Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

We’ve known for a while that the Bush Administration — at the highest levels — authorized and was aware of treatment of detainees that can only be described as torture. We also know that they got the Justice Department to gin up legal opinions to fit the square peg of beatings, waterboarding and abuse into the round hole of the Geneva Conventions and American domestic law prohibiting torture. So, in a sense, Mark Danner’s NYRB piece on the Red Cross Report on 14 “high value” detainees who were transferred to Guantanamo from black sites in 2006 is not exactly breaking news. But, still, it should be read by everyone who has any interest in what our country turned into after 9/11. Here is the excerpt that most fully captures the moral empitness at the core of our detainee policy — and the culpability of the Bush Administration:

Two and a half months after Abu Zubaydah woke up strapped to a bed in the white room, the interrogation resumed “with more intensity than before”:

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….

I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.

One is reminded here that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room—guards, interrogators, doctor—was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him. Or I’m going to shake him. Or I’m gonna make him stay up for 48 hours,” said John Kiriakou.

Each one of these steps…had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, “He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.” And that permission would come…. The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific. And the bottom line was these were very unusual authorities that the agency got after 9/11. No one wanted to mess them up. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.… No one wanted to be the guy who accidentally did lasting damage to a prisoner.

Smashing against hard walls before Zubaydah enters the tall black coffin-like box; sudden appearance of plywood sheeting affixed to the wall for him to be smashed against when he emerges. Perhaps the deputy director of operations, pondering the matter in his Langley, Virginia, office, suggested the plywood?

Or perhaps it was someone higher up? Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers “briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee,” including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who “then signed off on the [interrogation] plan.” At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a “golden shield” from the Justice Department—the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous “torture memorandum,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002, which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The “golden shield” presumably would protect CIA officers from prosecution. Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees—”whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning”—in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.” At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

The writer at A Grand Mute Proof objects to some of my proposals for reforming the financial sector.

His first one is in reponse to my idea that large banks which pose systemic risk to the world economy if they collapse, should be limited in what activities they engage in. In short, Citigroup shouldn’t be doing the same type of trading as Joe Hedge Fund. His concern is that a restriction on any type of financial activity  “might depress economic activity, since less money will be moving around in high-risk transactions. High economic growth is, unfortunately, correlated with high risk, and the challenge of regulating financial institutions lies in striking a good balance between fostering growth while inhibiting risk.” Well, I’m afraid that events are rather firmly on my size here. We are currently being forced to support an insolvent bank because of its risky trading. That hasn’t exactly been good for growth. Also, debt-based profits in finance that we’ve seen in the past 8 or so years has been highly tilted towards the richest, and as evidenced by our current crisis, not exactly sustainable. Also, because of the high profits in finance, people who might become regulators have gone into the financial sector, which then made the resulting crash all the more likely. And, inasmuch as high growth is caused by “risk” — we can imagine a world where Citigroup doesn’t do naked CDS trading and yet there’s still a lot of venture capital or where we have liberal bakruptcy laws, both of which have a lot more to do with growth than risky trading by large financial institutions.

His second objection is to my “super-FDIC.” While he sees some merit in the idea, he proposes this alteration:

Mandating membership in such an institution for banks above a certain size would be a nightmare: legislating the cutoff line and policing banks who might cross it from year to year would be just two likely difficulties in that scenario. However, a better approach might consist of letting banks above a certain size voluntarily join this ULTRA FDIC, and encouraging that member banks advertise their membership to their customers.

I’m afraid that providing “too big to fail bailout insurance” (which is a better name than FDIC, which exists to insure depositors against bank failure, while the Super-FDIC is meant to make it so banks pay for their eventual bailouts due to risky activities, not tax payers). Making it voluntary would be the death-knell for the SFDIC. The banks are, of course, not bearing the cost of their own bailouts. Perhaps a compromise would be that if large banks that would require bailouts in the case of their insolvency or failure refrained from those certain types of risky trading, their contribution to the bailout fund would be reduced.

To zoom out a bit, I think that, in general, the approach towards financial regulation — that what’s best for financial institutions, or what financial institutions say is best for them, is best for the economy or society as a whole, has been proven faulty recently.

I think it was Jon Chait (or Matt Yglesias, or both) who wrote that one reason why Clinton’s economic strategy of balancing the budget and  building up a surplus failed was that once Bush came into office, he was able to use the budget surplus to pass tax cuts that were largely tilted towards the well-off. Moreover, the general trend is that Republicans tend to build up deficits (I’m thinking Reagan-Bush and Bush here) and Democrats are left to hold the bag, with their options for pursuing aggressive fiscal and domestic policy constrained by GOP fiscal irresponsibility. Obama seems to have broken this pattern by taking advantage of an economic crisis to vastly the role of government, raise taxes on rich people and has insulated himself from criticism for this expansive agenda by convincing a lot of centrist minded people in the media that he’s really, at heart, a deficit hawk and a policy moderate.

But let’s put aside Obama’s canniness in not letting Bush-era deficits deter from pursuing a broad, liberal agenda for a second. Looking at Nate Silver’s post on poll results showing that American confidence in most all institutions has cratered, the conspiratorial side in me says this is also part of the grand Republican plan.

The last time where we had a total loss of faith in governmental institutions, or just institutions in general, was in the mid-to-late 1970s. Much of this was due to Watergate (though Vietnam is important to), and to the Democratic-lead exhuming of all the horrible stuff the government had been doing. So, confidence in government craters, Jimmy Carter is an ineffective communicator who is ultimately done in by events and Reagan wins by telling everyone that, yes, in fact, the government can’t help you, only hurt you. The only reason that same thing won’t happen this time is because Obama appears to be much better at actually getting things done. If we can come out of this great loss of faith in our institutions with universal health care and an economy that is approaching relative health, then Obama will have won a great victory. But it will be difficult, thanks to eight years of GOP governance.

When there’s an act of violence in a place that’s on the brink of conflict, or has a long history of conflict, people worry about the response. Even if that violence is purely meant to elicit an irrational, violent response that ratchets up the intensity of conflict and leads to more needless deaths, people will ruefully shake their heads and just assume that this one act of violence means that there are more to come.

I’m being too obscure here. My point is that in Northern Ireland, where IRA fighters killed three British officers in two days, there seems to have been no ratcheting up of tension or any real violence in response — from John Burns’ Times piece:

ut as formerly sworn enemies filed into a provincial church on Friday to mourn as one, the funeral of the slain policeman provided the latest and most powerful demonstration of the ways in which the province’s people and its leaders have united against a return to the violence that racked Northern Ireland for 30 years. Rallies that drew thousands to silent vigils this week in Belfast and other major towns across the north, and dozens of interviews across the province, suggested that the old antagonists — Roman Catholics and Protestants, nationalists seeking a united Ireland and Unionists committed to keeping Ulster a part of Britain — remain determined to settle their future in peace.

The thing is, in theory, there’s no reason why this basically shouldn’t always happen. In most cases, sectarian warfare — or just organized violence between groups in general — is a negative-sum activity. And most importantly, it’s a choice to respond to violent provocations violently. People and political groups aren’t billiard balls; they have agency. And in Northern Ireland, all the relevant groups have realized that they have more to win from not descending into more internecine violence.

Of course, there are reasons why it’s easier to avoid this chain on bloodshed in Northern Ireland than in, say, Iraq. There are groups who visibly have a lot to gain from peace,  and the attacks occurred against a background of peace and quiet. But still, just because it’s easier in this case to resist these provocations, doesn’t mean that the underlying calculus is much different than it was in post Golden Mosque bombing Iraq or, to get really radical for a bit, post 9/11 America or post Sderot-rocket attacks Israel.

If the huge blow up in the financial sector has shown us anything, it’s despite the protestations of those on Wall Street and their allies in the government and press, much activity in finance has zero-t0-negative social value. Sure, naked CDS trading can enrich banks and traders (for a while anyway), but it’s hard to say exactly how society benefits from it. But just because certain activities have little (or, in the long run) negative social value, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen at all, but just that government should take steps to mitigate their long run negative impact and certainly shouldn’t encourage the proliferation or expansion of these types of activities.

So, looking forward to how we want to regulate the financial sector, a few things seem obvious.

One, impose a simple rule on financial institutions. Either, you can be big — so big that your insolvency would threaten the collapse of the world economy — and not do anything risky or you can be small and do whatever the hell you want. Another way to thread the needle here would be to require banks like Citigroup, or anything that’s “too big too fail,” to pay into a super-FDIC, essentially to buy bailout insurance, so that if and when they need to be bailed out, it’s not a huge, sudden expense on the taxpayer. Or you simply let hedge funds do all the exotic stuff and tell banks to, well, be banks. Or, hell, you could just not let financial institutions get too big. For example, you could say that investment banks have to be partnerships and not let them become publicly traded companies (and thus get so big) or, on a smaller scale, just limit how much leverage can be used.

The point is not that x,y or z regulation should be adopted, but simply that if you approach financial regulation from the perspective of “what are simple rules would we adopt if we assumed that only some financial activity had a positive effect on social welfare (meaning that simply enriching already rich people wouldn’t count)” then a whole lot of ideas come to mind that are pretty different from what we had before.

Politically speaking, if we’re going to actually implement any of these  reforms, we would have to do it pretty soon. That’s because, as evidenced by the last ten or so years, financial institutions can make a lot of money doing stuff that doesn’t really benefit anyone besides themselves (and pose a risk of destroying the global economy) and so all the smart people go into finance instead of regulating and financial institutions can effectively lobby the government to not adopt any of these regulations. We have to get them while they’re down.

Glenn Thrush at the Politico reports on numbers showing approval ratings for Congress going way up.

Democrats are touting a new Gallup poll that shows congressional approval ratings at their highest point in four years — 39 percent — but Republicans are trying pry behind those numbers to show that they’re mostly driven by Democrats who are finally content, rather than independents or Republicans. The poll shows 57 percent of self identified Democrats in the poll approve of Congress, up just 14 points in a month.

The big jump in Democratic approval of Congress is interesting. One of the weird things about Congressional approval ratings is that after Democrats won back Congress in 2006, they faced very low approval ratings for the duration of the Bush administration. A lot of conservatives harped on this point as a piece of evidence that Bush, Republicans and so on weren’t actually all that unpopular, at least in comparison to the perfidious Reid and Pelosi. But what they were missing — and this was explained very well by Glenn Greenwald a while back — was that Democrats were disapproving of Congress at roughly the same rate that Republicans were.

This was because the Congress wasn’t passing a lot of liberal policy and was doing little to stop the end-all, be-all of unpopular conservative policies: the Iraq war. With Obama elected, Congress can finally pass and implement Democratic policies and so Democratic approval ratings have gone up. With a plan for withdrawal, a massive spending bill that reflects Democratic priorities, pay equity legislation and a huge focus on health care and climate change, Democrats are liking Congress a lot more.

None of this was particularly complicated or hard to predict, and everyone harping on the low approval ratings at a time when Congress wasn’t satisfying anyone (Republicans were hardly getting their policy priorities pushed through between 2006 and 2008) was ignoring exactly why the ratings were so low.

If I were the AFL-CIO, I would tell Arlen Specter that he would get their endorsement if and only he was the decisive vote in favor of EFCA.  Or maybe that we would get the endorsement if he wins his primary against Toomey. Otherwise, supporting Spector is just silly.

Look, Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for Obama 55 – 45, has a Democratic governor, a Democratic senator and a pretty moderate Republican senator. The trend has been for blue states with Republican senators to vote for Democrats, not prop up a dying breed of Republican moderates. Just look at the scenarios and it’s easy to see that it doesn’t make sense to support Specter in any of them.

One scenario is that Specter concludes that he is going to lose the Republican primary to Pat Toomey, leaves the GOP and runs as an independent or a Democrat. In this case, Democrats and their allies should just support the Democratic candidate. Toomey would have little chance of winning — he’s far too conservative for Pennsylvania — meaning that instead of getting a Republican squish, we could just have another Democrat from Pennsylvania.

Republicans in Connecticut, where Joe Lieberman was able to pull this stunt off, were forced to support him because a Republican had no shot of winning a Senate seat there. That is not true about Democrats in Pennsylvania. Arlen Specter is old, so he would get Democrats, at max, six years of repersentation. Why not get a real Democrat in there?

If, against all odds, he wins the primary and supported EFCA, then maybe the AFL-CIO should give him the endorsement. Maybe.

Reihan Salam has a good post about the Employee Free Choice Act pointing out that card check isn’t the most important part of the legislation and that other mechanisms, such as simply expediting elections, could achieve much the same effect without getting rid of the secret ballot for certification elections. So, why hold on to the most controversial bit of the legislation and instead say that “secret ballots are good and valuable and in tune with American ideals, etc., [this would let] the labor movement would put its opponents on the defensive. It’s hard to see exactly how business groups would counter this move.”

I imagine that “business groups” would counter this move by saying “There is no compromise” and “There’s no credit for amending the bill, the only credit anyone gets is for voting against cloture. Am I clear?” This is, of course, what the Chamber of Commerce is already saying.

The way the politics of labor basically works is that business groups, especially the Chamber, hate unions and would prefer the status quo where businesses get to break all sorts of labor laws in discourage workers from joining or forming unions. If you think that most — if not all — opposition to EFCA is the result of the business community leaning on legislators who are sympathetic to their interests and arguments, then there’s no point in compromising on the specifics of the bill.

Democrats who supported the bill sotto voce when it wasn’t going to pass and who are now backing down won’t jump back on the EFCA bandwagon if the card-check provision is stripped. The reason they have changed their stripes is not because they discovered a love for the secret ballot in union certification elections but because, before Obama took office, they could please Democrats by supporting EFCA while not angering their supporters in the business community. Now that the business community is actually scared of EFCA passing, they’re going to oppose the plan no matter what little bits get stripped out. If they weren’t going to adopt a position of no-compromise resistance, then no lawmaker would incur the political costs of opposing EFCA.

OK, I think that everyone who saw the entire Freeman situation entirely through this lens.

1.Chas Freeman says heterodox stuff about Israel 2. Steve Rosen, Josh Block, Martin Kramer and Michael Goldfarb blow everything out of proportion and spread various about him 3. Charles Schumer and other Israel hawks sink the nomination

Should probably reevalutate that stance in light of Michael Isikoff’s reporting that, ultimately, it was Nancy Pelosi who squashed the nomination in light of Freeman’s rather blood curdling thoughts on Tiananmen Square.

Look, the undoing of Chas Freeman was an overdetermined event. Had the only thing wrong with him had been his statements on Israel, then the carping of his critics would have gained no traction. Sure, people who are already tooth-and-nail opposed to Obama’s foreign policy agenda would have brought up these concerns, and no one would have listened to them. But because Freeman made himself an easy target — for totally legitimate, non-Israel based reasons (fondness for Saudi Arabia) — anyone who had an issue with him could bring up all sorts of objections and he was subsequently done with.

Once again, I don’t think we’ve lost much by not having Freeman in the government. The cases where the Israel Lobby, or to make everything sound less ominous, the hawkish pro-Israel community, is able to exert influence in appointments and policy making specific to Israel (or to the Middle East more generally), we should be concerned.

It will wipe out the shareholders.

Although the entire Chas Freeman to-do confirmed some rather depressing facts about who can most effectively bend both the foreign policy discussion and the actual make up of the foreign policy community to their will, it was not, in and of itself, a great loss. I haven’t really red anything that really convinced me, independent of the loathing he elicted in Michael Goldfarb and Steve Rosen, why Chas Freeman was such a great choice. Sure, the fact that Dennis Blair wanted him should have been enough, but I imagine that the intelligence community will get along OK with out Freeman. In short, the fact that the Israel Lobby was able to scalp Freeman doesn’t really have any specific implications for American foreign policy, or most importantly, our policy towards the Middle East. Freeman was supposed to be an intelligence analyst, not someone who was coming up with a strategy for ensuring peace in Israel and the Territories.

I think it’s instructive to look at what happened to Freeman and what happened to Rob Malley. Malley, unlike Freeman, not only had impeccable credentials as a foreign policy guy, but had incredibly experience specific to the Peace Process. A veteran of Clinton’s NSC, he became a special adviser for Arab-Israeli Affairs and was one of the key players in the Camp David negotiations. AFter they fell through, he wrote an infamous article in the New York Review of Books which challenged the prevailing wisdom that A. Arafat had been offered the best deal possible and B. that he was nearly entirely responsible for scuttling the negotiations. For this, he earned the enmity of the hawkish pro-Israel community.

Flash forward to 2008. He’s working for the International Crisis Group on Middle East issues and he’s one of Obama’s numerous unofficial foreign policy advisers. It comes out that, as part of his work with ICG, he has talked with Hamas leadership. This makes sense — the ICG is charged with resolving conflicts, and Hamas is a participant in a particularly knotty conflict, so of course Malley would talk to them — but Malley quickly ends his association with the campaign to spare Obama  any embarassment.

In the case of Malley, Obama truly lost someone who had specific expertise and background that is basically irreplacable. It’s not that there aren’t other experienced diplomats with knowledge of the peace process, but Malley, because of his subsequent work with the ICG and experience talking with Hamas, had something unique to bring to the table. But because there are very strict parameters over who can think and say what and still be involved at the highest levels of forumlating and implementing American foreign policy, Malley will be standing on the sidelines. That — not Chas Freeman — is probably the most unfortunate recent action of this group of vindicative hawks.

Ok, so, we can all agree that Michael Goldfarb entitling a post “Pedophile Lobby Gets Behind Freeman” is perfectly denotive of the total bad faith in which the Weekly Standard deals with questions of Israel and of foreign policy . But even if we accept that it’s all relevant that Scott Ritter, who endorsed Chas Freeman,”had arranged in an Internet chat room to meet with the girl at a Burger King in Colonie, a suburb of Albany, so she could witness him masturbating,” I want to make another, more minor point that really has nothing to do with Chas Freeman or foreign policy at all.

Pedophilia is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV for all you psychology folk out there) as:

• A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger);
• B. The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty;
• C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.

What’s important here is that the clinical definition for pedophilia has nothing to do with our intuitions about the appropriateness of relationships between adults and teenagers (not children, this is very important) or with any statuatory rape laws. For example, a 40 year old man who has a sexual attraction to, say, a 16 year old girl is not a pedophile, even if he acts on that attraction. To say otherwise is to just ignore the real meaning of these words. It’s really not that difficult to understand that a 16 year old girl is a whole lot different than a 9 year old girl. It’s the difference between Elle Fanning and Miley Cyrus.

*Interesting how Godlfarb never mentions that, along with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern (who he considers “crackpots”), some 17 former ambassadors — including Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to the UN for Bush I — had endorsed Freeman. Just more proof of the rampant bad faith on display here.

Chas Freeman won’t be the head of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman’s appointment, per se, didn’t really seem like the best hill to die on. Beyond hyperbolic, out of context descriptions of his work by his opponents and then testimonials by his son and this good, yet totally hypothetical, piece by James Fallows, there wasn’t very much disinterested looking at this record, and beyond the fact that he won the ire of Michael Goldfarb and Steve Rosen, there wasn’t a whole lot of great discussion about the positive reasons for why he should be appointed.

But I think this entire incident has been instructive in clarifying two things. One, there is an “Israel-lobby” that is very good at ensuring that a rather narrow band of thought about Israel is ever expressed by anyone with any power or influence in the government. Two, due to the existence of said lobby and their effectiveness at going after their designated targets, there is high probability that anyone looking to rise up through the national security, intelligence or diplomatic ranks will do their best to never run afoul of them.

I guess what I would like to see is some of the more moderate Israel Lobby defenders — i.e. those who recognize that it exists — like Jon Chait and Jeffrey Goldberg defend the results of its ability to so fully shape the discourse and discussion around issues of Israel policy.

Dana Goldstein has a post at Tapped documenting where exactly Michelle Rhee is getting the money to pay teachers on her non-tenured “Green” track up to $130,000 in salary. It turns out that, as everyone expected, Rhee expects to get the money get from philanthropists interested in education reform, namely Eli Broad and Bill Gates.

And while I think Broad and Gates are doing a good thing by providing the money to support an alternative model of paying teachers, this method of funding is somewhat problematic. It will probably work out for DC for as long as Rhee, or a Rhee-like successor, very publicly push a reform message and try to make DC ground zero for rather radical policy changes, which would also end up directing a lot of attention towards the work being done by theses philanthropic organizations. But the problem is that you’re not going to find  a Gates or a Broad in every school district willing to pony up the necessary funds to increase teacher pay.

While I wouldn’t mind higher taxes or an increase in overall education funding to pay teachers more, I imagine that conservatives, who always talk about how much they like Rhee and Joel Klein and who generally put themselves in the reform camp, won’t be happy when they realize that paying teachers more means spending more on education. As I wrote back in November:

That’s because, as of now, the huge pay increases that Rhee is giving to good teachers without tenure (along with the rest of her experimenting) are being funded by private donors. There is obviously a problem with scaling that model up. If more school districts and states were to get on the Rhee program, it would mean more money for schools. And not just that internet money, but tax money. At that point, expect Republicans to stop pretending they support liberal school reform and start carping about vouchers again.

I think that’s all still true today, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Yglesias wonders why conservatives are going gaga over 14 year old talking point peddler Jonathan Krohn. On face, it’s pretty weird. Do you really want to send the message that anyone, even a 14 year old, can be a spokesperson for your party? Of course, the Joe the Plumber enthralled grassroots have already shown a marked, proud disdain for expertise and real knowledge, so their adoption of Krohn can easily be seen in that light.

I think, however, it’s a bit more subtle than that. You’ll notice that conservatives are quite prickly about the fact that they’re basically the party of aging white men. So, whenever someone who isn’t a A. Old B. White or C. Male pops onto the scene spouting die-hard conservative rhetoric, the movement does the best it can to get them out there as repersentative of conservatism writ large.

It doesn’t matter if they’re not very impressive; what matters is that these people can be used as a bludgeon against liberals who actually repersent the majority of young people, minorities and women. So, we have the elevation of someone who’s never won a real election (Michael Steele) to RNC leader, who before that was a big GOP celebrity. And then of course there was the Sarah Palin phenomenon and, as Yglesias noted, the brief conservative celebrity of Ben Shapiro when he was a 17 year old Townhall columnist.

I wonder when conservatives realize that tokenism won’t do very much to get them votes from their ever-shrinking middle aged and old white guy base.

Late 60s: College students read poetry by Sylvia Plath, The Authobiography of Malcolm X and Howl

Today: College students read Twilight books.

Today: Northwestern students raise $576,470 for Project Kindle, an advocacy and support group for kids with HIV/AIDS. Oh yeah, and they raised the money in a school year long process that culminated in 30 hours of dancing to music that Ron Charles would surely disapprove of for its vapidity (I’m looking at you, “I’m On A Boat”).

I should also note that Charles’ article commits journalistic malpractice by comparing real data on book sales to college students today with his own memories and anecdotes of what he and his friends were reading in the late 60s. I doubt that the reading habits of a future book reviewer and his social circle were representative of the reading habits of all college students.

One of the benefits of being in the opposition is the ability to be relentlessly negative. And even if you’re negativity would result, in, say, the total collapse of the world economy, there isn’t much of a price to be paid. I’m talking about Richard Shelby and John McCain taking a step beyond “no more bailouts” and openly endorsing “let them fail” in reference to big banks teetering on the edge of annihilation (ie, Citigroup and BofA).

Of course, only a crazy person would actually let Citigroup or Bank of America fail as institutions — ie, let everything except their FDIC insured deposits go under. Megan McArdle has a good explanation of what would actually happen in Citigroup went under. You should read the whole thing, but let me summarize: it wouldn’t be pretty. And the thing is, everyone knows this. Hell, John McCain and Richard Shelby might know it. But because they have no obligation to actually come up with a politically acceptable plan to ensure that the financial system survies and even comes back to health without wasting too many taxpayer dollars or enriching the people responsible for our current plight, they can take this absurd line that has the faint outline of populism or fiscal discipline. Of course, by doing so, they make Obama’s task all the harder. If the major roadblock to nationalization is that Obama can’t get Congress to appropriate enough money, then it will be even harder to get them to appropriate anything if there’s a substantial contingent in the Senate who at least state publicly that they want to let the chips fall where they may.

Jonathan Littell, the American born French author who lives in Barcelona, has finally released his epic Holocaust novel, The Kindly Ones, in the United States. When the book came out in 2006 in France, it won two of the country’s most prestigious literary awards and sparked years of debate. Some thought he wrote the most important French novel in decades, while others thought he was purveying cheap Nazi fetishism. Since France has probably the second most tortured relationship with the Holocaust — or maybe the first — the book, which is a 1000 page “memoir” of a fictional SS soldier who just so happens be a capital S Sadist (as in, resembling de Sade, the Marquis), sold hundreds of thousands of copies and went on to sell over a million before it hit the US. The sparks have already started flying, with Michiko Kakutani panning it and Michael Korda, formerly the editor-in-chief of Simon And Schuster, loving it. Well, enough of the background. Although I won’t get to actually trekking to the library to pick up a copy until after I finish Gravity’s Rainbow – which just so happens to feature one of literature’s most famous sexually perverted Nazis, the infamous Captain Blicero — I decided to least read the excerpt available at the book’s website.

I don’t want to comment on anything yet, except to say that the prose is unremarkable (maybe it reads better in French), but this one passage really leaped out at me:

You might be wondering how I ended up in the lace business. Nothing particularly marked me out for commerce, far from it. I studied law and political science and received my doctorate in law; in Germany the letters Dr. jur. form a legal part of my name. Yet it must be said that circumstances played a part in preventing me from making use of my diploma after 1945. If you really want to know, nothing truly marked me out for law either: as a young man I wanted above all else to study literature and philosophy.

Every quarter at Northwestern, I have to meet with my adviser. We go over what classes I’m interested in and generally discuss my academic future . He makes me fill out a form before every meeting, and one of the questions he asks is if I have any graduate school plans. Now, this is a question really meant for people who want to go to medical school and therefore have to take a specific set of classes. For everyone else, your class choice doesn’t really matter. I, for one, always write “law school?” with the foreboding uncertainty that most people who study the humanities in college have. Or, to put it another way, as a young man, I want to, above all else, study literature and philosophy, but could very well end up settling for law.

Of course, Obama should be congratulated for looking into our horribly flawed defense procurement system. Even if you don’t consider much of our defense contracting to be essentially laundering money from the taxpayer to well connected defense contractors, everyone can agree that insomuch as we are buying a bunch of stuff and services from these companies, the taxpayer should get the best possible deal.

But even that attitude, which longtime foe of out-of-control procurement John McCain has, doesn’t really get us very far in making our defense budget fiscally sensible. Jamelle points out that as long as we have overstretched military commitments (bases around the world, two hot wars and so on), just trimming around the edges in contracting won’t do much. Now, this is a line of thinking that I have a lot of sympathy for, but I think it’s slightly off.

I don’t think there’s a ton wrong with a large military footprint, per se. While our active military presence in, say, Saudi Arabia probably cost us too much in terms of blowback and terrorism, I still think that absent some global governance structure, the US military’s worldwide deployment provides some public goods in terms of easing the movement of goods that would not be provided by any one else.

But just because you support benign hegemony or a public goods providing military force doesn’t mean you have to support increasing the end-strength of the Army and the Marine or buying a bunch of F-22s. In short, there’s a sensible middle ground between out of control procurements in support of endless intervention and a paring back of our peacetime military commitments that doesn’t involve funneling a lot of money to defense contractors.

Paul Campos has a good post breaking down the bizarre right wing discourse around “working hard” and taxes. The way Glenn Reynolds and other neo-Galtists seem to view the world, people work hard and accordingly earn money. Some people work, at say, 50 units of hardness. Since every unit of hardness is worth $5,000 of pre-tax income, people who work at 50 hardness units earn $250,000. So, people who earn $40,000 only worked at 8 hardness units and therefore it’s not only discouraging to the hard workers to distribute their money to the less hard workers, it’s also totally immoral.

Now, what I described sounds ridiculous. We all know that our income distribution doesn’t reflect merit. And even (smart) people who defend the status quo of distribution won’t make this argument. They will instead say that our income distribution is the result of billions of consensual market interactions, most of which are just and fair on their own, and so we shouldn’t do anything to screw around with it. And even if they don’t describe it that way. Instead, they can make the other argument that our system doesn’t reward merit, but instead that people get paid for certain types of work because their high pay reflects investment in human capital, and this is good because we want to encourage people to invest in and increase their human capital. But in these descriptions, no one will say that merit and working hard have anything to do with the income distribution. I’m sorry to use a cliche, but it’s hard to say that the investment banker (or law professor and so on) is working harder that the construction work. Sure, they’ve made greater human capital investments and maybe their work is more specialized and has value to society at a whole, so their getting paid more is justifiable, but that doesn’t mean they work harder.

But the thing is, this rhetoric is not only deployed all over the place, it’s also very powerful, when it comes to opposing returning capital gains and income rates to their levels in the 1990s and cutting taxes for 95% of people. I think it says something about the intellectual state of the GOP and modern conservatism that this troglodytic, absurd argument is the fulcrum of their opposition to a popular president’s policy agenda.