MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.
Supremes’ COPA decision
I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.
Ronald Reagan vs. the Evil Empire
Did Ronald Reagan singlehandedly defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War? You’d think so, based on the tidal waves of adulatory coverage following his death. My old friend Jim Hershberg has spent much of his career as a historian specializing in the Cold War era, digging up important info from the archives of the former Soviet satellites, and he says, in this great Washington Post piece:
|
…For the media and Reagan’s hagiographers to give the 40th president all the credit is like saying a late-inning relief pitcher had “won” a baseball game without mentioning the starting pitcher, the closer or the teammates who scored the runs that gave the team its lead. Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter. Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev… |
Here comes the fuzz
This morning’s Times brings a William Safire column that leaps to the defense of the Bush administration’s claims about a Saddam/al-Qaida connection and takes issue with the 9/11 Commission’s staff report on that topic. Safire, astonishingly, complains that the report “fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks.”
Now, if you’ve followed this issue at all you know that there has indeed been a whole lot of “fuzzing up” of “distinctions,” and that it is the hands of the Bush administration that are full of fuzz.
The president, the vice president, the defense secretary and the national security adviser have all served at one time or another as purveyors of this fuzz. They have fastened on three issues: (1) roughly decade-old contacts between al-Qaida and Saddam, in which, as the commission staff report recounts, Osama bin Laden sought bases in Iraq; (2) a report of a meeting in the Czech Republic between 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials; and (3) the presence inside Saddam’s Iraq of a radical Islamic group known as Ansar al-Islam that had ties to al-Qaida and an association with a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The Bush administration, and now its apologists like Safire, maintain that points 1, 2 and 3 together constitute “ties” between Saddam and al-Qaida. But here’s the fuzz: they completely ignore central contradictory facts. For instance: (1) bin Laden didn’t get what he wanted from Saddam — he was rebuffed. (2) Every credible and careful review of the evidence about Atta’s Czech rendezvous has concluded that it never took place. (3) Ansar-al-Islam operated in a part of Iraqi Kurdistan that Saddam did not control, and Ansar, far from being in cahoots with the dictator, wanted to overthrow the Saddam regime — the Islamic Ansar detested the secular Baathists.
How anyone possessed of the facts can conclude that this body of evidence constitutes “ties” remains a baffling mystery. It’s like this: Say a small but vicious band of neo-Aryan white supremacists had approached the Bush administration in early 2001 with a request for federal funding. Say the Bush administration had rejected them. Say these people established some crazy separatist camps in northern Montana on the Canadian border and launched an occasional raid from that enclave. By the logic the Bush administration’s claims on the Saddam/al-Qaida question, it would be fair for us to declare, on the basis of these facts, that the Bush administration had “longstanding, significant ties” to neo-Nazis, and that it was “harboring” them.
So, yes, there has been a lot of “fuzzing.” Do we think that the 70% of the American public who, at one point over the last year, believed that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks (the number is down in the 50s, according to a variety of polls today) simply arrived at that conclusion on their own, based on independent sources of intelligence that they consulted in their spare time? I don’t think so. American voters drew that conclusion because the Bush administration pushed it, at every available speaking opportunity. Bush officials preserved plausible deniability by adopting weasel-word locutions that protected them from the most blatant complaints of lying while preserving the essential charge and establishing the transfer of American outrage at 9/11 from the al-Qaida terrorists who committed the crime to a tinpot Middle East dictator who had nothing to do with it.
Now the administration’s leaders are stuck with the feeblest of defenses: When confronted with the facts, they insist that their claims, once asserted as demonstrable truth, are now unfathomable uncertainties — things that have not been proven, but haven’t been disproven, either.
Right. I can assert that, at this very moment, a troupe of small green crustaceans is performing “Brigadoon” on the far side of Ganymede. You can declare that I’m bonkers. And I can say, “Well, I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it!”
Fallows on blogging, Murray on Bush
Sometimes it just takes me longer to get around to posting on certain topics than I expect. One advantage to delay is that, quite often, someone else winds up making the same point. Instead of rolling out my own rhetoric, all I need do is link to somebody else. Conserves effort; even helps reduce depletion of the global rhetoric reserve!
For instance, I was all set to point out the flaws in the estimable James Fallows’ argument in last Sunday’s New York Times business section about the blogging business. Fallows offered a qualified but optimistic picture of the way Google’s AdSense text ads might provide a healthy business model for bloggers. I was primed to point out the problems here — AdSense doesn’t work well unless your blog has a very narrow focus, and doesn’t bring in many dollars unless that focus is on something sellable (like tech gadgets). But Dana Blankenhorn beat me to it. So you can go read his response.
Similarly, I was gearing up to fulminate about the absurdities in Alan Murray’s Wall Street Journal column arguing that President Bush’s deceptions surrounding the war in Iraq somehow didn’t “break a covenant” with the American people the way President Clinton’s deceptions about Monica did. What Bush critics label as “lies,” Murray argues, the president actually believed in at the time: “Mr. Bush’s broad-brush division of the world into good guys and bad guys can be criticized for its crudeness and simplicity. But most who know him believe it is how he sees the world.”
But Murray’s effort to get Bush off the hook for his pre-war distortions of reality collapses in the face of the president’s continued assertions — up to this week — about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The rest of the world knows these assertions are utterly bogus. The 9/11 Commission, with its access to classified information and its staff headed up by a former Bush administration official, has now confirmed they are utterly bogus. (Various attempts on the part of some conservative commentators to defend what Bush is saying these days on the basis of technicalities are appalling; by contrast, the Clinton-era parsings of “the meaning of is” — which at the time were elevated to the level of impeachable offenses — were small potatoes.)
At this point, Bush’s and Cheney’s repetitions of the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link represent desperate acts of official mendacity that are simply indefensible. In any world other than one in which, as Dennis Hastert’s spokesman recently reminded us, one party controls “all three branches of government” (refreshing honesty about the Supreme Court, there, no?), we would be hearing talk of impeachment once more.
But no need for me to vent further — Brad DeLong has laid this all out ahead of me.
1980 election — a squeaker?
Some folks in the comments below and elsewhere are contesting my statement that Reagan’s 1980 election was a close one.
Reagan won 43.9 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million. Anderson won 5.7 million votes. (The electoral map looks much worse, as it usually does.) Certainly not a squeaker like 2000, and not as close as I remember it, but not at all the landslide it’s often recalled as, or that Reagan’s subsequent victory in 1984 really was.
If you look back at the coverage from that year you see that in fact the polls remained much closer till near the very end. The debates were evidently decisive — debates that we discovered a few years later had been seriously tampered with: William Casey had stolen the Carter campaign’s briefing book to prep his candidate. (And then there is the murky matter of the October non-surprise — we’ll almost certainly never know the full story of what did or didn’t happen between the Saudi-friendly Reagan-Bush operators and Iran, but speculation remains strong that they exerted great effort to make sure those hostages stayed hostages till after Election Day.)
In the hazy glow of post-mortem memorials we can delude ourselves that today’s bare-knuckles Republicans are a nastier species than their Reaganite predecessors, but the truth is that dirty tricks have long run in the party’s genes.
Last night’s post about Reagan has elicited a good and spirited back-and-forth in the comments. I’ll let that debate be, with one clarification: When I wrote, “America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president,” some readers seem to take that to be synonymous with “America was a lot better off in 1980 than in 1988 (when Reagan left office).” Of course things changed in 8 years, some of them for the better. Was Reagan responsible for all those changes? Would a different president have seen inflation decline (Paul Volcker did more to accomplish that than Reagan, and guess who appointed him?)? Or seen the Soviet Union begin to decline and fall? Could the positives of the Reagan era have been realized without the hefty negatives? Could a real leader rather than a Potemkin-village leader have done a better job? This is the direction in which my comment was aimed.
And no, I do not think that — outside of popular music (even Elvis Costello managed to produce one bad album!) — the ’80s were a dark age. But the moment at which Reagan won office felt to me, as a young man who’d come of political age in the ’70s, like a closing of horizons and a snuffing out of hope. (If I’d been writing in the morning instead of at midnight, the sentence would have read, “that moment felt like the start of a dark age.”) In retrospect, that feeling was plainly unwarranted. But the world looks different to you at 21 than at 44. If it doesn’t, something’s probably wrong!
I’m here at the Wall Street Journal “D” Conference, where I finally got the Internet connection in my room working after an hour of fiddling (problem turned out to be — no joke — a loose cable, but not a loose ethernet cable; rather, a loose connection from the mini-hub to the wall-jack– sheesh!). So I’ll have to post notes on Bill Gates’ talk tomorrow.
But first, a note on the passing of Ronald Reagan. This conference began with a moment of silence in memory of the 40th president. (It is, after all, a Wall Street Journal event.) I’m sorry for his relatives and friends that he’s dead; I had a relative who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I know how painful that is.
But can we stop with the canonization, please? Maybe too many Americans are now too young to remember, or maybe Reagan looks good by comparison with the current occupant of the White House, or maybe the passage of time just makes us all forgetful.
But Reagan — however “nice” a man he was — was no saint, and in fact in most ways he was a terrible president. I know, de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that, but there is a great whitewashing going on in the media, and I can’t stand it.
I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.
It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.
Late night thoughts on barbarism
I liked Josh Marshall’s summary of the opera-bouffe-like character of the slow-motion Beltway meltdown underway, in his commentary on the Tenet resignation:
| …Beside the possibility that the White House’s favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country’s own spies, I’d say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine. |
It does seem as though one of George Bush’s chief legacies may be the complete implosion of the C.I.A. — at a time when the nation desperately needs its services. (Bush’s father served as director of the C.I.A. for many years. Is there some sort of Oedipal lunacy at work?)
So now Bush will be running on a platform of — competence? Effectiveness in the war on terror? Isn’t a war on terror first and foremost a war dependent on good intelligence? At what point can we declare this charade of Republican knowhow at an end?
If you’re a pragmatist, you should be running from Bush as fast as you can, out of sheer desire to see the nation’s business restored to good management. If you think in moral terms, of course, it’s even worse.
My friend Charlie Varon recently e-mailed me with a pointer to a diary Wallace Shawn published in The Nation on the eve of the invasion of Iraq over a year ago — a piece of writing I missed at the time of its publication. It’s a typical slice of Shawn’s brand of self-lacerating thought, which will infuriate those on the right who disagree with him, trouble those on the left who might be thought to be in his camp, and cause any reader to think hard.
Shawn has always tried, in works like “The Fever” as in this diary, to unearth the connection between the comfortable lives of Americans — Red and Blue staters — and the privation and suffering in other parts of the world that seems to make our comfort possible. The position is beyond bleeding-heart — it’s spurting-arteries-of-guilt liberalism. However you feel about that, it has the singular virtue of cutting through abstract cant and partisan rhetoric and talking about the particulars of real human suffering.
All of which is a roundabout way of introducing this observation by Shawn:
| Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It’s as if there were some sort of gentlemen’s agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible power they will have over so many other people, by the thought of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they’re planning, the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror. |
Now, I’m sure this sounded over the top when Shawn published it in March 2003. And it may still sound over the top to you today. What a thing to say about a president! Or about any human being!
Still, it’s always seemed critically important, in trying to understand the Bush administration’s march of folly, to remember that its entire top leadership (with the exception of its one half-hearted multilaterist at the State Department, who nobody listens to) consists of men (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) who never served in combat. The next level down of leadership — the architects of the Iraq policy, men like Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle (and let’s not forget Rove) — have no record at all of any military service. For such leaders, I can’t help thinking, “the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror” must necessarily remain abstractions — at best, matters that one can turn one’s gaze away from (as the government has literally done with the taboo photos of returning military coffins), and at worst, as Shawn argued, bearers of vague quasi-sexual excitement (as we saw with the pumped-up macho display of the “Mission Accomplished” tableau, now so painfully embarrassing).
The experience of combat service doesn’t inoculate a leader against making mistakes, nor does it turn more than a few people into pacifists. But surely in most cases it burns into the brain an awareness of the essential seriousness of war. And that, finally, seems to have been Bush’s failure with Iraq, one that even conservative supporters of the president — like the historian Paul Johnson in today’s Wall Street Journal — are beginning to admit.
Bush drove the nation to war and threw an army into the field without taking the enterprise seriously enough. He didn’t plan, he didn’t study, he didn’t question, because these are things he does not do. He has told us as much. And the people he trusted to do these things for him were equally unwilling to treat the situation with the gravity it deserved, instead using it as an opportunity to settle political scores or put into motion long-hatching schemes and delusional geopolitical chess moves.
I can’t help thinking that, had more people in the White House ever been on the receiving end of a bombing raid or taken barrages of enemy fire, this administration might have proceeded with somewhat less criminal a level of recklessness and incompetence.
More info on Patriot Act challenge
The full text of the amicus brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Salon and other organizations — filed as part of the ACLU’s challenge to the USA Patriot Act — is now available. (See my original posting on this for more.)
The ACLU also has a lot more information online about the proceeding. Here’s the ACLU’s news release.