Jello, Nail, Tree

So what was my fan mail all about, anyway? It was about that horse’s ass Keith Olbermann and his latest rant against President Bush, which I needed to watch just in case I forgot the lessons of my youth…namely, how stunningly useless criticism-for-criticism’s-sake-alone can be. How little criticism, by itself, really says when it’s offered without an accompanying solution. How much volume and heat it can generate, how righteously indignant it can sound — and why intelligent, effective leaders rarely listen to it, in situations where it’s delivered without a plan.

Oh, every snippy paragraph makes the Bush-hating anti-war hippy giggle like a giddy schoolgirl, and insofar as that criteria applies, it’s “good.” But what is to be made of this? Olbermann refuses to tell us. Instead, he tells us what we are not supposed to make of it…

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona Congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.”

The hell they did.

177 Democrats opposed the President’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

Having defined exactly what kind of deception and skulduggery it is in which he thinks the President is engaged, Olbermann then pursues a windy screed, repeatedly referring to the administration’s “lies.”

President Bush may have been referring to a vote that took place in the House late last month on supporting his warrantless wiretap program. I do not know of any other method our country has of “listening to the conversations of terrorists.” I don’t know of any other means of doing this, I don’t think Olbermann knows, and I don’t think the 177 know.

So President Bush’s interpretation has merit, at least with me. That’s a matter of opinion. But it’s a legitimate opinion to have.

Olbermann’s entire windy epistle rests on a fundamental premise: If you have that opinion, then you have placed words in someone else’s mouth, and therefore you are a “liar.” Well…isn’t Olbermann, then, exactly what he calls others? The 177 Democrats want terrorists to conduct their conversations in secret, at least from us — OR — the Democrats have some other method in mind that will protect the Constitution in all the ways they have in mind and at the same time go ahead an intercept those conversations. They want President Bush to stop OR they have a better way in mind to do what he’s trying to do.

Both of those may not apply; and one, or the other, must. Logically, this is inescapable. So which is it.

Well, Olbermann says I’m a liar if I infer Option A instead of Option B. There is no factual evidence of which I’m aware — none, whatsoever — that would support Option B. None. Olbermann named — none. The 177, so far as I know, named — none.

But if I pursue Occam’s Razor, Olby says I’m a liar.

Fuck him. Craven hypocrite.

Unbelievably, writing for ZDNet, Jeff Cohen argues that “strong criticism of an extremist presidency hardly makes Olbermann a leftist.” That’s a meme being repeated in a great many places, and it shows the truism that a vast pattern of re-echoing, does little to make a point meritorious. Olby is pursuing the “nailing jello to a tree” defense, the Bart Simpson type of “I never said that” thinking — which, even if you happen to agree with it, is a pretty far cry from what we need here.

I mean, just use common sense here. When you need to get something done, “Federal Express” style — ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, HAVE TO — what the fuck good is it to have a whole bunch of nattering nabobs calling out “don’t do it this way don’t do it that way”…and then when you say “you don’t seem to want me to get it done” angrily lash back with the “I never said that” defense?

I mean it’s a great way of thinking when you want to obstruct things. But do you do your own stuff this way? Unclog a stopped-up drain? Drive down a winding road on a foggy day? Figure out what pesticide to use in your garden? Scrape old paint off your house, and buy a bucket of newer stuff for the next coat? Bleed your car’s brakes?

Anything, where you need to figure out a) the state of affairs as they really exist; and b) what to do about them. How useful is it to have someone snarkily challenge you to figure out what they’re trying to say, and deliberately make it as difficult as nailing jello to a tree, to pin them down on it? HOW, in the Butthole of Premenstrual Ganesh, does this silly, snippy intellectual exercise get us any closer to where we need to be?

Olbermann went on to quote the President saying “If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party…it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is � wait until we’re attacked again. [emphasis mine]” Further on down in the transcript, Olbermann refers to this as “slander.”

Why do people keep calling this sportscaster brave? Why do they repeatedly credit him with “speaking truth to power”? He’s a hypocrite, plain and simple. All he’s doing, is jumping to extravagant, poorly-supported conclusions about the intent behind what others are saying…and denying the President exactly that same privilege, calling him a liar for doing so.

Keith Olbermann is exactly what he calls others. Exactly. The only difference is, when President Bush talks about how he interprets the vote cast by the 177, he’s posing an argument based on logic and common sense: If you don’t intercept the conversations this way, then how? And no answer forthcoming, you’re opposed to…exactly what he said you’re opposed to. And in drawing his inference that some liberals want no action to be taken until the country is attacked again, he’s providing his personal interpretation; his words allow for a reasonable, different, interpretation by other people. He’s talking about what it means to him. His opinion.

Olbermann, on the other hand, is passing judgment, allowing for no dissenting viewpoint, none whatsoever. A liar is whoever Olbermann says is a liar. He pretends that the facts support his thesis…and they simply don’t. What they support, is that Olbermann is guilty of hypocrisy, and we’re engaged in a situation in which better-quality thinking is absolutely necessary, or else our continuing existence is subject to random chance.

Discrimination, Prejudice and Preferences

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, makes a subtle reference to an experiment conducted thousands of years ago to determine the size of the earth. The experiment was conducted by a an ordinary guy…a high-ranking official, a library administrator, a student of philosophy and sciences, but not someone who had any “business” dabbling in such things. And yet, he got the answer more-or-less right.

So thinking about what he did, we examine the methods we use today to get answers more or less wrong. Thinking in committees, paying overly-too-much attention to accredited people with letters after their names, subordinating our own common sense to the apparatchiks and charlatans and talking heads and, last but not least, the “prevailing viewpoint.”

Prof. Walter E. Williams has been writing a series of articles that dovetail beautifully with this, pointing out the three intangible nouns listed in the headline to this post. Those three words are thrown around with great frequency nowadays. They have very specific meanings if you take the time to look them up in a dictionary…when you glean the intended meaning at the time those words are used, their meanings are not quite so well-defined or well-thought-out.

That’s a problem. It’s representative, I would add, of a much, much larger problem. As of Wednesday, Dr. Williams would like to discuss preferences, and I recommend you go take a look at it. Actually, I recommend you read all of this series, article by article, word by word. Makes you think.

Preferences alone do not determine behavior. If we conducted a survey asking people which they prefer: filet mignon or chuck steak, Rolex watches or Timex, Rolls Royces or Dodge Neons, I’m guessing that filet mignon, Rolex and Rolls Royce would win hands down. Having found what people preferred the most, then watch what they actually do. You would find chuck steak outselling filet mignon, Timex watches outselling Rolex, and Dodge Neons outselling Rolls Royces any day of the week.
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What minimum wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence…If filet mignon sold for $9 a pound and chuck steak $4, the cost of discriminating in favor of filet mignon is $5 a pound, the price difference. But if a law mandating a minimum price for chuck steak were on the books, say, $7 a pound, it would lower the cost of discrimination against chuck steak.

Minimum wage laws lower the cost of discrimination. Well, of course they do. Dr. Williams is examining differentials in price, and any regulation in price — of which I, personally, have ever come to be aware — has been a regulation toward normalcy. That is to say, I don’t know of any price restriction or wage restriction that says “you must charge an excessively larger price for this commodity, compared to that commodity.” I don’t know of anything like that proposed anywhere. No, wage and price restrictions tend strongly toward a median. Toward something wishy-washy and lukewarm. Can’t have it too high, that’ll hurt somebody…too low, it will hurt someone else.

So it just makes sense that when you have regulations toward uniformity, differentials gradually disappear. And that means, to borrow from Dr. Williams’ phraseology, the “cost of discrimination” is lowered. It has to be.

And that means the cost of any kind of discrimination comes down, as the differentials wane away. We say we don’t like people to discriminate. Well, this simple logic demonstrates that the desire to fight discrimination, stands in strident opposition to the desire to fight economic discomfort. Those who claim to support both, are either misrepresenting their actions, chasing their own tails, or both.

Pretty easy to argue with this by rankling distastefully at the outcome; but the logic that leads to that outcome, seems pretty solid. I’d like to see someone emerge and tell me where Dr. Williams has gone wrong. Not holding my breath.

Fan Mail

It’s just too good to let go. It’s a comment by FARK user EvelFarknievel who, hell, could be a thirteen-year-old mentally-challenged kid for all I know. And he, who says “If you are a Republican, I hate you and wish great suffering for you and your fellow Republicans,” goes on quite a tear. It always pleases me to read how incredibly wealthy and privileged I am.

Morgan Freeberg has an opinion about everything in his conservative – celebrated blog. And if you disagree with him, he’ll try to paint you as a “liberal” who hates America. In this thread he’s just called all of us who disagree with him stupid. If he could now just make up some lies about us, and say we’re all soft on terrorism, he could apply for a job with the Bush Admionistration.

He doesn’t realize that most of us can go toe-to-toe with him intellectually. His sprawling intellect is perceptively diminished by his failure to actually think for himself.

Mr. Freeberg is not part of the problem. He and people like him are *ALL* of the problem. He and his rich, white, fellow Republicans sit around counting their money and feeling smug that they are so much smarter than the rest of us while blindly following the new dictator of America.

He is reading this now and scoffing at the use of the word dictator as overblown hype, not realizing that history has proven the course of action currently being undertaken by this administration has proven in history to be disastrous over and over and over. And over.

He probably thinks the war was a good idea. He probably thinks the deficit is simply a necessary by-product of the genius of this administration. He undoubtedly thinks the Constitution is just an outdated piece of paper that has no place in today’s world.

He thinks this because he feels safe for now.

But while he is feeling safe and supporting the Administration, they are taking advantage of that, and Mr. Freeberg’s freedoms are quietly disappearing. And like people of other countries who have blindly supported the degrading of freedom by a corrupt, power hungry administration, he will eventually wake up one day and realize how terribly wrong he was and be full of regret.

I actually envy him. I’ll bet he gets more sleep at night than I do, because he doesn’t worry what kind of world is being created for his children. He thinks everything is fine. I wish I could lie to myself that way. I’d sleep a lot better.

Blah blah blah…yeah, not exactly an overture to an exchange of reasoned ideas, is it? Looks more like a plea for high-fives and pats on the back from his liberal buddies. Which, in that thread, I didn’t see forthcoming, but I did call out to his attention that apparently he can put words in other peoples’ mouths, while I’m not allowed to do the same thing. Which, interestingly, was supposed to be the entire focus of his complaint about me.

Ah, well. The topic under discussion was the irrational ravings of Keith Olbermann. That could have been Olbermann himself, using a pseudonym.

Truth and Fairness

In observing what’s going on down in Florida, I’m inclined to think of a certain Steven Segal movie, and I think it’s this one. There’s an unintentionally hilarious scene at the end where the Army helicopters are dusting the good citizens of…whatever town it is…with some kind of vaccine or innoculant. The citizens look up at the helicopters, obviously concerned about whether they are being poisoned. But not to worry, the helicopters have loudspeakers. Someone dutifully explains through the loudspeakers that the powder is harmless. No identification, nothing. The citizens look relieved. Oh, okay, well I’m glad that’s all cleared up.

The poorly-thought-out segment creates quite a few heady questions for anyone inclined to think about such things. What are governments supposed to do, anyway? Can we believe everything our government tells us? Should we?

Well, there’s this bizarre wrinkle in Florida law that says the ballots must be printed with Mark Foley’s name on them. Absentee ballots have already gone out…Foley was still in the running at the time they went out…everybody has to have the same ballot. So you can swap the candidates, but you can’t change the list.

In sum, the law compels the list of names, to lie.

On this, there is little disagreement. The disagreement concerns what to do…

The Washington Post is reporting as of yesterday, that supports of Foley’s replacement, Joe Negron, may post signs indicating that a vote for Foley is really a vote for Negron.

An e-mail from the State Division of Elections to election supervisors in counties that are part of Foley’s district said that “preferably, the notice would be placed in every voting booth” and in absentee ballot mailings. The suggestion angered some Democrats who said it gives Negron unfair help.

See the thing about “unfair help”? That has been a huge controversy up until now. There’s a school of thought that says you shouldn’t post any signs about a specific candidate, no matter what the tone, anywhere near the polling place. Several other states have that law. I wasn’t able to find where Florida has such a law, and apparently nobody else can find that out either…so a school-o-thought, is all it is. Certainly I can understand it.

But if “fairness” is what it’s all about, the dictum becomes self-contradictory. In a great big hurry, it does.

How fair is it to run for the House, and have some pervert’s name printed next to the hole voters are to punch to vote for you?

So those who object to the signs, are standing up for fairness but not universal fairness. They want the lying-ballot to be left unchallenged. No inserts handed out with the ballots, no signs in the voting booth, or within one hundred, two hundred, five hundred feet of the polling place. It’s all about fairness…fairness only for certain people. Democrats. Hey, give them some credit, they’re usually not lying. It’s pretty tough to find any of them claiming to stand up for fairness for everyone. It’s pretty tough to find any of them claiming they’d argue the same way, if the situation was reversed…or anyone pointedly asking them such a thing. No, overall, the people who argue that the lying ballots should be left unchallenged, are arguing that for the sake of “fairness” and they don’t say a whole lot else about what motivates them.

So we have a situation here, where “fairness” as interpreted by some, is the opposite of truth. I suspect the point I’m making here, is something everybody already understands intuitively: This situation comes up a lot more often than we know.

And that’s why real flesh-and-blood people, who don’t live in movies, are hardly inclined to stop worrying when a helicopter dumps powder on their heads and a loudspeaker intones that the powder is harmless. Real people aren’t going to stop worrying in that situation…they’re going to start worrying. Because real people understand, one man is inclined to tell another man the truth, if and when the two men are true peers, and have interests that are identical.

That set of circumstances simply doesn’t come up very often in real life. Everybody who’s ever made their mother something shitty in Arts and Crafts, and taken it home to her and asked her if she liked it, has been lied to…by their own mother. And we all know it. The simple fact of the matter is, people have to be forced to tell the truth; to be held to account. That used to be what having a free press is all about. Here we are, in 2006, having a fairly vicious debate about whether it’s okay, or even compulsory, to lie in a voting ballot. Mark Foley is not “on the ballot.” That’s simply a fact.

So look what we have going on here. Democrats perceive fairness — to them — to be antithetical to telling the truth. They want the ballot to be left in place, they want voters to believe the choice is between a Democrat and a pervert…which is a lie. And with the lie in place, they want a Democrat elected to that seat, so that Democrats can take over Congress, and next year the Democratic Congress will tell us terrorism isn’t a problem anymore. And since it will be a popularly-elected Congress, we’ll just have to believe them.

Don’t worry about the terrorists…just like, don’t worry about the powder. We’ll be coerced to believe that, so soon after being deceived about who the candidates are.

I dunno, guys. I’ll be the first to confess our relationship with government should be based on cynicism, rather than “trust.” I believe that, and it’s plain the Founding Fathers believed that too. We revere the opinions of the Founding Fathers, today, because they understood “fairness” was a subjective concept, decided by individuals — and “fairness” to one coterie, often stands in opposition to truth. That is the philosophy upon which our system of government is really based. But at the same time, it seems to me, it’s going a bit far to lobby the government into telling the electorate factually untrue things, and then lie by omission to support the untrue things.

Foleygate Wrap-Up

It’s pretty early to be wrapping things up, but I think we know everything we need to know at this point.

It seems pretty clear Foley is scum, and the Republican majority in the House really has handled this badly. Another thing is abundantly clear: Democrats have no ideas for how to lead this country. None. They criticize, and when people ask them what they’d do differently, they respond with a blank stare, “Go To Candidate XXX’s Website To Find Out,” righteous indignation, or a sudden change of subject.

They might very well win this midterm. They might win both houses of Congress. If they do, they will have won because of Mark Foley and not because of their ideas.

Howard Dean’s been e-mailing me as a “Fellow Democrat,” busily indoctrinating me about how Republicans have a “culture of corruption” and have been making a bunch of messes that a Democratic majority would promptly clean up. How his team would clean it up, he doesn’t want to tell me. I understand I’m supposed to think Democrats would be much cleaner; why I’m supposed to think that, he doesn’t want to tell me that either.

Mark Foley, so far as people can figure out, seems to have been engaged in his shenanigans for a very, very long time. Do we have a clean party-divide between the folks who knew about this and the folks that didn’t…with all in-the-know belonging to the GOP, and all the ignorant klutzes being Democrats? If not, then the Republican guilt, and the Democrat innocence — the two big reasons to vote for a donk this fall — both lose a whole lot of punch. On the other hand, if that is indeed the case, who the hell wants them running, or cleaning up, anything?

Well, via Strata-Sphere, we see the first of those two scenarios is much more likely.

Foleygate May Turn Into CREWgate

The FBI, which keeps meticulous records and has no reason to spin this mess, is now claiming that CREW had the emails as early as April and that they were so heavily redacted the FBI could not do much with them – so says the Washington Post:

Law enforcement officials said then that the e-mails did not provide enough evidence of a possible crime to warrant a full investigation. In the e-mails, Foley praises the physical attributes of one page and asks another teenager for his picture.

In subsequent days, unidentified Justice and FBI officials told reporters that the e-mails provided by CREW were heavily redacted and that the group refused to provide unedited versions to the FBI. One law enforcement official…also told The Washington Post the FBI believed that CREW may have received the e-mails as early as April and that the group refused to tell the FBI how they were obtained.

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler points us to Newsbusters where we get a little bit of much-needed perspective on this.

ABC�s World News Tonight story on [Congressman Mel] Reynolds being convicted on August 23, 1995, didn�t have any fury about how Democrats could allow this sexual predator in their caucus. For their part, ABC seemed more suffused with sadness than outrage:

Diane Sawyer, substitute anchor: “In Chicago, Congressman Mel Reynolds remains free on his own recognizance after his conviction last night of having sex with a minor. His lawyers say they’ll appeal. In the meantime, the Illinois Democrat will continue to pick up a paycheck, as ABC’s Ron Claiborne reports.”

Ron Claiborne: “In the end, it was Mel Reynolds’ own words that led to his conviction on charges of having sex with a 16-year-old girl. Jurors said the most powerful evidence against him was police tape recordings of his intimate phone conversations with Beverly Heard, now 19.”

Jeslyn Cipriani, Juror: “It was the tapes, the transcripts that we heard, Mel and Beverly talking.”

Claiborne: “At one point on the tapes, which were made with Heard’s cooperation, she and Reynolds discussed what underwear he prefers. He also uses explicit language as he talks about having sex with her and with himself. On the stand, Reynolds denied ever having sex with Heard. He insisted their conversations were only phone sex fantasies. But the jury convicted him of all 12 felony counts, including sexual abuse and sexual assault. He was also found guilty of soliciting child pornography for asking Heard for a nude photo of a 15-year-old girl; and of obstruction of justice, for trying to get Heard to recant her accusations.

“The convictions likely end Reynolds’ promising political career. He had risen from a childhood of poverty in rural Mississippi to Harvard, Oxford Rhodes scholar and to Congress.”

Can’t you just hear that Democrat Wizard of Oz, telling you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?

Well, whaddya gonna do. Thus ends the 2006 midterm elections, and we’re left not so much with answers, but with a nagging question: Do liberal ideas really work? They’ve been tried lots of times, with a pretty dismal record of success. Their big selling point is supposed to be that whether they work or not, people believe them. Well, do people, really? It doesn’t seem Democrats can even win, unless there’s a Republican scandal. They themselves appear convinced that this is the only way they’ve got a shot at peddling their fecal moon pies at the high school bake sale.

Watergate…some charismatic saxophone-playin’ ladeez-man in a couple three-way presidential races…and, yet another Republican scandal. This time, with the fingerprints of manipulation all over it. Those are the only ways you get Democrats elected on the national stage. Across a third of a century!

Whether they win or lose this round, that pattern will remain solid this year.

We just don’t want them. We’ve outgrown ’em. Even if they end up in charge of everything next year, they’re still done.

Update: Denny tells ’em to stick it.

10,000 Year Old Liberal

Via Boortz: Archeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a liberal who lived 10,000 years ago. Take a look.

Snap Out Of It

Karol at Alarming News tells Republicans that if they’re too stupefied by the Foley scandal to drag their asses to a voting booth on election day, they need to just snap the hell out of it.

She speaks for me. Get over it already, Republicans…assuming you’re as demoralized as everybody keeps telling me you are. Which, of course, I somewhat doubt.

This Is Good XXIV

This was a great sense of enjoyment to me last week, and I forgot to bookmark the site, which makes a practice of eviscerating several other quality cinematic productions besides this one, The Movie That Killed Batman.

I just love this “review.” Not only is it gratuitously harsh on the talented contributions of Mr. Schumacher, but it’s well-written too. Includes such gems as…

Bruce Wayne: Millionaire playboy who fights crime by night. Pushing forty, yet still unmarried and living all alone with a guy in his twenties. I’m not implying anything here, I’m just saying.

Alfred: Batman and Robin’s English butler. In this film, he’s dying of a Movie Illness that seriously impairs his ability to pick secure passwords.

Pamela Isley: A Greenpeace reject who gets infused with plant toxins that compel her to constantly toss out smutty one-liners. (Imagine Mae West reincarnated as a carrot.)

As an afterthought, it should be noted Schumacher’s other contribution to the Batman franchise had one (1) redeeming quality, and only one. Batman III, a.k.a. Batman Forever, had a cool car. A very cool car.

There’s a website dedicated to the Batman III car. Don’t want to lose track of it.

Harmless?

Conspiracy theories. They’re the Burma Shave signs of our times.

That they’re popping up around us like zits on a teenager’s face, is a bad thing, but the reason they’re doing so is rooted in something healthy. People understand that whatever your feelings about the war, like it or not we have a War President right now. Which means very little, really — except, where you normally have to get out of bed every morning being suspicious of your government when it’s at peace, in times like these you’re better off harboring renewed suspicions every hour on the hour.

And this calls for crisp, cool, thinking. Knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t. Ideally, relying on logic that is so solid, that someone who passionately disagrees with you on the conclusion would say “I don’t like to admit it but that makes a lot of sense.” That’s what you have to do in order to make sure our government has all the tools it needs for the unprecedented threat, and at the same time, our constitutional protections remain firm.

As a whole we are woefully unprepared for this task. McDonald’s-And-Hookers type Presidents, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tamagotchi Toys and Oprah Winfrey have left us with an intellectual toolset which, for the task that awaits us, is roughly equivalent to clear-cutting a redwood forest with a hundred spatulas. We don’t know what we’re doing. I think we know that we don’t know what we’re doing.

Poll a hundred people about their primary source for what’s going on in the world. I’m sure you’ll get back CNN and the New York Times…and say what you will about those sources, at least they try to lend an appearance to reporting news. But adminster truth serum before the questioning, and ask which news source consumes more time out of your participants’ daily lives as they collect information from that source — well, who wants to be in the kitchen grabbing a beer, or in the bathroom, when the commercial is over and John Stewart’s smiling face comes back on? He’s so funny, so glib, so witty. Nobody wants to miss a single minute of that. So most people get news from there. They don’t admit it; they think it doesn’t show; but when they start arguing about politics, it shows. Certain people, everything that comes out of their mouths, is a cliche. Some cliches are rhetorical questions. They are not met with answers, or with logical arguments about why the questions set up false choices, or why the questions are off-topic — they are met with a change-of-subject. Nobody ever digs in. Rarely does anybody actually exchange ideas with someone else.

But a conspiracy theory makes you feel like you’re doing something. Nevermind the patent absurdity of believing your government is out to kill you — and then hopping in your car Monday through Friday, going through your stupid little commute to your stupid little job. Aren’t you supposed to go underground, drive yourself paranoid and have Patrick Stewart chase you all over hell-n-gone? So really, nobody wants to do anything about the problem we have with the government lying to us — most people just want to look like they’ve identified the problem, or at least, become wise to the problem before most other folks.

Is it harmless?

I used to think so. Then I read this…

Former US Attorney General Says Prosecutors Botched McVeigh Case
Tuesday October 03, 2006 8:01am

Washington, DC (AP) – Former U-S Attorney General John Ashcroft says federal prosecutors “botched” the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Ashcroft’s claim is in a new book called “Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice” which goes on sale today.

Ashcroft criticizes prosecutors for agreeing to provide material not normally given to criminal defendants.
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Prosecutors in the case are dismissing Ashcroft’s claims. Former prosecutor Larry Mackey says the prosecution team provided unprecedented information to the defense because they wanted the public to know the government wasn’t hiding anything. [emphasis mine]

It’s not harmless.

There is a difference between a government that is transparent, and a government that is toothless and ineffectual. And like it or not, we seem to have a pattern going where whenever we ask for the first of those two, we end up getting the second. And, like it or not, part of the legitimate business of our government is to do things to incredibly evil men…things that, like Jack Nicholson said, “you don’t talk about at parties.” Our leaders start showing off how fuzzy and harmless their agencies are, and the next thing that happens, people die.

That is not to say I intend to plug my ears and go “LA LA LA LA” if & when someone provides real evidence that the Flight 77 crash was staged and there never was a plane, or that Flight 93 was hit by a missile. But I wish people wouldn’t promulgate such things just to make themselves feel important. Or to make a buck.

It’s not harmless. It’s just not.

Not Articulated Outright III

Smart people have problems with the way they think about things, sometimes, that dumb people don’t have. Believe me, I’m in a position to know.

One of the problems smart people have, is that their brains, like high-performance sports cars, fail to function at their peak when they’re just tootling along. They want to go faster. And so they become vulnerable to being “out-thought” by clever charlatans who can give them a good “nudge” off in the direction the charlatan wants them to go. If the charlatan doesn’t speak the idea he wants to sell, word-for-word, the responsibility for going off on that bunny trail is all on the smart person and not on the charlatan.

Say the word “test” ten times as fast as you can. Now, what do you put in a toaster? No, the answer isn’t “toast,” it’s BREAD. That’s an example of what I’m talking about. I give you a good push in the direction of thinking what I want you to think, but I don’t actually say it word-for-word; I leave that up to you. That you would put toast in a toaster, is an idea that makes no sense, and for me to risk my reputation by putting something into words, I need my statements to make some sense. But I can imply things all day long; silly, nonsensical things. If and when someone wants to pick up on what I’m implying, the responsibility rests on them.

So we have all these silly things, only implied, not articulated outright.

And the thing implied here, not articulated outright, is this.

President Bush is stupid, and with a friendly, Republican-controlled Congress doing his bidding, our government is doing stupid things. He’s acting on false intelligence and invading countries that aren’t a threat to us. That’s one reason we need to give Congress to the Democrats, so they can provide a check on these dumb things the President is doing. Furthermore, Republicans are a bunch of family-values hypocrites. Their ranks are loaded with perverts like Mark Foley, who sent inappropriate messages to a sixteen-year-old male page.

Republicans knew all about what was going on. Democrats didn’t. Republicans, therefore, are known to cover for a sexual predator in order to hang on to a congressional seat. If the Democrats knew about what Foley was doing, surely they would have blown this story wide open and brought him to justice. But they couldn’t do that because Republicans control Congress.

We need the Democrats to control Congress. We need their superior powers of observation, their solid connections to science, and their critical thinking skills to run a check on this Bubble Boy presidency.

It would seem this thing with Foley has been going on for at least five years….

Uh, ahem.

We got a little bit of a contradiction here. Democrats are so smart they know what’s going on…except they don’t…even when it’s been going on for years.

I think I’m starting to see why this argument isn’t being articulated outright anywhere. Instead, the voters are being led down a path, to reach the desired conclusions on their own. The question remains, did the Democrats know about this or not? Two answers are possible, and only two; either one will compromise the message that a Democrat-controlled Congress will fix much of anything; and so, I’m not holding my breath waiting for the answer.

But boy, I’d sure like to know what it is.

Memo For File XXVI

David Luban is a professor at Georgetown University. Last summer he wrote a treatise assaulting the practice of torture which, for hundreds of thousands of liberals, has showcased all the arguments about why we shouldn’t be doing it. For me, his essay showcased…uh, the pun is quite unintentional…tortured logic.

Prof. Luban set out to attack the “Ticking Time-Bomb Scenario” and to show how little it benefits us to discuss this hypothetical in evaluating torture against real-world situations. Somewhere in the literary adventure, is professorly mindset got a little sidetracked, because he made a point of drawing on real-life events that proved without a doubt the validity of the scenario. Specifically, he chose — for reasons I still don’t understand — the events surrounding Operation Bojinka, the plot to attack airliners in 1995. This was a complicated plan involving an attack on the CIA headquarters, assassinating Pope John Paul II, and detonating passenger airliners over the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Philippine police tortured Abdul Hakim Murad, the suicide pilot who was supposed to crash the plane into the CIA, for 67 days. This wasn’t waterboarding, it was lit cigarettes on the testes, and beatings. As Luban himself said, “Grisly, to be sure �- but if they hadn�t done it, thousands of innocent travelers might have died horrible deaths.”

Mmmmkay. If you want me to stop believing in the Ticking Time Bomb scenario, and you want to present a real-life episode wherein Ticking Time Bomb was real and worked just fine-and-dandy…twist my arm, professor.

But sometime after that, Luban wrote another article which appeared in the Washington Post, also seeking to disqualify the Ticking Time Bomb scenario. This time, someone must have reminded the Professor that when you’re trying to convince people it’s a sunny day outside, pointing out the water on the sidewalk and the gray clouds and the umbrellas everywhere — it’s probably not the right way to go. So, gone was any mention of Abdul Hakim Murad and Operation Bojinka. Prof. Luban carefully stuck to philosophy on this one, and stayed away from reality.

There are two torture debates going on in America today: One is about fantasy, and the other is about reality.

For viewers of TV shows such as “Commander in Chief” and “24,” the question is about ticking bombs. To find the ticking bomb, should a conscientious public servant toss the rulebook out the window and torture the terrorist who knows where the lethal device is? Many people think the answer is yes: Supreme emergencies demand exceptions to even the best rules. Others answer no: A law is a law, and a moral absolute is a moral absolute. Period. Still others try to split the difference: We won’t change the rule, but we will cross our fingers and hope that Jack Bauer, the daring counterterrorism agent on “24,” will break it. Then we will figure out whether to punish Bauer, give him a medal, or both. Finally, some insist that since torture doesn’t work — that it doesn’t actually unearth vital information — the whole hypothetical rests on a false premise. Respectable arguments can be made on all sides of this debate.

Real intelligence gathering is not a made-for-TV melodrama. It consists of acquiring countless bits of information and piecing together a mosaic. So the most urgent question has nothing to do with torture and ticking bombs. It has to do with brutal tactics that fall short — but not far short — of torture employed on a fishing expedition for morsels of information that might prove useful but usually don’t, according to people who have worked in military intelligence. After Time magazine revealed the harsh methods used at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to interrogate Mohamed Qatani, the so-called “20th hijacker,” the Pentagon replied with a memo describing the “valuable intelligence information” he had revealed. Most of it had to do with Qatani’s own past and his role in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other parts concerned al Qaeda’s modus operandi. But, conspicuously, the Pentagon has never claimed that anything Qatani revealed helped it prevent terrorist attacks, imminent or otherwise.

The real torture debate, therefore, isn’t about whether to throw out the rulebook in the exceptional emergencies. Rather, it’s about what the rulebook says about the ordinary interrogation — about whether you can shoot up Qatani with saline solution to make him urinate on himself, or threaten him with dogs in order to find out whether he ever met Osama bin Laden. And the trouble is that this second debate is so wrapped up in legalisms, jargon and half-truths that it is truly hard to unravel.

So unravel it Professor Luban does…always in a way supportive of his argument. From out of nowhere, emerges the dictum that we shouldn’t be doing this, and that if & when we do, it doesn’t work.

And this November piece effectively “Google-bombed” his name. His earlier piece, which clumsily grasped at evidence damaging to his own conclusion, was virtually buried. I haven’t been able to find it.

Until now. “LIBERALISM, TORTURE, AND THE TICKING BOMB” is a book that was excerpted in the Virginia Law Review — Vol. 91, p. 1425. Professor Luban begins to make his argument about Murad on Law Review page 1442.

But look at the example one more time. The Philippine agents were surprised he survived �- in other words, they came close to torturing him to death before he talked. And they tortured him for weeks, during which time they didn�t know about any specific al Qaeda plot. What if he too didn�t know? Or what if there had been no al Qaeda plot? Then they would have tortured him for weeks, possibly tortured him to death, for nothing. For all they knew at the time, that is exactly what they were doing. You cannot use the argument that preventing the al Qaeda attack justified the decision to torture, because at the moment the decision was made no one knew about the al Qaeda attack.

The ticking-bomb scenario cheats its way around these difficulties by stipulating that the bomb is there, ticking away, and that officials know it and know they have the man who planted it. Those conditions will seldom be met. Let us try some more realistic hypotheticals and the questions they raise:

1. The authorities know there may be a bomb plot in the offing, and they have captured a man who may know something about it, but may not. Torture him? How much? For weeks? For months? The chances are considerable that you are torturing a man with nothing to tell you. If he doesn�t talk, does that mean it�s time to stop, or time to ramp up the level of torture? How likely does it have to be that he knows something important? Fifty-fifty? Thirty-seventy? Will one out of a hundred suffice to land him on the waterboard?

2. Do you really want to make the torture decision by running the numbers? A one-percent chance of saving a thousand lives yields ten statistical lives. Does that mean that you can torture up to nine people on a one-percent chance of finding crucial information?

3. The authorities think that one out of a group of fifty captives in Guantanamo might know where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but they do not know which captive. Torture them all? That is: Do you torture forty-nine captives with nothing to tell you on the uncertain chance of capturing bin Laden?

4. For that matter, would capturing Osama bin Laden demon-strably save a single human life? The Bush administration has downplayed the importance of capturing bin Laden because American strategy has succeeded in marginalizing him. Maybe capturing him would save lives, but how certain do you have to be? Or does it not matter whether torture is intended to save human lives from a specific threat, as long as it furthers some goal in the War on Terror? This last question is especially important once we realize that the interrogation of al Qaeda suspects will almost never be employed to find out where the ticking bomb is hidden. Instead, interrogation is a more general fishing expedition for any intelligence that might be used to help “unwind” the terrorist organization. Now one might reply that al Qaeda is itself the ticking time bomb, so that unwinding the organization meets the formal conditions of the ticking-bomb hypothetical. This is equivalent to asserting that any intelligence that promotes victory in the War on Terror justifies torture, precisely because we understand that the enemy in the War on Terror aims to kill American civilians. Presumably, on this argument, Japan would have been justified in torturing American captives in World War II on the chance of finding intelligence that would help them shoot down the Enola Gay; I assume that a ticking-bomb hard-liner will not flinch from this conclusion. But at this point, we verge on declaring all military threats and adversaries that menace American civilians to be ticking bombs whose defeat justifies torture. The limitation of torture to emergency exceptions, implicit in the ticking-bomb story, now threatens to unravel, mak-ing torture a legitimate instrument of military policy. And then the question becomes inevitable: Why not torture in pursuit of any worthwhile goal?

5. Indeed, if you are willing to torture forty-nine innocent people to get information from the one who has it, why stop there? If suspects will not break under torture, why not torture their loved ones in front of them? They are no more innocent than the forty-nine you have already shown you are prepared to torture. In fact, if only the numbers matter, torturing loved ones is almost a no-brainer if you think it will work. Of course, you won�t know until you try whether torturing his child will break the suspect. But that just changes the odds; it does not alter the argument.

Luban, here, has over-thought things and he’s done it pretty badly. My beef with his argument is two-fold: First of all, he’s clinging to the twentieth-century liberal mindset that knowledge equals endorsement. Remember, the United States didn’t perform the torture on Murad, the Philippines did. Luban’s twentieth century liberal dictum says if you know something, you may continue knowing it in which case you’re endorsing any and all means invoked to learn it; or, you may un-learn what you know and proceed on the premise that the thing you know to be true, is everlastingly false and cannot be re-learned under any circumstances. There is no in-between.

Our liberals won’t let us debate this. They assert, correctly in my view, that whether or not this “game of pretend” is a worthwhile exercise, is a matter not to be left to the ballot box. To them, however, this lifts the whole matter out of the sphere of debate. That we have a moral obligation to forget things we know to be true, is a premise fit only for a monolog and never for a dialog.

Excuse me, there’s a difference between declaring a subject out of the proper realm of voting, and removing it from the arena of ideas. Seems to me, if we really become a more refined and civilized culture by playing games of pretend, this doctrine should be sufficiently durable to withstand scrutiny. I just think we should talk it over. Cop knocks on the wrong apartment door responding to a domestic call, catches you growing marijuana plants — does the law really have an obligation to pretend you’re not growing pot, when the law knows damn well that you are? Really? What if the cop walked in on you carving up your wife’s body in the bathtub?

So Luban proceeds from the premise that by using the information, the United States “lowers” itself, so to speak, to the level of the Philippine authorities who extracted the information. He doesn’t say it outright, but makes several assertions that rest on this premise.

The other problem I have, is with his drift. He asks five questions about where we should go from here. Question 1 sets up a false choice, Question 2 sets up the dubious concept of “statistical lives,” Question 3 appeals to our sensibilities to be horrified at the practice of group-torture, Question 4 calls the value of the theoretical reward into doubt, for no logical reason whatsoever. By the time he gets to Question 5 we’re beating bin Laden’s pregnant sister with a metal chair.

There’s a problem with logic drift: If it’s legitimate to take it in one direction, it’s quite alright to take it in another. Can I take this another way, in order to attack Luban’s doctrine of un-learning things? That’s how the ticking time bomb came about…the bomb is ticking away, we have a suspect, lives are at stake. Luban says, you really shouldn’t torture him because at the time, you don’t know for sure he’s the guy who planted it. Okay, what if we do know this to be the case? Luban and millions of others don’t want us to waterboard. Alrighty, so we got this guy we know planted the bomb, we can’t waterboard him…and by simple extension that means we can’t make him stand for prolonged periods of time, or deny him food. Are we then “above” the practice of, let us say, giving him lower quality food until he tells us where the bomb is? I guess we must be, so that’s out. This is all about safeguarding our principles, our way of life, our high-minded ideals.

So if all the other terrorists get to watch Amazing Race, it would be inhumane to make this guy, who knows where the bomb is, that is ticking away…sit in front of Friends reruns in solitary confinement. That would be too primitive, right?

Okay now I’m being silly. But that’s the point. Luban is engaged in multiple games of pretend here. Pretend we don’t know what Murad confessed, in a pointless virtual-protest against his treatment in another country. Again, he doesn’t say that outright but his argument rests on the dictum that that is what we should do. Pretend we can control what people think about our country, that people will stop hating us if we stop torturing, which we know damn well is not the case. Pretend that how “good” of a people we are, is some kind of moral absolute and is not subject to individual interpretations, or the day-to-day whims of people simply changing their minds, favorably or otherwise.

But most offensive of all to logic and common sense, is to simply pretend that Operation Bojinka never happened…and, somehow, cannot happen.

So no, Prof. Luban, it would seem this is emphatically not about two different torture debates, one in fantasy and one in reality. That doesn’t quite capture it. There is, instead, a “clean” debate in which our left-wing anti-war types would like to engage…a world where nobody ever tortures anybody, unless the other side does it first. And then it’s done in retaliation, never to extract information, because that never, ever works.

And then there’s the debate that recognizes if torture never works, it simply wouldn’t be done…not unless one seeks to assert that all torture is cathartic blood-lust, a personal exercise in arousal for the person doing the torturing. The latter of those two enjoys the luxury of learning from Operation Bojinka, and recognizing what took place: TORTURE WORKED. The former argument can’t afford to rely on this anecdote. It damages itself in doing this, because the anecdote proves that torture can be used to extract information, and human lives can and do depend on it.

Foley Is A (Blank)

Well, well, well. Congressman Mark Foley has had to resign, right before the midterm elections, because it has come to light that he has been asking 16-year-old boys what it feels like to jerk off into a towel. This is the guy responsible for enacting some of the sexual predator laws that, ironically, will probably be used to hang him. That makes Republicans look pretty bad. But wait, it looks like the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives has known about this for quite some time…and done very little about it. Why, that makes them look a whole lot worse.

I am led to believe, by those with a vested interest in me concluding such a thing, that those in power have something for which to attone. Well, I’m gonna go ahead and agree with that. This is sick and disgusting, and Speaker Dennis Hastert & Co. have some splainin’ to do.

Three problems with the Mark Foley situation:

1. As Patterico has nailed down, there is a significant discrepancy between what the facts tell us about what Hastert knew and when Speaker Hastert knew it…and what the High Priests Of Truthiness^TM tell us we are supposed to conclude, about what Speaker Hastert knew and when Speaker Hastert knew it.

2. The High Priests further indignantly intone to us certain beliefs we are supposed to have about Congressman Foley’s memberships in certain groups. Specifically, they demand we are to have the opinion that the “R” after Foley’s name, is all-important. His reprehensible conduct is endemic to being a Republican, and it is a reflection upon all Republicans. His homosexuality, political correctness demands we are to believe, is off topic. Try this. Go to a left-wing blog and find some comments about Foley; it’s not hard to do. Read what they have, and substitute “Republican” with “homosexual” (since Foley is both). After that pattern replacement exercise, does the result look like something liberals, or anybody else, would have the balls to say anywhere? No, I really don’t think it does. Now, common sense tells us that to believe that one of his attributes is 100% relevant, and another of his attributes is utterly irrelevant — that just isn’t gonna fly. Common sense says that. I wonder how many among us will listen.

3. Perhaps some will think I’m unfair by simply asking the question: What did the Democrats know about this and when did they know it? I’ll confess to being biased, since as I’ve said before, I don’t trust Democrats on anything. That’s a bias. All biases are not necessarily unfair, since I have reasons to think the things I think about them. And let’s face up to something here: If no Democrats, anywhere, knew anything about the Foley shenanigans prior to 9/24/06, that sets up one scenario; but if a single Democrat under the dome, anywhere…Minority Leader Pelosi, the freshest, greenest Democrat, or anyone in between those two extremes…if even a single one of them knew a single thing about this, why, that sets up a completely different scenario. Most reasonable people, whatever their prejudices, will ‘fess up to agreeing with that. This has the appearance of being an October Surprise, in its most naked, brazen form. Why is the question not being asked anywhere?

Interesting side note: This showed up in the mail from Netflix, the very night the scandal exploded. That freakin’ night. I am shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

Update: Just getting in at the end of a long, long line of other bloggers who consider it worthwhile to point you here. Macsmind wants to ask pretty much the same questions that I do…except in my case, the questions are all I have, whereas what’s presented over there is pound after pound after pound of raw, fresh, lean meat. Every single ounce of which, raises the pertinence of the questions. Responsible Americans will demand answers before figuring out who’s naughty & who’s nice…and they’ll certainly insist on them before changing leadership of our Congress.