The Crossed Pond

From the the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the U.N. agency tasked with fighting the Global War on Drugs (GWOD):

The Board notes with concern that in countries in South America, such as Argentina, Brazil and Colombia (and in countries in North America, such as Mexico and the United States), there is a growing movement to decriminalize the possession of controlled drugs, in particular cannabis, for personal use. Regrettably, influential personalities, including former high-level politicians in countries in South America, have publicly expressed their support for that movement. The Board is concerned that the movement, if not resolutely countered by the respective Governments, will undermine national and international efforts to combat the abuse of and illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs. In any case, the movement poses a threat to the coherence and effectiveness of the international drug control system.

I’m not sure if the additional Reason commentary on this one is even necessary.

“I don’t think there’s a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it.”

– George Will, arguing with Liz Cheney

As apt as anything.

“Joe Lieberman is a divorced Dad refusing to pay for private school, in part, because it might please his ex-wife. ”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates

“We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn’t see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn’t see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.”

—Alberto Gonzales

Radley Balko is profiled in The Economist, and this made me think of my constant “come over to the Dark Side!” argument I have with Thimbles, to the effect of “why do you keep arranging a system entirely around the hope that the right people and only the right people will be running it?” Or, as I call it, the “Everything would be great if it weren’t for all the f*$king liberals/conservatives in office!” syndrome.

That said, I think there’s reason for some optimism for libertarians. The generations raised on the internet will be more educated, aware, and informed than any before them, and I think that has instilled in them some naturally libertarian instincts, particularly when it comes to issues like government transparency, accountability, censorship, and police power. Perhaps I’m a bit pollyanna-ish, but it’s at least possible that once the Obama administration proves just as inept, corrupt, and hopeless as the Bush administration, the younger people who flocked to Obama will start to understand that the problem isn’t who’s running government, it’s that government power itself corrupts–and that we’re better off keeping as much of our lives as possible off limits to the whims of politicians instead of this repeating cycle of putting all of our hope into the idea that someday, the right politicians will finally get elected.

“It’s hard to be more conservative than I am on issues — though there are different ways stylistically to communicate that — I’m pro-life, I’m pro-gun, I’m pro-family, and I’m anti tax. … I don’t know what else you’re supposed to be, except maybe angry too.”

—Charlie Crist

Well hell, now that I posted that last one, I keep thinking of this one.

“The Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin might conclude that she represents the exact moment important Republicans gave up on democracy. She was clearly seen as an empty vessel who could be controlled by her intellectual betters. These include the editorial boards of the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which would hire Palin to make an editorial judgment but both of which would be thrilled to see her as president of the United States. It does not bother these people in the least that the woman is a demagogue — remember “death panels”? — and not, on the face of it, very responsible.

Finally, the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin will mull what she represents. She has a phenomenal favorability rating among Republicans — 76 percent — who have a quite irrational belief that she would not make such a bad president. What they mean is that she will act out their resentments — take an ax to the people and institutions they hate. The Palin Movement is fueled by high-octane bile, and it is worth watching and studying for these reasons alone.

Via John Cole:

“Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Sarah Palin’s ‘Going Rogue,’ I immediately thought of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss.”

—Matt Continetti, the Weekly Standard

Someone asked Jon Hunstman what he thinks about the current ideological battles within the GOP.

“It’s a good time to be in Beijing.”

– Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R)

“Haha, what?” edition.

What happened to John Shadegg? I used to think he was one of the more sane voices in the conservative caucus. But since deciding he’s not going to run for reelection, he’s taken a decidedly nutty turn.

Here he is today reacting to Michael Bloomberg saying he was fine with holding the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York.

“I saw the Mayor of New York said today, ‘We’re tough. We can do it.’ Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it’s your daughter that’s kidnapped at school by a terrorist? “

Man. Seriously, these guys have watched way too much 24.

“The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured.”

—Dick Armey

Daniel Larison, on yesterday’s elections:

What is more encouraging to me is that the wins by Christie and McDonnell show that competent center-right candidates interested in governance and all those “parochial” local issues can tap into voter discontent and win electoral victories. Hoffman’s possible defeat suggests that campaigns dominated by the presence of national activists, empty sloganeering and indifference to local interests may not gain traction even in those districts that are traditionally inclined to favor the politics of someone like Hoffman. Those of us who would like to see Democratic domestic agendas thwarted without empowering the Palins of the world may have managed to get exactly the results we would wish to have.

From a State Department spokesperson:

“Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.”

From Patton Oswalt of all people.

AVC: You’ve stuck with MySpace as sort of your social-networking site of choice. You’ve also taken some distance from Facebook and sworn off Twitter. Why is that?

PO: I haven’t sworn off Facebook. I’m on Facebook. There’s a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I’m on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird. And then with MySpace, I just don’t read messages. I delete everything, and I just post updates every now and then. I don’t know, there’s something about MySpace for someone as OCD as me. MySpace is somehow more welcoming than Facebook. And Twittering, I just… Ugh. I like having radio silence. I think radio silence is an important part of any public figure’s day. We haven’t seen it yet, but there’s going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It’ll be cool to have never posted anything online, never commented, never opened a webpage or a MySpace, never Twittered. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong.

“It’s despotism when we lose, freedom when we win. We should have more confidence in Tcs2 the people and the country than this. We should also have more charity to our political opponents – who after all are contending with hideous problems bequeathed to them by … by … well suddenly we Republicans cannot seem to remember who preceded Barack Obama in office. To listen to us, you’d think that the bailouts and takeovers started on January 20, 2009, not the previous March. You’d never know that TARP was supported by almost every Republican commentator, including the editors of National Review. Or that Vice President Cheney argued urgently in favor of the rescue of the Detroit automakers. Or that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enjoyed the backing of Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.

One bad election converts us from ardent admirers of the American people to glum declinists who can see only a miserable moldering of a once great nation. I should have thought that conservative patriotism was made of stronger stuff.”

—David Frum

I don’t think saying “it was Bush’s fault” is a very effective way in dealing with the inadequacies or oversights of the current President. But that does not stop it from being, in many cases, true. Nor is it pedantic and irrelevant, particularly when many leaders of the conservative movement are actively throwing around phrases like tyranny and socialism and what have you and acting as if the sky has fallen on free America because voters got sick of a purportedly conservative president creating conservative problems and trying to append half-ass liberal solutions to them, and instead elected a purportedly liberal president in the hopes that he can append at least three-quarters-ass liberal solutions to the explicit conservative problems created by his predecessor.

But it does strike me, often, when otherwise intelligent conservative commentators (and then the rest, who are at the very least reportedly sentient) disregard this point. One would think that Barack Obama just appeared in a poof of smoke and brimstone to take over the country in the name of INSERT SCAREMONGERING ABSTRACTION HERE. And not, in fact, because those riding under the banner of conservatism screwed the nation in almost every conceivable way, to the point where the people they spent 80% of their governing time defining in opposition to them might start looking pretty good.

To put that another way, even if one were to think that voters chose Obama, offering socialism and tyranny, if the Bush years were conservatism and freedom, who can blame them?

One is a “serious” voice of conservatism. The other purportedly an air-headed floozie. You be the judge.

The blurb on the book jacket of Joe the Plumber’s new book:

“Joe’s story is the iconic American tale. He’s a patriot who became instantly famous for simply asking a question that millions of us wanted asked. As my friend Sean Hannity would say, Joe is a great American!” — Mike Gallagher, Syndicated Talk Radio

Shortly before [Meghan] McCain sat for this interview, Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, gave an interview to Christianity Today in which he complained about “queers” and declared, “I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.” Unprompted, McCain rails against the man her father’s presidential campaign touted as an American everyman and made a showpiece in the weeks before the election.

“Joe the Plumber — you can quote me — is a dumbass. He should stick to plumbing.”

I think we’ll look back at President Barack Obama as being hugely influential on the question of race in America, indeed a critical turning point on part with the 60s, but not just or even primarily because he’s a black guy who became President. He is also one of the strongest voices in the African American community (but existing kind of outside or even above it) for personal responsibility and an end to the victim mentality that permeated (and understandably and even necessarily so) African American leadership from the civil rights era until this decade. The pushback against that has been a long time coming from within those communities—and has always existed, I should add, in pockets. But since say the mid-90s, the role of the people regularly labeled “hucksters” (your Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons) trading on injury have declined precipitously, and the idea of a self-directed destiny and a sharp denunciation of excuse-making has been ascendant (at the time, I criticized people for lauding Bill Cosby’s rants on this subject not because they were wrong, but because so many of them were ignoring that his critiques were enormously well-received by the black community, and indeed at that time had almost become mainstream. People were acting like he had gone rouge and defied the black community, ignoring that for his comments, he got a standing ovation, and many black leaders and community members had been saying the same thing for years).

Point being, I think we’ve reached critical mass in the black community for this kind of thinking. Listening to President Obama give the speech to the NAACP he does below for some reason makes me think of the last step of the Ghandian ladder (the part after they laugh at you and after they fight you, the part where you win). The social evolution of minority groups from de-humanized pariahs to average joe mainstream fascinates me, and with the black community, I think we’re on the full cusp of something profound, an end, if you like, of the “us vs. them” mentality that has been at times prevalent (and I say again, understandably and probably necessarily).

The quote from President Obama is this (at around the 24 minute mark).

“We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. That’s not a reason to get bad grades. That’s not a reason to cut class. That’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands. You can not forget that. That’s what we need to teach all our children: no excuses.”

Note too that it’s the biggest applause line in the entire speech.

This is not the future of the conversation in the black community. It is the present.

I’m not really going to harp on Sarah Palin here—her recent moves seem to me to more or less speak for themselves. But it’s hard not to pass on this excerpt from her ABC interview, which Andrew Sullivan relays under the title “The Person John McCain Thought Could be President.”

But as for whether another pursuit of national office, as she did less than a year ago when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House, would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations. “I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said. There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

Even putting aside the sniggering about the “Department of Law” bit, that’s a pretty frightening view of the White House and its relationship to the freedom of the press. I’m not even really sure how she imagines that interplay, but it smacks to me of a decidedly dictatorial fantasy of the office. A rough paraphrase might be “Well, when I’m President, I can make ethics allegations go away.”

Nixon in high heels is not a bad analogy for any number of reasons at this point.

And, frankly, the GOP deserves her at this point.

Presuming Sarah Palin doesn’t leave politics entirely, even if you were to give her the benefit of the doubt and take her at her word, it’s hard to get past Bruce Reed’s read:

“Palin’s resignation is a symptom of what’s crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.”

Grover Norquist, on the Mark Sanford scandal:

“It does indicate that men who oppose federal spending at the local level are irresistible to women.”

Well played, sir. Well played.

There is an interesting side debate (or maybe it’s the central one) going on in the context of the Iranian demonstrations. Namely, there are some, like John McCain and others, who argue that the United States needs to present a full-throated denunciation of the Iranian election and throw in with those currently demonstrating against the present regime. Then there are those, like presumably Obama, who believe that we need to keep our distance, for a myriad of practical reasons.

There are, of course, various merits to both arguments I suppose, though it probably isn’t hard to guess which side I come down on. But Daniel Larison I think puts the discussion in the proper perspective.

U.S. involvement in the Iranian election controversy in any form is unwise. Except for the most generic statements condemning violence and urging peaceful resolution to the crisis, Washington should say nothing, and I mean nothing. After all, whose interests do we serve by having our government speak up? The casual assumption is that condemning foreign election fraud, of which there was probably a great deal in Iran, is both some kind of moral imperative and a strategically wise thing to do in order to aid Mousavi, which in turn is based on another questionable belief that Westerners are somehow obliged to aid him and his supporters. The first part of this is very dubious, and the second is clearly wrong.

Western policing of other nations’ elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country’s people.[...]

One of the great problems with a foreign policy that takes global “leadership” as a given is that it seems to compel the U.S. government to have an official view on every event and crisis around the world. The idea that there are events that have nothing to do with us, and which we have no business concerning ourselves with, is so alien to our policymakers that I am fairly sure that it never occurs to them. Certainly, if it ever did, they would dismiss it immediately as unacceptable “inaction” in a “time of crisis.” Discretion sometimes truly is the better part of valor.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I’ve asked this a hundred different times in a hundred different ways, so…

…here it is again!

[H]ere’s my main question: what exactly is so hard about getting terrorists convicted in American courts? Under US law, even “providing material aid” to any “terrorist organization” is a felony. I mean, come on — the US can try university professors for “material aid” to a “terrorist” organization for recruiting donations to a Palestinian political and charity group that was not, at the time, considered a terrorist organization. How hard is it, really, to convict someone picked up “on the battlefield” in Afghanistan of having “provided material support” to the Taliban? [A]re you seriously telling me that the Bush Administration’s torture regime has so thoroughly bolloxed the entirety of the evidence regarding detainees at Gitmo that we can no longer even prove they were doing anything to support any group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations? Any such group whose actions have resulted in “the death of any person”? If we can’t prove that about these guys, what are they doing in prison?

Simple.

This was never about justice.

No honest man can ever look at the full brunt of the reality of it and conclude otherwise.

Unlike Adam, I have very little respect for the political power of the “releasing Gitmo detainees into American communities!” argument. I have even LESS respect for the “releasing Gitmo detainees into American prisons” argument, which seems to operate under the assumption that these guys are all test subjects of Al Queda super soldier serum that No Walls Can Hold. It is an argument contrary to common sense and easily refuted and, if anything, easily turned into an argument that projects strength and common sense (i.e. “you guys are sniveling babies turning the War on Terror into a ridiculous farce by play acting everything and not being serious about national security”). If Democrats are ready to cave on something this dumb and paper tigered, there’s no hope for them on anything. They have the White House behind them, common sense, all the actors and experts in both national security and American criminal justice, and even if they did cave, they can’t cave indefinitely…it’s not like this won’t again be an issue next year, and the year after, and the year after, and thus, by caving, you’re essentially surrendering a Republican talking point that will come up again and again and again.

So, of course, they cave.

Dan Froomkin says it best:

Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the Obama era: Republicans are still able to come up with scare tactics that turn Senate Democrats into a terrified and incoherent bunch of mewling babies.

It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than the suggestion that bringing some of the terror suspects currently incarcerated in Guantanamo to high-security prisons in America will pose a threat to local communities.

It is nothing more than a bogeyman argument, easily refuted with a little common sense. (Isn’t that what prisons are for?) But that’s assuming you don’t spend your every moment living in fear of Republican attack ads questioning your devotion to the security of the country. Or that you have a modicum of respect for the intelligence of the American public.

Ah well. Old habits die hard, I guess. And Senate Democrats apparently remain an easily frightened bunch, after eight years of faint-hearted submission.

So, I think Michael Steele has done it. He has ceased to be somebody I take seriously as a political actor, even as a bad one, and has now officially entered the realm where I appreciate him as walking talking self-parody, a performance artist really, ala Rod Blagojevich or FEMA.

Behold, one of the most awesome Quote of the Days ever. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Steele:

“The Republican Party has turned a corner, and as we move forward Republicans should take a lesson from Ronald Reagan. Again, we’re not looking back – if President Reagan were here today he would have no patience for Americans who looked backward.”

This blog doesn’t quite get the whole “it’s partisan to go after the officials of the previous administration who ordered people be tortured” idea, either.

“We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders. I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.”

“We’re currently occupying two Muslim countries. We’re killing civilians regularly (as usual) — with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We’re imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people — virtually all Muslim — ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We’re denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a “state secret” and that we need to “look to the future.” We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions “inflame anti-American sentiment” is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government’s abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would ‘inflame anti-American sentiment.’”

—Glenn Greenwald

Jesse Ventura: I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.

Larry King: You were a Navy S.E.A.L.

Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know… It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Watch that video.

I would vote for Jesse Ventura for President. I’m glad to have him in the Revolution—I hope he takes a more active role.

“…the important discussion about torture – which is to say: the discussion about torture that we need to be having, as opposed to the one we’d be in a position to have if not for all the things that happened on our government’s watch – is a discussion about whether, given the circumstances that actually obtained, the things that agents of our government did to prisoners and detainees were warranted. Whether there are some other possible circumstances in which some of those behaviors might have been warranted or even morally required is an entirely separate question, and while it’s of some philosophical interest it clearly ought to be far less important to us than the question of whether what we did constituted torture; and as such, it’s generally quite hard to see the insistence on posing wild counterfactuals rather than dealing with real-life cases as anything but a ruse.”

—John Schwenkle, Against Thought Experiments.

First McCain and his daughter, now…

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh Wednesday that if former Secretary of State Colin Powell is going to keep criticizing the GOP, he may as well leave the party and become a Democrat—adding that Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was “purely and solely based on race.”

“He’s just mad at me because I’m the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “There can be no other explanation for it.”

“What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat, instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party. He’s not. He’s a full-fledged Democrat,” Limbaugh said.

This would just be nonsense spewed by a talk show personality were said talk show personality not the de facto leader of the party who the congressional and national party leadership are terrified of and overly responsive to.

“Specter, take McCain with you. And his daughter. Take McCain and his daughter with you if you’re gonna…It’s ultimately good. You’re weeding out people who aren’t really Republicans.”

—Rush Limbaugh