Category: Politics (explicit)

Yesterday, the Palestinian populace had parliamentary elections, and the Hamas party won a ton of seats. The NYPost cover today screams, “HAMASTAN,” and predicts a Taliban-like state of religious oppression will take over the Palestinian territories.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, mainly because I don’t think the vote was an overwhelming endorsement of Hamas so much as it was an overwhelming condemnation of Fatah. In addition, I think Hamas will have its hands full trying to actually administer the government. If branches of it actively try to launch attacks on Israel, reprisals can be much fiercer, now that its leaders have to be politically accountable.

There’s a good post at the Volokh Conspiracy that mirrors some of my sentiments about the vote. It reminds me of the post I wrote a while ago about Hezbollah condemning the first video’d-beheading in Iraq; Hezbollah’s still a terrorist organization, but it’s also tied into the social structure of Lebanon in a way that demands it do respectable things. The party got a good number of votes in the Lebanese elections, but that also means that it can be voted out (provided the government doesn’t suspend elections and revert to strong-arm tactics).

Now, one of my simplistic takes on Arafat was that he benefited from not having peace, because it’s a lot easier to be a warrior-hero than it is to administer a state. It’s like hot-button topics in politics (think abortion): if the issues were reconciled, then fundraisers wouldn’t be able to scare up contributions.

Similarly, now that Hamas has to take responsibility for running things, they’re going to have to deal with issues of unemployment and infrastructure without making a first resort of suicide bombing (admittedly, that would cut down unemployment numbers. . .)

Chris Hitchens is mighty bothered by the discovery that he was the subject of one of those warrantless wiretaps conducted by the NSA. It’s not just the intrusion privacy that seems to anger him, but the waste of resources:

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration’s own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Read the whole thing. While you’re at it, you oughtta check out The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s books about the NSA, in case you ever thought any phone conversation you had might have been private.

A few days ago, Radley Balko (aka The Agitator) quoted a recent George Will column excoriating the attempt at moralizing via tax breaks in the post-Katrina recovery package (I goofed on that subject in December.

With today’s column, it looks like Balko underestimated how pissed off Will is at the GOP.

Here’s a snippet:

Until the Bush administration, with its incontinent spending, unleashed an especially conscienceless Republican control of both political branches, conservatives pretended to believe in limited government. The past five years, during which the number of registered lobbyists more than doubled, have proved that, for some Republicans, conservative virtue was merely the absence of opportunity for vice.

I’m sure Will would characterize himself more as a “true conservative” than as a libertarian, but politics makes strange bedfellows.

Read more.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Why is it that whenever Congress gets into an ethics scrape, its first reaction is to further restrict the Constitutional rights of other Americans to influence Members of Congress?

Vodkapundit writes pretty well about the war on terror, and how ideologies fight.