads.

It's not clear that Goldberg accepted, or even understood, Krauthammer's distinction between the "ticking time bomb" and the "slow fuse". Krauthammer endorsed torturing somebody like Mohammed on the assumption that he's going to have useful information that he won't otherwise provide to interrogators -- and because he doesn't believe that suspected terrorists are deserving of basic human rights or dignity. Krauthammer's exceptions are so broad that his proposed limited prohibition of torture would not prevent any torture. His conception of the "ticking time bomb" is so broad as to encompass pretty much any possible, future terrorist attack or the location of a captures soldier. It's difficult to believe that he would object to the use of torture to find arms stashes, or to find people higher on the food chain, all in the name of preventing imminent terrorist attacks -- because terrorists are always plotting the next attack. Any detainee is thus reasonably treated as a "ticking time bomb" -- and if, for some reason, you can't make that case, you can simply apply the subjective measure that you think the person is "high value" and can be tortured to obtain whatever information he holds.

Although it seems obvious, Goldberg was completely unable to grasp the distinction between the positions of people like McCain and Kerry, and the unprincipled arguments of somebody like Krauthammer. Kerry and McCain were prepared for the possibility that the mythic "ticking time bomb" might actually be found, with the President being called upon to authorize torture in violation of the law. A President who could not make the case would be subject to impeachment, and he and those following his orders could face criminal charges. Such an approach should all-but-eliminate the possibility of a Bush-Cheney torture regime, as their programs would be plainly unlawful. Krauthammer, on the other hand, would have been perfectly happy to give that regime the full blessings of the law.

Goldberg is upset with the idea that once something is identified as torture, it should be deemed off-limits:

One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross. As a result, if you think the enhanced interrogation techniques are necessary, or simply justified, you have to call them something else. Similarly, many sincere opponents of these techniques think that if they can simply call them “torture,” their work is done.

Pierce points out the stupidity of Goldberg's points of comparison:

This is a guy who has made a comfortable career out of the notion that liberal fascists use "racism" as a club to bludgeon conservatives into silence when those conservatives are only trying to have a discussion about values and the public schools. Is he implying here that people use the words "incest" and "torture" in the same way? Do liberals cry "incest" when conservatives are only trying to talk about the gene pool out of which have emerged their hot cousins?

But more than that, Goldberg again displays the same sort of cowardice that plagues not just his musings on torture, but most of his work. He just told us that he was tremulous of using the word "torture" to describe torture, yet he's now suggesting that all it takes to get us back to where we were a few years ago is a properly applied euphemism. There is no similarity between suggesting that torture should be illegal, and using a euphemism to describe acts you know to fall under the definition of torture in order to try to sidestep legal and moral issues. Beyond that, Goldberg knows that torture opponents are not simply articulating a definition and declaring their job to be done:

The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless.

As previously explained, McCain would have the torturer and those who authorized his acts face possible prosecution, defending his breach of a torture prohibition based upon a strong argument of necessity. McCain would have the torturer clearly demonstrate courage in his convictions, a concept that appears to be outside of Goldberg's comprehension.

And nearly everyone understands the point: When a greater evil is looming in the imminent future, the lesser evil becomes more tolerable. This is why opponents of the interrogation program are obsessed with claiming that it never worked, at all.

Here, again, Goldberg is unable to maintain internal consistency. He cannot simultaneously hold up John McCain as the iconic opponent of the torture program, while pretending that McCain is "obsessed with claiming that it never worked." While some do take the position that torture "never" works, most opponents of torture recognize that you may be able to gain useful information from torture -- but with much of that information subject to being elicited through rapport-based interrogation without the moral issues of torture, or the confounding problem of useful facts being buried in an avalanche of lies and misinformation pouring out of a suspect who will say anything to make the torture stop.

Goldberg also steps right past the obvious, that proponents of the torture program have a very long history of lying about the program and the intelligence they gathered. They lied about the scope of the program. They lied about its effectiveness. They lied about the utility of information they gathered. Knowing that their actions would shock the conscience of the nation, they systematically destroyed the evidence. You would not expect that level of deceit, exaggeration and cover-up from people who sincerely believed in their program.

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, wrote an essay for Foreign Policy, entitled, I don’t believe a word of what torture advocates say—and neither should you.

Predictably, torture’s acolytes are already responding: The report was a Republican witch hunt led by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein. Facts were selectively culled by partisan staffers in order to paint the program in the worst possible light. Other staffers could’ve selected different facts and reached completely opposite conclusions. Sure, there were problems with the program, but these techniques really did “work.” They saved lives. Someday, the truth will be revealed, and the men and women who performed this “hard, dirty work” for good ends will be lauded as the true heroes they are. In the mean time, trust us regarding this program’s success. WE KNOW.

Hogwash. I’ve never believed a word of what torture’s advocates say, and neither should you.

The author, who managed interrogation operations for the 1st Armored Division (1AD) in Baghdad from Jul-Nov 2003, asked that several of his prisoners be "re-interrogated" at Abu Ghraib,

Now, this is important: not once during this period did my Division receive any useful intelligence from Abu Ghraib. We received a few reports that Abu Ghraib interrogators seemed to think contained useful intelligence, but they contained nothing of substance that wasn’t contained in earlier reports. It was a mystery to me then why our interrogators in Baghdad produced actionable intelligence nearly every day but those at Abu Ghraib produced nothing of value—not little of value, NOTHING of value.

He opines,

But while trying to make sense of my own experiences, I’ve also read extensively on the subject, and all that I’ve read reinforces the same conclusion: torture is an immensely impractical intelligence-gathering tool. Professional interrogators who have become truly expert at employing rapport-based approaches decry torture’s effectiveness as an intelligence-gathering tool. Yes, you sometimes get the truth, but this truth is rarely substantial and is typically buried in what I’ve heard professional interrogators call “the longest list of lies in the world.”

Those who claim that torture has more chance of success than rapport-based approaches have limited (if any) direct experience with these approaches. They’re rarely real interrogators....

When the 9/11 attacks took place, nearly 3000 Americans lost their lives, and so many Americans lost their minds, U.S. Army interrogation doctrine (as expressed in the 1987 Intelligence Interrogation manual) had it right: “Experience indicates that . . . the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” Unfortunately, this doctrine—which reflected the practical experience of generations of interrogators—was thrown away by arrogant amateurs who thought they knew more than the professionals.

He points out that there's more to the debate than "does it work",

The question of "does it work" aside, there are HUGE strategic drawbacks to torture, such as how it undermines the rule of law, corrupts those who use it, undercuts military training, cedes moral high ground to our nation’s enemies, creates distrust among allies, sows dissension at home, serves as a source of recruits and donations for our nation’s enemies, creates irreconcilable enemies, and makes the ultimate goal of any conflict—its peaceful resolution—increasingly difficult.

Quite simply, for a mature democracy in the information age, there may be no surer tool for prolonging conflicts and shaping defeat than employing torture.

By pretending that opponents of torture begin and end their argument with, "It's wrong", Goldberg conveniently avoids addressing any of the more difficult arguments against torture.

Goldberg then brings in the false analogy:

And this suggests why the talking point about drone strikes has such power. Killing is worse than torture. Life in prison might be called torture for some people, and yet we consider the death penalty a more severe punishment....

It’s odd: Even though killing is a graver moral act, there’s more flexibility to it. America killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in World War II, but few would call that murder because such actions as the firebombing of Dresden were deemed necessary to win the war.

In other words, we have the moral vocabulary to talk about kinds of killing — from euthanasia and abortion to capital punishment, involuntary manslaughter and, of course, murder — but we don’t have a similar lexicon when it comes to kinds of torture.

It would be interesting to hear Jonah Goldberg's description of the military justification of the firebombing of Dresden, which I expect would be about as deep as his understanding of Mussolini's connection to fascism -- "Oops, I forgot Mussolini was a fascist".¹

Goldberg is obviously no student of history, but if he were he might have learned that the allied commanders who ordered such acts as the firebombing of cities in Japan knew that their acts were legally dubious and knew that they would likely result in war crimes charges if the Allies lost the war. That is the very sort of accountability that John McCain wishes to bring to torture -- to have the person making the order do so in contemplation that his decision could result in his spending many years in prison (or, in the case of war crimes, the hangman's noose), something that also likely plays into the public acceptance of the necessity defense.

Also, in war the question is almost never going to be, "Should we fire a missile or should we conduct a precision raid to kill or extract an enemy leader or terrorist". While it may be true that, in hindsight, a terrorist might prefer to be tortured and imprisoned over being blown up by a drone, perhaps along with members of his family, that only becomes relevant if the putative target of a drone strike decides to turn himself over to U.S. forces.

Goldberg is essentially arguing that, having accepted that torture is wrong, we need a new euphemism for torture, or at least for the modest amount of torture that Goldberg would have us see as something other than torture. Actually, the issue of whether or not an act constitutes torture can be made reasonably clear, using a definition such as Lt. Col. Pryer's, "Today, I judge any tactic designed to inflict physical or mental pain severe enough to 'break' someone to be 'torture.'". Goldberg might want us to believe that offering a criminal suspect a cup of coffee during an interrogation is an insidious form of sleep deprivation, tantamount to making him stand without sleep and forcibly waking him every time he dozes off, but I suspect that most others can see the difference between an interrogation that goes on arguably past the point when a suspect should be allowed to sleep and intentional sleep deprivation.²

Moreover, in the former case the suspect can argue in court that the circumstances of the interrogation became unduly coercive -- and that is made easier if it's clear that interrogating officers were intentionally depriving the suspect of sleep in order to continue the interrogation of a suspect whose mental faculties were breaking down. There is no point to trying to use Goldberg's "little bit of torture" approach, as torture is only useful if the suspect breaks. Once you make the decision to torture, there's no level at which your actions do not constitute torture.

I don't want to overstate things here. Sometimes a suspect can be inspired to provide self-incriminating information based upon threats or statements that are coercive, but are not deemed to be torture. The federal government has a reputation for threatening to bring charges against a primary suspect's spouse, or possibly other family members, when pressuring a suspect to confess to a crime or to accept a plea bargain. Suspects detained for interrogation may be told that a co-defendant is making a confession that implicates them, and that if they don't confess they'll get a more severe penalty. I don't think that Pryer is referring to causing a suspect to break his silence, or break from a prior narrative, when he speaks of "mental pain severe enough to 'break' someone" -- but I would not be surprised if he argued that you would be much more likely to get reliable information from criminal suspects if you successfully use rapport-based techniques, particularly if he's familiar with false confession cases.

Goldberg then presents the argument, "Our torture is different, because our motives are pure,"

When John McCain was brutally tortured — far, far more severely than anything we’ve done to the 9/11 plotters — it was done to elicit false confessions and other statements for purposes of propaganda. When we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was to get actionable intelligence on ongoing plots. It seems to me that’s an important moral distinction. If I torture a fiend to find out where he left a child to suffocate or starve in some dungeon, that’s a less evil act than torturing someone just to hear them renounce their god or country. Also, KSM was not some innocent subjected to torture to satisfy the grotesque desires of some sadists. He is an unlawful combatant responsible for murdering thousands of innocent Americans.

This may sound like nothing more than a rationalization. But that is to be expected when you try to reason through a morally fraught problem.

What it sounds like is both an oversimplification and a rationalization. While it is true that torture states use torture in order to obtain statements useful for propaganda purposes, as well as to generally intimidate the public, it is not true that they thus never use torture to gain intelligence about criminal, dissident, or terrorist activity, or to try to obtain useful intelligence from enemy soldiers. I suspect, also, that their torturers are every bit as good at rationalizing their conduct as is Goldberg when it comes to his insistence that when Americans torture they have only the purest of motives.

Here, again, Goldberg avoids addressing the actual positions of torture opponents. People like John McCain fully embrace the idea of American exceptionalism, and are going into this debate with the assumption that our motives in using torture will be pure. Unlike Goldberg, however, he has enough understanding of both history and the realities of torture to recognize that the use of torture should nonetheless be extremely rare, and that the legal framework for the use of torture should force decision-makers to consider both the need for torture and all reasonable alternatives before authorizing its use.

--------------------------------
Footnotes:

1. Goldberg's actual statement,

Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Goldberg's defense of his error is that he "misspoke", a claim that may be true but, if so, is akin to somebody professing to be an expert on the Middle East conflicts while forgetting, even momentarily, about Mohammed's connection to Islam. Actually, given that Mussolini railed against socialism, it would be a bit like such an "expert" arguing that Mohammed unsuccessfully tried to stop Islam.

2. One wonders what distinctions Goldberg would draw that would render the techniques of torture to be, in his view, non-torture. Is there actually a degree of waterboarding that could be deemed anything but torture? Would he defect rectal feeding -- "As long as you don't use any more hummus than you get in one of those airline snack packs" -- or would he concede that some techniques are always torture even if used only to a limited degree?

The Latest News from Planet Douthat

When it comes to politics and political commentary the "fools or frauds" question often arises. When somebody makes an assertion that reflects badly on their intelligence, you have to wonder are they truly that foolish or are they knowingly advancing a fraudulent argument. Some columnists appear to believe that "fool or fraud" is a false dichotomy, far too constraining - you don't have to be one or the other when you can be both? And then, alas, you at times see somebody who is attempting a fraud so clumsily that he reveals himself to be a fool.

For some reason my thoughts now shift to Ross Douthat. Douthat opens by assuming that last week's debate was between "the flaws in contemporary conservatism" and "the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism", and suggests that flawed contemporary conservatism carried the day. I am wondering at this point if Douthat watched the same debate I saw, but alas, he offers no analysis to support his conclusion. We then move into fantasy land:

Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance – a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was only supposed to be the beginning.

The glory days of Lyndon Johnson.... wasn't that the Obama team's tag line going into the election? Seriously, other than a handful of first time voters already exhausted by eight years of Bush ineptitude, few of whom would get the "Johnson/Vietnam" reference, who does Douthat imagine he is describing?

The most common reaction I was hearing from Democrats was, "I hope the Democrats in Congress don't **** this up." A close second place went to, "I wonder how the Democrats in Congress are going to **** this up?" Perhaps Douthat is confused and believes that Democrats live in opposite land, and if he and his circle of confederates were crying about how Obama was going to ruin the world it could only mean that Democrats believed the opposite. It appears that he needs a bit more grounding in what the Bush Administration deemed "the reality based community."

He goes from there to worse:

With the Democrats enjoying huge congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: Immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector – and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

Immigration reform. You know, that ridiculous "liberal" concept that George W. Bush wanted to make part of his first term agenda, and that "liberals" like John "DREAM Act" McCain used to champion.

A program to combat climate change. You know, like the cap and trade approach that John McCain guy used to advance, in the past also endorsed by that other ridiculous, naive liberal, Newt Gingrich.

Advocacy for "a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector"? Earth to Planet Douthat? Where did he get the idea that President Obama supported whatever he imagines "trust-busting in the banking sector" to mean? Perhaps Douthat has President Obama confused with Teddy Roosevelt? In the real world, Obama was praising Jamie Dimon while letting Larry Summers and Tim Geithner spearhead financial industry reforms.

A "return to Clinton-era tax rates"? Republicans continue to feign concern about deficit spending and the need for lower deficits and balanced budgets, so it would not be unreasonable for Obama to allow the "Bush-era tax cuts" to expire. I am sure Douthat has erased the facts from his memory, but the cuts passed through reconciliation and were scheduled to expire after ten years. But I digress. No member of the Democratic Party advocated "", and in fact taxes were cut. There is talk about "a return to Clinton-era tax rates" for the wealthiest wage earners, but that's entirely different from what Douthat is pretending to have been Democratic Party policy.

Card check legislation? Well, obviously the modern Republican Party isn't going to help labor unions, so at least he is correct in terms of associating it with the Democratic Party, but it was not the priority Douthat would have us believe. Why pull it out of mothballs? Because it remains a Republican talking point.

In other words, Douthat complains that the Democrats wanted to pass a "weak" form of "liberalism" which, for the most part, had previously been at the core of campaign rhetoric and policy proposals of the prior President and Obama's 2008 election opponent. Well, yes, adopting Republican policies can reasonably be described as a weak form of liberalism, but that's obviously not what Douthat meant.

And... whoah... we're only too paragraphs into Douthat's foolishness.

Douthat pontificates,

Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party’s upper middle class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

It should be unnecessary to say this, but McCain/Gingrich style "cap and trade" measures, and McCain/Bush-style immigration reform aren't the best examples of "Obama-era liberalism" or its failure. Immigration reform failed because of right-wing demagoguery, a strategy of xenophobia that remains remarkably effective at scaring and dividing people. John McCain could have demonstrated some backbone and picked up at least one of his old causes, rallying the tiny number of Republican votes it would have taken to see his dreams (no pun intended) become reality. But no, politics were more important, and as Mitch McConnell said, their number one job was to beat Obama in 2012.

How about that little sneer at the Democratic Party's elites who are out of touch with "the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents"? Because, you know, 95% of Democrats are rich, urb9o0anites, doing something other than working in the financial industry but, you know, otherwise that rich and out of touch. Were Douthat an honest man, he would admit that he's using a euphemism here for "working class white males who have not attended college", but... he's not. Even if we assume that there remains no lingering effect of the Republican Southern Strategy, which we should not, the Republican Party has engaged in shameless demagoguery on a wide variety of issues to keep that group of voters largely in its corner. And yes, it reached the point where John McCain had to scamper away from his own long-held beliefs in support of policies that Douthat purports to be "Obama-era liberalism".

Douthat next launches into the standard Republican double message on Obama's first year in office - having just told us how the President should have been able to resolve pretty much every major, unresolved issue facing the country, we get "but he simultaneously should also have tried to do less".

Then came the White House’s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus’s underperformance – by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead – and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010.

You see, there was no issue with Republican obstructionism and demagoguery, the whole "death panels" thing never happened, Republicans didn't (and don't) criticize the President for supposedly cutting Social Security (to give money to undeserving people who haven't "paid for" Medicare), and the like. No, all the President had to do was give speech and the nation would have magically understood the entire bill. You have to ask, why didn't he think of that. Oh yeah, because he doesn't have the good fortune of living on Planet Douthat.

This failure of salesmanship doesn’t in and of itself discredit the bill’s provisions.

That's an interesting admission, Ross. Funny how you didn't have enough space in your blog post (which does not have any limitations on its length) to better explain that one.

But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will only be accepted if they’re founded on a secure base of economic growth – growth that Obama’s policies, unlike F.D.R.’s or L.B.J.’s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

And just like that, we're beamed back up to Planet Douthat. The planet where seniors won't take a penny of Social Security or Medicare unless they're sure they paid for everything they receive (and more!) over their working lives. The planet in which Medicare Part D, a gargantuan, unfunded expansion of Medicare wasn't spearheaded by a Republican President, passed by a Republican Congress, and eagerly accepted by a panoply of senior citizens who vote Republican. With Paul "Mr. Fiscal Responsibility" Ryan himself voting for the expansion. Because... redistribution. Ew.

Not being big on internal consistency, Douthat explains the biggest fault of "Obama-era liberalism" - it's designed to advance the ends of powerful interest and industry groups, instead of the people.

More broadly, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform).

One wonders how Douthat defines "conservatism", or if he has ever heard either the expression, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" or "business as usual". He can't possibly be that clueless about how Washington works.

A small dose of reality: The legislation the President passed could have been made significantly better had a handful of responsible Republicans signed on. The President would have been able to avoid making unseemly deals with the likes of Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, the nation would have been better served, the special interests might have been pushed back at least a few inches. But no, Mitch McConnnell was focused on creating a context for Obama's defeat, and it makes for much better demagoguery to whine about "The Louisiana Purchase" than to admit that one responsible Republican could have voted in favor of the bill and obviated the need for that deal.

It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

The President was, of course, handicapped by the facts. Romney can do his usual, embracing both sides of the issue: "I love Dodd-Frank, except for the parts that I hate and will repeal, and no I'm not going to tell you what parts I'm taking about," and pretend that he would do more than the President to take on the financial industry. May have been an empty rhetorical gesture? Once again, "Earth to Planet Douthat...." The financial sector is openly seething about what they see as an attack by the President. Bailing them out so that they could pay their bonuses with taxpayer dollars and borrow for next to nothing, and get right back to business as usual? You can only imagine their horror. You can rest assured that Romney is presenting a very different message behind closed doors. Those are, after all, his people.

And hm... what word is it that anti-Obama demagogues like to use to describe Obama, and what does it have to do with "big government intertwine[d] with big business"? (Something that Douthat has apparently never noticed before. Seriously?) Perhaps he's been hanging out with Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, Obama's that brand of socialist-communist-fascist that is always ignoring the needs of the people in favor of serving powerful industries.

How can you follow up on such a wonderful analysis? How about by... lying?

But what we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn’t worked out as planned.

Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course” and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent.

You know, job bill? Blocked by Republicans? Because they want Obama to lose? Apparently no similar effort was made on Planet Douthat? You can criticize it on substance - Matt Taibbi thinks it's a handout to Wall Street, Richard Epstein thinks it would create a socialist nightmare - but you cannot pretend it does not exist. What does Mitt Romney promise to do, again? Oh, that's right... "create" the exact number of jobs that are projected to be created if we vote a turnip into the White House.

It’s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn’t, and couldn’t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint.

Actually, as Douthat knows, if Romney's party thought Romney believed half of what he said in the debate they would pull the plug on his campaign. The same interests that Douthat whines are too influential in the Obama Administration consider Romney to be bought and paid for.

But Romney isn’t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them – and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism’s glass jaw.

Wow. For mixed metaphors of that caliber I usually have to read Thomas Friedman.

Frankly, if a Republican presidential nominee can win an election by serving up a steaming dose of Rafalca leavings, but doing so in a "forward-looking, energetic and reassuring" manner, we have bigger problems than trying to figure out how to make glass jaws stop shivering. Douthat may come to realize that, should he ever move back to Planet Earth.

Should Douthat venture beyond his peer group and into the world at large, he will find that Democrats are very concerned about what might happen in a second Obama term. That they're aware of the institution impediments politicians like McConnell are happy to utilize to damage the President, even when he knows he's also harming the country, because power is more important than policy. But I suspect I"m now getting into stuff that's beyond Douthat's ability to grasp, harder and nowhere near as much fun to write as a blog post that echoe's Republican talking points, and not at all likely to fill Douthat's pockets through speaker fees and book contracts.

Update: Ethan Gach is far more charitable to Douthat than I. Responding to Douthat's claim that "liberals" have "rallied" behind the President and his lukewarm second term agenda, Gach comments, "What makes Douthat’s chiding so unbearable isn’t that it’s untrue: it’s that it completely misses the point."

When Douthat complains, "we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about it seems that he missed his own political party's inability to "soul search" following various election losses. But more than that, he's presenting a hollow man argument. In his bifurcation of society, Douthat whines about "liberals" as if there's a single, unified "liberal" mindset, and that "liberals" are all cheering for the President. He can only believe that if... he never ventures outside and limits his media exposure to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It would be more true to accuse conservatives of mindlessly cheering for Mitt Romney despite his offering what Douthat charitably describes as "at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint". Seriously - Douthat defends that on the ground that Romney is not the incumbent, but it's much easier to run on a fantasy when your campaign is not firmly grounded in facts on the ground.

Gach believes that Douthat is expressing a clever form of contrarianism, that "The very thing that liberals love to accuse Romney of being, well, it’s actually true of their guy". Except the concern about Romney is not that "his agenda going forward is insubstantive" - the concern about Romney is that he has an agenda that he refuses to disclose, but that he may nonetheless be elected.

Gach continues his charity work,

I can understand why Douthat doesn’t want to look at the entire context in which the people, philosophies, and political parties he’s discussing are operating. That would be difficult, complex, and inconclusive. It certainly would not lend itself to the kind of “actually THIS is what’s going on” blogging that professional pundits are expected and encouraged to turn out.

If you say, though, that Douthat "doesn’t want to look at the entire context" you have the choice of stating that his blindness is not willful (fool) or that he's deliberately omitting the context in order to present an argument he knows to be deeply flawed if not false (fraud). Yes, if you can see through the charade this approach "makes what he says kind of silly", but his pontifications weren't intended for somebody like Gach who can see through the charade.

Wretched Public Policy Arguments

If Paul Krugman is correct, it becomes more understandable why editorials from AEI "scholars" seem so often to be wretched, weak in analysis and careless with facts.

In discussing the [David] Frum firing [by AEI], Bruce Bartlett asserts that AEI has muzzled its health-care experts, because the truth is that they agree with a lot of what Obama is proposing.

Sort of an, "If you don't have anything nice to say for the benefit of our corporate sponsors, don't say anything at all"? Ensuring that your most knowledgeable experts either toe the corporate line or remain silent?

Update: "They’re hiring Jonah Goldberg and Marc Thiessen." As I was saying... wretched.

"Our Greatest Contemporary Philosopher" Speaks

Following up on David Mamet, maybe I should have gone with the parody I contemplated in footnote 1:

I was tempted to write a piece about Mamet's early work being performed the Organic Theater and, well, basically drawing as many parallels I could between Mamet's background and Jonah Goldberg's notions of a "liberal fascist." Such a piece would be entitled, "I used to be a liberal fascist, but it turns out I was a conservative the whole time." That, of course, would be intended as a poke in the eye of those who gush over both this essay and Goldberg's book, but they wouldn't get it and everybody else would be bored.

Because I just discovered (via Glenn Kenny) the great philosopher's edict on liberal fascism:

Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism." As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss — and a major loss.

Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis.

Right.... Brilliant.

But If We Look To Other Commonalities....

When I think of the word "fascism", I think of traditional definitions such as this:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

The colloquial alternative meaning, "a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control", also comes to mind, but I think it is fair to criticize that use as being... well, let's use the words of Jonah Goldberg's publisher,

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers” - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale.

The first part is nonsense, of course - such accusations are occasionally made by a few people, but the assertion is an absurd overgeneralization. In terms of popularizing the meaningless, overbroad use of the term, people like Goldberg lead the field - "But who are the real fascists in our midst? writes his publisher in support of his evolving book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Alright then - so in one breath the use of the word "fascist" is an unfair tool used to impugn somebody's politics, and in the next, "By the way, liberals are fascists" - his "striking parallels":

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Goldberg apparently believes that by finding commonalities between two political ideologies, they somehow merge.

• Liberalism is not the same thing as socialism;
• The idea that "free health care", instituted in Germany under Otto Von Bismarck in 1883, emerged from Nazism defies both history and common sense, while Italy long ago emerged from fascism yet has chosen to maintain national health care despite its being introduced by Mussolini;
• I don't know of any liberals who believe in "guaranteed jobs";
• I don't know any liberals who believe in confiscating inherited wealth, nor of any in the mainstream who support any form of confiscatory estate tax;
• I am not sure what it means to expend "vast sums" on education, but I'm not aware of any mainstream conservative movement that admits to wishing to defund public education, of any mainstream "liberal" movement to significantly increase spending on public education, or of any appreciable difference in state education spending which follows from a transition from Democratic to Republican governance;
• To characterize Nazi programs of eugenics as "pro-choice" in nature verges on the obscene; outside of that context, the Nazis encouraged population growth and large families;
• The Constitution, which long predates the advent of fascism, separates church and state, although I'm sure if they were around the Founding Fathers would be the first to apologize for offending Goldberg's sensitivities (and, sorry, liberalism is not working to advance paganism);
• To the extent that some on the political left support gun control as a means of reducing crime and gun-related accidents, there's a world of difference between their methods and motivations and those of a totalitarian regime which wishes to suppress specific individuals and groups;
• The Nazis opposed smoking... and drug use, sure, as part of their goal of "bodily purity". Goldberg focuses on a nebulous, poorly implemented, and in no small part bipartisan "war on smoking", yet disregards the "war on drugs";
• The number of "liberals" who can be reasonably deemed to "loathe the free market" is infinitesimal;
• Fascists, like every developed country, offer some form of "pension" to the elderly? The horror;
• Goldberg would equate quota systems meant to advance discrimination against disfavored minorities with affirmative action?
• Goldberg would equate modern "speech codes" which protect conduct which the Nazis deemed punishable by death with Nazi-era totalitarianism as extended to University campuses?
• Because Nazis liked organic farmers, organic farmers are Nazis?
• Because Hitler was a vegetarian, vegetarians are Nazis?
• Because Himmler was an animal rights activist, animal rights activists are Nazis?

It's easy to ridicule, as it's absolutely ridiculous. Himmler was interested in Astrology - does that mean, in Goldberg's mind, Nancy and Ronald Reagan were fascists or Nazis?

The publisher's note also tries to get some mileage out of people it deems as being on the political left, yet sympathetic to totalitarianism. "W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song." No mention of Prescott Bush? It's just silly.

And yet others, who have perhaps advanced less on nepotism than Goldberg, make similar arguments in advance of the concept of "Islamofascism". Christopher Hitchens, who loves that term, argues,

The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

It's interesting how there is zero overlap between what Goldberg deems to be the key aspects of fascism as applied against liberals, and what Hitchens deems to be the key aspects of fascism as applied against Islamic fundamentalists. It is interesting that Goldberg defines fascism as a tool to separate church and state, while Hitchens sees it as a tool to advance theocracy.

It is probably unfair to juxtapose Hitchens with Goldberg in this manner, given that Hitchens is trying to articulate a coherent argument whereas Goldberg's book is perpetually in progress (with the evolution of its tag line being something of a joke). However, it is fair to observe that in advancing the concept of Islamofascism, Hitchens takes a view of fascism that is at odds with any conventional concept of liberalism:

• Hostility to modernity;
• Hostility to other religions (not ot mention what they deem as inferior versions of their own religion);
• Leader worship;
• Adherence to "the power of one great book";
• Sexual repression and misogyny; and
• Advocacy, and sometimes overt acts, of censorship of the arts and literature.

The overlap he sees is largely a tendency toward totalitarianism, intolerance and dogma. It is perhaps also interesting to note that what Hitchens sees as key aspects of fascism are much more consistent with religious fundamentalism - any religious fundamentalism - than they are with fascism.

As for more traditional hallmarks of "fascism", "Islamofascism" is not associated with any particular race or nation - for those who don't know, the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arabs. It is not associated with any centralized autocratic government and, although the Taliban's example suggests it would be as autocratic as the regimes it seeks to topple, holds particular animus toward totalitarian Islamic regimes that it deems as being untrue to Islam. Advocacy of social regimentation? Happy to forcibly suppress opposition? Obviously. Advancing economic regimentation? Control of industry by the central authority? Not so much.

When you look only at the commonalities under a traditional definition of fascism, you're really speaking of autocracy, centralized control, subversion of opposing political and religious viewpoints, and subordination of the individual to the central authority.... That is to say, totalitarianism.

In short, as defined by Hitchens, the religious aspects of "Islamofascism" can be found among extremists in any major religion. (I will grant that the numbers of such extremists vary significantly, and concede that Islam has a disproportionately high number of powerful extremists as compared to other major religions, but this phenomenon is simply not unique to Islam.) The political aspects of "Islamofascism" are not fascist, but are totalitarian. And so you are left with a term which isn't actually descriptive of either Islam or fascism. But it sounds scary so, if for no other reason but your deep respect for the work of George Orwell, ya gotta stick with it.

Is Torture Really That Hard To Understand

Apparently so.... The inspiration for my last comment was a blog post in which the author explained why he didn't speak out on the subject of torture.

The case of torture is a good example of the limits of my knowledge. For the reasons outlined by Charles Krauthammer, I do not believe that torturing captured terrorists to obtain information is always wrong as a matter of principle. But I don't have anything original to add to his moral argument, so I haven't blogged about it. In any event, I don't think that arguments about intrinsic morality are enough to resolve the issue. To me, the crucial question is whether we can effectively confine the use of torture to the rare cases where I believe it to be justified and prevent it from "spilling over" onto non-terrorist prisoners (as probably happened at Abu Ghraib), ordinary criminals, or even innocent civilians. A second important question is that of how much valuable information can really be obtained through torture that we could not get otherwise. Because I don't know enough to give a compelling answer to these two crucial questions, I don't have anything useful to contribute to the debate over the issue.

I deem that paragraph reasonable in part, and unreasonable in part. But then, anybody who cites a demagogue like Charles Krauthammer as an authority probably shouldn't be claiming any appreciable understanding of the issue under discussion.

The Krauthammer editorial divides the world of war prisoners into three categories:

First, there is the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle. There is no question that he is entitled to humane treatment. Indeed, we have no right to disturb a hair on his head. His detention has but a single purpose: to keep him hors de combat. * * *

Second, there is the captured terrorist. A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents. He is entitled to no protections whatsoever.

But, Krauthammer adds, we're going to treat him pretty well anyway because we're so nice. (I'm not sure how that helps us if, say, a civilian contractor working in Iraq is captured - under Krauthammer's dichotomy as he's not an "ordinary soldier" he must be a "captured terrorist" entitled to no protections whatsoever. Does anybody recall how Krauthammer reacted to the atrocity in Fallujah?) And then Krauthammer collapses his house of cards:

Third, there is the terrorist with information. Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply. Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

This is a wonderfully stupid example, evidencing perhaps only that Krauthammer watches too many action movies. If in fact you know that you have captured a terrorist who has specific knowledge that will let you save a million lives, and he won't talk, I think we're in a situation where the vast majority of people would agree that a tipping point has been reached, and we can use pretty much any means of interrogation to try to get that information. The odds of this actually occurring? Pretty much zero.

But why is it different if we suspect that an "ordinary soldier" has equivalent knowledge, which if obtained could save hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian lives? What if the soldier has information which would enable us to disable key defense systems of the enemy state, bringing a quick end to a war that would otherwise drag on for years with high levels of civilian casualties? What if the soldier has information which would enable us to disable or destroy key offensive weapons systems, such as a network of nuclear-tipped missiled which are aimed at our major cities? What if the soldier has information which would enable us to prevent an enemy military assault on one of our cities? We torture the terrorist to get that type of information, but let the "ordinary soldier" enjoy the quiet dignity of a POW camp that is in complete compliance with the applicable Geneva Conventions?

Krauthammer further explains, sure, that the nuclear aspect is fanciful - but that you should also be able to torture to find out about the terrorist's knowledge of a possible car bomb at a coffee shop. This is supposed to make his rationale for torture more sensible? Then he speaks of the valuable information that might be tortured out of somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This is supposed to help us understand why, if captured, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be excluded from torture?

Please don't get me wrong, here - I know that, despite his effort to couch his argument such that it might appear otherwise, Krauthammer is not trying to actually differentiate when torture should and should not occur. Instead, he is trying to set up a framework through which he can argue that the nation states he likes, which are embroiled in conflicts with forces not part of a state military, cannot torture our troops, but why we can torture theirs. It's a contextual argument - the U.S. in Iraq and Israel in the occupied territories. It's a legalistic argument - if you accept his interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, we're not breaking the law in torturing anybody who is not an "ordinary soldier" and are in no way hypocritical when we decry the wrongful touching of even a single hair on one of our soldier's heads. And it sidesteps moral questions about torture through this narrowing of the context in which he argues for torture to occur.

Krauthammer does propose limits on torture, but gives his full blessing to the torture of "(1) the ticking time bomb and (2) the slower-fuse high-level terrorist (such as KSM)". How do you know somebody is a ticking time bomb? You guess? You torture them a bit until they admit to being a ticking time bomb, then torture some more until they tell you where the bomb is (whether or not it exists)? And again, if we can torture their captured leaders to determine "terroristic" plans, why can't the other side torture our leaders to determine what we define as military plans?

Krauthammer's best - no, his only - example of the "ticking time bomb" relates to a Palestinian who, a dozen years ago, was tortured until he revealed the location of a single Israeli hostage, who was recovered. How exactly is this Palestinian a "ticking time bomb"? I won't argue that recovering the hostage unharmed was anything but a good thing. But is there any evidence or precedent which would have suggested that those holding him hostage had any intention to do him harm, as opposed to attempting to use him as a bargaining chip for a prisoner exchange? This is the best and only example? (Yet you would have to be pretty darn stupid to believe that this was the only incident where somebody was tortured on the suspicion that they might be a ticking time bomb.)

Moving from Krauthammer's situational sophistry to the blindingly stupid, let's take a look at the confusion of Jonah Goldberg:

I think it is a perfectly defensible and honorable position to claim that waterboarding, sleep deprivation etc. amount to torture. I don't think I agree with that view. But I certainly believe it is made in good faith. But the good faith ends when the same people then issue blanket and sweeping assertions that the people who want to legalize those actions are simply pro-torture. If the legalizers were simply pro-torture they would favor hot pokers, iron maidens, finger-nail-yanking and the rest. And the people supporting the use of waterboarding (in a tiny number of cases) aren't doing that. Not only do they think they're not in favor of torture but they objectively oppose things they consider to be torture. So even on the "anti-torture" crowds' own terms, the worst that could legitimately be said is that Bush wants to legalize "some torture" while banning most kinds of torture.

We can reasonably assert that for most people, a more accurate term than "pro-torture" would be "in favor of the minimum level of psychological and physical coercion that will cause a suspect with potentially highly valuable information to provide accurate disclosure of that information." For some, they would just as soon use the hot pokers and don't much care what the prisoner knows - they endorse torture for torture's sake - but the're peripheral to this debate.

Goldberg carefully detailed his list of "things that aren't torture" as "waterboarding, sleep deprivation etc." - I'm not sure that even the Bush Administration remains willing to share his "it's not torture" perpsective on waterboarding. But I will guarantee that I can create a context in which Mr. Goldberg will agree that sleep deprivation constitutes torture, if he's willing to undergo the type of sleep deprivation regimen we're talking about in this context. Or, for that matter, waterboarding.

Further, in a true "ticking timebomb" case - Krauthammer's nuclear bomb in NYC - I don't think that anybody is going to get into the niceties of whether or not we can use "finger-nail-yanking". If what we're really doing is drawing the outline for what constitutes reasonable interrogation of a suspect, we're doing something quite apart from determining the outer bounds of what we can or should do if we truly have a "ticking time bomb" in custody. And this implicates Krauthammer's complaint about the (now-abandoned) ban on torture once proposed by Senator McCain - it means you have to break the law in such a case. I think the Senator McCain of that time would have responded that yes, you have to break the law, but if you do so justifiably you will be protected by virtue of the President's pardon power, and that people are far less likely to cross the line if they risk prosecution. Does Goldberg truly believe that we can't use "finger-nail-yanking and the rest" to save a million civilians from nuclear incineration? If he does, what makes him different than those on the "other side" of the debate, other than his drawing a slightly different line on what constitutes permissible versus impermissible interrogation? If not, then in fact he doesn't stand by the distinctions he describes.

As for "iron maidens".... Where Krauthammer seems to get his understanding of the terrorist threat from action movies, what is Goldberg watching? Conan the Barbarian? The Beastmaster? I am at a bit of a loss as to how an iron maiden could truly be used to obtain useful information from a suspect - let's see... we inflict mortal wounds and while the subject exsanguinates we'll ask some questions. Brilliant. I can understand how somebody might be psychologically intimidated if shown an iron maiden and convinced that if he doesn't talk he'll be placed in it, but I somehow doubt that Goldberg would object to such a use.

Fundamentally, what Goldberg is arguing is that he favors methods of interrogation which are neat and clean - where you don't have to mop anything more offensive than perhaps some urine or excrement from the floor afterward, and the suspect doesn't end up with lacerations, avulsions, hematomas, puncture wounds or broken bones. Torturers of the modern world have long been aware of these western sensitivities to blood and guts, and have devised tortures which leave a prisoner looking reasonably physically sound to an outside visitor.

You've Never Heard of Hyperbole, Mr. Goldberg?

Apparently there actually is a person who reads Maureen Dowd's columns while somehow missing her often over-the-top use of sarcasm, irony, and hyperbole - Jonah Goldberg:

Maureen Dowd, the reigning scribe of unthinking liberalism, recently wrote in the New York Times that Dick Cheney — whom she calls "The Grim Peeper" — is trying to turn America into a "police state." "I don't like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling," Dowd writes without rhyme or reason.

It was a silly column, even for Dowd, but it does capture a certain level of both the legitimate fear and the outright paranoia out there.

Partisanship is obviously part of the equation. For instance, the heretofore-unknown disease of Cheneyphobia seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. It seems to cause some people to believe that the vice president of the United States has superhuman powers and that he is capable of personally reading hundreds of millions of e-mails while listening to thousands of hours of phone conversations and — simultaneously — scanning trillions of web searches.

Oh, I recognize that Goldberg doesn't believe in the literal truth of what he writes. He is smart enough to recognize that Dowd does not literally expect Dick Cheney to be personally reviewing her Google searches. Further, it is not the fault of the political left that Dick Cheney has become the poster child for intrusive government. Has Cheney ever spoken publicly on any government intrusion into individual privacy without warmly embracing the intrusion?

Goldberg doesn't identify even a single person who "seems to" believe Cheney capable of serving as a one-man Total Information Awareness project; I doubt that he sincerely believes that such a person exists. One would think that somebody so gifted with the use of hyperbole would recognize its use by others.

Fixing Democracy in the U.S.A.

In "Third parties don't have a chance", Bruce Bartlett provides some interesting thoughts on the (non)viability of third parties for U.S. federal elections - and a suggestion as to how to give them life:

One reform I have long favored that is more doable would be to allow third party votes to be aggregated with those on major party lines. This can be done in 10 states, according to the New Majority Education Fund (www.nmef.org). Most prominent is New York, which has long had an influential Conservative Party, Liberal Party and Right to Life Party. When a major party candidate is endorsed by one of these third parties, votes on their line are added to his vote total. This makes their endorsement valuable and gives third parties more influence without upsetting the basic electoral system.

There are, of course, other means to the same end, but Bartlett's suggestion has the benefits pretty simple, understandable, and has proved itself to at least some degree in the states Bartlett described.

And, while whining about the fact that the Supreme Court upheld campaign finance reform, Jonah Goldberg presents the suggestion that redistricting problems can be fixed by enlarging Congress:

I don't know if we should have districts of 30,000 these days. That would create a Congress of more than 8,000 representatives. But a couple thousand wouldn't be a bad way to start.

I'm all for a larger Congress, having enjoyed a much closer relationship to and understanding of my provincial and federal legislators when living in Canada. However, larger isn't always better - and any change in the number of Members of Congress should be associated with a long-overdue federal reform of redistricting - as otherwise a map of Congressional districts for the new, larger Congress is likely to look like a spilled bowl of spaghetti. I think the present emphasis should be on redistricting reform.

A side note - I like Jonah's introductory line, "everyone who understands the First Amendment was rightly having conniptions...." I don't like it because it is fair or accurate, but because it is quite the opposite. It is a little trick I have sometimes used myself - but only in debates where my opponent is not sufficiently intelligent to pick up on the underlying logical fallacy. It's a preemptive version of "when did you stop beating your wife". Within this context, whatever the merit of the campaign finance reform decision, I would venture that the five Supreme Court justices who voted for reform understand the Constitution far better than Goldberg ever will.

[Update - Dec. 21, 2003 - Lawrence Kestenbaum has provided a highly relevant caution about Bartlett's idea, and how it can result in a significant loss of choice for voters, in the comments section.]

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