Victor Davis Hanson: Going Against the Grain Liberates Presidents

Surprisingly, I agree with this essay by Victor Davis Hanson virtually in its entirety. If a president does something that their own side is more inclined to criticize, they can act almost with impunity. The key, though, is to have given your own side enough red meat not to rebel when you do it. Bush learned the hard way with Harriet Miers that the base will sometimes rise up. That was, though, a combination of her being an obvious crony appointment and social conservatives being an advanced state of paranoia due to having slavishly devoted themselves to the GOP for thirty years and gotten little to show for it. That's why I knew she was toast when the speech in which she sounded sympathetic to Planned Parenthood v. Casey started circulating the Internet. Twenty-four hours later she was no longer the nominee.


Adding to that, in international matters the president doesn't really need to run anything by Congress unless they want to launch a full-scale ground invasion. War is one area where the Court tends to stay out of the fray as much as possible, probably because if it didn't it would probably get nobbled in one way or another. The War Powers Act is more honored in the breach than in the observance.

Thus it's entirely possible that Obama would bomb Iran. The fallout would be severe though. I suspect we'd end up with a ground war, since Iran could retaliate by blocking the straight of Hormuz causing economic catastrophy for the world. We'd probably need to wage full-scale war to clear it and keep it clear.

People who never look in the mirror

A couple of items. First, Republicans thinking they lost the Ohio union ballot because they are too noble to stoop to dirty tactics. Hah! Talk about delusional. Of course this is the publication that defended Saxby Chambliss's Bin Laden ad. The second item is this:

The cheaply partisan contemporary Left makes me miss the old explicitly Marxist Left, at least a little bit. As the Marxists knew, the key to maintaining a paranoid, fantasy-driven worldview is maintaining a narrative that while wildly implausible is internally consistent, just as in sci-fi or horror movies.

This applies equally to modern American Right. Paranoia is rampant, preventing any compromise whatsoever. Comprehensive immigration reform can never happen because "the other side will trick us: we'll get amnesty and no border security," bipartisan deficit reduction is impossible, because "the other side will trick us: we'll get tax hikes and no spending cuts," and even banning late-term abortions is impossible, because "the other side will trick us: the health exception will mean that women who stub their toe will be able to get late term abortions." In all cases, nothing can be done without Republican political domination. In the case of the budget, it becomes an immediate threat to the nation because they inexplicably insist on threatening apocalyptic shutdowns and defaults if they don't get what they want the way they want it.

This really is bad for the country. We need two sane political parties. Hopefully if Romney becomes president, he'll reign in the crazies like Bush did. Or if Cain gets nominated and then goes down in flames because of more sex scandals and because people don't want their taxes raised to give more tax breaks to the rich, it will have a salutory effect on the Republican psyche (like a parent's spanking of their child). Unlikely, I know: they'll find some way to blame a conspiracy of "liberal racists" or whatnot. Ultimately this is what happens to you when you only pay attention to sources specifically tailored to your political perspective, dismissing pretty much the entire mainstream media as a propaganda wing for the other side.

I should note that Democrats are every bit as capable as Republicans of dirty campaigning. I also note that they have their share of paranoid members, though I can't remember the last time the paranoids almost caused massive catastrophe like Republican paranoia nearly caused a default and might still cause a shutdown.

Solitary confinement as a form of torture

Sarah Shourd, one of the hikers arrested by Iran for "espionage," describes being in solitary confinement for most of fourteen months. She ends:

It’s wonderful to begin my life again, and every day I feel more free, but I can’t help thinking about the thousands of others who are alone right now. I believe the excessive use of solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment — that it is torture. The United Nations should proscribe this inhumane practice, and the United States should take the lead role in its eradication. 

The problem is that you have to qualify it with "excessive." I mean, what else do you do with a lifer who rapes, tortures, or murders other prisoners? There are two options (since adding time to their sentence is pointless): kill them or lock them up alone. Allowing them to continue to rape and torture their fellow prisoners is unacceptable. So is permitting criminal enterprises to form in prison and continue unabated.

I can absolutely believe that the US uses solitary confinement where it isn't warranted, though: we have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Americans don't care how many people we put in jail, or what happens to them, as long as they're taken out of sight.

More shutdown danger, more yawns

The congressional Republicans have overplayed the shutdown card. It's hard to believe they're still trying to use that threat at all, let alone to undo Obamacare. Really, there's a very good chance the Supreme Court will strike it down and nothing will need to be done by them, and they will probably win the White House and the Senate next year if things don't improve and they both fail to nominate a loon and fail to obviously tank the economy through intransigence.

If they were going to go the shutdown route, they should have pulled the trigger back in Spring. Instead they punted, threatened to do far worse damage to the country with a default, chickened out at the last minute (not without drawing some Democratic blood, though), and now they want to go at it again? Frankly, the biggest selling point in a Romney presidency is that maybe he'd keep these psychos under control. Failing that, seeing the Republicans eat each other alive would be fun. I doubt Romney would roll over and let Republican inferiors in the House run the country for him.

Anyway, there won't be a shutdown. This is just apocalyptic posturing to please the Tea Party. Nothing to see here. Moving on...

Cain is Obama's best hope for reelection

The 9-9-9 proposal is a sure catastrophe in the general election if the Obama campaign has any competence at all. Raising taxes on 80% of Americans while simultaneously cutting them enormously on the richest Americans is a recipe for a landslide. Not to mention the GOP could kiss the elderly vote goodbye since 9-9-9 repeals Social Security's revenue source, the payroll tax.

Political Paralysis on Taxes and Immigration

Imigration and the Federal budget are two problems that will never be solved. The current situation on both is unsustainable. The deficit is massive and will continue to spiral upwards and more and more Mexicans emigrate here every year illegally. There's a general consensus that both need to be fixed, but there's no way to accomplish a fix.

On immigration, both sides have interests pushing to maintain the status quo. Businesses like cheap labor that, in red states at least, have to live in fear of being discovered and sent back home. Democrats dream of someday turning those illegal immigrants into Democratic block voters (aided by nativist Republicans--the nativist uproar over Bush's comprehensive immigration reform led McCain to do very poorly among Hispanics). Beyond that, the anti-immigration crowd themselves killed said immigration reform during the Bush administration because they didn't trust that the border enforcement would actually happen. There was nothing you could give them that would appease them. Of course the problem is that getting rid of the many millions of illegal immigrants already here would not only be a massive undertaking, it would look like a pogrom at this scale. So nothing much was done.


Likewise conservatives refuse to compromise one iota on taxes, so any budget deal is impossible. We get repeated apocalyptic showdowns and the deficit remains enormous both in the short-term and in the long-term. It's unlikely anything much will be done. Many on the right have been complaining for years that the budget process includes a baseline that causes every part of the government to grow every year automatically. Does the right offer tax hikes in exchange for changing the baseline? Of course not. Tax hikes are from the Devil. Nothing, no matter how monumental, is a good enough trade to get them. Besides, they reason, no matter what they get in return, it will turn out to be a trick. Of course it stands to follow that whatever they extort from the Democrats by threatening to shut down the government or send the nation into default will also be a trick, so what's the point?

More Hanson and liberal faux-hypocrisy

I've noticed that his writings on National Review, even on the Corner, are better thought-out than on PJMedia.com. The latter seems to be a forum for emoting and tossing red meat, very stale red meat, to the hyper-conservative echo chamber there. Hence this piece on charges of hypocrisy against the left that no doubt everyone has heard about a million times. Note that most of it isn't even real hypocrisy. One can discuss whether carbon credits are genuine, but the concept of cleaning up after oneself by planting trees to soak up carbon to offset what you emit isn't invalid. It does put millionaires like Gore in an "easy for you to say" position, since most of us can't afford carbon credits, but then aren't the Republicans in the "easy for you to say" camp on almost everything?

Likewise there's no hypocrisy in wanting to tighten the tax code so that there's less avoidance while taking advantage what's legal now. It may undercut your moral authority a bit to not lead by example, but saying "I believe in gun control, but if everyone around me is packing heat you bet I'm going to do it too." It's living in the system you're in while trying to change it. Hypocrisy comes in when you do something like the Maryland politician who was found to have an unregistered gun when he himself voted for tougher gun registration laws, or when someone hides the fact that he's not leading by example. Besides, if Warren Buffet made his corporations fail to engage in legal tax sheltering, he'd be doing a disservice to his investors for not maximizing the value of their investment as the law would allow.

As for foundations, has Buffet actually come out against outlawing them? It's relevant because there are two reasons to have an inheritance tax: 1) to break up family dynasties and 2) to raise money for the government. Inherited wealth is what produces the idle rich which Hanson himself has so criticized. Bill Gates, by funneling his money into a charitable foundation, is fulfilling the first goal admirably. Every advocate of inheritance taxes should have no problem with that.

He almost has a point on Obama's war on terror policies. It's probably more a matter of growing in office, in a way many progressives see as being partly in a twisted way. Some of it is bowing to political reality combined with having to deal with an inherited problem. Guantanimo springs to mind: if people and state governments, aided and whipped into a frenzy by congress, are unwilling to allow trials for detainees, closing Guantanimo is impossible.

I'll grant the point about teachers in colleges. I've personally known teachers who were being exploited in that way. Considering how academia's internal politics are, I have no doubt the tenured class aren't too eager to bring equality and put themselves on the chopping block. Nor is it terribly difficult to see that liberals aren't inclined to attack academia and give more excuse for budget cuts, union-busting, tenure-busting, etc.

One more point of note: everyone in American politics protects their own. Accusing anyone of hypocrisy on that score may have some legitimacy, but it's almost like saying water is wet. Of course both sides make the accusations too, so I guess the best response is to yawn and shrug and move on.

Actually, waterboarding IS a dead issue

Why? Because Obama stopped doing it. At least officially, which is probably all that anyone can expect. The CIA has always been up to all sorts of illegal, amoral, and sometimes downright evil stuff. The Bush administration was only unusual in that they got stooges like John "No law or treaty can stop the government from crushing a child's testacles" Yoo to "make it legal" in the Palpatine sense. Even if all Obama did was push torture back into the shadows, that's still a victory for civilization.

"If we can blow them up, then we can do whatever we want to them"

That is the logic Victor Davis Hanson uses to declare waterboarding a "dead issue":

Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?

That's always been a stupid argument, no less so now that Dick Cheney has used it. Since we vaporized lots of Japanese women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and boiled lots of Japanese women in Tokyo with napalm, does that mean it would've been okay for General MacArthur to force Japanese women to serve as "comfort women" for American soldiers? Of course not. Likewise blowing up enemies on the field has no moral bearing on whether it's legitimate to torture them in confinement, i.e., after they have been rendered non-threatening.

Hanson in general has gone to seed in the last few years. Most of the Right has moved on from the disastrous Bush administration, but Hanson must continue to defend them and the failed neocon enterprise. He despises the Obama administration but won't admit that the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration led to the Obama administration.

Romney's right, but supporting TARP might be a big mistake politically

Good for him, but he needs to be careful. TARP has always been unpopular. It is probably the key argument against direct democracy that things like that are always very unpopular. Without government action stop the dominoes falling leading to a massive run on the banks and the collapse of the entire financial system, we'd be in the second Great Depression now instead of the Great Recession.

How misunderstood is direct messaging?

With the British coalition Energy Secretary pulling a non-sexual* Anthony Weiner and tweeting something he wanted to direct message, this question is relevant. It is extremely ironic that the Telegraph itself misunderstands how Twitter direct messaging (in a paragraph that's sure to be pulled):

It was not clear who the intended recipient was, although he would have only been able to send a Direct Message to one of the 87 people he follows, who include about 30 national journalists and several fellow MPs. 

No, that's not the way it works. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant. I've received DMs from people who never followed me, but I of course followed them. It makes sense when you look at following as a granting of trust, and you can only send people DMs if they trust you.

*He wanted to rubbish some unknown person but to do it from the shadows. This proves once again that Chris Huhne is a backbiting git.

Update: Sure enough, the paragraph has been corrected. It now reads:

It was not clear who the intended recipient was: he would have been able to send a Direct Message to any of his 7,616 followers.

Sarah Palin isn't running

Democrats breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Country-club Republicans (the few that are still left) breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Moderately smart conservative Republicans breath a sigh of relief: the GOP will not nominate a woman who would probably lose even to Obama.

The Religious Right is slightly saddened, but they like Bachmann better anyway.

So good news all around. Not surprising, though. Quitting in the middle of her gubernatorial term was a clear sign that she really wasn't up to it (which most of us knew from the 2008 campaign) and wasn't really interested in running.

The dark side of Wikileaks' anarchist shotgun approach to leaking

The Belarussian government is using the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks to go after dissidents. I wonder how many will be caught in the Wikileaks cyber-blast radius when all is said and done.

Chris Christie has some sense

He will not run for president this time around. His political inexperience can be fixed. I'm not sure his other problems can be.

Half-term Gov. Christie might enter the race

Okay, first, his political experience beyond being a prosecutor is minimal. Second, he looks like he could be on the Sopranos. Third, he's got the New Jersey obnoxious thing going on. This is an absurd idea. Oh, and he likes to defund public libraries.

Governor Beverly Perdue of North Carolina is an idiot

She suggested suspending elections because of gridlock. Good grief! The official word is that she was not serious, though apparently she certainly sounded serious at the event. Way to give the Republicans ammunition, Bev. Obviously we can't simply suspend parts of the constitution, and there's no way to reinterpret the requirement for biennial elections. It's mundane, procedural, and highly specific.

If, on the other hand, you want to suggest extending the length of House terms, I'm very open to that. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to, say, making the House term variable length with a maximum of four years with new elections to be called after at least one year upon the command of the president. In exchange, the president would give up the veto, thus eliminating another element of gridlock, while the presidential ability to call a snap election would replace it as a check on the legislative branch. That's the way it works in Fifth Republic France.

Or you could just make them four-year fixed terms. If you want to maintain the check on the executive that midterms provide, straddle them so that the House is only elected on the midterms. That's the way the Virginia Senate works. I'm not entirely sure that would help with gridlock, though.

What happens when you hold a shutdown and nobody comes?

That's what the latest showdown on capitol hill feels like. I think the House GOP has played out its leverage, at least when it comes to the usage of brinksmanship to get what they want. Their mistake was to blink the first time around and then try again with the debt limit, where the damage to the economy would have been much greater. I'm sure the wealthy backbone of the GOP was screaming in Boehner's ear. He had to come to terms much less than the Tea Party wanted, but they'd already been psyched up. Actually, I suspect if Obama had any balls he could have given them almost nothing if not nothing given that.

Business as Usual in Russia

Putin returns. Did anyone not see this coming? Ah, "Managed Democracy." Though, to be fair, this isn't necessarily that bad of a thing for the rest of a world. The Yeltsin government was a royal mess, which is unacceptable when a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles is on hand. Just don't look into the guy's soul and see a true Christian, okay?

*More* Facebook privacy problems

Go figure. Facebook seems to simply ooze information about you wherever you walk. It reminds me of my carpet after the hot water heater exploded a few days ago (it is finally dry now).

Bicameralism and the Direct Election of Senators

I've usually rolled my eyes and dismissed calls to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to state legislatures electing the U.S. Senate. I mean, considering that it's supporters are neo-Confederates and other cranks that want to turn the clock back to the 19th century (at least), and it is a move to make the government less democratic, it seems like a terrible idea. But just now it occurred to me that there's a strong argument in favor of doing that.

Bicameralism isn't that odd. What is odd is having two houses with equal powers and equal democratic legitimacy. That has led to all sorts of problems in our country. There's a genuine advantage to having the Senate lack the democratic legitimacy of the House. It would also mean that the Senators wouldn't be afraid of being primaried by Tea Party loons if they cut deals or rolled over. I doubt you'd see the sort of universal obstructionism you saw during Obama's first two years. Heck, I doubt the Democrats would have gone to such lengths to keep Bush's Federal judges from being confirmed.