The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Tag: politics

  • Scooter Libby and the Rule of Law

    OK, first off, what the President did — commuting Libby’s sentence so that he serves no jail time — is itself well within the law. Perhaps unwisely, the Founders did vest that power in the President and he gets to use it, even when it’s unseemly. Let’s leave that aside.

    But if the President thinks Libby has been mistreated, why only commute the sentence? Why not pardon him outright? In the next few days, I predict you’ll see an apparent division in the rightwing noise machine. Don’t fall for it — it’s a sham. More below the fold.
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  • Irksome metric

    Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:

    Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.

    “The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.

    Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.

  • Another criminal escapes justice on a technicality

    Interestingly, that’s not how the right-wing noise machine is approaching this story, about how some of the indictments against Tom DeLay have been thrown out. You’d think that people who have spent literally four decades decrying “judicial activism” and unjust outcomes of people “clearly” guilty, would be a-twitter that a judge and then an appeals court threw out the indictments on a technical point.

    In fact, however, people at, say, the National Review think this post-facto justifies Mr. DeLay and makes it almost criminal that he was forced to step down as House Majority Leader. We should all cry for Mr. DeLay, apparently. Except of course — as even the more-friendly Houston Chronicle article is forced to admit — Mr. DeLay still faces charges of laundering money and of committing conspiracy to launder money. Those were crimes at the time (Illegal to launder money? Who knew?) — and he may still face trial on them.

    The guys at the National Review take this as evidence that “the charges seem to be falling apart”, but that seems a tad over-optimistic based on the articles I’ve seen. The dismissal came because the crime Mr. DeLay was alleged to have committed didn’t come into force until 2003, whereas his disreputable actions happened in 2002 and before. It seems the courts had little choice on this one — though I’d love to know what prosecutor Ron Erle had in mind when he pressed the charges in the first place. I doubt this is as open-and-shut as it seems. All that notwithstanding, the other charges are not hobbled by the same calendar problem. Money laundering and conspiracy have been on the books as crimes for quite some time now.

    Though the Review article would have you believe that the dismissals taint the other indictments, in fact, the only reason that Mr. DeLay has not faced trial yet is that the presiding judge opted to wait until the appeal of indictments was complete.

    Has “the Hammer” been vindicated? Hardly.

  • The Appeal of Apocalypse

    What is so seductive about the end of the world?

    Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of the dice. Preachers orate, as they always have, of the coming of hellfire. Books like Left Behind are runaway best-sellers.

    Why is it that we are drawn to the end of the world? More below the fold.

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  • Are you safer?

    In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things that are true or good. We are safer, Mr. Cohen asserts, and we should be willing to say or hear this.

    Problem is, he’s flat out wrong. More below the fold.

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  • Ubi Dubium

    There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi libertas”, or, “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”)

  • Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

    Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the strict timetables that led to his veto of the previous ones.

    I make no secret of the fact that I fall on the political left and that I believe this Administration is, very likely, the Very Worst Ever. I think it’s time to end this war and to begin healing the massive wounds that have been dealt to our prestige abroad, our civil liberties at home, and indeed the very soul of our democracy. I would support, without reservation, a move to impeach this President for abuse of his office and betrayal of the American people and, worse, the betrayal of core American principles that have made this nation a beacon of hope for humanity.

    So naturally enough, the blogs I read and the people I pay attention to have been in a furor over the recent decision by the Democratic Party leadership. Outraged, and shocked, and hurt, these commentators lament that the Democrats “caved in” to the President and handed him his first legislative victory since November. It will be taken, they say, as a sign of weakness. I felt the same visceral revulsion, the same sense of abandonment, when I realized that the timetable-stripped bill was the one that would reach the President’s desk. After that mind-blowing adrenaline high of sweeping Congress, of finally getting real oversight going, this did seem like a crash back to the dark depths of the Bush supremacy, circa 2004. I did feel that the leadership let me down.

    And yet…
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  • Pondering Hate Crimes and Hate-Crime Laws

    Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been rather cool to the whole idea. I think I agree with Danny Concannon: A crime’s a crime and no murder is any worse or any better than another. But I’ll admit that Orcinus’ argument from mense rea is compelling. Moreover, I hadn’t even viewed hate crimes through the prism that they are crimes against the community as well as against an individual. Put a different way: The purpose of a murder is to kill someone. The purpose of a lynching is to divide a community against itself, to undermine the very idea of the community — in short, to attack society in toto. That’s certainly a different crime and, conceivably, a worse one.

    I still think I come down against hate crime laws. Once you begin criminalizing what someone is thinking, we start down a very dark and dangerous road, and I’m not sure we come out the other side. But for the first time in a long while, I have something new to chew over. I’m not as sure as I was yesterday.

  • Vanishing Ink?

    (written 2007 0412; extended 2007 0413)
    I’ll admit that this post is basically ripped off from Glenn Greenwald, whom you should read for details. I just wanted to collect all the points in a clean, stripped version. The subject? The amazing and disturbing “incompetence” demonstrated by the Bush administration in producing records that might put it in a bad light. How many times must we accept the excuse “The dog ate my homework” before everyone recognizes that this is actually criminal malfeasance. I know that you should “never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity” — but come on — this is passing from unbelievable to ridiculous:

    Date Missing document
    2007 0412 Emails regarding plans to fire US Attorneys, allegedly sent via RNC accounts
    2007 0324 18 days of emails (this time from the Justice Department and White House) regarding plans to fire US Attorneys
    2007 0228 Videotape of the final interrogation of detained US citizen Jose Padilla, which could shed light on whether he had been tortured.

    2004 0624 Memos regarding the White House policies on torture

    2004 0524 Over 2,000 pages of a classified report, missing from the copy submitted to Congressional oversight committees, regarding possible abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib

    2004 0905 Legally-required documents to explain gaps in President Bush’s service — or, more usually, lack thereof — in the Air National Guard

    2006 0301 Transcript of a videoconference call that directly contradicted the White House story on how engaged the President was during the Katrina debacle. The administration told Congress that no such transcript existed — then oops! it was found and leaked.

    2007 0403 FBI records indicating agency participation in the interrogation of anti-war protesters in 2002. The FBI denied that the secret intelligence unit was present, except — oops! — DC police logs show that it was.

    2006 0202 Emails relating to the case against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for illegally disclosing the identity of a covert CIA operative
    2003 1218 Videotape records of abuse by federal guards of foreign citizens detained after the 9/11 attacks.

    How do they expect anyone to believe their story?

    PS: If you have links to any similar events, I’d appreciate hearing them and I’ll add them to the list. And before the wingbats take over the comment space, yes, I’ve heard of Sandy Berger and yes, that was reprehensible. What’s your point?

  • More on Guiliani-as-Kaiser

    Glen Greenwald continues to shine a welcome spotlight on the outright authoritarian — dare we say, totalitarian? — impulses of the Right’s new darling, Rudy Guiliani. Twice in the past few days, he’s made statements that, only a handful of years ago, would have been credible only coming from the mouth of some cartoonish caricature. Really, there is no Constitutional guarantee not under attack by the wingbats who have hijacked the Republican party…