Author Page for Scott Lemieux

(Actual, Not Kantian) Nihilism

Shorter Jeff Goldstein: The thwarting of a terrorist plot using lawful means proves that we need to use lawless methods to thwart terrorism.

What’s particularly funny about this, of course, is that Goldtsein is constantly blathering about how anyone who disagrees with him about anything is a “moral relativist;” he seems as confused about the concept as Chris Muir. For those who are confused, a simple primer: “torture is morally unacceptable, as well as counterproductive, and hence we should not engage in it”–whether right or wrong–is not “moral relativism.” Conversely, “conventional standards of morality do not apply when a pre-defined class of ‘good guys’ exercises lawless violence on a pre-defined class of ‘bad guys’” is pretty much the definition of “moral relativism.” (And needless to say, using a successful use of lawful methods in order to bootstrap arguments for arbitrary state authority is pretty much the antithesis of “classical liberalism.”)

Next Week: Who Moved My Cheese? The Movie!

For reasons I can’t explain, and much to the annoyance of anyone unfortunate to be in my presence while reading the Friday newspaper, I’ve always been fascinated by the marketing of movies that studios know are destined to be massive commercial and critical bombs. The more typical variety is the movie where the studio has a glimmer of hope that the movie might become inexplicably profitable, like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; they take out a large ad, studded with critical blurbs, only that they can’t even get Peter Travers or Gene Shalit or Kevin Thomas on board so if you read the really small type you’ll notice they’re all from Earl Dittman and Mose Persico and some guy at UPN-13 in Tulsa.

But then there’s the ones where the don’t even do that; there’s a small corner ad, like some stillborn indie with Piper Perabo that plays with quiet shame for one week in early February. And then you notice that it’s opening in more theaters in New Jersey than in New York City. It is this category to which the movie based on The Celestine Prophecy, which apparently opened this week. In fairness to the producers, it’s hard to know a priori which movie based on an historically bad but very popular novel can become a blockbuster, while yours gets a week of empty theaters in the suburbs. But you probably need to strike while the iron is, uh, a little hotter.

Here’s my question, though: who the hell could be “disappointed” by the quality of a movie based on The Celestine Prophecy? That’s like, “I can’t believe that the new album of Celine Dion covering the Jewel songbook with arrangements by Enya isn’t good!” I guess that’s like the disappointment Ann Althouse will feel when she finds out that Samuel Alito isn’t a supporter of Roe v. Wade…

Today In Fake Libertarianism

Joe Lieberman’s favorite op-ed page, approvingly quoted by principled, non-partisan libertarian Glenn Reynolds:

Let’s emphasize that again: The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.

So did the success in Britain prove that legal constraints on executive power are incompatible with fighting terrorism, meaning that we must abandon the Bill of Rights and allow George Bush to have his unsupervised way? Happily, no:

Today’s fascinating Washington Post account of how a British-led team of investigators prevented the attack confirms his suspicion. However, it’s worth pointing out one key difference between the British way and the new American way of surveillance: Barring some unforeseen and massively scandalous revelation, British investigators, in all cases, have to obtain and comply with court-issued warrants for any surveillance. [ed note: according to Glenn Greenwald, these warrants are actually issued by the British Home Secretary.] This week’s counter-terrorism success should demonstrate how possible it is, and remains, for open-society to combat jihadism while preserving the rule of law.

In fact, let’s take that a step further. According to a U.S. intelligence official cited by the Post, some of the British terrorists placed phone calls to individuals within the United States. Whoever they called should very obviously be placed under surveillance. The FISA court would undoubtedly agree, despite Bush’s protests that successful counter-terrorism surveillance has to occur outside the restrictions of FISA. In short: counter-terrorism success, vigilance, the rule of law, and you–perfect together.

Not that this will stop conservertarians from happily going along with using terror as a pretext for pre-existing conservative desires to expand executive power, but…

…given how common it is, it’s worth identifying the obvious sophistry here. The strawman being propped up by the WSJ and Reynolds opposes various forms of “surveillance” as a general principle. But, of course, virtually nobody objects to such forms of surveillance given individualized suspicion and proper legal procedures being followed. Criticism of the administration is based on the latter issues, not because the administration believes (like everybody does) that one should engage in surveillance of suspected terrorists. More on this from Mona and Glenn Greenwald.

Operation Meth Merchant, Arbitrary Enforcement, and Abortion Law

“I regard it as a salutary doctrine that cities, states and the Federal Government must exercise their powers so as not to discriminate between their inhabitants except upon some reasonable differentiation fairly related to the object of regulation. This equality is not merely abstract justice. The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally. Conversely, nothing opens the door to arbitrary action so effectively as to allow those officials to pick and choose only a few to whom they will apply legislation and thus to escape the political retribution that might be visited upon them if larger numbers were affected. Courts can take no better measure to assure that laws will be just than to require that laws be equal in operation.”

–Robert Jackson, Railway Express v. New York

I wrote a while back about Operation Meth Merchant, a case in Georgia in which stores owned by South Asians were 100 times more likely than white-owned stores to be targeted for investigation. Dismayingly–but not surprisingly–the equal protection argument has been rejected in District Court.

Which brings us back to my recent series of posts–soon to continue–about Roe v. Wade. Several commenters noted that arguments about over- and under- inclusiveness and as-applied violations of equal protection were unlikely to be successful. As the case of Operation Meth Merchant case reflects, these criticisms, as far as they go, are right–the exercise is literally academic. I understand that Yick Wo and Shapiro v. Thompson are largely observed in the breach, and successfully making these types of arguments under existing precedents is immensely difficult. A real-life litigator would unquestionably be unwise to rely on such arguments rather than simply asserting that a woman’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom should trump the compelling state interests reflected in legislation, although I personally find these arguments much less compelling.

Still, I think it’s worth thinking about these arguments. First of all, I don’t believe that the current jurisprudence on the subject is correct. While evidently there are going to be significant enforcement inequities in any non-utopian legal system, and legislation is often not going to meet strict formal standards of logical consistency, I’m not willing to take the Rehnquist route and simply throw up my hands and give up on trying to address even the most egregious cases of arbitrary application. It will not always be easy to draw distinctions between the inequities that are inevitable even in honest attempts to write and apply laws fairly and egregious arbitrariness, but it is judge’s job to make these judgments. And it’s particularly important not to abandon the field entirely in cases like the drug war and abortion law, where grossly inequitable enforcement is absolutely critical to the maintenance of legislation in the first place.

Secondly, I think it’s worth discussing the patently irrational construction and arbitrary enforcement of abortion statutes for other reasons. First of all, these practices are important policy considerations even if they do not rise to the level of being constitutional violations in themselves. If a rule isn’t important enough to apply with even a modicum of fairness, this strongly suggests that the ends are not compelling enough to justify state coercion, and also suggests that the laws are unlikely to be effective enough to justify the negative externalities. (This is particularly important with respect to drug laws, where a fairly applied statute would not abridge fundamental constitutional rights.) Secondly, I think that this analysis should inform other types of constitutional reasoning. If we are left with the difficult problem of balancing a fundamental right against a potentially compelling state interest–and as long as Griswold and Eisenstadt remain good law, this is the situation with abortion laws–it would ordinarily be appropriate to accord a significant measure of deference to legislatures. However, in making the prudential judgments involved in such balancing, it is surely worth considering the fact that abortion laws in many respects bear little rational relationship to the asserted state interests, and are virtually unenforceable against people with any social status. Legislatures in such circumstances should sure be accorded less than the usual deference, even if one doesn’t believe that the arbitrary construction and application of the laws rises to the level of a constitutional violation.

Publius Speak

You listen. Two crucial points: first, that randomly invading countries in the vain hope that a pro-American liberal democracy will emerge from the ashes is an exceptionally ineffective strategy for fighting terrorism. Second, Democrats need to stop spending so much time whining about the inevitable Republican politicization of terror attacks and more time making this case effectively.

A Retrospective Vindication of Connecticut Primary Voters

Needless to say, incoherent demagoguery is not just limited to blogospheric hacks:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman seized on the terror arrests in Britain today to attack his Democratic rival, Ned Lamont, saying that Mr. Lamont’s goals for ending the war in Iraq would constitute a “victory” for extremists, including those accused of plotting to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States.

Yeah, if Ned Lamont said it once, he said it a million times: “I am against using intellgence and law enforcement to thwart terrorist attacks.” Fortunately, the disastrous war that Holy Joe strongly supports stopped these terrorists from plotting, because…look, a brown dog!

And it goes without saying that by equating “opposition to the infinite continuation of the Iraq War” to “indifference ot terrorist attacks,” he’s doing Karl Rove’s dirty work. But when isn’t he? We can’t be rid of this disgraceful blowhard soon enough…

Bobo’s Fantasy World

David Weigel gets it exactly right with respect to Bobo’s fantasies about a centrist third party built around two politicians who don’t have anything resembling centrist views on the most pressing issue of the day:

Moreover, as Yglesias points out, Brooks’ heroes McCain and Lieberman don’t represent the mainstream on the most pressing issue of our time. Both men are diehard Iraq war hawks. The mainstream of American opinion – Iraq’s a mistake, let’s start getting out, let’s not bomb Iran – if it’s represented by anyone, is represented by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE.). Why don’t pundits like Brooks assign Americans membership of the Hegel party (maybe the Hagel-Cantwell party?). Because they like McCain and Lieberman. They don’t care that they’ve been rejected by their party’s presidential primary voters. The pundits who keep flogging these two senators and demanding that voters embrace them are like nerds raging against the popular kids winning homecoming court, and voting for the Star Trek fan club president and treasurer in protest.

Right. Pundits like Brooks have projected their adolescent crushes on hawkish pols like Lieberman onto the general public, and no matter how much evidence stares them in the face are convinced that their increasingly discredited foreign policy ideas must be overwhelmingly popular.

Gentlemen: To the Strawman Construction Mobile!

Patterico uses the thwarted terror attacks in London as a basis for rejecting the claim made by various visions in his head that “This whole war on terror thing is a phony construct made up by Bush.” Various other Bush apologists see this as a vindication for Bush’s strategy, the most important component of which seems to be subsuming all aspects of fighting terrorism under the rubric of “war.” But wait:

A police official in London called it a plan for “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”

In a briefing at Scotland Yard, the police said they had arrested 21 people in connection with the plot. In response, some flights into London’s Heathrow Airport were canceled. Airlines banned all carry-on luggage on planes leaving Heathrow, causing chaos and long delays during one of the busiest weeks for summer trans-Atlantic travel.

So, let’s summarize the competing strategies here:

• Liberals: While, as in Afghanistan, conventional military force may sometimes by appropriate, other tools–including ordinary police work–will be crucial to thwarting terrorism, while invading secular dictatorships and replacing them with theocratic quasi-states is not merely useless but counterproductive.
• Conservatives: No, no, no, everything has to be seen under the “war paradigm.” Anybody who believes that dainty “police work” can do anything to stop terrorism is an objectively pro-Islamofascist pussy. Only people from Mars understand the jihadist threat, which can be effectively countered only via military force.

What’s amazing is that in light of a serious terrorist plot being thwarted by effective police work, various conservatives are accusing liberals of having their heads in the sand and not taking the war on terror seriously. Because everyone knows that you prove that by devoting an immense amount of resources of invading countries that had virtually nothing to do with Al-Qaeda! I can’t argue with that logic. Personally, I blame the emboldening of the terrorists in the wake of the defeat of Joe Lieberman!

…and I think we can also kiss the winguts’ beloved flypaper theory goodbye.

…of course, to get really stupid you have to wait until Roger L. Simon shows up:

No one looks dopier today than the collection of self-righteous fuddy-duddies who voted for Ned Lamont in Tuesday’s Democratic Primary in Connecticut. In the darkness of his soul Lamont himself must be wondering how to react to the news that another ten jets filled with innocent human beings were about to explode over the Atlantic. Not good for his campaign. It reminds me of the old LA Weekly cartoon: “Nuclear War? There goes my career!”

The problem with Lamont and his ilk is that they are unable to wrap their minds around the fact that Islamic Fascsim is a deeply real and pervasive phenomenon with hundreds of millions of adherents and fellow travelers.

Yes, if anything looks stupid today, it’s the idea that we should be focusing on a variety of techniques to stop terrorism rather than randomly invading countries with virtually no connection to anti-American terrorism! It’s as plain as the fact that Scenes From A Mall is an enduring masterpiece!

Ned: the New Ike! But Pro-Civil Rights…

Another antidote to Weisbergian invocations of dirty, dirty hippies and objectively-pro-Islamofascists who were right about the war before it became fashionable to be. (Needless to say, TNR has hauled George McGovern out of the mothballs for the eight billionth time.) Noting that the unwashed radicals who oppose the Iraq War now constitute 60% of the American public, Jim Henley Mona [guest-blogging at Unqualified Offerings from her home site Inactivist] points us to a counternarrative to the relentless invocations of McGovern:

Just as it is always 1938 and Munich when war supporters discuss Middle East policy, a lot of them lay a 1972 template over Democrats who oppose the war. This (wishful) analysis misses the characteristics of the 60s and the culural upheaval of the time. McGovern was tarred with the “three A’s,” of purportedly rendering the Democrats the party of “amnesty, acid and abortion.” Further, the anti-war movement of that era was comprised of some truly radical, revolutionary and violent sub-sets. None of that is true today (or, to the extent abortion remains an issue, most Americans are pro-choice as are most Democrats), and there is no reason to believe that merely opposing an unpopular war has to constitute political suicide.
Indeed, it wasn’t for the Republicans, when Ike rode to victory on an avowedly anti-war platform in 1952, promising to end the war in Korea that was opposed by most Americans.

[...]

That is what the voting public in 1952 wanted — with nary an acid-trippin’ hippie in sight — and it is what war-opponent Ike delivered for them…A party that delivers what the public wants is responsive, not suicidal.

There’s good reason to believe that this is more 1952 than 1972; as I recently argued, trying to abstract McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War from the cultural upheavals and historic electoral realignment of the time is a foolish enterprise. And, at any rate, that’s the Democrats’ best shot; it’s not like trying to kinda support the war worked in 2004. The Democrats need to argue that the Iraq war has been counterproductive in the serious struggle against terrorism–an argument that has the advantage of being plainly true–rather than engage in futile attempts to one-up the Republicans in the blind support for idiotic foreign policy game.

They Write Letters

The General makes a modest proposal to Marty Peretz.

"It’ll hurt when you think of the fool you’ve been."

For pure, unadulterated comedy gold you can’t get much better than Marty Peretz reacting to the shocking development of a Democrat winning the Democratic primary in Connecticut. Admittedly, he’s so pompous it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding or not when he expresses dismay that writing an editorial for the nation’s ground zero of wingnuttery in which illogic, dishonesty, and hypocritical ad hominems struggled valiantly for attention failed to persuade Democratic primary voters. But I really think he’s dead serious about Clinton costing Lieberman the primary. I think you can understand why he thought it was a great idea to hire Michael Kelly…

Limb-Climbing

With 94. 45% of precincts reporting, Lawyers, Guns, and Money is projecting Ned Lamont as winner of the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary. Hey, if Mariano Rivera can give up a homerun to blow a save, I figure this is a night where justice can triumph for once.

Here’s a thought: what happens if it’s close enough for the outcome to be contested? If you thought you hated Lieberman before, imagine if he actually makes a serious effort to fight this time…I don’t have enough fibers in my being to despise him as much as he would deserve. (And, obviously, an independent candidacy amounts to basically the same thing.)

UPDATE: LIEBERMAN CONCEDES! As is appropriate, I’m watching it on Fox News…

…TBogg makes a good point; it will be interesting to see how the media portrays an incumbent winning 51-48 in 2004 versus a massive underdog winning 51-48 over an incumbent this time. Three guesses and the first two don’t count. And this is also right: Lieberman’s reprehensible independent run “will result in cash and resources that should be going to the real Democrats down ticket being spent fighting off a Vichy Democrat.” Indeed.

…this indeed would be a good start.

…I’ll give Henley the last word:

Lieberman came to personify the effort to cast all opposition to the Administration’s war policies as disrespectable fringe behavior. As a matter of principle, this is noxious. As a matter of practicality, it’s ridiculous in a member of the nominal opposition party. I foresee a future in which Lieberman becomes as bitter and menacing as Robert Bork became in the years after he was rejected for the Supreme Court.