Wanker of the Cycle
Ron Fournier. See also.
This is the Hot Soup wanker? Wow, that’s world class.
Archive for August, 2008
More (Against the New Target) Please
As Ezra says, this probably sums up the case for Biden as well as anything:
In theory, his knowledge of foreign policy and refreshing willingness to take the fight to Republicans should be somewhat undermined by his vote on the war. But in the strange calculus of the Beltway media, being wrong about the war seems to give you more foreign policy credibility…
…Benen is also relieved. Cohn expresses happiness rather than relief here, as does Publius. Tomasky is less enthused; I think he overrates the extent to which Bayh would have put a lock on Indiana, and Bayh is worse in every other important respect. “Ready to govern from the start” is the bottom line for me.
Officially Biden?
Obviously, one wants to be careful about such scoops — ask the previous Democratic running mate, Dick Gephardt — but apparently it will be Biden.
I guess I feel relief without happiness. Certainly, if the other runners-up were Kaine and Bayh, Biden has to be considered the best choice by a huge margin. If we must have someone who voted for the war, it would be nice to at least have that person be a pro-choice progressive of some accomplishment (and Biden was at least much more critical post-war than Bayh or Clinton.) On the other hand, I would have much preferred Sebelius, preferred Reed, and perhaps marginally preferred Clinton (unlike Rob, I’m not sure about Clark.) Still, it’s a decent choice. I am at least glad that Obama focused ability rather than chasing phantom political gains that never materialize.
Friday Cat Blogging
Henry.
Henry is on extraordinarily thin ice around here. Since we returned from vacation in early July, he’s been spraying the front door of our house every day [clarification: on the inside of the house], sometimes on multiple occasions. Though neutered at an appropriately young age, he’s gone through occasional marking phases his whole life; we’ve endured these patiently, cleaning up after him and — during a few longer periods — using artificial pheromones and even amitriptyline to chill his ass out. At fourteen years of age, it’s possible he’s simply losing his marbles. Or he might just have a thing for doors. Who knows? Physically, there appears to be nothing wrong with him, and our vet predicts he’ll live another five years.
If he doesn’t knock off the pissing, though, he might not make it until next week. I’m trying to find a new home for him, based on the absurd theory that he’s simply grown tired of living with two dogs, and three humans, and his sister. For some reason, though, my friends and colleagues are unwilling to adopt a cat with a history of drenching doors with urine. I can’t imagine dumping him at the humane society — a no-kill shelter, but still — and I couldn’t bring myself to snuff him for this. I’d wish for a stroke or aneurysm to knock him out quickly, but I’m sort of angling for one of those myself, and I don’t want to blow all my negative karma on a cat. My wife, meantime, suggests we lather him in fish oil before sending him off to meet the neighborhood bears.
If any LGM readers are capable of speaking telepathically to cats, please tell my boy to knock this off.
"The Liberal Hour"
Rick Perlstein has a TAP article that’s worth a look. Its historical argument — that the experiences of FDR and LBJ show that progressive presidential agendas must be accomplished quickly and ruthlessly, before the saboteurs descend — is not exactly news, but it’s a history worth bearing in mind if Obama wins and (in what seems a near-certainty at this point) Democrats make big gains in Congress. Campaigning and governing are obviously different species of politics, but Perlstein is right — if Obama wins, extending the “right hand of fellowship” to Republicans would be catastrophic.
Perlstein also revisits one of the least-remembered episodes of the Carter administration — namely the hatchet job William Safire performed on him in mid-1977. For those of us who stand slack-jawed in amazement that the NY Times would offer work to William Kristol, the hiring of Safire in the mid-1970s was almost as inexcusable.
No, I Do Not Want to Buy a Stupid Snorg Tee
Yes, your models are quite attractive, and yes, the t-shirts can be mildly funny. But after enduring advertisements for Snorg tees under the top post of most of the major blogs I read, all over the Onion, on the New York Times website, and seemingly everywhere else that I look, I can safely say that pure spite will prevent me from purchasing any of your products.
Posner v. Heller
Richard Posner has an interesting article — essentially an application of his recent HLR Foreword — critiquing the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller, the D.C. gun control case. It’s a useful corrective to the glib certainty of the majority opinion and its strongest supporters. And yet, it’s frustrating in its own right.
One problem is his apparent assumption that until very recently conservatives had a principled opposition to an activist judiciary, as opposed to an opposition to the substantive decisions of the Warren and early Burger Courts: “The idea behind the decision–it is not articulated, of course, and perhaps not even consciously held–may simply be that turnabout is fair play. Liberal judges have used loose construction to expand constitutional prohibitions beyond any reasonable construal of original meaning; and now it is the conservatives’ turn.” Given that there’s never been a post-Civil War court with a conservative median vote that didn’t engage in significant activism with highly contestable constitutional moorings, the basis for this is unclear. Well over a century after the Civil Rights Cases and Allgeyer and nearly a century after Hammer v. Dagenhart, it’s strange indeed to view reactionary judicial activism as a 21st century phenomenon. Also odd is the absence from Posner’s account of a rather notable recent example of unprincipled “judicial activism” far, far more egregious than Heller: Bush v. Gore. Presumably, this is because Posner wrote an entire book using pragmatism and what can only be called law-office democratic theory to defend the Court’s decision. Posner is entitled to change his mind, of course, but when he complains the he “cannot discern any principles in the pattern of the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations” one would think this would compel an acknowledgment of his own strong support for a “loose construction” that reached congenial results for conservatives.
This brings us to another problem, which is that rather than correctly noting that the legal materials surrounding the Second Amendment are considerably more complex than Scalia can allow and admit to multiple reasonable interpretations, he simply asserts without anything like the necessary evidence that Scalia is wrong. (“The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property.”) This goes too far. His analysis is at one point even contradictory: he can’t seem to decide whether Scalia’s position is nonsense because “[i]t is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias’ effectiveness,” or because “the ratifiers of the amendment probably did think that the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms entitled them to keep their weapons in their homes.” Which is it? His overreaching certainty extends to other cases : for example , he claims that the contemporary doctrine that the Bill of Rights is “incorporated” against the states was “decided in the teeth of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment.” It is true that the Fourteenth Amendment repeating the language of the due process clause of the Fifth is a point against the incorporation theory, but it is hardly dispositive. Proponents of incorporation can point to the other side’s own textual puzzles — why did the framers of the 14th Amendment bother to include a privileges and immunities clause that allegedly just re-affirmed some minor rights already recognized prior to the Civil War? — and cite important historical evidence such as the fact that the floor manager of the Amendment expected it to incorporate the Bill of Rights. One can disagree with Black’s arguments, but to claim that they contradict the text of the Fourteenth Amendment is silly.
Posner is right that constitutional interpretation in interesting cases inevitably involves a significant amount of judicial discretion, although I don’t think that calls for “judicial modesty” have much point; as long as activist judicial review serves the interests of the legislators who make it possible, it will continue, and will come from judges of all ideological persuasions. But Posner’s own unfounded certainties about the meaning of broad, ambiguous constitutional provisions tend to undermine his own argument.
Art, Life, etc.
Court records show Felicia ”Snoop” Pearson, who played a killer of the same name on the televesion series, was charged after police went to her home in Northeast Baltimore to pick her up for refusing to cooperate as a witness in a murder trial.
She was arrested Wednesday after police served a warrant that would allow them to detain her, if needed, until the Sept. 16 trial of Steven Lashley. Court documents say Pearson is accused of having two cigars containing suspected marijuana in a bedroom and loose plant material. She was charged with one count of drug possession.
Authorities say Pearson witnessed Lashley stab three men, killing one, during an argument in 2005.
An Extremely Dangerous Point
I concur with Ackerman et al that Maliki is taking a very serious gamble by moving against the “Awakening” leadership. The success of the Iraqi Army in Basra and Baghdad (albeit with US support) has been greater than I expected, but challenging the Sunni elite is a different job altogether. I’m guessing that Maliki thinks he needs to handle this now, while US forces are still in country and prepared to back him up. He’s probably right about that; the US pretty much has to back Maliki, even if the campaign means a substantial increase in violence.
It’s important to acknowledge that this is the inevitable outcome of the “Awakening” strategy. Strengthening and legitimizing Sunni elites directly undercuts the authority and capacity of the Iraqi central government. Conflict is unavoidable.
More on the Russian Air Force
Via Danger Room, David Fulghum has a good post up at Ares on the Russian Air Force. Whatever prep the Army and the Navy may have conducted prior to the beginning of the war, it doesn’t appear that the planning spread to the Air Force. There was apparently no advance recon of Georgian air defenses, no plan for the suppression of the air defense network, and no systematic plan for sweeping the Georgian Air Force from the sky. Perhaps most surprising, Russia did not employ any of its anti-radiation missiles, which are designed to destroy enemy radar installations and SAM sites.
It’s curious, to say the least, that the Air Force apparently didn’t get the memo about the possibility of war against Georgia. Unfortunately, the reasons for the failure are probably so byzantine that we’ll never have a clear picture of what happened.
…in tangentially related news, Axe has a nice post (in which he cites Fulghum) regarding the dueling efforts by the USAF and the Indian Air Force to obscure the capabilities of their most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-22 and Su-30 respectively.
Reporting Beauchamp
Spencer Ackerman has a very interesting article about Scott Beauchamp and Elspeth Reeve. The whole thing is very much worth reading. The executive summary:
I ended up interviewing Beauchamp a couple times — once in person and over email a couple times — and did a bunch of follow-up reporting. And I came to a much different conclusion than I started out suspecting: Scott Thomas Beauchamp did not lie and did not misrepresent his service. The New Republic’s investigation did not uncover any such misrepresentation, and yet the magazine threw him under the bus to spare itself the controversy. Yet it was also true that TNR was the victim of cynical misportrayal from conservatives.
The fundamental problems with trying to report stories recounted by a still-serving soldier — most importantly, that the sources who could effectively corroborate Beauchamp’s account won’t go on the record — mean that deciding whether to trust Beauchamp remains a gut judgment. We still don’t really know if the stories hold up — but nor, with the exception of one error in location, have any been convincingly rebutted.
