OC Rape Case Update

I’ve discussed before the horrifying case of a young Orange County woman who was repeatedly gang-raped while she was unconscious. What made the case particularly appalling was the conduct of the defense. Lacking any credible case that they consented, they used the well-worn strategy of attacking the victim with irrelevant sexist details, egregious violations of privacy and outright intimidation:

Since the moment the tape was recovered by police, there’s been an effort to destroy Doe. An army of Haidl lawyers and private detectives have continually hounded her and her family; posted inflammatory fliers in her neighborhood; called her a “slut” who tricked “an innocent boy” into making a “sex film” because she wanted to be a “porn star”; spread defamatory rumors about each member of her family; persuaded her high school friends to betray her in court; tailed her to her new high school and informed her new, unsuspecting friends about the rape case; and released her private medical and psychological records to the media.

While no ending to such a case can be “happy,” the primary assailants have been convicted. In addition, Jane Doe is suing for civil damages.

Ikoi Hiroe emails me to say that she’s collecting letters of support for Jane Doe–you can send letters addressed to the latter at ihiroe@yahoo.com and Ikoi will pass them along. (This has been vetted by Sheelzebub, who in addition to her other terrific work on this case contacted Doe’s attorney and confirmed that the letters of support will be passed on.) Please consider doing so.

Lexblogging: Fun with Governor Fletcher

In 1986, Judge Lewis Paisley declared Kentucky’s anti-sodomy law unconstitutional.

In 1991, a group called Pro-Family Kentucky distributed a flier claiming that “Lexington is becoming a Hot-Bed for growing Sodomy, Pornography and Violence against women and families,” in part because of Judge Paisley.

The treasurer of Pro-Family Kentucky at the time was a man named Ernie Fletcher, who is now the governor of our fair state.

As one of the commenters at Bluegrass Report puts it, “I didn’t know you could grow Sodomy in a Hot-Bed. And to think for all these years I’ve been using potting soil and Miracle Gro.”

Given that it’s had fifteen years to grow, you’d think I’d notice all the sodomy here in Lexington. Eh, not so much, as far as I can tell. I’m also uncertain how sodomy laws prevent violence against women and families, but I’m sure that Governor Fletcher has a good explanation.

V

V for Vendetta was fair enough for a big studio production. Natalie Portman rarely impresses me as an actress, and this was no exception. Hugo Weaving was a perfect choice for the title role, however, and pulled it off both verbally and physically. The plot was rather predictable, and its foray into the political was unsurprisingly hamfisted and clumsy.

As a final note, please don’t rely on this film for its historical interpretation of the original Guy Fawkes. Just because you want to blow up Parliament and decapitate the English elite does not, in fact, mean that you’re an anarchist.

The Wingnutosphere: A Test Case

David Duke has endorsed the Mearsheimer/Walt paper about the alleged “unmatched power” of the “Israel lobby,” something that I’m guessing will be picked up around the right-wing blogosphere. Most of the lessons will be obvious: it’s a bad paper, but I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that anti-Semitism played a role in writing it even if anti-Semites trumpet it, but I’m sure some clueless hacks will run with the New York Sun‘s angle and play the guilt-by-association game–turning this work of two scholars into something about “Harvard” (and even more amusingly into something about “liberal academics.”)

What will be particularly instructive is to compare the reaction of the purveyors of reactionary academic identity politics to this with their defenses of their allegedly martyred idol Larry Summers. We have two cases in which somebody used poorly supported, largely circular arguments to reach “anti-p.c.” conclusions. Except that it’s worse in Summers’ case, because he was speaking as a representative of the university, and his comments were consistent with a terrible record of hiring and retaining women in science faculties. Somehow, though, I don’t think we’re going to see Mearsheimer and Walt similarly portrayed as victims of a political witch hunt when the media and other faculty start attacking them. Because, of course, “acadmic freedom” as they define it (which, if we can derive its conservative usage in the Summers case, seems to mean “the right to say stupid things without being criticized by people who know far more about the subject than you do and without any consequences”) somehow becomes less important when the “anti p.c.” comments are less congenial with the conservative line of the day…

…Pithlord has more.

Reproductive Freedom: It’s Positively Unxenophobic!

According to Georgia state senator, “Big employers may get the benefit of cheap labor, but the U.S. taxpayer will pay for their healthcare, food stamps, schooling for children, and income tax credits. I am convinced it is a consequence to the almost 50 million children we have put to death in their mother’s womb through abortion. The large unfilled job market in Georgia would not be a problem if the almost 50 million Americans were here filling many of those jobs.” But why stop there? Why, if we were to outlaw birth control, maybe we could prevent anyone from immigrating at all!

Hmm, that argument ads a nice racist element to perhaps the worst genre of anti-abortion arguments, the “would you have wanted to be aborted in the womb” argument. The problem with this argument, of course, is that to any non-crackpot it proves rather too much. In retrospect, I am indeed happy not to have been aborted; I’m also happy my parents were not using birth control the night I was conceived, that my mother didn’t get a tubal ligation, etc. etc.–I guess we really have no choice but to ban those things too! Always nice to get the Christian consevrative agenda out in the open…

A Brief Note About Dream Sequences

I saw Transamerica last month. Not a bad picture, actually–not only the expert lead performance, but a genuinely interesting lead character. The biggest problem with the film–what makes is a halfway decent movie with a great acting performance rather than a really good movie–is that the road movie just isn’t as robust a genre as indie directors seem to think it is. The picture slowly runs out of gas as the arbitrary incidents and local color pile up; it’s almost impossible to do anything with it at this point, and it saves screenwriters from thinking up more dramatically interesting ways of advancing the narrative. I’m not sure what’s more exhausted, though: the road movie, or the dream sequence.

By dream sequence, I hasten to add, I don’t mean a Lynch-like aesthetic where everything teeters on the edge of dreaminess, but dreams within an otherwise straightforward narrative, especially on TV. I suppose it’s not literally true that if they’re more than 30 seconds, they suck, but I’m tempted to say it anyway. This was made particularly evident in the regrettable 3rd season of Six Feet Under–the dream sequences undermined what the show did really well (first-rate soap opera in the non-pejorative sense with some terrific characters) and emphasize what it did badly (Alan Ball’s conviction that his well-worn cliches about suburban life are Profound Insights), but with 1000% more wankery.

And then we have The Sopranos. It’s used short dream sequences well sometimes, especially in the Season 2 finale. I suppose “The Test Dream” was better than I feared, but while it was pretty good for an interminable dream sequence it was also exceptionally subpar for a Sopranos episode. And tonight…I guess I could be perverse enough to point out that it did replicate a real dream more than these things usually do: some but not total resemblance to real life, with anxious failures and things you just can’t grasp. But, really, to be candid it was dull and pretentious, no takeoff and no payoff. (I’m embarrassed that I didn’t see this as an inevitable downside to Tony getting shot last week.) I don’t mean to sound like Television Without Pity reviewing the last season of Buffy, but the prospect of this stillborn concept continuing for more episodes is dampening my enthusiasm for Season 6 considerably…

More On Tough Choices in Foreign Policy

As one might expect Dan Drezner has some interesting comments about the earlier-discussed Mearsheimer/Walt article. Drezner makes 3 important points. First, he explains in more detail that the explanation seems a strained, ad hoc, excessively simplistic explanation to explain away a problematic anomaly for the realist framework. Second, he points out that “[i]f “The Lobby” is as powerful as Walt and Mearsheimer claim, why hasn’t there been a bigger push in the United States for more fuel-efficient cars, alternative energy sources, and the like?” I would go further: if the swing-state Jewish vote is so critical in presidential elections, why have the Republicans adopted approximately none of the other policy preferences of the median swing state Jewish voter? (In a way, I wish M/W were right: I can’t wait for the next Republican platform to enthusiastically endorse Roe v. Wade and the strict separation of church and state!)

The third point, which provides the frame of Drezner’s analysis, is a comparison of M/W to Sam Huntington. That strikes me as a quite apt description, especially insofar as Mearsheimer is concerned. Both have written very important scholarly works whose gift for parsimonious explanations can sometimes cross the line into crude overgeneralization, and the latter tends to overwhelm the good parts of their work when they’re writing for a popular audience. (Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, which emphasized that the most crucial difference between states is those that have effective governments and those that don’t, is certainly highly relevant today.) I’m not sure about the “full Huntington” either way. On one hand, while it’s not my field I doubt that any of Mearsheimer’s work will prove as important or influential as Huntington’s powerful early work, but on the other hand while I strongly disagree with it I don’t think the new M/W piece is anywhere near as normatively objectionable as most Huntington’s Clash Of Civilizations-era work (the worst of which Drezner has a good piece about here.)

Speaking of overly simplistic thinking about foreign policy, Andrew Sullivan uses a familiar routine, ending a discussion of Juan Cole’s analysis of Sistani’s horrific anti-gay statements by claiming that “Cole tries a third option: he blames all this on what he regards as the misguided attempt to get rid of Saddam. Ah: Saddam. The pomo-left’s last great hope for Arabia. I assume he’s referring to (and distorting) this part of Cole’s argument:

I personally condemn Sistani’s stance here, of course. He is a conservative Shiite cleric, however, so I don’t know what people were expecting to happen if the secular Baath was overthrown and replaced by primordial ethnic identities.

In other words, Sullivan is using the classic warblogger technique of avoiding difficult questions by accusing anyone who raises arguments about the war of being Saddam-lovers. Cole’s point, is of course, unassailably correct: the increased power of radicals like Sistani was the nearly inevitable consequence of disposing Hussein. This doesn’t make any statement about the comparative merits of Hussein’s regime. To subject anyone who points this out to the smear that Hussein is their “hope” is disgraceful. And, of course, evaluating what the actual alternative regime is, rather than assuming that deposing a dictatorship means liberal democracy is crucial to assessing the war. With the security justifications evaporated, the only possible defense of this war is on humanitarian grounds. It may be at least possible to defend the war if deposing Hussein would lead to liberal democracy. But if one compares it to the quasi-theocracy that was always vastly more likely, the argument is impossible to make. A somewhat democratic illiberal Islamic state may be a better outcome than the preceding government (although if I were a woman or gay person in Iraq, I’m not so sure that I would agree), but hardly enough to justify the invasion. And, in addition, it exposes the self-evident folly of folding the deposing of Hussein’s brutal but secular dictatorship with a war on “radical Islam.” If anything, the invasion benefits it, and pointing this out this blindingly obvious fact doesn’t make you an apologist for Hussein.

Half A Million Served

Thanks to our loyal and new readers!

For Glenn Reynolds, is there a difference?

Verbatim Glenn:

They’re not so much “antiwar” as just on the other side.

Israel and Neorealism

Jeff Goldstein has found another purported example of the perfidy of the “Democratic party and liberals” at Harvard. The political scientists in the audience will be amused by the punchline: it’s the work of the conservative University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer. Whether someone who voted for Bush in 2000 counts as a liberal or a Democrat is, I would submit, contestable. (I don’t know about the politics of his co-author Stephen Walt–my IR scholar co-blogger says he has voted for candidates of both parties. He’s certainly not a public man of the left.) Almost as remarkable as the fact that he quite clearly knows nothing about the scholars in question but is willing to link uncritically to marginally literate screeds by Randite crackpots accusing them of “Jewhatred” is the way he refers to their working paper as a “Harvard paper,” as if the institution sort of produces ideas that scholars receive like radio transmitters. Hmm, let’s apply this logic further–I’m appalled about this “Harvard book“: clearly the campus is overrun with Straussian male chauvinists! No wonder Larry Summers found poorly-supported just-so tautologies about female inferiority so convincing! And…no, really, this is too stupid.

Having said that, though, once you strip away the silly right-wing identity politics frame, Goldstein has a point: the Mearsheimer/Walt claim (the full version is in PDF form here) that American policy toward Israel is the result of an exceptionally powerful “Israeli lobby” is, in fact, not very persuasive. The bulk of the paper, indeed, is not about supplying evidence for their central argument. W/M establish what is, from a neorealist perspective, an anomaly: American policy toward Israel is more supportive than would expect based on neorealist conceptions of national self-interest. This is probably right, although the extent of the gap is debatable. They then go on to dismiss the moral case for supporting Israel; I find this less persuasive, you may find it more, but at any rate it’s neither here not there as far as the empirical case is concerned; what matters is not whether I or they find the case convincing, but whether people with decision-making authority in the American state find it convincing and whether it’s at least arguable. (I don’t disagree that Israeli policy is currently contrary to some liberal “American values”; it is also true that the US would have failed the “American values” test rather more resoundingly less than 50 years ago, and the relevant metric is to compare with other countries rather than against an ideal liberal democracy.) And then they conclude with a summary of the effects of what they see as excessive American support for Israel. But the key middle section–where they actually try to establish the key proposition–is skimpy and unconvincing, filled with dubious inferences and slippery causal relationships. To take an example of the at times almost comically tendentious nature of their empirical analysis, consider this paragraph:

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

First of all, of course, for several cycles CA, NY and IL have hardly been “key states”; they haven’t been remotely in play, and it would be pretty odd to for Republicans craft messages with a disproportinate eye toward small minorities in states they have no chance of winning. Pennsylvania’s population of religious Jews is a whopping 2%. And then you have to remember that neorealist foreign policy would not predict hostility toward Israel, but less marginal support, narrowing the policy terrain. And, of course, Jews have far from monolithic positions towards Israel. So basically we’re left with an enormous amount of leverage over the executive branch derived from the effects of differences within a narrow policy range within a segment of a small minority within a single swing state. Er, let’s just say I consider the question open.

And there’s an even bigger problem when it comes to the Iraq War. Iraq is an even clearer empirical anomaly from a neorealist perspective, but it is (to put it mildly) far from clear that installing a Shiite state with very tenuous coercive capacity in Iraq is in the interests of the Israeli state. The M/W attempts to explain the alleged “Israel Lobby” influence on the Iraq war come down to little more that inferences drawn from the fact many administration proponents of the war are also supporters of Israel. But when it comes to evidence that Israeli interests were a key factor in the decision, that’s awfully watery broth, and one I would think a neorealist would be particularly skeptical of.

Since I’m not committed to neorealist explanations, I think a lot more explanatory leverage can be derived from noting that many important American state actors conceive of American interests differently than neorealists do and that they also believe the moral case for supporting Israel is more tenable than M/W do. Admittedly, measuring interest group power is a nettlesome problem, and assertions of interest group influence are almost impossible to prove or disprove, but I just don’t find the case at all persuasive. While I think it’s a disgraceful smear to imply that these serious scholars are anti-Semites, I do think they’re straining to provide a simple explanation for some outcomes that their theoretical framework can’t really account for. The well-organized and funded Israeli lobby may explain some policy choices at the margin, but there’s little evidence that it’s a central variable.

As a final note, another reason I don’t think that creating an “Israeli lobby” bogeyman is particularly helpful is that is obscures what neorealism can help us think about: the difficult choices that we face in the middle east. Unlike the ice-cream-castles-in-the-air vision of too many neocons, the realists grasp the obvious point that the democratization of despotic regimes whose populations are even more hostile to Israel than the current governing elites will produce very difficult dilemmas in which American interests, Israeli interests, and democratization are in serious tension with one another. Pretending that all of these interests are inherently aligned is useless, but weakly-supported intimations about a nearly-omnipotent “Israeli lobby” are also diversions from the real issues involved.

Feingold and the Censure Resolution: 2006 and 2008

[This was posted as a cameo guest slot at FireDogLake: but at least 50% new maetrial!]

As a follow up to ReddHedd’s post below, yesterday I wrote a post about Ryan Lizza’s baffling claim, in response to Russ Feingold’s proposed censure of the President, that “[c]hanging the FISA law is the way to address Bush’s overreach.” Ann Althouse objects, arguing that I am not “the best person to be deciding who’s ‘vacuous.’” The merits of the ad hominem I will leave to the reader, but I think that Althouse is missing the fundamental point here, and I don’t think that what’s at stake can be emphasized often enough. There are two issues here: the politics, and the merits. The former issue I see little point in discussing, because whether it’s a net positive or negative the political impact of a censure resolution on mid-term elections in November will be negligible in any case. I will only point out another contradiction in Lizza’s argument. His argument that the resolution will be politically damaging rests on his assertion that “providing a check on Bush and the Republican dominance of Washington is a key Democratic talking point, but it’s being advanced subtly by candidates who still often must distance themselves from national Democrats.” But, if a Democratic victory rests on red-state Democrats being able to distance themselves from the Senate leadership–a plausible enough claim–then how can the fact that Feingold’s resolution has not produced a unified Democratic caucus be damaging? Lizza’s argument gets more puzzling the more you think about it.

But the more important point, which I think Althouse also misses, is that Lizza’s claim that supporters of the resolution have the policy wrong is just a transparent non-sequitur. Changing the FISA law is hardly an adequate response to presidential overreaching, given that the administration has asserted the authority to ignore any statutory restrictions placed on its authority to conduct domestic searches. The value of Feingold’s resolution is that it draws attention to the point that pundits like Lizza seem unable to grasp: this dispute is not only about the best policy to gather information about terrorists, but is about central questions of the President’s constitutional powers and the rule of law. The key issue here is that the President acted–and continues to act years after 9/11, and therefore with plenty of time to request changes in the statute if it was inadequate–against a law passed by Congress. And, as ReddHedd says, claims that FISA is unconstitutional because the President has unconstrained authority over foreign policy are exceptionally weak. It’s worth repeating my quote from Cass Sunstein about how contrary to our Constitutional framework such claims of plenary presidential power are:

Yoo emphasizes Blackstone and British practice, arguing that the United States closely followed the British model, in which the executive–the king!–was able to make war on his own. But not so fast. There is specific evidence that the British model was rejected. Just three years after ratification Wilson wrote, with unambiguous disapproval, that “in England, the king has the sole prerogative of making war.” Wilson contrasted the United States, where the power “of making war and peace” is in the legislature. Early presidents spoke in similar terms. Facing attacks from Indian tribes along the western frontier, George Washington, whose views on presidential power over war deserve special respect, observed: “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated on the subject, and authorized such a measure.” As president, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams expressed similar views. In his influential Commentaries, written in 1826, James Kent wrote that “war cannot lawfully be commenced on the part of the United States, without an act of Congress.”

That’s the issue. The administration is claiming powers to act unilaterally with respect to a conflict with no logical end, powers far beyond what Lincoln claimed at the height of the Civil War. Changing the FISA statute not only doesn’t address this crucial issue–which the censure resolution, at least, foregrounds–it compounds it by legitimating the President’s lawbreaking and contempt for constitutional restraints retroactively. Feingold, unlike Lizza, actually understands the crucial issue at stake. As long as Congressional Republicans refuse to assert congressional prerogatives there’s nothing Democrats can do policy-wise, but at least they should be making this point as often as possible.

One area where I agree with Lizza, however, is that this is more about 2008 than 2006, and that’s where I’ll throw open to the discussion to our readers. This probably won’t make me a very popular in these parts, but as much as I admire Feingold I think that, ideally, the Democrats would be better served by running a red-state governor than a blue-state Senator. On the other hand, if Matt is right that this strengthens Feingold’s odds against Clinton, that can only be good news. If it comes down to Clinton/Feingold, then I think there shouldn’t be any contest: Clinton–who ran well behind Gore in New Work, while Feingold ran well ahead of Kerry in Wisconsin–has electability issues that are just as or more serious, and Feingold is much better on the merits. To the extent that it weakens Clinton by highlighting her unswerving commitment to a disastrous and increasingly unpopular war, this is a good thing for the Dems in ’08.