July 21, 2008

Where you Vote effects how you Vote

Hard to imagine but according to one study, true.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution)

Where you vote...

More details here

Posted by rakhier at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

A Graph of the Welfare Rate in NYC over 50 years

As you can see the number of people in New York City on Welfare is radically reduced now vs. March 1995. Clearly the Clinton welfare reform worked by at least this single metric.

See the graph for yourself

Posted by rakhier at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2008

Prisons work says James Q. Wilson...

This entry at the Volokh Conspiracy is a good one (by guest Blogger Jame Q. Wilson)



I must say the Volokh Conspiracy is moving up in the world with a guest blogger as eminent as James Q. Wilson.

Posted by rakhier at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2007

Democracy - like the tribe consulting a shaman...

Great thought experiment from Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias

Hmmm. Not sure I buy it but still, thought provoking.

Posted by rakhier at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

The Plame Affair... An Outrage...

For the last three years, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson has been loudly claiming that the Bush administration is composed of criminals who delibrately leaked secret information about his wife (a C.I.A. agent) to the writer Bob Novak. Why? Because they were attempting to punish him for his op-ed (published in the New York Times in July of 2003). His essay stated that the Bush White House statff knew that Iraq had never attempted to obtain uranium from Niger but went ahead and claimed it was true in the president's 2003 State of the Union address.

Now (as of September 1, 2006) we know that everything Wilson claimed to be true was, in fact, false.

We know that Iraq did try to buy uranium (either that or cattle) from Niger in the mid-1990s. Oddly, Wilson knew this was true because he talked to the government minister of Niger who had talked with the Iraqi official. So the entire idea behind his op-ed essay in the New York Times was false. The Bush White House speech writers had good reason for putting the text in the speech. It was false for him to assert that they knew it was a lie at the time they wrote the speech.

And now we know that it was not Bush White House officials (such as Karl Rove or Vice President Richard Cheney) who revealed his wife's secret. It was the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who revealed the information to Bob Novak.

For years Wilson has been going around the country making speeches in which he attacked the Bush White House staff for illegal and immoral behavior and all the time he was wrong.

The behavior of Mr. Armitage now seems both illegal and immoral. He could have come forward any time and revealed the truth. He could have privately told Mr. Wilson that his story was actually all wrong. But instead he stayed silent, while the country was divided and bitter accusations were thrown at the President, the Vice President, and his staff.

Thanks so much Mr. Armitage. You really have helped the country with your years of silent denial of responsibility.

Let me finish with a quote from the September 1 editorial of the Washington Post:

Yes, it is sad. Its sad that people are willing to say things that that they know aren't true because it happens to fit their world view. Its sad that people who did know the truth didn't feel there was any good reason for them to step forward and set the record straight.

In a better world we would have a lot of people appologizing to the Bush White House staff for their false accusations on this matter, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by rakhier at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2006

The NYTimes and the LATimes, Unelected 4th Branch of Government...

The recent publication by the NYTimes of the SWIFT program (details here). Key points:

The New York Times thinks that it can handle secret information and can ignore the U.S. Government. It reserves the right to determin when a secret program should be revealed to the public. It is a better judge than the people who actually know the details.

And if they are wrong? If they shouldn't have revealed this program? What accountability is there for the New York Times? Do we, the voters, get to throw them out of office for their mistakes?

Michael Barone writes



Andrew McCarthy writes

I find the New York Times position to be evil. By trumpeting the details of the SWIFT operation, they are essentially on the side of the barbarians who are trying to kill Americans. And I say this as a long-time subscriber to the New York Times.

My recomendation is as follows. The U.S. Government should begin a criminal investigation into finding out who gave this information to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The people who wrote the news stories should be forced to testify to a Grand Jury. If they will not reveal names, then they should be put in jail until such time as they will reveal the names of the people who revealed this information. I would also punish the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in other obvious ways. Revocation of press credentials, refusal to allow their reporters into the White House press conferences, etc.

I do not take this harrassment of the Times lightly but they need to stop revealing secret operations conducted by the U.S. Government and they need to appologize.

I'll close with this letter from Lt. Tom Cotton in Iraq today

We shall see...

Posted by rakhier at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2006

The Democratic Platform: Withdraw from Iraq before we win...

This article by David Horowitz captures the current world view the Democratic Party. Its sad and it bears NO RELATION to the Democratic party of 45 years ago. JFK would spit on the people in the party today who want to lose, who want to see America humiliated and defeated.

Sad to see. It would be nice to have a major political party that wasn't composed of people who want America to lose. At the moment, there is only one such party.

Posted by rakhier at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2006

The Press has no more rights than the People...

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today are in deep trouble - for publishing secret information.

Read this detailed analysis by an expert in Constitutional Law (these were remarks addressed to a Congressional Committe, May 26 2006, and reprinted by the Wall Street Journal).

To summarize:

  1. The press has no more rights than normal citizens of the United States. This is a fact, clearly established by case law over 200 years.
  2. The government has the right to keep some things secret from the public. This is established in the Constitution, supported by Federalist Paper 71 and by long established case law.
  3. Citizens are not allowed to disclose secret information on their own discretion. People who do this are subject to penalties up to and including charges of treason.

Every citizen, including--particularly including--those employed with major media organs have a responsibility to prevent ongoing operational secrets from falling into the hands of our enemies by complying with the law regarding classified information. It is one of those "basic and simple duties" of citizenship that rests equally "on taxi drivers, Justices, and the New York Times."

Bottom line: there is no legitimate defence for revealing secret information about on-going wartime intelligence operations. For the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today to take the position that the law on secrecy doesn't apply to them flies in the face of clear, well established case law. They need to appologize fast and they need to stop doing it in the future.

Posted by rakhier at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2006

On the obligations of citizens...

I think this post by Joe Katzman is a very important analysis and it captures why the talk from various people about how they "support our troops" is so much garbage.

I haven't talked about Haditha because I don't know much about it. I will say from the get go that (1) War is ugly. People die. Innocent people are killed. Sometimes (rarely) our soldiers lose their composure and bad things happen. (2) Counter-insergency wars are really ugly. You can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Even when you are doing the right thing, people who are innocent can be killed. (3) I knew all this before the war started. I continue to be impressed by the skill and discipline of the US Soldiers in Iraq. Under the most trying circumstances our forces have behaved correctly the vast majority of the time.

Now, as to the incident at Haditha. First, our US Marines have the presumption of innocence. No one has the facts clearly spelled out. No one should start with the presumption that the US Marines are guilty. As Katzman says

Second, we, as citizens have an obligation to those men and women that protect our state and kill other people on our behalf. Its an ugly job at times but it is necessary. Period. The bottom line is, our soldiers are out there, risking their lives on behalf of all of us and we owe them. We owe them (to quote Katzman again)

Basic honesty requires us to admit that we don't know the facts. However our obligation to the people that fight for this country requires that we need to give these people the benefit of the doubt.

The "left wing" in the US delights in pointing out our military failures, both tactical and moral. Guess what people: you can not pay people enough money to die for their country. If by constant criticism you erode away the willingness of young people to join the military then eventually you will find (like the Roman Empire of 400 CE) that too few people are willing to protect the state against those who wish to destroy it. This can happen. It has happened in the past.

Posted by rakhier at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2006

Lou Dobbs on Ignoring Illegal Aliens...

Lou Dobbs has rather strong words for the President and the Congress for ignoring "200 million middle-class Americans".

President Bush says that the installation of the new Iraqi government was a "watershed event," but at the same time warns Americans of the challenges and loss as we continue to prosecute the war against Iraqi insurgents. Sen. Harry Reid declares that legislation that would render English the national language is racist.

Thirty-seven Democrats vote for full amnesty for all illegal aliens in this country, even though nobody really knows whether the number is 11 million, 12 million or 20 million. The Senate Republican leadership demands that a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan must be passed before this Memorial Day weekend. And the president signs into law a tax cut that raises taxes on the educational funds of teenagers saving for college.

Never before in our country's history have both the president and Congress been so out of touch with most Americans. Never before have so few of our elected officials and corporate leaders been less willing to commit to the national interest. And never before has our nation's largest constituent group -- some 200 million middle-class Americans -- been without representation in our nation's capital.(Watch why Dobbs said Mexico's leader is in charge of U.S. immigration policy -- 3:16)

George W. Bush's approval ratings have slumped to the lowest of his presidency. The approval rating for Congress is even lower, and nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

But what is our government doing about that? The president is staying the course in Iraq and apparently demanding little of his generals to create a new, far more effective strategy for urgent success. Of course, he also wants a guest-worker program and amnesty of millions of illegal aliens. And Congress, faced with midterm elections in just over five months, is intent on giving the president what he wants and telling working men and women and their families, American citizens all, to go to hell.

Illegal aliens are more important to this Congress than securing our borders and our ports, more important than those legal immigrants who have waited in line and who follow the law. The Senate has added to the litany of lunacy that makes up what it calls reform: Illegal aliens would only have to pay back taxes on three of the past five years, they will not be prosecuted for felonies such as identity theft or purchasing or using fraudulent Social Security cards, and unlike millions of visa holders who have to leave the country to have them renewed, they may simply remain in the United States while this Congress and this president give away all the benefits and privileges of American citizenship.

This is an outright assault in the elitist war on the middle class. And working men and women who've already borne the pain of losing good-paying manufacturing jobs and having middle-class jobs outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets are faced with the onslaught of more illegal immigration and cheap labor into the American economy. This president and Congress talk about bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows while they turn out the lights on our middle class.

President Bush and his most trusted advisers tell us how well our economy is doing, how many jobs have been created and how so-called free trade will enrich the lives of the same people whose livelihoods these policies are destroying.

It's hard not to think of the trusted adviser to Catherine the Great who sought to hide from her the embarrassing and shoddy condition of Ukrainian and Crimean villages by having elaborate facades built to divert her attention and to mask an uncomfortable reality. I don't know whether Karl Rove is President Bush's Grigori Potemkin or whether George Bush has created Potemkin villages all by himself. But the facades are cracking, and phony fronts of failed policies are quickly crumbling.

Six thousand unarmed National Guardsmen working as adjunct rear support to our undermanned, under-equipped Border Patrol is not border security. Three million illegal aliens continue to cross our borders and depress wages by hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The millions of manufacturing and middle-class jobs lost over the last five years have been replaced by lower-wage employment.

The president's faith-based commitment to so-called free trade will likely lead to a $1 trillion U.S. current account deficit this year and a trade debt of $4.5 trillion after 30 years of trade deficits. And while the president and Congress point to No Child Left Behind as a solution to our educational crisis, we're failing an entire generation of Americans whose test scores continue to fall and whose high school dropout rates would be embarrassing to a third-world country.

And a third-world country is what we will be if our elected officials don't soon come to their senses.

I must say, as Ed Meese points out in todays New York Times op-ed (May 24) - what the Senate is proposing is (1) an Amnesty program for illegal aliens and (2) just about identical to what the Congress passed 20 years ago.

It is clear to just about everyone that the problem of illegal aliens has become worse in the 20 years since the last law was passed. To do the exact same thing now strikes me as, well, insane. 20 years ago there were an estimated 2 million illegal aliens in the country. Now estimates are between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens. Clearly, by any reasonable standard, the law passed 20 years ago failed. Why pass it again? Time for a new approach I think.

I strongly suggest building a major, expensive, and 99% unbeatable wall across the entire border with Mexico. Yes it will cost lots of money. Yes Mexico will complain. And yes, it will make it harder for illegal aliens to go over the border back south to Mexico. Sorry. The current situation is intolerable and getting worse. The other strategies (guest workers, employee enforcement, building up Mexico's economy) have been tried and essentially have all failed. Time for the wall.

Posted by rakhier at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

Serious Errors in Reporting on Hurricane Katrina...

Here is a rather strong attack on the media for spreading lies about what was going on in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Jonah Goldberg NRO

On a recent edition of Larry King Live, liberal Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, eager to put some distance between himself and the president, explained what he thinks is George Bush’s real albatross. “Let me just say that I think the thing that has hurt the president most is not Iraq. It’s Katrina,” Shays said. “People saw an arrogant but confident administration, but when they saw Katrina, they saw arrogance and frankly incompetence, and that was very unsettling.”

his sentiment is pervasive among Democrats and the press. Time writes matter-of-factly that “the government’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina” is a major liability for Republicans in ‘06. Howard Dean and other Democrats mention Katrina as a staple talking point. That’s certainly fair, given that the bar is set pretty low for what constitutes fair in American politics these days. But it is worth reminding people that the Katrina they think they remember wasn’t the Katrina that actually took place. In fact, it is difficult to think of a bigger media scandal in my lifetime than the fraudulently inaccurate coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Where to begin? As I’ve written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn’s words, “bands of rapists, going block to block”? Not true. The tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus. The yarns, peddled on Oprah by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that “little babies” were getting raped in the Superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely false. The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society “left them behind”? Nah-ah. While most outlets limited themselves to taking Nagin’s estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor and Publisher—the watchdog of the media—ran the headline, “Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane.”

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.

This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. Keep in mind that the most horrifying tales of woe that captivated the press and prompted news anchors to scream—quite literally—at federal officials occurred within the safe zone around the Superdome where the press was operating. Shame on local officials for fomenting fear and passing along newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the press for recycling this stuff uncritically. Members of the press had access to the Superdome. Why not just run in and look for the bodies? Interview the rape victims? Couldn’t be bothered? The major networks had hundreds of people in New Orleans. Was there not a single intern available to fact-check? The coverage actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks. At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.

And yet, an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush’s worst hour and the press’s best. That faultless paragon of media scrupulousness Dan Rather proclaimed it one of the “quintessential great moments in television news.” Christiane Amanpour explained, “I think what’s interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real journalists, real journalism, and I think that’s a good thing.”

But in the race to prove the federal response incompetent, the “real journalists” missed some important details. As Lou Dolinar exhaustively documents, the National Guard did amazing work in New Orleans. From the Superdome, the Guard managed some 2,500 troops, a dozen emergency shelters, more than 200 boats, 150 helicopters (which flew more than 10,000 sorties moving 88,181 passengers, 18,834 tons of cargo, and saved 17,411 survivors), and an enormous M*A*S*H operation that, among other things, delivered seven babies.

Also left out of the conventional tale of Katrina is the fact that the hurricane hardly singled out New Orleans. Obviously, the flooding there was worse because of the levee breaks. But, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour noted, the people of his state and Alabama and Florida have the same federal government. And despite awesome destruction, they managed to do okay.

None of this is to say that the federal government and the Bush administration didn’t make mistakes. But, if we’re looking for poster children for arrogant incompetence in response to Katrina, there are better candidates than George W. Bush.

Posted by rakhier at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2006

The Problem with the Powell Doctrine..

This is a part of a huge, and brilliant post from a Windsofchange.net discussion by "celebrim", comment #54

“The Powell doctrine had always been to go in with overwhelming force: enough to impose day-by-day, neighborhood-by-neighborhood law and order.”

I’ve never ever seen the implication of the “Powell doctrine”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_doctrine be that we would have sufficient force to impose law and order. In fact, a more full statement of the Powell doctrine than the breezy one you quote would indicate that the Powell doctrine would be to avoid occupations entirely. Frankly, I’m somewhat mystified how any military observer would at this time be a fan of the Powell doctrine. The Powell doctrine was a disaster virtually every where it was applied – beginning with Powell’s command in Beirut and continuing right on to Gulf War I and Somalia.

The Powell doctrine was less of a military doctrine than it was a political approach to the challenges created by the damage done to the American spirit by the Vietnam War. It required that all the following questions be clearly answered:

  1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
  2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
  3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
  4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
  5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
  6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
  7. Is the action supported by the American people?
  8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

Essentially the Powell doctrine is only enter into wars which will be short, decisive, and popular. Superficially, there is nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing at all wrong with the above check list. But in practice, the Powell doctrine – whether Powell was in command or someone else was trying to implement it – could be shortened down to the statement, “Whenever you meet resistance, cut your losses and run.” This resulted in a series of seemingly minor failures over the course of two decades which were little noticed in America, but served to give notice to our enemies that America was a paper tiger that lacked the will for a long or difficult fight. It’s that apparent weakness which in the words of our present enemies led to their decision to attack the United States.

In practice, the Powell doctrine requires too high of a burden. It’s simply not possible only to fight wars which meet all the Powell hurdles. Under the Powell doctrine, the Union would have settled with the Confederacy after losing at Bull Run, the US wouldn’t have entered WWI, and would have negotiated peace with Japan after Pearl Harbor. How can you ever know what all the possible consequences of your action will be? How can you always be certain of victory? In the real world, you’ve sometimes got to take your chances. In particular, it notion of a “plausible exit strategy” means that the US is continually looking for some out other than victory and the surrender and destruction of the enemy. Most of all though, the Powell doctrine fails to learn the central lesson of 20th century warfare – never leave a war half-finished and your opponent unbeaten. That haunted the whole world in WWII, and will continue to haunt the US through the rest of this century – assuming we survive it.

I agree.

Posted by rakhier at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

Attorney General Gonzales defends the NSA's International Surveillance

Attorney General Gonzales did an able job of defending the Bush Administration's authorization of the NSA's surveillance of Al Qaeda over the last four years. You can read an informed discussion of his points here at Powerline Blog.

The part which really hit me like a ton of bricks was a statement he made in response to a question from Senator Feinstein. She asked him where the administration found "escape hatches" from the FISA act because she could only find two, and neither one applied.

He responded by saying that Section 109 of the act talked about other surveillance that was authorized by statuate. The administration interperted this to mean that the Congressional authorization for the use of force against Al Qaeda was exactly the sort of statuate the act reffered to.

Then he dropped his bombshell: This, he said, was a reasonable interpretion of the act. The other interpretation of the act lead (in their opinion) to a constitutional "tension" between the law passed by Congress and the inherent powers of the President as defined by the Constitution. He said a fundemental principle of law in this country is that IF there are two reasonable interpretations of a law, and one of them leads to a constitutional conflict THEN THE OTHER interpretation is ASSUMED to be the correct one.

So, to decode this exchange, Feinstein asserts "how can you say you are following the law when the FISA act doesn't talk about exceptions like the President has authorized?

Gonzales responds "Look, there are two ways of looking at this law. One is that this law, FISA, severly limits the power of the President in ways that no previous presidents have been limited. This would be the 'constitutional crisis' way of looking at the law. The other way is the way we have choosen which is, the law is fine as it is, but the law admits that other statues (such as Congressional authorization for the use of force) can override FISA. This interpretation does not provoke a constitutional crisis and so this interpretation must be the correct one."

In my opinion, this is a very clever arguement which has a lot of merit. It is also a facinating deep issue in Constitutional law.

Posted by rakhier at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

A real graph of Federal Spending for the last 30 Years...

Its very misleading to compare the size of the Federal Government to ANYTHING unless you account for 2 vital factors:

1) The size of the U.S. Economy (in other words, how big is the U.S. government compared to the economy as a whole)

2) The inflation rate (in other words, compare apples to apples, do not compare apples of today vs. the huge golden apples of the past).

Here is a graph which does those things:
fed-spending-graph.jpg

As you can see, Federal Spending isn't really much different from in years past - in the vital important sense of how big is the government in relation to the past and the economy as a whole.

Graph created by Angry Bear using U.S. Congressional Budget Office data.

Posted by rakhier at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

The CIA Now Leaks News...

This essay from Powerline Blog points out a very serious problem: people in the CIA are leaking information which is damaging U.S. national security and harming the current administration. This hasn't happened before and it shouldn't be happening now.

Hear hear.

Posted by rakhier at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

Howard Dean says the U.S. has lost - does he speak for the Democratic Party in 2005?

Howard Dean said "I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

His proposal: pull out, redeploy more troops to Afghanistan "where they like us".

As Tom Bevan said on his RCP Blog

I'd like to know that too. Because if this is the position of the Democratic Party, then I'm gone. I've stuck with the party since 1992 but this is the straw that breaks the camels back for me.

We have not lost this war. In fact I think we are winning the war. The world is better off now in 2005 than it was in 2003 when Saddam was in power.

A reasonably solid understanding of U.S. History shows that we always get to a nasty phase towards the end of a war when the temptation to cut and run becomes strong. Leadership is about knowing these sorts of things and seeing what is best for America - victory.

We haven't lost 25,000 soldiers, we have lost less than 2,000 dead soldiers in Iraq over 2 years. Our population is 300,000 million. We are the richest country in the world, we can afford this war (I'm sorry to be so cold blooded about this but this is a war. Our casuality rate is both historically low and is sustainable.) If we continue losing 800 soliders a year in Iraq, we can stay there for the next 50 years and still come out ahead.

Posted by rakhier at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2005

Why American Law Is Different from European Law...

American law is quite different from European law, despite common origins. Here is a post by Jane Galt where she explains some interesting origin features...

Posted by rakhier at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2005

Miers and the Federalist Papers...

It turns out that the selection of Miers is exactly what the Constitution was designed to AVOID and is explained in the Federalist Paper number 76 (writen by Hamilton). This is what Randy Barnett writes in Wall Street Journal. The whole essay is in the extended section. Its worth reading. I totally agree with Mr Barnett. Ms. Miers is a bad choice for the Supreme Court. If the Senate does NOT reject Ms. Miers then the Senate will have failed to do what it is supposed to do: prevent unqualified people from entering America's highest court.

Cronyism
Alexander Hamilton wouldn't approve of Justice Harriet Miers.

BY RANDY E. BARNETT
Tuesday, October 4, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

During the Clinton impeachment imbroglio, Alexander Hamilton's definition of "impeachable offense" from Federalist No. 65 was plastered from one end of the media to the other. With the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, get ready for another passage from Hamilton to get similar play--this one from Federalist No. 76:

Harriet Miers is not just the close confidante of the president in her capacity as his staff secretary and then as White House counsel. She also was George W. Bush's personal lawyer. Apart from nominating his brother or former business partner, it is hard to see how the president could have selected someone who fit Hamilton's description any more closely. Imagine the reaction of Republicans if President Clinton had nominated Deputy White House Counsel Cheryl Mills, who had ably represented him during his impeachment proceedings, to the Supreme Court. How about Bernie Nussbaum?

As the quote from Hamilton suggests, the core purpose of Senate confirmation of presidential nominees is to screen out the appointment of "cronies," which Merriam-Webster defines as "a close friend especially of long standing." Cronyism is bad not only because it leads to less qualified judges, but also because we want a judiciary with independence from the executive branch. A longtime friend of the president who has served as his close personal and political adviser and confidante, no matter how fine a lawyer, can hardly be expected to be sufficiently independent--especially during the remaining term of her former boss.

By characterizing this appointment as cronyism, I mean to cast no aspersions on Ms. Miers. I imagine she is an intelligent and able lawyer. To hold down the spot of White House counsel she must be that and more. She must also be personally loyal to the president and an effective bureaucratic infighter, two attributes that are not on the top of the list of qualifications for the Supreme Court.

To be qualified, a Supreme Court justice must have more than credentials; she must have a well-considered "judicial philosophy," by which is meant an internalized view of the Constitution and the role of a justice that will guide her through the constitutional minefield that the Supreme Court must navigate. Nothing in Harriet Miers's professional background called upon her to develop considered views on the extent of congressional powers, the separation of powers, the role of judicial precedent, the importance of states in the federal system, or the need for judges to protect both the enumerated and unenumerated rights retained by the people. It is not enough simply to have private opinions on these complex matters; a prospective justice needs to have wrestled with them in all their complexity before attaining the sort of judgment that decision-making at the Supreme Court level requires, especially in the face of executive or congressional disagreement.

Even a star quarterback with years of high school and college football under his belt takes years of experience and hard knocks to develop the knowledge and instincts needed to survive in the NFL. The Supreme Court is the big league of the legal profession, and Ms. Miers has never even played the judicial equivalent of high school ball, much less won a Heisman Trophy.

Ms. Miers would be well qualified for a seat on a court of appeals, where she could develop a grasp of all these important issues. She would then have to decide what role text and original meaning should play in constitutional interpretation in the context of close cases and very difficult decisions. The Supreme Court is no place to confront these issues for the very first time.

Given her lack of experience, does anyone doubt that Ms. Miers's only qualification to be a Supreme Court justice is her close connection to the president? Would the president have ever picked her if she had not been his lawyer, his close confidante, and his adviser? Of course, Hamilton also thought that the existence of Senate confirmation would deter the nomination of cronies:

While the Senate once successfully resisted President Lyndon Johnson's attempt to nominate his own highly able crony, Abe Fortas, to be chief justice, perhaps the performance of senators during the Roberts nomination reduced the deterrent effect of "advise and consent." Judiciary Committee Democrats spent half their time making speeches rather than questioning. What questions they did ask were not carefully designed to ferret out the nominee's judicial philosophy, favoring instead to inquire about his feelings, or whether he would stand up for the "little guy," or bemoaning his refusal to telegraph how he would rule on particular cases likely to come before the court.

For their part, Senate Republicans were content to parrot the empty line that a judge "should follow the law and not legislate from the bench." Sit tight and vote seemed to be their approach. By refusing to demand a nominee with a judicial philosophy of adherence to the text of the Constitution--the whole text, including the parts that limit federal and state powers--Republicans did nothing to induce the White House to send up a nominee who was at least as committed to limits on federal power as Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had been.

Times like these demand a justice with a firm grasp on constitutional text, history and principles. Someone who can resist the severe pressure brought by Congress, by the executive branch, by state and local governments, and also by fellow justices to exceed the Constitution's limits on government power. Does anything in her record suggest that Harriet Miers will be that sort of justice? We do not need to wait for Senate hearings to answer this question. What hearings will tell us, however, is whether the Senate, too, will succumb, in Hamilton's words, to "a spirit of favoritism."

Mr. Barnett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Law at Boston University and the author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton, 2004).

Posted by rakhier at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

Worst Supreme Court Nominee in my Life...

The current president's nominee to replace Justice O'Conner is Harriet Miers. Ms. Miers has been Mr. Bush's personal lawyer for at least 10 years.

This is an aweful choice for a Supreme Court Justice, easily the worst such choice since his father picked Clarence Thomas. Ms. Miers has never been a judge nor has she even argued a case before the Supreme Court. She has no major professional qualifications, no great background, no books, she has nothing to justify such a high office. Her close personal ties to the president, while nice for Mr. Bush, are not a desirable feature for a candidate for the Supreme Court.

I agree with Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog when he says

This nomination should be defeated. The President was foolish to select (again) the person who headed his nomination committe.

Historical parallel: None other than Dick Cheney was the head of George Bush's Vice Presidential nominating committe. Instead of choosing one of the people Cheney recommended for the job, Bush picked Cheney. Picking Miers is the same behavior. Cheney was not a bad choice back in 2000 but not a great one either. Miers strikes me as a terrible choice in 2005.

Posted by rakhier at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

Judge Roberts...

I did not hear much of Judge Robert's confirmation hearings. It strikes me that this is so much political theater. The truth is that if a person so clearly unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice as Clarence Thomas can be confirmed, then a man much more qualified will certainly be confirmed. Judge Roberts is one of those people who is a great nominee for the Supreme Court. Smart, top of his class, all the right background, and, most importantly, he hasn't been a Judge very long so his paper trail is short and non-controversial. Baring some smoking gun (or smoking pot), Robert's confirmation is a foregone conclusion.

This short comment by a member of the Volokh Conspiracy is a good critique of the Senatorial comments.

Indeed. The Senators attack the results of the law without asking if the law was decieded wrongly.

Posted by rakhier at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

When can the Federal Government Act?

This from the Washington Post (as quoted in Power Line)

This explains why the President needed the Governor's approval:

Posted by rakhier at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

Hugh Hewitt asks: Why does anyone think the Federal Government can intervene?

Hugh Hewitt asks some good questions:

One can argue that our system of government doesn't work well when local authorities are either corrupt or incompotent. Which is true. But the alternative of Federal control is, in my opinion, worse. Not to mention the fact that you would have to change the Constitution in order to give Federal control.

My father argues that what you could do is have Federal inspections of various state institutions, a Federal "guideline" for things like flood control for major urban areas, and then publish the results. What he hopes is that news papers would pick up the results and alert the citizens with headlines like: New Orleans levees fail Federal inspections for the 5th time in a row. This seems reasonable to me. Certainly a lot of people knew that New Orlean's levees weren't likely to protect the city in the face of a class 4 hurricane. And yet they did not fix the system. Well they paid the price of their complacency this time.

Posted by rakhier at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

Mark Steyn suggests some aspects of American Government don't work very well...

Mark Steyn's comment on response and planning for levee breaks in New Oreleans left something to be desired...

Well, I agree. It turns out the City of New Orleans disaster plan was litterly "you are on your own". This according to a news report published July 25, 2005 (a full month and a half before the flooding of New Orleans).

Some plan. Basically, in the event of a flood that fills the city, you are all going to drown. Local government at its finest.

Posted by rakhier at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

Who to Blame...

Lots of people are blaming FEMA, the President, and the Federal Government for the disaster which New Orleans has turned into. Here are some, rather more rational comments - (culled from Power Line Blog)

Dr. David Caskey writes from Louisiana:

From John Galvin:

From Jim Ouly:

The truth is: we have a system of government which is designed to give as much power as possible to the local authorities. Above the local government stands the State governments. Now States in the United States are essentially independent nations. They each have their own constitutions and their own set of laws. There is a great deal the Federal Government simply CAN NOT do. To blame the Federal Government for a failure to

(a) Make sure that New Orleans was protected from a Class 4 Hurricane is wrong. This is NOT the Federal Government's job. Its up to the people of New Orleans and (if they won't do it) the State of Louisiana to solve this sort of problem. The Federal Government does not mandate how cities should deal with potential disasters. Is there a Federal Standard for earthquake safety in building design? No there is not for very good reasons: some states need to worry about earthquakes and some do not.

(b) Make sure the city of New Orleans could evacuate its population in a fast and efficient maner. Again: this is NOT the job of the Federal Government. States are responsible for internal issues like fire, flood, police, and power. The Federal Government does not deal with this. Its NOT its job. The Feds don't evacuate people, the Feds don't run bus services.

Really, this is basic U.S. Government behavior here. This is the way the system was designed. Sure I can see why the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana would like to shift the responsibility to someone else, but it really is their problem. The city of New Orleans and the state have had 90 years to deal with possibility of New Orleans flooding. The fact that they burried their heads in the sand and refused to plan for a Cat 4 Hurricane is no one's fault but theirs.

Update

Writer Cicero on Winds of Change.net makes the observation that for the last 4 years, the Federal Government has said "we can do more to help in the case of a disaster caused by terrorists". Hence the Department of Homeland Security. Hence the massive budget increase for emergencies. Is it not fair to ask if this Federal spending and re-organization has all been a waste of time and money and effort? The destruction of New Orleans is comperable to a terrorist attack on a major U.S. city. Isn't this the sort of thing the Feds ARE responsible for handling?

The answer is: This is not what the Department of Homeland Security has been focused on for the last 3 years. Hurricanes have been hitting the U.S. ever since we gained a Gulf Coast. In theory, we know how to deal with them. What is new, what no one knows how to deal with is a "dirty bomb", an attack using biological weapons, or a suitcase nuke hand delivered to the downtown of a major city. These new threats are what the Feds are trying to help cities deal with.

Realistically, the creation of a new Federal Department with a budget and a whole array of previously independent agencies, is not going to do very much good. Certainly not in three years, perhaps not in 20 years. The Department of Homeland Security is just a public band-aid and something to make the terrorists think we are stronger than we really are. The real plan for dealing with Islamic terrorists is the Iraq operation. Fighting Al Qaeda in Sunni Triangle as opposed to in Times Square.

I'm sorry that the City of New Orleans has been destroyed. I'm sorry that the people there are going to suffer because of failures in planning which reach back 90 years in time. But I'm not sorry we live in the U.S. where all laws and all solutions DO NOT COME from Washington D.C. If you want an example of a country where 99% of the laws and regulations come from the capital, look at France.

Posted by rakhier at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2005

On Judging Presidential Candidates

One of the many problems I had with the Clinton-haters was they were attacking him for faults that had little (or nothing) to do with his ability as President of the United States.

Like Aristotle, I believe character matters, but character matters as a guide to how a person behaves in high political office. Ultimately what matters most about a man who attains high office is what does he do when he has power? Some people are incapable of handling the executive office (Jimmy Carter comes to mind). Some people reveal dictatorial or anti-democratic behaviors when in high office (like Richard Nixon). But the truth is what we need from a president is performance. Can he do the job?

Before we elect a person to office we need to make a judgement "is this person suitable for the job?" In Clinton's case, his failures of character (largely confined to fooling around with women who were very unlike his wife) were largely irrelevant considering the man had held executive office (Governor of Arkansas) for 12 years. Looking at the record of a governor for 12 years is highly instructive. Is the man corruptable? Does he appoint good or bad people to positions? Can he do the job? Clearly Clinton was a good if not great governor.

So, for those people who felt Clinton had bad character, while they had some grounds for this arguement, the purpose of the critique was nearly pointless, the key question "can he perform as a political executive" had been answered.

The hatred and the criticism for Clinton reached (for me) the height of madness during the 1996 campaign. At this point, having served as president for four years, questions about his character were utterly pointless. We knew how he would govern if he was re-elected, the only question worth considering was "had he done a good enough job with the first four years"?

All the fuss over the Whitewater land development deal was such a waste of time. There was no chance that Clinton would be revealed as a venal crook during his time as governor of Arkansas. Whitewater lost money for everyone involved - and Clinton never had much money even though he was a governor and his wife was an attorney.

All the fuss over Clinton's fooling around with other women was also pointless. Had he ever made a illegal or even bad decision as governor based on his fooling around with women who were not his wife? No one has ever made this arguement. So for all practicle, pragmatic concerns, Clinton's flaws were irrelevant to his suitability for president or for his running for a second term.

John Kerry

Some of Kerry's supporters tried to argue that the Swift Boat Vets who attacked Kerry's service in Vietnam were arguing over a similarly pointless issue (most Kerry supporters simply dismissed the Swift Boat Vets as liars). On this issue I disagree.

First, Kerry's career in government was hardly the best training for President. In fact I think being a Senator is inferior to being a Governor as far as training for president is concerned. There have been some good Presidents who were Senators (Lyndon Johnson comes to mind, as does Truman) but how about these former governors: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the current president G.W. Bush? So for Kerry, his character mattered. For his opponent in 2004, his character was largely irrelevant, we knew how Bush behaved in office, the question was "did he do a good job in his first four years"?

Kerry's character can be seen in three areas of his life: his performance in college, his performance in the Vietnam war, his performance as Senator. In college he was popular, political and a poor student (G.H. Bush actually had a slightly higher GPA, not that it matters much).

In the Senate Kerry was an average Sentator. He was nice, got on well with his colleges, and sponsored hundreds of bills. However, he was not very successful in getting his bills passed into law (only 9 passed) and none of them is noteworthy. Compared to other Senators of his time - Arlen Specter, Sam Nunn, Alan Simpson, and the great Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Kerry comes off as second best.

His service in Vietnam is quite relevant to his quest for the presidency. Here he was an executive with life and death decision-making power as captain of a small boat on the Mekong river. War is a test of character under harsh conditions. Here Kerry proved to be at least average, if not above average based on the Navy records at the time.

My question is (and remains) what lessons did he draw from that war? Was Containment - the policy Kennedy and Johnson were following which lead to Vietnam - the right policy? Should the U.S. have commited troops to Vietnam?

We know what Kerry thought as soon as the war ended, he was actively opposed to it. He made his political reputation on that basis. But 30 years have passed since the fall of Saigon and we know a lot more now than we did then. The key question Kerry never answered in the presidential campaign (to my mind): Was the Vietnam war justified? I felt that in the campaign Kerry wanted to have it both ways. On the one hand he wanted to keep faith with his earlier self and assert that the Vietnam war had been wrong, but on the other hand he wanted to give people the impression that he was "strong on defence" and did believe in using U.S. troops to intervene in other countries (specifically to hunt down Osama bin Laden).

My belief is that Kerry himself never really thought through the implications of his behavior during that time compared with the present and that was a key weakness. At the 60 (in 2003) Kerry was old enough to have developed a consistent, rational world view. But I don't think he had it. Or if he did, he couldn't explain it.

Was the Vietnam War right or wrong. This is still an important question today. For the next 20 years, this issue is still going to dominate U.S. foreing policy debate - until it is suplanted by "Was the invasion of Iraq right or wrong"

Posted by rakhier at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2005

Charles Krauthammer on the Triumph of the Neo-Con world view...

Krauthammer writes an excellant essay in which he talks about the poltical experiment of the last 20 years in which the "three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism" all held power in Washington D.C.

I don't know if the essay will remain online so I'm putting it into the extended entry below.

The Neoconservative Convergence
Some once famously dissenting ideas now govern U.S. foreign policy, maturing as they go.

BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.

The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination. Mr. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves. His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of 15 free and independent states.

But we must not be retrospectively too severe. Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in the early 1990s, and Mr. Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Mr. Bush's other area of triumph--Iraq--that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.

Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf War, begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies, diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of U.N. sanctions. All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been fought far more easily--and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites, who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions--in 1991. One recalls with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the inconclusive end to the first Gulf War.

Still, the achievements of the elder Mr. Bush far outweigh the failures. The smooth and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire began, Saddam was stopped, and Arabia was saved. But then came the second, radically different experiment. For the balance of the 1990s, for reasons having nothing to do with foreign policy, realism was abruptly replaced by the classic liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

It is hard to be charitable in assessing the record. Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege." During its 7 1/2-year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

Then came another radical change. By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Fla., this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy. One prominent columnist, speaking for the conventional wisdom of the moment, called the Bush project in Iraq "a childish fantasy." And this, from a friend of neoconservatism.

As for the liberals who had come on board the project of liberating Iraq, they took its perceived foundering as an opportunity to engage in a mass jumping of ship. Some justified their abandonment of the Bush doctrine on the grounds that it was they who had been betrayed--by an administration whose incompetence, mendacity, political opportunism and various other crimes had ruined a policy that would already have been crowned with success if only they had been in charge of postwar Iraq, calibrating brilliantly precise troop levels, calculating to three decimal places the required degree of de-Baathification, and overseeing just about every other operational detail according to the dictates of their own tactical genius.

Other liberals donned the guise of realists, who by the summer of 2004 were back in fashion. At the height of this new vogue, just before the November election, even John Kerry's advisers, noting that the liberal-internationalist critique of the war (namely, that it lacked international support and legitimacy) was not exactly winning converts, settled instead on a "realist" line of attack. From then on, Iraq would be known as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," which, translated, meant that we should be chasing terrorists cave-to-cave in Afghanistan rather than pursuing an ideological crusade in the Middle East.

If you add to this mix the classical realists, from Brent Scowcroft to Dimitri Simes, who had opposed the entire project from the beginning and were now penning their I-told-you-so's, there seemed scarcely anyone left on board the neoconservative ship. But the most interesting about-face was that of some professed neoconservatives themselves. Among these, the most prominent was Francis Fukuyama, whose lead article in the summer 2004 National Interest was a "realist" attack on the entire ideological underpinnings of the Iraq war and the liberationist idea. The article's very title, "The Neoconservative Moment," made the mocking suggestion, also very much in vogue, that neoconservative foreign policy was finished, that its moment had come and gone, that it had been done in by Iraq, by its own overweening arrogance, and by its blindness to the realist wisdom that failure in Iraq was, as Mr. Fukuyama put it, "predictable in advance."

As it happens, Mr. Fukuyama had neglected to make that prediction in advance; at the time of the war and during the months of debate preceding it, he had been silent. Moreover, from the perspective of today, even his retroactive prediction in summer 2004 of inevitable and catastrophic failure in Iraq appears doubtful, to say the least. Getting a retroactive prediction wrong is quite an achievement, but it tells you much about the intellectual climate just a year ago.

Today, there is no euphoria regarding the Iraq project, but sobriety has replaced panic. Things have changed, and what changed them was four elections: two in the West, and two in the Middle East. First came the re-election in Australia of John Howard, a firm ally of the administration. This presaged the re-election of George W. Bush, which reaffirmed to the world America's staying power, gave popular legitimacy to the Bush doctrine, and established a clear mandate to continue the democratic project. The refusal of the American people last November to turn out a president who, rejecting an "exit strategy," pledged instead to remain until Iraqi self-governance had been secured, was a seminal moment.

The other two elections took place in the areas of our exertion: first the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed by the American media, then the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. The latter were a historical hinge point. After a string of other important steps in Iraq that had been confidently dismissed as impossible and certainly impossible to do on time--the writing of an interim constitution, the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government--came the greatest impossibility of all: free elections as scheduled. The overwhelming popular turnout, in what was essentially a referendum on the insurgency and on the democratic idea, sent a clear-cut message. Those who had said that the Iraqis, like Arabs in general, had no particular interest in self-government were wrong--as were those who claimed that the insurgency was a nationalist, anti-imperialist and widely popular movement.

This is hardly to say that things have not remained difficult in Iraq. The insurgency is still raging. It has the capacity to kill, to instill fear, and perhaps ultimately to destabilize the elected government. What the election did do, however, was to confirm what was already suggested by the insurgency's clear lack of any political program, any political wing, any ideology, indeed even any pretense of competing for hearts and minds. The election exposed the insurgency as an alliance of Baathist nihilism and atavistic jihadism, neither of which has a large constituency in Iraq.

And that is hardly all. The elections newly empowered fully 80% of the Iraqi population--the Kurds and the Shiites--and created an indigenous representative leadership with a life-and-death stake in defeating the insurgency. By giving that 80% the political and institutional means to build the necessary forces, the elections infinitely improved the chances that a stable, multiethnic, democratic Iraq can emerge, despite the current mayhem. As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, upon returning from a visit to the region:

The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. . . . By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world.

The elections' effect on the wider Arab world was likewise both immediate and profound. Millions of Arabs watched on television as Iraqis exercised their political rights, and were moved to ask the obvious question: Why are Iraqis the only Arabs voting in free elections--and doing so, moreover, under American aegis and protection? The rest is so well known as barely to merit repeating. The Beirut spring. Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. Open demonstrations and the beginnings of political competition in Egypt. Women's suffrage in Kuwait. Small but significant steps toward democratization in the gulf. Bashar Assad's declared intent to legalize political parties in Syria, purge the ruling Baath party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and move toward a market economy. (Not that Assad is likely to do any of this, but the fact that he must pretend to be doing it shows the astonishing reach of the Bush doctrine to date.)

Mr. Ajami has called this (in the title of a recent article in Foreign Affairs) the "Autumn of the Autocrats." Not the winter--nothing is certain, and we know of many democratizing movements in the past that were successfully put down. There are too many entrenched dictatorships and kleptocracies in the region to declare anything won. What we can declare, with certainty, is the falsity of those confident assurances before the Iraq war, during the Iraq war and after the Iraq war that this project was inevitably doomed to failure because we do not know how to "do" democracy, and they do not know how to receive it.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation--a truth that on Jan. 30 even al-Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical "realism" that began with FDR's deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.

The Iraqi elections had one final effect. They so acutely embarrassed foreign critics, especially in Europe, that we began to see a rash of headlines asking the rhetorical question: Was Bush Right? The answer to that is: Yes, so far. The democratic project has been launched, against the critics and against the odds. That in itself is an immense historical achievement. But success will require maturation--a neoconservatism of discrimination and restraint, prepared to examine both its principles and its practice in shaping a truly governing philosophy.

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last year, I tried to draw a distinction between a more expansive and a more restrictive neoconservative foreign policy. I called the two types, respectively, democratic globalism and democratic realism.

The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.

This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?

But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.

In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils. That means postponing radically destabilizing actions in places where the support of the current nondemocratic regime is needed against a larger existential threat to the free world. There is no need to apologize for that. In World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin against Hitler. (As Churchill said shortly after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.") This was a necessary alliance, and a temporary one: When we were done with Hitler, we turned our attention to Stalin and his successors.

During the subsequent war, the Cold War, we again made alliances with the devil, in the form of a variety of right-wing dictators, in order to fight the greater evil. Here, again, the partnership was necessary and temporary. Our deals with right-wing dictatorships were contingent upon their usefulness and upon the status of the ongoing struggle. Once again we were true to our word. Whenever we could, and particularly as we approached victory in the larger war, we dispensed with those alliances.

Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators. In 1986, we openly and decisively supported the Aquino revolution that deposed and exiled Marcos, and later in the '80s we pressed very hard for free elections in Chile that Mr. Pinochet lost, paving the way for the return of democracy.

Alliances with dictatorships were justified in the war against fascism and the Cold War, and they are justified now in the successor existential struggle, the war against Arab/Islamic radicalism. This is not just theory. It has practical implications. For nothing is more practical than the question: After Afghanistan, after Iraq, what?

The answer is, first Lebanon, then Syria. Lebanon is next because it is so obviously ready for democracy, having practiced a form of it for 30 years after decolonization. Its sophistication and political culture make it ripe for transformation, as the massive pro-democracy demonstrations have shown.

Then comes Syria, both because of its vulnerability--the Lebanon withdrawal has gravely weakened Assad--and because of its strategic importance. A critical island of recalcitrance in a liberalizing region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border, Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous geopolitical advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.

Some conservatives (and many liberals) have proposed instead that we be true to the universalist language of the president's second inaugural address and go after the three principal Islamic autocracies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Not so fast, and not so hard. Autocracies they are, and in many respects nasty ones. But doing this would be a mistake.

In Egypt, we certainly have liberal resources that should be supported and encouraged. But, keeping in mind the Algerian experience, we should be wary of bringing down the whole house of cards and thereby derailing any progress from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Saudi Arabia has a Byzantine culture, and an equally Byzantine method of governance, which must be delicately reformed short of overthrow. And Pakistan, which has great potential for democracy, is simply too critical as a military ally in the war on al Qaeda to risk anything right now. Pervez Musharraf is no bastard; but even if he were, he is ours. We should be encouraging the evolution of democracy in all of these countries, but relentless and ruthless means--of the kind we employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and should, perhaps short of direct military invention, be employing in Syria--are better applied to enemies, not friends.

What is interesting is that the Bush administration, in practice, is proceeding precisely along these lines. It pushes on Hosni Mubarak, but gently. It moves even more gingerly with Saudi Arabia, fearing what may emerge in the short term if the royal kleptocracy is deposed. And, because Pakistan is so central to the war on terror, it disturbs not a hair on the head of Mr. Musharraf.

In short, the Bush administration--if you like, neoconservatism in power--has been far more inclined to pursue democratic realism and to consign democratic globalism to the realm of aspiration. This kind of prudent circumspection is, in fact, a practical necessity for governing in the real world. We should, for example, be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Indeed, the behavior of the Bush administration implies that in practice, the distinction between democratic realism and democratic globalism may collapse, because globalism is simply not sustainable.

Another important sign of the maturing of neoconservative foreign policy is that it is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity. The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.

The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Ms. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Mr. Cheney served as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism--not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature.

What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy--so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts--have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.

This is not party discipline. It is compromise with reality, and convergence toward the middle. Above all, it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post

Posted by rakhier at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2005

Kelo not that bad? Hmm...

One of the writers for Powerline Blog offers this support for the Kelo decision in the Weekly Standard.

Its worth the read though I'm not convinced. I will admit that (as others have pointed out) the Kelo decision doesn't really break much new ground.

Posted by rakhier at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2005

Time for Rehnquist to Resign...

Justice of the Supreme Court since 1972, Chief Justice since 1986, William Rehnquist is the 2nd longest serving justice in U.S. history - and its time for him to quit.

This last term of the U.S. Supreme Court was one of the worst I can remember. The sheer idiocy of ruling both in favor AND against displaying the 10 Commandments is proof of the failure of this court. And I blame Rehnquist.

But the ultimate insult is the Kelo case. The idea that a state agency can take private property that is maintained, taxes paid, NOT distressed and just hand it over to a private entity is evil. This is the SCOTUS Blog summary of the case.

There are no defenders of this decision in the Blogsphere.

Although Rehnquist was in the dissent, correctly in my opinion, I still blame him. A more able Chief Justice could have and should have solved these cases differently.

When Rehnquist came down with thyroid cancer he should have resigned. He should resign now. If he won't resign, he should be impeached. I'm sorry if his long career has to end this way but no person should stay on a job as important as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in less than 90% of full health.

Here is what I would like to see for all Supreme Court Justices:

  1. A fixed, 18 year term. No person should occupy the Supreme Court for longer. One can argue about the time. I pick 18 years. I do not wish to see any more nominations of young people (like Justice Clarence Thomas) who was not qualified to be placed on the Supreme Court and was nominated (in part) because of his youth.

  2. Every year (or 2 years) each Justice must undergo a physical and mental exam. If the person is not in good health, they must resign within six months or face an automatic impeachment hearing by the Congress. I do not wish to see any more cases like Rehnquist, a man too ill to attend the majority of the court's sessions this year.

The Supreme Court is currently adrift, without strong leadership and making terrible decisions. Reform is needed, and reform needs to start at the top. Its time for Rehnquist to go.

Posted by rakhier at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2005

The Best Speech by President Bush

This speech is the best speech President Bush has made. Period.

June 27, 2005 - Address by President Bush

Thank you and good evening. I am pleased to visit Fort Bragg — "Home of the Airborne and Special Operations Forces." It is an honor to speak before you tonight. My greatest responsibility as president is to protect the American people, and that is your calling as well. I thank you for your service, your courage and your sacrifice. I thank your families, who support you in your vital work. The soldiers and families of Fort Bragg have contributed mightily to our efforts to secure our country and promote peace. Americais grateful — and so is your commander-in-chief.

The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. This war reached our shores on September 11, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us — and the terrorists we face — murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression — by toppling governments, driving us out of the region, and exporting terror.

To achieve these aims, they have continued to kill — in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, and elsewhere. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. After September 11, I made a commitment to the American people: This Nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will take the fight to the enemy. We will defend our freedom.

Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The commander in charge of Coalition operations in Iraq — who is also senior commander at this base — General John Vines, put it well the other day. He said: "We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us."

Our mission in Iraq is clear. We are hunting down the terrorists. We are helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We are advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability — and laying th