Crimes And Misdemeanors

My dad points out that this chart, which illustrates the key players in various Bush administration scandals, doesn't even include the Valerie Plame fiasco.

I'd add that what's really impressive is that all of those scandals are really just the criminal stuff. You can make a pretty good argument that most of the damage that Bush has done he did through totally legal means.

Roberak F. Obagan

Lefties, depending on their level of Obama fandom, are either gloating or fretting at the prospect of an endorsement from neoconservative extraordinaire Robert Kagan. Sez Kagan:

America must "lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good." With those words, Barack Obama put an end to the idea that the alleged overexuberant idealism and America-centric hubris of the past six years is about to give way to a new realism, a more limited and modest view of American interests, capabilities and responsibilities.

Obama's speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last week was pure John Kennedy, without a trace of John Mearsheimer. It had a deliberate New Frontier feel, including some Kennedy-era references ("we were Berliners") and even the Cold War-era notion that the United States is the "leader of the free world." No one speaks of the "free world" these days, and Obama's insistence that we not "cede our claim of leadership in world affairs" will sound like an anachronistic conceit to many Europeans, who even in the 1990s complained about the bullying "hyperpower." In Moscow and Beijing it will confirm suspicions about America's inherent hegemonism. But Obama believes the world yearns to follow us, if only we restore our worthiness to lead. Personally, I like it.

But I think people are kind of confused about what Kagan is doing here. About 80% of the strategy is aimed at some combination of the following two goals:

1. First, Kagan wants to create the impression that his own thoroughly-discredited world view retains significant credibility. (Look! Even prominent Democratic presidential contenders have foreign policy views much like mine! Mine's practically the consensus position!)
   
   
2. Second, Kagan is clearly - smugly, even - aware that by approving of Obama's alleged foreign policy views, he undermines Obama among a significant number of his potential supporters. Yes, Kagan is dumb. But he also kind of isn't; he knows what the liberal Democratic reaction to his column is going to be.

The big red flag should be that in order to accomplish either of those two objectives, Kagan has to significantly overstate the evidence that Obama actually holds views that are anything like Kagan's. Obama, let's all remember, opposed the Iraq war before it was cool.

So what Kagan is doing is using his page space at the Washington Post to muddy the waters surrounding the merits of his own fairly crazy foreign policy beliefs. If he asserts blithely and confidently enough that Barak Obama and John Kennedy hold or held approximately similar views, people won't know quite what to think anymore. And mission accomplished!

Kagan sort of admits the paucity of the evidence in his favor toward the end:

Of course, it's just a speech. At the Democrats' debate on Thursday, when asked how he would respond to another terrorist attack on the United States, Obama at first did not say a word about military action. So maybe his speech only reflects what he and his advisers think Americans want to hear. But that is revealing, too. When it comes to America's role in the world, apparently they don't think there's much of an argument.

Of course, a strong majority of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. So, there you have it: like much of the rest of the contemporary Republican party platform, the best you can say of their foreign policy is that the American people enjoy the rhetoric but don't actually want to see any of the concrete policy ideas actively pursued.

Let them have Fox News

How do people come about their political positions and how does this affect the evolution of political movements? My personal belief is that the politically involved tend to pick a political world-view around ages 20-25 and stick with it for life. This view is entirely based on personal experience.

I'm a politically involved person. So is everyone who writes for this site and so are you, probably. My personal world view consists of things like:

• The Christian right is crazier than anything on the left.
• America has the power to invade a country and drive out a specific bad leader and stop specific atrocities, but we don't have the power to bring democracy or stability if the country is inhospitable to it.
  
• Quote: "about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion"
• Liberals should not be afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
  

I didn't come upon these beliefs through careful consideration of all available evidence. Instead I happened upon them through personal experience. I personally knew several fundamentalists and evangelicals. I read their anti-evolution literature. I saw the rush to war in Iraq. I saw many major libertarians arguing that we should trust the state with vastly expanded powers (with notable exceptions). This is how I decided what to believe.

I fully admit to not being as open-minded as I would like to be. In high school, I was pro-life and vaguely anti-gay and even flirted with opposing contraception (it's an easy position for a Catholic who had never kissed a girl). All of these beliefs were reconsidered during the late 90'. Then I kind of stopped dramatically changing my positions on things. I tell myself that the facts on the ground don't warrant changing my position on X or Y, but that's just what I would think, isn't it? Now that I've identified with one side (liberal wonkosphere) there's a whole set of primal group dynamics encouraging me to stick with the others who've made the same decision.

So let's say that people form their opinions early in adulthood, group up, and then stick with those groups even if the case for those political ideas weakens. What you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a political movement is something like this:

1. A set of problems mold the world-view of people with certain values. They group up and recommend certain policies.
   
2. If they come to power, those policies gets enacted.
3. The reality changes and the world-view is no longer accurate (either because the problem is solved or because their polices have proven ineffective).
4. The group stops taking on new members as fewer people adopt the world-view.
5. The groups fades away as members die out or find themselves unable to form political coalitions with other groups.

When I look at the modern Republican movement, I see an organization that just doesn't understand America anymore. Over-regulation, pacifism, and urban race riots are not major problems. Similarly, when Mickey Kaus suggests that card-checks for unions will "cripple American capitalism in a fit of leftish nostalgia" I can't help but wonder what planet he lives on*.

Kevin says conservatives would do well to ignore Fox News because it makes them complacent. I ask: Is Fox News making conservatives complacent and closed-minded or is conservative closed-mindedness and complacency making them seek out things like Fox news? Shouldn't we expect that a movement built in the 60's and 70's and which applied it's polices throughout the 80's and 90s would find it's world-view no longer appealing in the 00's? And do we really expect Republicans will change their world-view if only they stopped watching Fox News?

Granted, political movements as vast as conservatism should have some flexibility to adopt new understandings, but I suspect that those new world-views come from new recruits, not grizzled veterans. Basically, if you're the type of person who want to cocoon him/herself with Fox News, getting rid of Fox News isn't going to help you.

*The answer: earth, 1972