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Coping with COPA

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Just in time for the reheating of the culture wars, as the social-issues Right tries to scare ma-and-pa America and media megacorporations run for cover, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is rearing its head again.

For those of you who don’t remember COPA, here’s the short version: After the original Internet censorship bill, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down as unconstitutional, Congress passed COPA as a dubious successor. It was attached to a big omnibus spending bill that Bill Clinton signed in fall 1998. The ACLU and a group of online-publisher plaintiffs — including, proudly, Salon (here’s our original editorial on the matter) — immediately challenged the law and obtained an injunction against its enforcement. Since then the case has wended a slow path through the Federal judiciary: first, an appeals court upheld the injunction; then the U.S. Supreme Court kicked it back down to the appeals court; then the appeals court, a year ago, offered a more definitive set of reasons why the law is a very bad way to keep kids away from inappropriate material on the Net.

A more sensible administration would have accepted this ruling and gone home. But we’re cursed with John Ashcroft as an attorney general, so the Justice Department is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court yet again. (The ACLU site offers tons of information.)

The case will be argued on Tuesday, March 2, and I’ll be there for the argument and for a press conference afterwards. The Court isn’t exactly WiFi enabled — in fact, electronic devices are prohibited — so I’ll have to write something up after the fact.

Greenspan, Bush and Social Security: Robin Hoods in reverse

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Alan Greenspan made everyone sit up and take notice yesterday by declaring that, since he thinks raising taxes is a bad idea, the only way to deal with the ballooning deficits the nation faces as the baby boomers retire is to cut Social Security benefits.

So there you have it, more starkly laid out than ever before, by the one voice in the national economy that everyone listens to. First we lowered taxes with a plan ridiculously weighted towards rewarding the extreme high end of wealthy citizens, while tossing a handful of crumbs to the middle class; now we’re told that we have to make up the difference by cutting retirement benefits for the mass of Americans.

Let’s be clear on a few things: I don’t feel that Social Security is a sacred cow that should never be reviewed, revisited or revised. Let’s talk about means tests, fixing the inflation indexing, whatever. There’s lots of room, and need, for good reform ideas. (The Bush privatization idea is not, however, one of them; putting aside the argument over whether it would offer good results, Bush has never explained how he intends to pay for it. Since the cash to pay for current retirees’ benefits comes from current wage-earners’ tax payments, if you put the current wage-earners’ payments into private accounts, you can’t pay the current retirees — and we’re right back to Greenspan’s talk of cutting benefits.)

But let’s not allow the most basic fact of this national debate to be obscured, either. Bush and Greenspan together are practicing a sick kind of reverse-Robin-Hoodism (or should it be hoodwinkery?). What we are witnessing is a gigantic transfer of cash from the pockets of the many to the pockets of the few. This isn’t just morally bankrupt — it’s pragmatically stupid, since in the long run it hobbles the economy.

Our memory span is so short that none of the media coverage of Greenspan’s speech that I saw bothered to review the basic history here: The U.S. had already had a plan in place to deal with the baby boom retirement! What do you think those surpluses we began to run up in the late 1990s were all about? That was the money that a bipartisan coalition of responsible Democrats and Republicans had — at considerable political cost to themselves — begun to sock away so that we could approach this demographic tidal wave with some degree of confidence.

Fast forward to the 2000 election: Remember George Bush’s absurd — but politically effective — argument about the surplus? He told us it was “our” money, not the government’s, and he wanted to give “us” some of it back. These are Bush’s words from that election: “Half the surplus is gonna go for Social Security reform and to pay down debt. One quarter is gonna go for new programs that are needed. But I think it’s fair, and I think it’s right, that one quarter go back to the hard working Americans who pay the bills.”

In hindsight, the distortions and outright lies rolled into that campaign statement are too tightly packed to pry apart: As it turned out, none of the surplus went toward Social Security reform or to pay down debt. Bush pushed through a series of tax cuts that reduced the tax burden on the wealthy while barely changing the tax situations of most “hard working Americans who pay the bills.” We encountered recession and war, and instead of facing up to tough fiscal choices, Bush kept telling us, “Just wait, the tax cuts will do their trick — the economy will grow, Americans will get back to work and the recovery will shave down the deficit.” None of that has happened, despite multiple waves of tax cuts. Instead, the deficits keep getting worse.

So now the other shoe drops: Whoops, says Alan Greenspan to middle America, George Bush wrecked your economy, the Republican Congress squandered the national piggy bank — now we’ll have to cut your retirement benefit! After all, isn’t it more important to protect billion-dollar estates from the “death tax” than to keep offering working retirees a reasonable pension?

There is one thing Greenspan has done here that the Bush administration will not forgive him for: He was supposed to wait till after the election to start talking about cutting Social Security. Before the election, this dose of truth-telling is a little too dangerous. People might actually start paying attention.

Fannie, Freddie

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If you’re like me, you’ve been unable to make much sense of the news trickling out about problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A lot of us have a hard time just understanding what it is that these strange mortgage-market behemoths — government-sponsored corporations with the mission of increasing home ownership — do, let alone what they might have done wrong.

Mitch Ratcliffe has posted an intriguing analysis over at the new Red Herring, suggesting that the moves against Fannie and Freddie are part of a Bush administration political “payback”:

  The call for new regulation is, in part, payback from the Bush administration for crackdowns on industries with which the White House has close ties, particularly energy, where executives have ended up in court after alledgedly stealing billions of dollars from investors and partners. The message is: “If you want accountability, we’ll give you accountability.”

Don’t discuss Bush’s lies — you might be helping a terrorist!

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Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, is scratching his head in incomprehension. “Why Do Dems Call Bush a Liar?,” his column today asks.

Henninger isn’t interested in anything so mundane as an actual review of the basis for many Democrats’ belief that Bush and his team are liars — an examination of the factual record of administration statements about why it was necessary, one year ago, to depose Saddam Hussein right now rather than continue to work with our allies and the U.N. in containing his regime and keeping it from mischief.

Such reviews, in Henninger’s view, are mere caviling — petty quibbles over “how many angels danced on the head of Mr. Bush’s intelligence estimates.”

No, Henninger is alarmed — as we all should be — over the fact that Pakistan’s atomic scientist A.Q. Khan has now been revealed as a peddler of nuclear secrets on the international black market. And he somehow believes, for reasons he completely fails to articulate, that Khan’s acts of counter-non-proliferation are supposed to make us all feel that the Bush administration’s failure to substantiate its claim about Iraqi WMDs simply doesn’t matter any more. (By his logic, we should have forgotten about Saddam and invaded Pakistan instead — but never mind, because there’s very little logic here.)

So what is Henninger’s point? “The Bush decision to invade Iraq was a judgment call,” he says, one that grownups can argue about. But those nasty Democrats are instead playing dirty, making it personal, calling the president names. This, Henninger feels, is not only bad sportsmanship; it actually endangers national security!

  But rather than engage at this level, the Democratic candidates and their coterie have chosen to dismantle and demolish Mr. Bush’s personal integrity. The Democrats–and especially John Kerry, if he is serious about succeeding to this office–need to get on-issue and off George Bush personally because the course they are on diverts the electorate from the seriousness of what’s at stake. It also reduces the authority of the country’s leadership at a dangerous moment and diminishes one other national institution: the Democratic Party.

Note that Henninger is not actually asserting here that President Bush is a man of integrity and that the Democrats are wrong. He’s saying the president’s integrity, or lack thereof, is not a fit subject for public debate because, well, you woudn’t want to “reduce the authority of the country’s leadership” at a “dangerous moment.” Here we have a preview of what is likely to be a fall-back strategy for the Republicans this summer, as the jobless economy, the Iraq mess and Bush’s increasingly scandal-ridden record begin, finally, to catch up with him.

Let us consider the jaw-dropping degree of chutzpah required to publish such a view on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal — the same paper that devoted the better part of the 1990s to the systematic character assassination of a sitting president. No charge against the Clintons was too low to trigger the full-on Journal treatment, a relentless combination of irritable rumor-mongering and self-righteous pontification that established a still-unrivalled gold standard in ad hominem editorial assault.

It didn’t seem to matter to the Journal then that such attacks might “reduce the authority of the country’s leadership.” Oh, maybe that wasn’t a “dangerous moment”? Come on, there are always dangers to face down in the Oval Office. (Remember that when Bill Clinton launched missiles against al-Qaeda in 1998, his right-wing foes cried “Wag the dog!”) Sure, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky — a dumb, self-inflicted wound. But by Henninger’s logic, Republicans should have refrained from calling him a liar because Presidents Need to Be Strong.

Well, they didn’t — in fact, they impeached him, and nearly drove him from office. So, Mr. Henninger, let me answer your question and explain exactly why “Dems Call Bush a Liar.” “Dems call Bush a liar” because Republicans broke the taboo on calling the president a liar. They said it so many times — long before it was true — that it lost any whiff of lese majeste, and became something you could say if you thought that, you know, the president was lying.

Now, where Bush’s predecessor lied about an ultimately private act of zero consequence to American security or American lives, Bush has lied about starting a war, the most profound decision any president can make. Has that happened before in American history? Of course. But unearthing the truth about the sorry origins of the Spanish American War or the Gulf of Tonkin incident didn’t, as Henninger worries, “diminish our institutions” — it strengthened them.

Beyond this, there’s a wider reason Democrats have lost any shyness about calling Bush a liar. We say it because we are daily astounded by the sheer volume of falsehood the Bush White House pumps into the polis in the course of its daily operations. For the Bush administration, lying (sugarcoat the phrase if you like and call it “distorting the facts” or “misrepresenting the truth,” the point is the same) is a fundamental coping strategy.

This administration didn’t only lie about Iraq’s WMDs: It lies about nearly everything. It lies about the economy. Its deceptive presentation of economic statistics has made it an utter laughing stock among those people who actually understand such statistics. It lies about hard facts (its own budget numbers). It lies about symbols (denying responsibility for the “Mission Accomplished” banner). It has even figured out ways to lie about scientific research, a realm that should be relatively impervious to subjective manipulation.

Everywhere you look, this presidency is draped in curtains of lies. And we’re supposed to protect the nation by not pointing them out? Sorry. The very dangers Henninger invokes to shush complaints instead add urgency to the alarms we must raise. A deceptive government isn’t ever desirable; “at a dangerous moment,” it’s not just bad, it’s hazardous.

Echolalia

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I’m so far behind in so many different areas of my life, including this blog, that I don’t know where to begin.

But I do want to mention the timely, provocative and well-argued piece we posted tonight by David Weinberger, taking arms against the conventional wisdom about the “echo-chamber” nature of online discussion.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s a choice quote:

  While most of us had assumed that the Internet would increase the diversity of opinion, the echo chamber meme says the Net encourages groups to form that increase the homogeneity of belief. This isn’t simply a factual argument about the topography carved by traffic and links. A “tut, tut” has been appended: See, you Web idealists have been shown up — humankind’s social nature sucks, just as we always told you! Furthermore (says the memester), you Deaniacs were self-deluding, weak-minded children: Wake up and smell the depressing coffee!

The facts are not in question. They show that the links-to-blogs curve follows a “power law,” that people tend to buy books that express similar values and views, and that a small number of sites get a disproportionate amount of traffic. But the echo chamber meme, with its “tut, tut,” doesn’t follow from those facts. It rides on a rationalist view of conversation, defining conversations as the exchange of information with the purpose of discovering truth and changing minds.

Talk about your foolish optimists!

Bush Yoga

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I am trying to pull together my notes and thoughts on ETCon but keep getting distracted.

In the meantime, just for fun, here is (courtesy Metafilter)

Bush Yoga!

I stared at this for a little while trying to figure out the site’s intent; after all, a set of presidential action-figure yoga poses shouldn’t necessarily be construed as mockery. Then again, the film clip that is the site’s only other content makes its politics pretty clear.

Finally, I wonder if they chose not to show the president in “corpse pose” (savasana) for fear of provoking the attention of the Secret Service.

Odds and ends (lost time is not found again)

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Eric Boehlert’s Salon piece yesterday on “Bush’s Missing Year” — the strange lacunae in our president’s service records — is a must-read if, like me, you continue to wonder why this story has never quite broken out in the mainstream media the way it should. The process by which the American press collectively decides what stories have “legs” and which ones should be buried remains fascinating, bizarre and far more important to our political process than it should be. Journalism schools should be throwing their resources at this! First chronicle it, exhaustively; then teach a new generation of writers and editors of ways to bypass it. On optimistic days I share the Internet idealism that suggests this sort of “gatekeeping” is doomed; but there’s still plenty of cause for pessimism.

Intelligence breakdown

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So I’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run post from one Eric Norlin, who dislikes my recent statement that “If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it”:

  Really? anyone remember when the CIA bombed the Chinese embassy on accident during the Clinton administration? Or how about when we blew up the baby food factory in Khartoum? Gimme a fucking break – the Bush administration didn’t “break” the US Intel community…..its basically the toughest job in the world — sorting through more data than any Netizen can imagine and making judgement calls as to what is actually important.

Sorry guys — if you’ve never worked in the US intel community, then you simply cannot even come close to fathoming what these people do on a daily basis. Its amazing they ever get anything right….and when shitheads talk outta line because they don’t like the current administration….well….ugh.

Well…ugh indeed. Let’s ignore Norlin’s specious notion that the fact that I’ve “never worked in the US intel community” somehow disqualifies me from understanding anything about intelligence. (By the same token, I could say to Norlin, hey, if you’ve never been managing editor of a Web site, then you “simply cannot even come close to fathoming what I do on a daily basis”! Silliness.)

Norlin is saying that the CIA made mistakes before Bush ever came into office. Of course. My post wasn’t suggesting that somehow a hitherto flawlessly functioning intelligence agency was wrecked by Bush. The argument, one more time for Mr. Norlin’s sake, is specifically with the mendacity of the Bush team’s sequence of statements about U.S. intelligence regarding Saddam’s WMD. Let’s recap:

(1) Before the war, the Bush hawks complained that, though they knew for certain that Iraq was sitting on big WMD stockpiles, tipped off as they had been by their own informants among the Iraqi exile community, the CIA (along with fellow-traveler wimps at State) refused, out of wimpiness or stubbornness or who knows what, to confirm what they knew. So Cheney, Rumsfeld & co. bypassed standard CIA procedure and “stovepiped” a variety of reports that the CIA’s own analysts had deemed untrustworthy: That means they took these reports out of context and fast-tracked them to the Oval Office. They said to the CIA, “Why can’t you deliver the intelligence we need to support our policies? We don’t trust your skepticism here. We know Saddam has WMD, and we’re overruling you.” Seymour Hersh’s reports in the New Yorker painstakingly and devastatingly chronicled this process, and today’s Salon column by Sidney Blumenthal offers yet more detail.

(2) Now that the WMD have failed to turn up on schedule, just as the CIA tried to tell the Bush hawks, the administration has the chutzpah to say that the whole WMD fiasco is the result of an “intelligence failure.” It was the CIA’s fault, see? This exercise in finger-pointing is an absurdist scandal. It was abuse of U.S. intelligence for political ends, not failure of intelligence-analysis capability, that led to this mess. That’s what I meant by arguing that, if you want to view the failure to gauge Iraq’s possession of WMD accurately as an indication that U.S. intelligence is broken, then you have to accept that it was the Bush administration that did the breaking.

Incidentally, if you are following my argument here, you will notice that it displays considerable respect for the men and women working at “the toughest job in the world,” as Norlin puts it — more respect than Bush’s crew showed by ignoring their own intelligence agency’s “judgement calls as to what is actually important” and insisting that the world was the way it had to be in their war plans.

The art of finger-pointing

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So President Bush will now back the creation of a commission to investigate intelligence failures preceding the Iraq war. But look closely and you’ll find that the administration’s game-plan is an astonishingly Machiavellian exercise.

Before the war, Bush’s Iraq hawks, dissatisfied with the weasely intel they were receiving suggesting that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, browbeat the CIA and zeroed in on a passel of dubious reports that indicated the dictator in fact possessed weapons of mass destruction. All indications suggest that the intelligence agency’s best people looked on in horror as their procedures for vetting and verifying information were ignored by the war-or-bust crowd, and impossible-to-verify accounts were touted as gospel. (Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker pieces on “stovepiping” provide the most thorough background here.)

With the WMD having failed to turn up, Bush and his men now have the gall to turn on the CIA and say, “Well, maybe we do have a problem here. We were misled by bad intelligence before the war. Better start an investigation into why our intelligence services screwed up so badly.”

If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it. Any investigation that fails to have a full mandate to explore not only the failure to collect intelligence properly at the C.I.A., but the failure to make appropriate use of it at the White House, is castrated from the starting line.

For more good detail, Josh Marshall is blogging up a storm.