Category: Politics (explicit)

Until last night, I hadn’t watched The Colbert Report on Comedy Central (myriad reasons, centering on lack of time & disinterest). Over dinner, Amy & I caught the broadcast, which included a profile of Congressional District 29. As part of the segment, Colbert interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff, which included this priceless exchange:

Schiff: Well, it was the most expensive race for the House in history.

Colbert: How much did it cost?

Schiff: We raised about $4.3 million and there were about $5 million in independent expenditures.

Colbert: After you were elected, did you pass legislation banning the very sort of unregulated donations that helped you win?

Schiff: Yes.

Colbert: Isn’t that the political equivalent of . . . sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?

Schiff: I wouldn’t want to say that.

Colbert spent the rest of the interview trying to get Rep. Schiff to accept a $100 bill.

A couple of neat op/eds at the Washington Post this morning:

Robert Samuelson tries to break down the problems with French labor laws:

The dilemma of advanced democracies, including the United States, is that they’ve made more promises than they can keep. Their political commitments outstrip the economy’s capacity to deliver. Sometimes the commitments were made dishonestly. Sometimes they were made sincerely based on foolish assumptions. Sometimes they’ve been overtaken by new circumstances. No matter. The dilemma is the same. To disavow past promises incites public furor; not to disavow them worsens the country’s future problems.

Richard Cohen weighs in on the silence of the Muslim countries over the Abdul Rahman apostasy case:

[Y]ou can say that these horrors are usually being inflicted by a minority. You say it is a few crazed terrorists of Iraq who are doing the killing. It is not most Iraqis. You can say the same about suicide bombers and torturers and rogue governments, like the one Saddam Hussein once headed. You can take solace in numbers. Most people are like us.

Then comes the Rahman case and it is not a solitary crazy prosecutor who brings the charge of apostasy but an entire society. It is not a single judge who would condemn the man but a culture. The Taliban are gone at gunpoint, their atrocities supposedly a thing of the past. In our boundless optimism, we consign them to the “too hard” file of horrors we cannot figure out: the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the communists of the Stalin period. Now, though, this awful thing returns and it is not just a single country that would kill a man for his beliefs but a huge swath of the world that would not protest. There can be only one conclusion: They were in agreement.

And then Charles Krauthammer went after Francis Fukuyama with a two-by-four.

Back to semi-real-world stuff. I just read an article in Foreign Affairs, about how absolutely misguided and deluded Hussein’s regime was before the invasion. It’s long (12 pages), but you oughtta give it a read, if only to get a greater understanding of what may have been going on at the upper levels of the government.

It made me wonder what we’ll find out when North Korea collapses. I think we’ll discover that there were some absolutely insane management choices, similar to some of the appointments made in Iraq, but I really wonder what we’ll find out about the “limits of dissension” in the military and inner circle. Will it turn out to have been even more restrictive than Iraq under Saddam?

I also wonder about Iran’s “management”, but at least there we know that there’s dissension (and its quashing). I don’t know if there’s a North Korean analog to, say, my buddy the Brooding Persian. Can anyone clue me in on such a blogger? And if one doesn’t exist, is that a sign of North Korea’s ruthless control over external displays of dissension (even anonymous ones), or is it even worse: a level of repression that bans even the thought of dissension?

Just wondering. I promise to get back to posting wedding pictures soon.

Jane Galt has a nice post on the “message-vacuum” of the Democratic party. Here’s a piece:

Democrats have been blaming the candidates: the wooden Gore, the hapless Kerry. But it seems to me that the problem is that the fissures on the left are so deep that it takes a political genius like Clinton, who zeroed in on symbolic wedge issues with the daring precision of a World War II ace, to cover over them long enough to get elected. Neither Gore nor Kerry were particularly good candidates, to be sure, but it’s not like George Bush is a stunning rhetorician or a dazzling political strategist. His main skills (and weaknesses) lie in dogged determination and keen administrative abilities. Yet he defeated Al Gore, who should have walked all over Bush, given that he was running as the incumbent’s successor in the sunset year of America’s longest postwar economic expansion. Kerry couldn’t beat Bush even though the guy had been caught in bed with a naked economic recession, suffered through a subsequent jobless recovery, and got the country into an enormously expensive, and prolonged, conflict in Iraq. Is that really a problem of the candidates, or the party?

Read all about it.

This week’s book is Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, by Patrick Dillon. It’s about the British prohibition of gin in the 1730s, and has all sorts of parallels with the crack and crank “epidemics” of our time.

I came across a neat passage yesterday about the supporters of the deposed King James. Dillon discusses how, over the years, being a Jacobite is less about restoring James’ line to the throne and more about dissing the establishment (notwithstanding a minor bombing by Nixon & Killingbeck). As he writes:

Jacobitism was the fly in the ointment of Hanoverian stability; it was Britain’s loose cannon, its unfinished business. Nearly half a century after the Glorious Revolution, the Old Pretender still waited in Paris with his ridiculous court and his bogus ceremonial; whenever a French king wanted to annoy the English, he still had only to start talking about invasions and restorations. Back in England, the wounds of the Glorious Revolution had still not healed over.

All the same, Jacobitism had changed in the past few decades. The passage of half a century was bound to change something. Even in 1715, restoration had been a real possibility. There had been a real Stuart army in Britain, with real support from Jacobite aristocrats, and from at least part of the people. The replacement of the unknown fifty-five-year-old German who sat on the throne with the late Queen’s half-brother seemed perfectly plausible.

By 1736, it didn’t seem so anymore, or only to people like Robert Nixon and Samuel Killingbeck. After twenty years of Hanoverian stability, the Stuarts had receded several steps into the realm of myth. A French-speaking king didn’t seem any more desirable than a German-speaking one. And although he had ditched much of the baggage of absolutism, James Stuart had stubbornly refused to turn away from Rome. The world had moved on. The opposition had found some other ground on which to fight its battles.

Jacobitism had become something more diffuse; the king across the water was wreathed in mist. The mist was partly made up of romantic memories and partly of dreams for a better future. Nine years later, in 1745, when the mist briefly evaporated and a real Jacobite army was marching through England behind a real Stuart prince, the main emotion among English Jacobites was one of alarm. The Pretender didn’t realize it himself, but after twenty-one years Jacobitism in England had turned into something quite different from a campaign to restore him.

Instead, it had become a general form of protest against those in power. As long as there was Jacobitism, there was an alternative to the Hanoverians. Jacobitism became a way of withholding support. That way, the King of England and his ministers, like everyone else, had to live with uncertainty. It had metamorphosed into a general spirit of subversion. Disgruntled Tory squires toasted the ‘King over the Water’ to express their disenchantment with London, the times and Walpole’s ministry. Jacobite songs like ‘The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again’ became a way to cheek anyone in authority.

This has led me to think about the knee-jerk “oppositionism” that characterizes a lot of debate in the U.S. for past decade-plus. It also, as ever, puts me in mind of Orwell. From England, Your England (1941):

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is, ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me,’ like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing.

It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.

According to this WashPost piece by Sebastian Mallaby, Paul Wolfowitz is doing a good job at revamping the World Bank’s policies regarding lending money to despotic regimes and graft-ridden contracts:

The new boss is going to be tough on corruption, and he’s going to push this campaign beyond the confines of the World Bank; on Saturday he persuaded the heads of several regional development banks to join his anti-corruption effort. It’s amusing to see the Wolfensohn-Stiglitz left-liberal critique of narrowly economic development policy being championed by this neoconservative icon; and it’s encouraging as well.

Because I wasn’t the guy who got shot, I think the Cheney hunting accident is pretty funny. Maybe not as funny as Bobby Knight plugging a buddy while grouse hunting in 1999, nor beating up his son on another hunting trip (broken nose, dislocated shoulder), but still pretty good.

What I like is that it brings us to a bygone era, when the post of vice president was treated as a national joke. Chevy Chase built a career on stumbling over stuff as Gerald Ford. Bush Sr. was regarded as an imbecile (until he turned out to be a lot craftier than anyone expected from a former head of the CIA). And Dan Quayle . . . well, I’m not even going to venture there.

What I’m saying is, since I was a kid, the vice president was either a joke or an afterthought. It was only with Clinton-Gore that we got the “Team USA” treatment from the Pres/VP tandem. With the 2000 election, that morphed into the “America, Inc.” campaign, where Bush’s strength was supposed to be in his ability to assemble a great “upper management” for the country. Of course, when his HR director named himself as the best guy to be chief operating officer, a light-bulb should’ve turned on.

Still, after all the mistakes, I hope this accident is a sign that the role of VP is heading back to irrelevance. After all, it’s not like it helped Gore in 2000.