The 18-to-24 Bracket

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2006-08-30T21:10:00.001-04:00

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Karl Rove's Doomsday Device

2006-08-30T11:57:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

With the midterm elections approaching, Republican strategists are busily searching for a way to avert disaster in the 70-some days remaining. Obviously, anything to do with terrorism helps: The foiling of the British airline plot brought President Bush’s approval ratings, uninvolved as he was, to a six-week high. Painting Democrats as cutting-and-running cowards has been a perennial fallback, as has the specter of Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading a frivolous impeachment investigation.

But while these tried-and-true tropes may yet win the battle of ideas, Republicans also know that nothing confers an advantage like procedural skullduggery. Tom Delay’s off-year redistricting in Texas ousted four Democratic congressmen and helped turn the state’s congressional delegation from 17-15 Democrat to 21-11 Republican. In Ohio, Republicans managed to put a referendum banning gay marriage on the 2004 ballot, ramping up evangelical turnout and securing a crucial state for President Bush. And in the Senate, the Republican “nuclear option” would have lowered the bar for conservative judges’ confirmation to a one-vote margin.

In each case, Republicans were acting within the rules; even Delay’s questionable redistricting plan was upheld by the Supreme Court. So railing against the GOP’s “dirty tricks” is clearly counterproductive; we ought just to be aware that convincing your fellow lawmakers to change the rules in your favor is often a lot easier than convincing your constituents you’re right. With that in mind, we liberals need to work on our skills of anticipation, because acting sooner always beats whining later.

Thus it is that I direct your attention to the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States, approved by Congress on March 1, 1845. Remember that Texas, for nine years after defeating Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto, officially existed as an independent republic. Annexation took so long, in part, because of the difficulty of the slavery issue: Adding another slave state, and such a large one, would upset the Union’s balance. And so annexation had to wait until Congress agreed on the following compromise:

New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas and having sufficient population, may, hereafter by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the Federal Constitution; and such states as may be formed out of the territory lying south of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude, commonly known as the Missouri Compromise Line, shall be admitted into the Union, with or without slavery, as the people of each state, asking admission shall desire; and in such State or States as shall be formed out of said territory, north of said Missouri Compromise Line, slavery, or involuntary servitude (except for crime) shall be prohibited.

Though the rationale for the state-splitting compromise has disappeared, the Joint Resolution remains, to my knowledge, the State of Texas’s founding document. Thus, Texans can still choose at any time to balkanize themselves.

Of course, the four prospective new states would still have to be admitted to the Union “under the provisions of the Federal Constitution”; and here the relevant passage is Article IV, Section 3:

New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.

Therefore, with the approval of the state legislature and both houses of Congress, Texas can at any time resolve itself into five states, each with their own congressional representation.

Representation in the House and the Electoral College, both of which are linked to population, would most likely remain unchanged. But, crucially, a breakup would enable Texans to increase their number of Senators from two to 10—the current two plus two each for four new states. And it goes without saying that this instant eight-seat pickup would be almost entirely Republican.

Would the necessary resolutions pass? It seems likely—a breakup is in the interest of every party involved. True, the state of Texas would lose some biggest-state-in-the-continental-US and whole-other-country cachet, but a five-fold increase in power on the national stage would easily compensate. And for congressional Republicans, the vote would be a no-brainer—a vote to place themselves in a permanent majority. With the rewards so rich, any Republican holdouts could easily be characterized as traitors to their party’s best interests.

Not even the most optimistic forecasts show Democrats winning back the Senate by more than one or two seats in November. The prospect of eight more Republicans (who would presumably take office in a series of rolling special elections over the next two or three cycles) would put the chamber out of play for the foreseeable future and place Democrats at a severe strategic disadvantage, forced to win every tight race in perpetuity just to stay competitive. And the guaranteed Republican majority would keep the original state-splitting resolution from being repealed any time soon.

But the GOP must act now. As the polls now stand, Republicans have only until the current Congress expires to get the ball rolling while they are still in the majority. If the political forecast doesn’t change drastically, and very soon, look for Karl Rove to reveal his Doomsday Device within the next month. And remember that you read it here first.

The Mortal Threat

2006-08-28T21:11:00.000-04:00

by Andrew Nowobilski

E(C) = P(C) * C

Expected cost of an attack equals probability of the costly incident occurring multiplied by the cost of the incident. This equation explains Vice President Dick Cheney‘s 1 percent doctrine. The 1 percent doctrine, as elucidated by Ron Suskind in The One-Percent Doctrine, is Cheney’s view that ''if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction… the United States must now act as if it were a certainty” (see New York Times June 20 review by Michiko Kakutani). OK, so that’s not quite correct Mr. Cheney. But critics can chortle all they want; Cheney’s instincts are right, and disturbingly so.

Assume the American electorate will tolerate only a certain expected cost in terms of terrorist attacks. This desire is approximately rational and consonant with preserving “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So E(C) is more or less fixed,. Now over the last fifty years C, or cost per incident, has risen meteorically. This is due to the explosion of high-yield, advanced weapons technology, mass production techniques that have made said technology widely available on the black market, and constantly progressing miniaturization techniques.

Therefore, in order to keep E(C) fixed, the government must somehow suppress P(C). Cheney’s argument that the government “must act as if there’s a 100 percent chance” is simply his admittedly awkward way of saying that the government must take threats seriously and suppress P(C). Enter the War on Terror, with its NSA wiretaps, the Patriot Act, and the Department of Homeland Security.

It is a foregone conclusion that in this situation that at least some liberty will be sacrificed for the sake of life and freedom from the tyranny of Islamo-fascists. If a people foresees the terrorist threat, advance action will minimize the terrorist threat, and increase, at least partially, the threat posed by government. Option two is that a people does not foresee the threat, or does and chooses to ignore it. Assuming the threat is real, an attack will eventually occur, and people will panic, rushing headlong into their chains. Illiberalism is therefore more or less a natural equilibrium and not a choice. Either way, as C increases, P(C) will fall, which means that - for a time at least - liberty will be restrained by popular will.

This problem is only going to get worse. Terrorism is fundamentally driven by technology. Without it, terrorism cannot exist. A pike man, a swordsman--even a gangster armed with a Tommy gun--cannot pose a serious enough threat to transform the geopolitical landscape. But with technology comes miniaturized nukes, ever-more sophisticated and deadly biological and chemical weapons, and plenty of ways of coordinating individuals over vast distances. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman outlines how technology and globalization create “Super Empowered Angry Men,” individuals who can play the same game as nations because technology “empowers” them. In X-Men 3, the US President asks his secretary of mutant affairs how democracy can persist when a single man can pose a mortal threat to the entire society on a whim. Terrorists are these Super Empowered Angry Men; they are Dark Phoenix. As Thomas Friedman notes, a “[nuclear] warhead exploding 300 miles above Omaha would instantly zap the United States from coast to coast,” melting down every computer and circuit in the country.

So what happens as technology advances further and further? What happens as miniaturization makes nuclear materials smaller and more transportable? What happens as genetic science and cloning leads to the re-invention or modification of deadly pathogens, present and past? Scientists have already brought the deadly Spanish flu back from extinction, and in the grand scheme of things genetic science is still in its early stages. In 1900 everyone rode around in horses and buggies; just think of where we will be in 2100 relative to today.

We cannot avoid the march of technological advancement. The choice between liberty and security is not before us because of some crafty, secretly-autocratic Republicans. Technology has irrevocably transformed the strategic landscape by super-empowering the individual. This cannot be reversed any more than we can un-invent the nuclear bomb.

Let’s say we fail to quash terrorism. C will rise. Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine will be replaced with 0.1 percent, or 0.01 percent doctrines. As the damage dealt by a single attack increases, the probability of attack that is tolerable decreases. As this happens civil liberties will give way. The real problem is that if we do not suppress terrorism sufficiently, if we do not decrease P(C) by decreasing the supply of terrorists, someday (far in the future perhaps, but some day) P(C) will have to plummet, and a revoking civil liberties will be the only option. Then something horrible will happen, much worse than public panic: The authoritarians will be right.

If that is a sobering thought, then let us recommit ourselves to the proposition that the only acceptable victory in this War on Terror is a total one. Whether by co-opting angry young Muslims into a capitalist economy, or by spreading democracy, or by simply hunting down Osama and his ilk, we must prevail. Whether we will is another matter entirely.

EDITOR'S CONTRIBUTON: Yet Another Danger of Polls

2006-08-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

Some politicians like to avoid risk by heeding the advice of polls. But evidence keeps suggesting that the real risk may lie in following them too closely.

Take a look at this result in “The Arkansas Poll,” administered in 2005 by political scientists Janine A. Parry and Bill Schreckhise at the University of Arkansas. The question is:

Do you approve or disapprove of a law that would prohibit Arkansas textbooks from defining marriage as anything other than a relationship between one man and one woman?

(In case you were unable or unwilling to follow that, “approve” is basically pro-gay marriage, and “disapprove” is basically anti-gay marriage.)

“The Arkansas Poll” broke down the results by “all respondents,” “evangelicals/‘born agains,’” “weekly [or more] churchgoers,” “[people who] know a gay or lesbian person,” and “[people who have a] somewhat/very unfavorable view of gays/lesbians.” From common sense, you might expect evangelicals to feel less favorably about teaching about alternative marriage, and you might expect people who know a gay or lesbian person to feel more favorably.

You would be wrong.

According to the poll, 81 percent of evangelicals/“born agains” take the essentially pro-gay view, along with 83 percent of people who have a somewhat/very unfavorable view of gays/lesbians. Specifically, the vast majority of evangelicals and anti-gays think Arkansas textbook writers should be free to define marriage as something other than a relationship between one man and one woman. This is far greater than the 70 percent of all respondents who feel this way.

This is a preposterous result. And it gets worse. Among those people who know a gay or lesbian person, a mere 68 percent approve of the law. According to the poll, people who personally know gays are less likely than people in any other group to support the teaching of alternative marriage.

Something is obviously amiss. The people of Arkansas are generally intelligent, thoughtful about gay issues, and honest, so that leaves two possibilities. Maybe evangelicals and anti-gay people actually favor gay marriage at unusually high rates, and people who know gays are more likely to oppose gay marriage. Or maybe the poll is misleading.

Let’s give the first explanation a fair shake, however unlikely it sounds. After all, if all we needed were our preconceptions, polls would be superfluous. So let us take a look at the answers voiced by various groups in the same University of Arkansas poll (broadly, a higher percentage signifies pro-gay attitudes):

Forty-six percent of evangelicals, 38 percent of anti-gays, and 67 percent of people who know a gay or lesbian person approve of gays in the military.
Sixty-five percent of evangelicals, 61 percent of anti-gays, and 76 percent of people who know a gay or lesbian person approve of gay adoption.
Twenty-two percent of evangelicals, 14 percent of anti-gays, and 31 percent of people who know a gay or lesbian person would ban discrimination against gays in the workplace.
Thirty-nine percent of evangelicals, 33 percent of anti-gays, and 51 percent of people who know a gay or lesbian person would permit gay foster parents.

Clearly, evangelicals and anti-gay people in Arkansas are consistently more opposed to gay rights than people who personally have gay acquaintances—just like our intuition tells us. So on the question of defining marriage in textbooks, the poll’s result is just plain wrong. The results on this particular question probably need to be reversed to reflect the true feelings of Arkansans. The poll question was flat misleading, to the point that it actually produced an opposite result.

(The poll’s lead researcher, Janine A. Parry, acknowledged in an email message that respondents did, indeed, have difficulty answering the question. “In fact,” she wrote, “we dropped those results from our academic analyses because people clearly misunderstood our meaning.”)

All this would be unfortunate but acceptable, of course, were the question not about a hot-button issue in a credible major university poll. A newspaper, politician, or researcher could selectively pull misleading data from the poll and present an entirely justified, entirely inaccurate result to the public or policymakers.

For example, anti-gay forces could use the misleading poll result to essentially say, “People who personally know gays oppose gay rights even more than the average Arkansan. You think gays are bad now—just wait until you meet one!” Or, pro-gay forces could say, “Even people who don’t like gays think it’s fine to teach kids about alternative marriages!” No one, on either side, wants such a ridiculous manipulation of facts. Using such invalid “results” could lead to the warping of voting patterns, legislative or referential agendas, or executive agendas for politicians who read too deeply into polls and not their own hearts.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this case. One, poll questions should be more clearly written so as to obtain more accurate answers. Two, politicians’ worship of polls represents a serious peril. Even when questions are phrased straightforwardly, results are not always what they appear to be. It is best for politicians to be true to their principles, express them clearly to the people, and let the polls take place where they belong: at the ballot box, where everyone has a voice in a vote.

Do you not approve of a ban on disallowing polls to unduly influence politicians from their course, with the expectation that they will heed them to the ignorance of the possibility that they may present misleading information?

My answer: Yes.

Ali G, Reactionary

2006-08-23T08:11:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

“So how come if a guy steal me wallet he go to jail, but if he steal me girlfriend he don’t?”

“Well, your wallet is your property, and your girlfriend is not.”

The problem with being interviewed by Ali G is that there’s really no right answer. If you’re some sort of world leader and the man sitting across from you is a highly intelligent comic playing a buffoon in a yellow tracksuit, you can profess incredulity, try to maintain your dignity, or hope that if you just laugh at him, he’ll vanish like some Germanic hobgoblin. But really, you lost as soon as your press agent signed you up for the interview.

It turns out that none of the interviewees I watched on the Compleet First Seazon DVD did too badly. Former Attorney General Richard Thornborough, who’s quoted above, did an excellent job of remaining calm and providing a sound legal definition of property. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was smiling and relaxed. Even Newt Gingrich managed not to say anything too fatuous. Comedy-wise, it was a bit of a disappointment. But each subject becomes a mockery through the mere act of dignifying Ali G with his presence.

So even if nothing funny happens, the joke on the mark remains, and the mark is presumed to not get it. He has to not get it. As long as that holds, we have the possibility of subversion; without it, we just have a lousy interview.

These two levels—both the intrinsic humor, and the necessity of excluding someone who doesn’t get it—seem to me to define a kind of bifurcated style that’s really popular lately. Think The Daily Show, with straight-faced reporters coaxing stupidity from the self-important. Think Stephen Colbert, Dog Bites Man, Tom Green, The Onion, or Ali G himself. Half the joke is that someone doesn’t get the joke—or at least the possibility that that someone might exist.

The tradition of the fake interview actually goes back a long way. We could trace it all the way to Socratic irony—the philosopher feigning ignorance to expose the ignorance of everyone else. We get the fullest exposition in Plato’s Apology: When Socrates heard the Oracle say that no man is wiser than he:

I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of this riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great….After a long consideration, I at last thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, “Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.” Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

Take that at face value, and Socrates is on a pious mission to prove his own inadequacy. But read between the lines as so many have done, and you see an extremely intelligent man humiliating his mark and then claiming the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Then as now, the target of choice is a politician.

In its most constructive form, Socratic irony is extremely useful; then, the ignorance isn’t really a pose at all, but mixed with actual humility. In that case, both parties can move toward the truth in dialogue, with what Montaigne called “a healthy ignorance.” At the very least, fake buffoonery is wonderful for exposing buried truths, and that’s the end our modern comic interviewers pursue when they’re at their best. I will always be in sincere awe of “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” The trouble is that the useful kind of Socratic irony is also the really hard kind, and therefore the really rare kind.

What we’re left with is mostly Socrates Lite. There’s still a mark—the idiot who takes the Onion article seriously, the conservative blog that approvingly quotes Stephen Colbert, the politician who sits through an Ali G interview with a straight face—but there’s nothing intrinsic to criticize about him. In most cases, the mark’s only failing is failing to get the joke, and so the mockery is sterile—it only amounts to “Why aren’t you on our rarefied, subtle plane of humor?” The point of Socrates Lite isn’t truth-telling or truth-finding, but merely the construction of a particularly facile in-group. Those Who Get It can be 99 percent of the viewing public—especially when shows like The Colbert Report are explicitly advertised as comedy—but as long as they can confirm the existence of at least one moron, they can consider themselves the elect. This pleasure of election is, I think, the chief attraction of Socrates Lite.

Which points to its biggest political problem. In practice, the Colbert/Daily Show/Ali G style can belong to any side. But in theory it will always carry the whiff of liberalism, because its target is an elite that has to be conceived as entrenched and out-of-touch. As Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G, puts it, “It depends on the class….The best targets—the legitimate targets—are successful, powerful white men, who rule the country.” There’s nothing wrong with that, or with liberal humor in general—comedy has always poked holes in elites, and for good reason.

But the kind of comedy practiced by Baron Cohen manufactures its own elitism. As I’ve said, the point is excluding someone who fails to get the joke. And there we have our new elite—based not on political power, but on mere joke-perception. Instead of forcing the audience to do something about the elite he considers corrupt, to make good on the liberalism he professes, the comic simply provides the satisfaction of swapping places. And in building new unmerited elites instead of tearing them down altogether, Socrates Lite internalizes exactly what it aims to mock.

Booyakasha?

P.S. On a mostly unrelated note, I can’t miss the chance to further disseminate a wonderful video. Pause it at 0:12 and 1:18. Recognize our friend on the right, in the Confederate uniform and fake mustache?

Three Cheers for the UN

2006-08-21T10:52:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Nowobilski

The United Nations cease-fire resolution between Lebanon and Israel is perfection incarnate. It compels Lebanon to establish control over Hezbollah soil. It orders the disarmament of Hezbollah. It cuts off Hezbollah’s arms supplies. And it beefs up Lebanese and international security forces to get the job done, all while limiting the loss of human life. What better monument is there to wisdom, temperance, and justice for all?

Yes, the UN resolution is a masterful victory in the War on Terror. If it is enforced.

A perfect agreement, which assiduously considers all the angles, piling stipulation upon stipulation, devoting its every element to prudence and virtue, means nothing if it is not enforced. And it won’t be. Why? The UN is not temperamentally or politically equipped to engage in offensive maneuvers, bloody guerilla warfare, or any conflict that might result in significant civilian casualties (which is to say, all of them).

But isn’t the UN’s mission primarily defensive? Well, at the moment yes. But all Hezbollah has to do to change the strategic landscape is simply to refuse to disarm. Then the UN will either give up its mission, or it will have to root out Hezbollah by force, against which Hezbollah would of course retaliate. If the hard-nosed Israelis had trouble enough with this sort of asymmetric warfare, is there any hope at all for the boys in blue? Clearly not. Hezbollah can therefore completely eviscerate the mortal threat posed to it by the resolution if only it has the will to fight. And will is something its fighters do not lack. This agreement is like a water bucket. One hole is enough to drain the whole thing. And this is a big hole.

Pundits will prevaricate. They will talk about incremental gains here and there from the resolution, even after Hezbollah refuses disarmament. But the very fact that the pundits’ approval requires so many qualifiers shows the cease fire is a bum deal. The only acceptable victory against the terrorists is a complete one. The sole question we need to ask is whether the UN and the Lebanese can rapidly and--if need be--forcefully disarm Hezbollah. If the answer is anything less than an unqualified “yes,” the deal represents an unacceptable deviation from the clarity required by the War on Terror.

We have not failed because diplomacy is useless. Seeking total victory against terrorists is in no way incompatible with diplomacy with states. Diplomacy used in conjunction with the threat of force is a good thing. So too is cooperation. There is nothing wrong with offering Lebanon a partnership in enforcing its own sovereignty. In fact, turning states against their resident terrorists and working with those states may be the only way to make this conflict tractable. That’s why a cease fire presented such an opportunity, if only it was proctored by a serious alliance instead of a utopian (dystopian?) bureaucracy.

If quasi-failed states like Lebanon could be made to police their own territories and expel terrorists from them with the cooperation of international forces, the War on Terror would become manageable. If the threat of unacceptable consequences for failure to prosecute terrorists forces a failed or rogue state to start regulating itself, then that state can be used as a lever against the terrorists. This strategy would fold the war into a more symmetrical framework by subsuming terrorism under the sovereignty of a state. A war against a state is a definite thing. It is not an infinite war fought against 10,000 evil, unknown, technologically-empowered armies of one. We know how to impose costs and benefits on states. They have an address. It requires vigilance; it can still get ugly; it requires a mix of both force and realistic diplomacy. But it is workable. As it stands, however, the US, the Israelis, and a handful of fellow travelers can only play Whack-a-Mole digging endlessly multiplying suicide bombers out of their foxholes. If war is hell, this type of asymmetric warfare is the seventh circle.

World leaders had a chance to test a new strategy. The choice to use the anemic UN instead of a robust military alliance has utterly thrown this opportunity away. Diplomacy is not at fault. Diplomacy is an essential asset. Rather, we have failed only because some people think that diplomacy means the UN. It doesn’t. Western leaders could have found a way to make the War on Terror tractable, to cooperate humanely with Lebanon, and to maintain the moral imperative of accepting only total victory against terrorist organizations. But they gave it up because they’d rather feed a foolish utopian fetish for a chimerical “world community“ than engage in serious strategic analysis.

The UN has become not just morally repugnant by positioning despots and democrats as equals. It is not just bureaucratic and weak. It has become dangerous. Governments seek its corrupt moral approval and shrink from a just doctrine that demands both clarity and total victory. We have had enough false starts in this War on Terror. Time is running out. Next time, Hezbollah’s rockets might just have nuclear tips.

When Opportunity Knocks

2006-08-18T05:21:00.000-04:00

By Jimmy Soni

Last week’s uncovering of a plot to down British airliners thrust terrorism and security issues back into the forefront of the American consciousness. To be sure, terrorism hadn’t strayed far, but its place at the top of the order was stealthily wedged out by a summer of high gas prices, intense heat, and Al Gore’s cinematic flair. Now, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, security concerns are sure to play a much more central role in the midterm elections, challenging both parties to critically examine where they are and where they are going in keeping America safe.

After a series of setbacks, the President is on the defensive. Despite an uptick in the polls for Republicans after the British arrests, the President’s job approval has not gained similar ground. Earlier this week, he lost a crucial fight when a federal judge ruled unconstitutional the National Security Administration’s selective wiretapping of international communications of Americans. Republican Representative Jo Ann Davis of Virginia unexpectedly broke ranks and called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, a reflection, perhaps, of waning White House control over the party’s rank-and-file. The Republicans—traditionally disciplined, in sync, on message—cannot afford these kinds of outbursts with the election less than two months away.

Perhaps the most disturbing news for the majority party came from a recent Pew poll surveying “security moms”—married women with children—in Ohio. The Democrats appear to have dislodged this group of swing voters from their Republican loyalties, a coup considering that this cohort supported Republicans 53-36 in 2002 and the President with 56% in 2004. In a crucial swing state, and one where Democrats have gone almost a decade without winning a statewide office, the Democratic candidate for governor leads by 20 points. Not only does this sea change leave vulnerable Republican Senator Mike DeWine reeling, but it suggests that the Republican strategy of rolling out summer votes on divisive cultural issues might have been blunted by security concerns.

The link between these unhappy mothers and uneasy Congressional representatives is Iraq. The decision by the President to marry the war in Iraq with the broader security of the United States appears now to have been a Faustian bargain, with Republicans facing criticism in an area that usually serves as their electoral anchor. With no end in sight and violence aplenty, the war will continue to be dead weight and will only cause more dissension. Mavericks will be forced to separate the war from security--an impossible trick if you ask any Democrat.

The Republicans unsure footing offers Democrats a rare opportunity to take charge. One emerging problem is how to turn these recent Republican setbacks into Democratic gains for the midterm elections, without sacrificing coherence and vision for the all-important 2008 Presidential campaign. Democrats remember all too vividly the sting of ‘voting for it, before voting against it,’ and the party ought to be careful not to make the same lethal mistake. One strategy might be to avoid tearing the party threadbare over Iraq and focusing on a platform that tackles forgotten security issues.

We have some inkling of such a strategy in Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel’s recently released “The Plan: Big Ideas for America.” Ignoring for a moment that the title lacks the brevity and clarity of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Emanuel’s “Plan” does challenge the United States to substantially increase the size of its armed forces and reexamine the labyrinthine Department of Homeland Security. But here’s the rub: Emanuel also proposes three months of compulsory disaster training for all 18-to-25-year-olds. It’s a fool’s errand, and comes at a time when Americans aren’t too keen on government projects laden with inefficiency (airport security), incompetence (Iraq), and inadequacy (energy policy).

In a matter of weeks, the country will pause to reflect on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. If we are to expect our elected officials to find real solutions to very real problems—port security, outdated intelligence systems, or loose nuclear weapons, for example—then we must demand it of them at the ballot box. The foiled British plot is a stark reminder that the threat of terrorism is ever-present, and solutions will require more than disaster training or disastrous conflicts.

Killing an Arab

2006-08-16T04:46:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

“US President George W. Bush quoted French existential writer Albert Camus to European leaders a year and a half ago, and now he’s read one of his most famous works: The Stranger. White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer’s 1946 novel—in English.”

-AFP, August 11

It’s been seven years since I myself read L’Étranger, and in that time I’ve forgotten most everything about it, except that the climax had something to do with an Arab. I tracked down a copy yesterday at the local university library, and what I found refreshed my memory entirely; I hope you won’t mind if I quote at length (not least because more Camus and less Goodman is probably a good thing):

It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back. I took some steps toward the stream. The Arab didn’t move. Perhaps because of the shadow on his face, he seemed to be grinning at me. I waited….And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight. A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less directly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

And that is how the hero Meursault kills an Arab, a crime for which he is eventually executed. Now, I’m not the first one to raise questions about this odd choice of summer reading; Slate’s John Dickerson does so here. But there are two things still undone.

First, no one has, to my knowledge, read the President’s choice of literature as a direct signal. But what else could it be? We know that there’s no such thing as private beach reading for a president—our public figures live lives as deliberately scripted as any Sun King. We also know that President Bush in particular has made a habit of advertising his reading list for political purposes. In this 2004 photo, Bush ostentatiously carries down the path to Marine One Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Pro-war historian Victor Davis Hanson has also been invited to the White House on the strength of his book Carnage and Culture and his opinion writing for National Review.

Given this ongoing ideological Reading Rainbow, it would be a fair deduction that President Bush announces his reading when he has a distinct message to send. Indeed, the announcement alone should tip us off—in what other field besides politics is your private recreation anyone else’s business? (“…and Friday’s lunch will be fish sticks with corn and a fruit cup. Finally, Mr. Goodman would like you to know that he is reading 120 Days of Sodom. Have a super weekend.”)

So—what message? Well, I suppose President Bush could have been trying to make nice with the French and demonstrate a little intellectual heft. But for that, he could have chosen anyone from Rabelais to Houellebecq —we need a more specific explanation. And I can’t help wondering if there’s a certain identification between Camus’s protagonist and a leader connected to (I won’t use that agitprop word, “responsible”) the deaths of so many Arabs.

The second thing that no one’s done on this question is attempt a close reading of Camus’s key passage; let’s do that, and as we do, let’s imagine that the words are spoken by George Bush; that it’s our President, perhaps in swim trunks, standing on the crowded French beach as the heat from the sun bores into his head.

First, the physical setting. The existentialist hero is deeply out of place, even in so ordinary a setting as a beach on the weekend. “The whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back”—the environs almost attack our speaker. “Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded”—the alien scene provokes a sympathetic reaction in his own body, tears of pain and frustration. He ceases to distinguish between the light from the sun and the direct threat of the light glinting from the Arab’s knife. And then, a cataclysm: “A fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift”—and Meursault/Bush pulls the trigger. What we have is a picture of paranoia and alienation—of a man so ill at ease in his own skin that he could easily crawl out of it. And if we posit an analogy between the stage on which Meursault acts and the stage on which Bush acts, we sense a man, and a President, distinctly pained by his place in the world. Indeed—imagine that Bush’s world of press conferences, G-8 meetings, and campaign stops is analogous to Meursault’s beach, and we have a clear explanation for the President’s consummately awkward public behavior, from the frequent inability to successfully complete a sentence, to the gait that many dismiss as a cowboy’s strut, but which I see as the carriage of a man in chronic internal pain. Meursault chose a day at the beach; Bush chose to run for national office. But neither suspected that the fruit would turn to ashes in his mouth. In fact, it seems not to be hatred of the Arab, or impulsiveness, or anger, that makes Meursault/Bush pull the trigger, but rather the pain emanating from the environment itself, the existential trauma of being-in-the-world—

Second, the Arab. We note that he doesn’t speak a word, and we note that he is nameless. Is this how the Arab world looks to our President—inscrutable, teeming with unspoken menace? We also note that the Arab does very little to provoke the crime. He grins, or seems to grin, possibly bespeaking a hidden knowledge our speaker lacks. He brandishes a knife, but he doesn’t use it, or advance with it—rather it’s the glint of light from the knife, the intimation of being attacked, that provokes Meursault/Bush. Is it, then, a preemptive strike? We only see that the speaker is conscious of the nerves in his body, and his grip on the stock, and the jerk of the underbelly of the butt, and the whipcrack sound of the pistol’s report, and of more light from the sun, and even of the body he’s fired into, but never even really of the Arab that he’s murdered. The killed man doesn’t get a word or a thought? Is this how it feels to kill from a distance, with a button, by an order, from a room filled with maps? The Arab, the Arabs, only lies there, mute and victimized—

Third, the act. Finally, we find that the Arab isn’t even the victim at all. “I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace.” We don’t even see the Arab die. Impervious in life, impervious in death. Instead, the very act of preemptive war rebounds most on the preemptor. The gunshot isn’t the act that ends the Arab’s life, or does anything to change the balance of power on the beach/world stage—rather the gunshot is “the loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.” Meursault/Bush does and un-does at the same time; it’s as if the thoughtless act of violence is an accidental suicide. And if being on the beach/being President was tough, it’s now instantly transmuted into nostalgia: “I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy.” The attentive reader replies—“What balance? What calm?" But the slow-dawning torment of this suicide-by-aggression is such that our speaker would gladly trade it back for the sting of the brine, and the glint of the silently threatening knife, and the sun beating down mercilessly—

So what does this all mean for George W. Bush? What is he pondering tonight in Crawford? Is it his delight in a hero who so thoroughly dehumanizes an Arab? Is it transference of his fears and his passions to a figure from literature? Is it identification with the tormented speaker and his unprovoked violence? Is he working out a secret guilt he can never speak? I can’t tell you; I wouldn’t presume to go any further.

But mark my words, George Bush read the book, and George Bush told us he read the book, and George Bush is trying to tell us something. That something can’t be said aloud, because it’s so often a leader of men has to speak in code to us. But at least we all see this: the pathos of a man who can never let go of his heart and speak to us true, but can only talk in signs, in signals, in passages scraped here and there from existentialist literature, in semaphores, in ciphers…

Downloading Democracy

2006-08-14T13:45:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Nowobilski

Aristotle’s assumption that democracy is essentially rule by mob is the cause of many a furrowed brow among present-day scholars. What an anti-democratic Neanderthal! sneers Modern Man. I suppose one can’t expect much from a slavery lover. But perhaps the enlightened egalitarians are too quick in using the unjustifiable latter opinion to disqualify the former from serious consideration. Democracy has some big problems. Aristotle was onto something; a one-year anniversary postmortem on the President’s campaign to reform Social Security proves it.

The Republicans never had a very serious plan. Given that they had sold themselves electorally on the mantra of lower taxes at any cost they couldn’t very well propose higher payroll “contributions” to fund the transition to personal accounts. But any credible savings program cannot generate more deficits now. Some compromise of cutting expenditures and raising taxes would be needed to launch a reform program. But compromising on taxes is anathema to one of the central pillars of Bush‘s political success. Republicans therefore reaped the bitter harvest of the indulgent expectations they had sewn; so constrained by their own promises, they could not even formulate a rational plan.

But the Democrats shouldn’t be too self-satisfied about foiling the President. Whether or not President Bush’s reform was the right one, the Medicare and Social Security financial numbers dictate that tough entitlement reform will be necessary, and it will hurt. The Democrats’ victory was too easy. It demonstrated all too clearly the immense political power of AARP and other seniors’ advocacy organizations. The so-called gray lobby wields veto authority over any far-sighted reform. It is swollen into a political monster that no other faction can match. And it is acutely sensitive to opportunistic accusations of nefarious plans to put seniors on a cat food diet. Democrats gave those fears free rein last time around. They promised painless solutions. They strengthened the forces that favor the unsustainable status quo. But whenever the Democrats regain Congress they will no longer have the good fortune of being able to simply needle everything the Republicans do. They will actually have to, you know, govern, and that means they will have to reign in grandpa Frankenstein. Frankie may not appreciate it.

Beneath the surface paternalism of the classicist’s skepticism of democracy resides a clarifying frankness. A democracy qua democracy contends only that society should be ruled at the total discretion of the will of the majority of the people. Combine that with the human impulse to reward oneself with goodies bought on someone else‘s tab, and democracy is like Napster for loot. Only instead of pimply-faced teenagers downloading songs without paying for them, the Joneses download beefier Social Security benefits and more generous Medicare services purchased with other people‘s checkbooks… or on their children’s backs.

Like music piracy, democratic pillaging is difficult to stop once begun. Just look across the pond. The French cannot institute even modest reform of their hiring laws for fear of retaliation by violent gangs. Every faction, from plumbers to prostitutes, has an unshakable sense of entitlement to its special advantages. People have been permitted, even encouraged, to download property and privilege for free, and the result is as unstoppable as Internet piracy. Like old-school Napster, democracy’s “product” is “free,” its acquisition impersonal, its use socially acceptable. It is demanded by everyone.

Madison recommended that factions be kept weak and competitive, so that they cancel each other out to the public benefit. But Madison’s Big Idea works only under a liberal order that places strict limitations on the resources and uses of government. The erosion of that order has given rise to the delusion that no tradeoffs are necessary. The tax cutters can get what they want, and so can the gray-haired robber barons over at AARP. Ask the Democratic Man what he’s doing to plug the future funding gaps in Medicare and Social Security, and he’ll just laugh at you and keep on downloading. Why not download some nice Medicare drug benefits? Sure, it may add trillions to our unfunded liabilities within a stone’s throw of the demographic tsunami, but who cares? It’s someone else’s problem.

The problem isn’t the demand for retirement income or medical care, any more than the problem with old-school Napster was that its denizens liked a lot of music. Newspaper headlines screaming about rising medical costs don’t consider that most of the cost creep derives directly from demand for life-enhancing quality improvements. The problem is that with the current entitlement system, like Napster, there is absolutely no correspondence between personal benefit and personal sacrifice. There is no feedback information about costs. And unfortunately, the economy has a lot less wealth than the World Wide Web does bandwidth. With everyone trying to download at once, the system will sooner or later slow to a crawl.

I hope Aristotle was wrong to criticize democracies so harshly. But if the US doesn’t temper its democratic zeal with a healthy dose of liberal restraint, in twenty years it will be exactly where much of Europe is now, with spoiled, ungovernable voters--with a mob. The Democrats had better enjoy the one-year anniversary of the quiet death of Bush’s plan while they can. The Gray Dawn nears. And Frankie’s a bit of an early riser.

EDITOR'S CONTRIBUTION: Shamelessly Exploiting Philanthropy

2006-08-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

The huge boom in private philanthropy has given the world’s unfortunate the opportunity to attain a better life.

It has also given government a whopping excuse.

As foundations ramp up their splendid work, the federal government should not recede from its responsibilities to Americans and people all over the world. The government should persist with its schedule of domestic programs and foreign aid regardless of private donations, and let the foundations mete out additional funds to urgent projects and underfunded areas.

The Bush administration has recently taken the position that if the private sector is committing money to a cause, the government has a green light to withdraw support. For example, The New York Times reported Aug. 13 that the administration’s fiscal year 2007 budget eliminates a $93.5 million program to underwrite the development of smaller schools, citing the increase in support for those schools from “nonfederal funds” from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

This is clearly wrongheaded. If the Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation commit significant new funds to smaller schools, it is because they have deemed the development of such schools to be a high-need area—even with the existing $93.5 million federal commitment. For the Bush administration to withdraw that money leaves an already vulnerable area further exposed and increases the burden on foundations. It essentially creates more of a need where one already exists; it is the equivalent of dropping a drowning person back in the water because someone else has come over to help.

The government is abandoning its responsibilities to Americans and the world, using private philanthropy as an excuse. This should not be tolerated. The private sector should be free to operate according to need and the desires of donors, not forced to fill in the gaps of an increasingly deadbeat government.

Ironically, despite the Bush administration’s constant rhetoric about free enterprise in philanthropy, it has actually bound private organizations to the whims of government to a degree never before seen in American history. By stripping federal dollars from certain causes—with the expectation that private organizations will fill in the gaps—the administration has exerted a classic “big government” overreach and now essentially controls a considerable portion of these organization’s budgets. The Bush administration is backhandedly treating private foundations as if they were US agencies; this is both ill advised and completely contrary to conservative ideals.

Foundations like Gates, Carnegie, and countless smaller organizations should be released from the dictates of government and allowed to move with the agility and critical analysis that distinguish them from the sometimes lugubrious federal government. Private organizations should not fill in lines in the federal budget, but rather swiftly analyze situations and apolitically allot funds to causes that need them most. The government can then distribute its aid along a generally consistent schedule, bowing, of course, to immediate exigencies like the AIDS crisis in Africa and Asia and disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

The private sector can and should be the vital “extra” that fills one of three roles: 1) money for a problem to which the government is too slow and/or unwieldy to respond; 2) a well researched “big picture” contribution for a cause not quite identified by government; 3) a concentrated boost to solve, not just alleviate, a problem; or 4) funding for a cause the government cannot approach for political reasons.

This state of affairs—the status quo for most of American history—gives the Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and others the freedom to function as capitalist enterprises, addressing vital needs that the government cannot quite reach. It frees these organizations from inappropriate governmental restrictions, and ceases the backhanded provision of resources to the Bush administration for its rancid policies. Where the Bush administration sees “money for the taking,” wise philanthropists like Bill Gates see opportunities to help major world problems. Gates’s money should be his to spend.

If President Bush needs money to alleviate his record budget deficit, I can suggest one place to start: withdraw the tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. Don’t patch up your sinking ship by exploiting the generous people who know what the hell’s going on and have the means and know-how to make a difference.

Thou Shalt Not Lie

2006-08-11T16:01:00.000-04:00

By Jimmy Soni

In 1995, Ralph Reed’s angelic 33-year-old face appeared on the cover of Time magazine, next to the words “The Right Hand of God.” What Reed recently learned is that age-old Sunday school lesson: the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away—particularly in politics.

Last month, Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and poster child for all things evangelical, faced a humiliating defeat in his primary race for lieutenant governor of Georgia. What is striking, aside from a heavy-hitter like Reed running for a second-tier state office, is that all his political chips—tested phone lists, countless contacts, charisma, years of experience, a perfect head of hair—could not carry the day.

His downfall was due in no small part to a 25-year-old relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose dirty dealings have sounded the death knell for countless others. Reed turned to Abramoff for help in starting his own lobbying and consulting firm. Help he did, bringing Reed in to smooth over details in Abramoff’s partnerships with Indian casinos. The rest, as they say, is history.

This case is revelatory for two reasons. The first is that Reed’s ethics were called into question despite his fervent religiosity—and, of all places, in Georgia. The second is that even the prospect of ethical impropriety led to his undoing; Reed himself has not been convicted of any crimes, though his record is peppered with similar near-infractions.

Despite years of Bible thumping and a formidable political machine, Reed lost due to questions of character, which suggests that no matter how closely you read the good book, it only counts if you are actually doing good. This turns the “moral values” agenda on its head. It suggests that baiting voters on divisive religious issues can’t serve as the ultimate political trump card. They know the difference between doing right and preaching right, and, in Reed’s case, they were certainly able to tease out the hypocrisy of making millions from Indian casinos, years after calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic.”

Is this revolutionary? Hardly. Americans have long hunted for honesty in their politicians. What it indicates, however, is a heightened level of scrutiny on ethical errors and an incentive for candidates to shoot straight. Consider the example of political neophyte Paul Hackett, the former Ohio Congressional candidate and near-Senate candidate, who’s straight-talking, no-nonsense ways nearly won him a seat in the House.

“My word is my bond and I will take it to my grave,” said Hackett, after withdrawing from the Senate campaign and refusing to run for Congress in another district because of earlier promises not to. In a solidly red district, Hackett’s pro-choice and anti-war positions had surprising purchase. His tell-it-like-it-is demeanor and military service in Iraq attracted a wide throng of supporters, including endorsements from leading Republican press; no small potatoes in a district that has only elected one Democrat since 1951. David Goodman, of Mother Jones magazine, reported on the strange tune sung by Hackett’s supporters:

Butch Davis, a 70-year-old lifelong Republican, pulled up at Hackett HQ in a 1943 Marine Corps jeep, complete with a mounted 30-caliber machine gun, sporting a “Veterans for Hackett” sign. “I’m a redneck from Brown County,” he declared proudly, extending his weathered hand. “Paul’s pro-choice,” he added. “I’m pro-life. He said educating the young fellas and gals is the answer to the problem, not outlawing abortion.”
Davis continued in a thick Southern drawl, “I used to think clinic bombers were doing the right thing. My preacher said I was too uptight.” He chuckled. Now, he said, “I think Paul’s approach is as good as mine.” The Bush administration, he continued, “trampled on our Bill of Rights and Constitution. They should be ashamed.”

In recent years, Americans have seen captains of industry hauled away in chains, experienced the bitter taste of a war fought for reasons unverified, and watched numerous members of Congress fall victim to temptation and hubris. Is it any wonder that forthright candidates like Paul Hackett are in high demand? Is it any surprise that “religious” is no longer simply synonymous with “moral?” It seems that honesty, always the best policy, might now be the best politics.

j = mv...

2006-08-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

…where m represents mass, v represents velocity, and j represents joementum. I want to argue that even today, j remains a nonzero positive integer likely to increase as t approaches November.

Right now, Joe Lieberman’s newly-independent Senate campaign faces two hurdles: a growing Ned Lamont bandwagon, and the perception that pushing on as if nothing happened last night makes the Senator a sore loser. On the first point, it still seems to me that Lieberman has the edge, given his crossover appeal to independents and Republicans in a general election; it seems less likely that leftish Lamont can expand his base beyond the hardcore Democrats who turned out for him on Tuesday. But I’ll leave that question to the professionals. I’m more interested in whether disregarding a primary result will be, or ought to be, considered sour grapes.

Byron York makes the argument on this morning’s NRO:

If you lose a campaign and then come around two, or four, or six years later to challenge the man who beat you, that’s one thing. If you lose a campaign and keep running as if you hadn’t lost, that’s another. From now on, every day that Lieberman campaigns, he will be reminded that he has already lost to the man he is running against. Lamont’s supporters won’t let him forget it, and Lamont himself will be happy to point it out….This time, it might be Democrats holding those “Sore Loserman” signs.

Ignoring the fact that punning on the Senator’s ethnic name is blatantly anti-Semitic (whereas punning on his given, or Christian, name remains wholesome fun), I would dispute York’s basic claim. Anyone should be allowed to ignore a primary—if he can get away with it.

After all, primaries exist largely to lift politicians from obscurity. In return for convincing your party’s hardcore supporters that you’re the man for the job, you get a) media coverage, b) money from the national organization, and, most importantly, c) the party’s imprimatur, its D or R next to your name in November. The party’s endorsement is basically a time-saving device for voters: It gives them a broad summary of your views, and it tells them that you are the preferred choice of other likeminded party members. For an obscure candidate, the transaction is mutually beneficial: Contribute to the party’s talent pool and submit to party discipline, and in return you get the seal that can sway uninformed voters.

But what if you’re not obscure? What if you have the name recognition of a three-term Senator? In that case, the primary transaction becomes a lot less beneficial—the party has little to offer you that you don’t already have yourself. In that case, you can operate outside the system without consequence. Primaries aren’t sacred; they’re simply a deal between party and candidate that either can abrogate.

Besides, candidates who use their unusual personal resources to operate outside the system are regularly tolerated. The real parallel for Lieberman isn’t the 2000-issue Al Gore. It’s Michael Bloomberg, the lifelong Democrat billionaire who ran in the Republican primary for New York Mayor (because there was less competition) and blew everyone out of the water with campaign spending. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who used his celebrity to defeat over a hundred other candidates on a California recall ballot. Or Ross Perot, self-financing his independent campaign in 1992.

Now I myself think it’s mightily unfair that Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger, and Perot got a leg up because they were rich and/or famous, minimizing the primary endorsement process by buying their own name recognition. But it’s also true that Americans accept self-financed candidates and continue to put them in office. Often, we’re persuaded by the argument that a candidate who’s already rich can’t be bought.

So how’s Lieberman any different? Unlike Lamont, Lieberman is no longer tied to any segment of the party, so he has the freedom to reposition that Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger claim for themselves. And unlike self-financed candidates, Lieberman’s electoral wealth is actually intrinsic to politics—not Wall Street money, but a record built up over three terms in the Senate and two national campaigns. If Americans support a Bloomberg, they’ll support Lieberman, and for the same reasons.

None of this makes the sore-loser epithet sting any less. (Lieberman could have saved face and avoided this mess if he’d had the foresight to switch parties a year ago.) It just means that Lieberman can make a continuing case that he’s earned the right to bypass the primary, if he’s willing to do without the big D by his name. Obviously, Joe doesn’t have to tell Democratic primary voters to go fuck themselves. But he makes the case implicitly whenever he cites his long record of service, or when he stakes out positions that Lamont can’t touch. If voters forgave Bloomberg for essentially buying his way out of the primary, they’ll forgive Lieberman for earning his way out.

Lieberman has every right to face the general election with renewed energy. Because, as we all know, E = cj. He’s got the joementum, and c represents the speed of light, which is a whole lot.

Moderates at Stake

2006-08-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

Senator Joe Lieberman’s unexpectedly robust challenge from liberal philanthropist Ned Lamont in tomorrow’s Connecticut Democratic primary is not about Lieberman’s record, Lamont’s qualifications, Presidential smooches, or even, really, Iraq. At issue is the identity—the very definition—of the moderate.

What is a moderate? The term’s elusiveness partly results from its linguistic similarity to “modulate,” “modify,” and “moderate” the verb, which means, “to tamp down.” Those words have variable meanings, but all bespeak a mealy-mouthed lack of conviction and certitude. None of these terms are the same as the political orientation describing Lieberman, both Clintons, John McCain, and 45 percent of the American people.

“Moderate,” meaning a pragmatic political centrist or someone whose views span across traditional categories, has no linguistic connotations of moral or ideological flimsiness. It suggests adherence to principles—adherence that can be as fervent as that of an archliberal or ultraconservative. A moderate may be committed to positions anywhere along the ideological spectrum, but there is no logical reason to question the strength with which he or she holds positions.

In fact, if you consider that a moderate must come by his or her positions without the guidance of a readymade popular ideology, you might conclude his or her commitment to principle to be more carefully considered and more deeply held than that of a rote liberal or conservative.

Logic, of course, holds little sway in election season. When confusion about terminology meets manipulative political opponents, the result is the public perception of the moderate-as-pushover or the moderate-as-flip-flopper. That is what Joe Lieberman presently faces in Connecticut.

Far from being a pushover or flip-flopper, however, Lieberman is quite the opposite. He has thus far refused to bow to immensely powerful forces ordering him to repudiate his 2002 vote authorizing force in Iraq. Nor has he flip-flopped by any stretch. In his longstanding conviction that 1) Iraq needed to be confronted, by force, if necessary; 2) the Bush administration mishandled the war from the get-go; and 3) the United States must do well by Iraq, the region, and itself by finishing the job right; Lieberman has been stalwart.

One can reasonably disagree with his stance without castigating him for vacillation and kowtowing to Republicans, as the campaign of Ned Lamont has done. In willfully distorting his positions and record, Lamont has attempted to damn Lieberman—and, by extension, the moderates he represents as the most public standard-bearer for that political orientation—as spineless. It is nasty politics and should be taken as an affront to anyone who navigates politics with a personal, not partisan, compass.

It should be noted that the only reason Lamont threatens to be successful in this task is the odd American primary system, which tends to reward candidates on the respective extremes of the political spectrum. In states where only those persons registered with the party in question are allowed to vote in primaries, the pool of voters is naturally skewed in orientation toward whichever extreme ideology is encapsulated by the party holding the primary; in this case, the left half of the spectrum will have the opportunity to choose between Lamont and Lieberman in Connecticut and will thereby be inclined to vote for a more liberal candidate than the populace would favor more in the general election. In addition, primary voters are typically more radicalized than general election voters, further skewing the results. By the end of a competitive primary season, the choice between candidates is generally more extreme than an average voter would prefer. This greatly contributes to Washington partisanship and makes the nomination of moderates like Lieberman—whom 56 percent of Connecticut voters would favor in the general election—difficult.

Americans are basically a moderate lot. And with the clarification of a moderate self-definition, political fair play, and perhaps primary reform, they might even have the opportunity to vote for principled candidates that best match their policy preferences, personal preferences, and disparate-but-generally-pragmatic visions for America.

Unfortunately, the chances of those developments transpiring are slim. Moderates are being held to the stake by the imperfect structure of our democracy, as they have been for many years. And they will continue to remain a scarce commodity for the foreseeable future, except for those rare and blessed episodes when someone like Lieberman can sneak through and, for a time, conduct the country’s business with the sense of fair play and open-mindedness desired by a vast plurality of the American people.

A Bullheaded Blitzkrieg

2006-08-04T12:33:00.000-04:00

By Jimmy Soni

What did Israel get for its recent military action? A hill of beans.

Early results from Israel’s blitzkrieg of Beirut leave little doubt of the madness of the exercise. By holding out as long as it has, Hezbollah has sharpened its sword in the region. By failing to forestall the violence, the fragile Lebanese government has lost what little authority it had. Al Qaeda, though traditionally hostile to Shiites, has embraced Hezbollah and even emulated its language in recently released messages. Arab governments initially critical of Hezbollah and supportive of Israel have done an about-face. Hezbollah’s Sheik Nasarallah has been deified for his defiance—all this after only two weeks.

And this is only what we can confirm. No doubt the exercise has replenished the supply of accusations against Israel and, to a lesser-though-still-significant degree, the United States. It has likely shifted or intensified loyalties among other terrorist organizations, civilian populations, and their donor nations. And it has almost certainly emboldened the next generation of yet unrecruited Hezbollah fighters.

The majority of these developments were foreseeable, and some were so easily anticipated that they would not have changed the calculus for war. But when coupled with the war’s ill-conceived logic—that precision bombing could squash, once and for all, a diffuse organization that fills its ranks with civilians—it becomes infinitely harder to make the case for military action.

There is no question that the near simultaneous attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas that precipitated this conflict required some response. But the chosen strategy seems more a means for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to prove his military bona fides than for Israel to eliminate the threat to its citizens. Terrorism by its nature flies in the face of the doctrine of overwhelming force. Targeted assassinations, intelligence gathering, small unit tactics, and diplomacy—even if slow-going and politically prickly—are ultimately more successful strategies in such a war.

Olmert’s failure of leadership is only matched by President Bush’s own. His unwillingness or inability to bring the conflict to a cease-fire not only prolonged the carnage, but eroded what little diplomatic capital the US had left in the region. The conflict opened the door to courageous statesmanship, and the President quickly slammed it shut. As wisely noted by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Washington Post, there is a predictable logic at work here: tempers flare, hostilities begin, the US negotiates a cease-fire.

The logic is, of course, confounded by Syrian and Iranian support of Hezbollah. Even so, that doesn’t prevent the United States from crafting a cease-fire, basking in praise, and then moving on to Syria and Iran.

Make no mistake—there is an alternative to war with either country. To those frustrated with the hard work of diplomacy, like my Bracket colleague Andrew Nowobilski, I offer the example of Libya, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself called “an important model” for extremist tune-changing. The United States recently restored diplomatic ties with Libya—the same Libya that once actively supported terrorists, festered US resentment in the region, and stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Sound familiar? If, as suspected, the Israel-Lebanon crisis is a proxy for the United States vs. Syria or the United States vs. Iran, then we need only look to Libya for a cheaper, smarter, and ultimately more effective model.

The President is wrong to call this a “moment of opportunity”—it is in fact, a closing window. Hezbollah can be weakened, Israeli positions fortified, Syria and Iran neutralized, and the Lebanese government strengthened, but not until a cease-fire is achieved. It’s time to stop playing into Hezbollah’s hand and start playing the diplomatic game.

The Parable of the Drunk Anti-Semite

2006-08-02T03:45:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

I know my first response to this whole Mel Gibson thing shouldn’t be childlike delight, but it’s just that it’s so rare our national life provides us with anything resembling an answer key. In February 2004, the question was posed: “Is Mel Gibson (A) a pious, yet misunderstood artist, or (B) an anti-Semite nutjob?” And in July 2006, we as a people turned our kids’ menu upside-down and found the answer in small print, right next to the solution to the word jumble. I don’t expect anything this clear-cut to happen again in my lifetime. So in these weeks of bombs falling on civilians who may or may not be sheltering terrorists, we can at least thank Melvin for giving us something so blissfully unambiguous.

But some of us want even more. It’s not enough that we’ve resolved a question of character; apparently we’ve also resolved a question of art. The critics who called Gibson’s Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic back in 2004 are claiming a smashing victory—hateful director, hateful film. Indeed, I’m racking my brain and can’t think of a debate on art that was ever won this decisively. Is Finnegans Wake readable? Is The Rite of Spring music or noise? Is Wagner’s Alberich an obvious Jewish caricature? I’m sure there are learned articles on all sides of these and many other questions, but I haven’t read a single one that ended: “In conclusion: Neener-neener.”

Debates in criticism can move toward consensus, but they just don’t get won. Yet the demand for apologies and the naming of names going on right now in the blogosphere seems to suggest that The Passion is a unique case in all this history. I suppose it could be. But I think it’s likelier that what we have is a much more mundane case of the logic politics corrupting the logic of art.

Take these juxtaposed quotes posted by Andrew Sullivan, who, as an early opponent of The Passion, has been gloating for about 72 hours:

“Mel Gibson might be my favorite feminist…. In a day when 'Take Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries' is an often-heard chorus in mainstream abortion debates, Mel Gibson's understanding of women and his articulation of their unique mission could have remarkable repercussions. This new—or old, inasmuch as it is natural and commonsensical—kind of feminism, a focus on the different contributions of men and women and the different ways they live their missions, should make us all rethink how we live and love,” - Kathryn-Jean Lopez, National Review Online, not so long ago.

“What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?” - Mel Gibson to a female police officer last Friday.

The quotations are posted back-to-back, with no comment, as if the latter is an obvious refutation of the former. But is it? Gibson’s certainly a misogynist as well as an anti-Semite, but I don’t think Lopez said anything about his character. In fact, if you click on the link, you find that she’s talking about his filmmaking. And since “sugar tits” isn’t heard a single time in The Passion, or any other of Gibson’s movies (to the best of my knowledge), his filmmaking has to stand or fall on its own. Sullivan has amply proven hypocrisy, but he hasn’t proven a thing about the content of Gibson’s movies—unless he wants to argue that wonderful ideas, sounds, and pictures can only come from wonderful souls. It would take about ten minutes in any art history class to disabuse him of that notion.

The gotcha moment on The Passion’s anti-Semitism follows much the same deficient logic, and I called it political logic because of its blinkered focus on personality. Gibson’s rant will certainly keep him from ever being elected to Congress, but it can’t touch his movies.

In fact, this is probably the single insight literary criticism has to offer the broader world: The author is irrelevant. If Shakespeare came back from the grave tomorrow and told us what he meant by Hamlet, his interpretation wouldn’t be any more inherently valid than mine. Why? First, art and art criticism are two independent disciplines, drawing on far different skills and frames of mind. As Northrop Frye argued in The Anatomy of Criticism:

The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with.

Second, once a piece of art is released into the world, it has its own life. It can contain themes and dimensions the artist never consciously conceived; but because art can’t exist without an audience, those themes and dimensions are there if we see them. Making our own readings is the necessary condition of our autonomy as readers. We have to argue for them, but we can’t simply short-circuit the argument by appealing to biography. The Romantics thought Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost; everything I know about John Milton’s personal beliefs might tell me otherwise, but I haven’t made an argument about the poem until I point out exactly where and how they’re misreading.

So let’s step back and apply this line of reasoning to Mel Gibson. He’s offered us an interpretation of his own movie: “The Jews are the cause of all the evil in the world, and my movie shows how they killed Jesus.” From what we now know, that’s what he intended. But do we have to take his word about his movie? No! That would be lazy. We know how film is a complex medium that can sustain multiple readings. We know how an artist’s spoken intentions can go awry, and how his unspoken ones can surface uncalled. We know, as of last Friday, that Mel Gibson is an idiot and probably incapable of intelligent criticism. For all of these reasons, his interpretation is irrelevant.

Now, this doesn’t mean that The Passion is not anti-Semitic. All it means is that arguments to that effect have to come from the movie itself—its portrayal of the Jewish people, its privileging of the New Testament’s most anti-Jewish details, its pornographic violence. I haven’t seen The Passion, but I am personally swayed by what I’ve read of those arguments (Charles Krauthammer has a particularly insightful one here; and, in fairness, Sullivan was arguing on the merits back in 2004). I’m just asking us to discriminate: Folks like Krauthammer are interested in debating art; folks who simply cite the Malibu traffic stop are interested in embarassing their opponents.

This has been a a lot of time to waste on a two-year-old movie—but it’s not really about that. The shoddy thinking that favors personality over content is at the heart of a lot of political idiocies of both left and right, from the insulting “chickenhawk” trope and the “unimpeachable moral authority” of Cindy Sheehan, to Republican cronyism and President Bush’s good ol’ boy appeal. The present fiasco is just a more flamboyant case of the above.

True, we’re not going to be able to wipe out this universal ad-hominization. It appeals to too many of our appetites: drama, simplicity, laziness. For the most part, it is politics. But can we please keep it out of art?

If not, we risk spoiling the simple joy of watching a real-life person get unmasked like a Scooby-Doo villain.

(And he would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling Jews.)

Don't Forget About Terrorism

2006-07-31T06:00:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

Terrorism is still on the public agenda, but media outlets and public intellectuals have got the emphasis all wrong. Our primary focus should be destroying terrorist networks, not poking legalistic holes in our efforts and undermining ourselves to terrorists' advantage.

How quickly we forget the lessons of 9/11. Less than five years after that unimaginable tragedy, terrorism is now almost entirely discussed in the context of preventing the overreach of law enforcement agencies, government, and the military. Civil liberties and prisoner rights are the buzzwords.

It is indeed important to ensure that the War on Terror is prosecuted with due respect to civil and human rights. The Bush administration appears to have broken the law with its domestic espionage program, and certain measures legalized by the USA PATRIOT Act are among the most draconian ever seen in the United States. We must not let our anti-terrorism efforts compromise the rights of any our citizens--or anyone, for that matter.

But there is a balance to be struck, and the self-flagellating now crowds out journalism demanding creativity, aggressiveness, and results in fighting terror. The tenor of public discussion comes dangerously close, at times, to sounding pro-terrorist. The news media spends little time on stories about fighting terrorism beyond the unavoidable events like the plan to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower and a crawling "Elevated" terror status on cable news stations--which, by the way, remains distinctly unhelpful.

Why does it matter what the public talks about, when the War on Terror is being waged by law enforcement agencies, bureaucrats, and elected officials? Several reasons: For one, everyone fighting the War on Terror is susceptible to public pressure; if the public demands caution and discretion, officials will take note. Secondly, a less-than-full-throttle sentiment toward the War on Terror leaves open the frightening possibility of a pansy civil libertarian being elected President and leaving the United States more susceptible to attack. It is an unlikely scenario, but one that has become considerably more plausible with the present press distaste for the War on Terror.

The roots of the media/intellectual complex's passive rejection of the War on Terror are easy to identify. Foremost, time has eroded the searing, universal sense of post-9/11 urgency. Everyone from David Letterman to Tom Brokaw was a fervent anti-terrorist in those days; the regression of many of these public figures was predicable. There is also the general anti-Bush sentiment in the media, borne not of partisanship but of the administration's secrecy and antipathy toward the media. There is no doubt that some journalists and media organizations relish "sticking it to the administration" in their coverage of the War on Terror.

The media is either creating or communicating a standard storyline in the War on Terror: disaster (9/11), strong response (Afghanistan, tightening of security and financial transactions), overreach (USA PATRIOT Act, Iraq, prisoner abuses), and redress (country turns on President Bush, Iraq becomes a debacle, executive powers are checked). At the conclusion of this narrative arc, the overreach is to be fixed and we are all supposed to return to "normal." The problem is, "normal" is not where we want to be, as long as we are facing terrorists who preach an ideology of hate and murder. It is a long-term fight, and we need to adjust permanently. The media's storyline befits a one-time event, but the current struggle is much closer to the Cold War and should not be tied up in a tidy bow after a few years.

About the only thing that can be done to rectify the current situation is for editors and media executives to realize that the public interest is well served by holding leaders to the fire on the aggressiveness of their anti-terror efforts. Unveiling and criticizing espionage programs is important, but not anywhere close to half the battle.

The War on Terror is an exceptional fight, requiring vigilance, and routine political pressures and press tendencies are harming our ability to win it. We need to bear down as hard as we can on terrorists, and we need coverage to tilt back into better balance. Forward-looking, not navel-gazing.

If we don't get our perspective straight, they will damn sure do it for us. Please, don't let it be another terrorist strike against America that jolts us into an aggressive posture once more.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: In Praise of Diplomacy

2006-07-26T22:16:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Nowobilski

If I were king of the West, I would heap every praise on today’s diplomats and their partisans in the political press. I would hold conferences, of the type where little is accomplished, but that lack of accomplishment is executed with precision, formality, and delicious continental breakfasts. I would invite them to lavish state dinners, entertain them in person and nod and harumph in concord with their erudite ruminations. Yes, yes Ambassador So-and-So. You are so very right. War is the last resort. M-hm. We must give the United Nations time--oh yes, indeed! Surely a peaceable solution is just at hand.

Oh yes, and I would ignore their advice completely.

As Israel exacts payment from Hezbollah for years of “shit”-giving--and let President Bush be commended for his way with words--we can be grateful that our President is wisely ignoring the squawking of diplomats for a cease-fire. And yet it is an incredible thing to witness. Diplomats require incentives and punishments in order to move world leaders. Even non-radical Middle Eastern rulers are surrounded on every side by danger, physical or political--from their neighbors, from the Islamic extremists, from the West. They do not possess the luxury of making decisions based on personal warmth or expressions of world sentiment that exist only on parchment or in sound-bites. And yet whenever a country employs force to transform the political calculus of the region and place a trump card in the hands of future diplomats, they protest. No aces for us, please. We’d much rather fold.

When Israel attacks Southern Lebanon, it is essentially rounding out the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine is a blessing to diplomats everywhere, for--consistently applied--it vests them with real power in prodding the dictators and tribesmen of the Middle East and elsewhere to clean house. That power is the knowledge that a failure to dismantle terrorist organizations has dire consequences. When a government like Lebanon’s fails to expel its terrorist elements, the use of Israeli force is appropriate, even if Lebanon harbors no malicious intentions. If Lebanon does not possess resources to rule, then diplomacy won’t help anyway.

But if Lebanon actually does possess the resources to police itself, then states in the same predicament in the future will “find” the resources to police themselves, because their own security depends on it. Israel is just forcing Lebanon to “internalize” its Hezbollah-related externalities. Just think how effective diplomats could be if other nations expected us to consistently act in like manner when they failed to cooperate with our fine diplomatic corps. Imagine the headlines: British negotiators convince General Ali Despotarrafi to eject al Qaeda from Somewhere-istan. Imagine the praises showered down upon the diplomats! Imagine the clucking on the New York Times editorial page. See, we told you diplomacy could work!

The war of words between the diplomats and hawks over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear warheads is even sillier. Let’s side with the diplomats. Now Mr. Ambassador, under what circumstances could we imagine President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreeing to genuinely forestall his nuclear efforts for the foreseeable future? There are two possibilities. The first is that we bribe him. Now, there is a good chance this would have no effect on a good, stoic, maniacal Muslim extremist like Ahmadinejad. But even if this strategy succeeded, it would establish a lamentable precedent that would encourage future brinkmanship on the part of other despots. And for all this, the US could do nothing to prevent Iran from reneging in the future for the purposes of extracting additional concessions while inching ever closer to nuclear status.

The second possibility is to instill in Ahmadinejad the certainty that failure to comply will result not in glory and honor but defeat and humiliation. One option takes the anarchy of the international system seriously and deals with it frankly; the other does not. One attempts to get foreign leaders to act in a way that it is not in their own interests to act; the other changes what those interests are by altering expectations.

The Israeli campaign is one expression of a larger strategic philosophy that, if taken seriously, would alter the political calculus for the future so that next time diplomacy can succeed. Diplomacy in the Global War on Terror requires the threat of force, the credibility of which depends on its consistent application against those who continue to support terrorism despite our supplications. The West should always offer a window for rapprochement if her enemies reject terrorism; but that window must have a definite length and breadth, and once that window closes the hammer must fall. Then maybe next time, another despot will heed our ambassadors.

I like diplomats; I really do. That’s why if I were king I would just ignore them sometimes. I’d be doing them a favor. All I’d ask in return is another continental breakfast.

Andrew Nowobilski is a senior at Duke University.

The United States Goes to War

2006-07-24T06:00:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

The world has reacted to Israel’s bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon with mystification and outrage. Many cannot see sense in Israel unleashing hell “against an organization” in a relatively friendly neighboring state, particularly when the head of the hydra can be found in Syria and Iran. What is really going on here?

As it turns out, a lot. The current conflict has a deep subtext that interweaves the same big strands of Iraq, Iran, Israel, terrorism, democracy, Shi’ites, Sunnis, and the United States that have long shaped this region’s destiny. Think of the violence not as Israel versus Hezbollah or Israel versus Lebanon, but the United States versus Iran. We have entered what promises to be a protracted war, watching, in Ted Koppel’s assessment, the first proxy battle.

In grasping the magnitude of the conflict, it is important to realize that President Bush must have given Israel the green light to attack Hezbollah. The United States is Israel’s only meaningful ally. A scenario in which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wages a large-scale military operation without ensuring President Bush’s blessing does not make sense. Were the United States to vocalize opposition to the strikes, Israel would be isolated, condemned, and markedly less secure.

So the United States and Israel are confronting an unsatisfactory status quo against an enemy. The nature of this enemy is not what it superficially seems. Hezbollah is a serpentine terrorist structure that uses Lebanon as a launch base and storehouse but is supported financially by Syria and is most properly conceived of as an appendage of Iran.

Assaulting Hezbollah in Lebanon is not going to dismantle it. The United States and Israel know this. By raising the stakes in such a visible and aggressive way, they have laid down the gauntlet on destroying Hezbollah as the only acceptable option. This means confronting its power sources, a proposition that necessarily puts the United States and Iran in direct conflict.

The United States already has a litany of well known grievances against Iran, the aggregate of which already merits a war in the minds of many US intellectuals and policymakers. Iran supports Hezbollah and other organizations that terrorize Israel and the United States, undermines the fledgling democracy in Afghanistan, wields ominous influence over Iraq, and promises to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” Then there is that whole nuclear thing.

With the strikes against Hezbollah, the United States now has a foothold from which it can expand the conflict with Iran. The administration’s chosen next step is to engage Syria and further isolate Shi’ite, Persian Iran from its Sunni, Arab neighbor states. This is a destabilizing step that could precipitate a variety of positive or negative results, including, possibly, a groundswell of anti-Iran machinations in the region.

Mistrust and fear of Iran is vast in the Middle East. Despite the even deeper antipathy toward Israel and the United States, several Sunni countries went so far as to tacitly support Israel in its recent military action. “The street” generally supports Hezbollah against Israel because of the conflict’s David-versus-Goliath qualities, but many also acknowledge that Iran is one of the primary obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and Palestinians and the creation of Palestine. Were a choice reduced to achieving Palestinian goals or supporting Iran’s marauding, most Arabs would abandon Iran. Isolating Iran could possibly constitute a “victory” for the United States in a limited war that never turns hot.

The goals could be more sweeping, however. With regional support, it is not hard to imagine the United States engaging in military action against Iran. The US administration holds no illusions about the threat posed by a country in the world’s toughest neighborhood with resources, a deranged leader, an expressed desire to eradicate another nation, a record of financing terrorism, and—soon—nuclear weapons. The United States is not about to sack Tehran for now, but depending on how events play out with Syria and Lebanon, it is well within the realm of possibility.

A strategy that relies in any part upon Arab support could also backfire, however. Confronting Iran could grant it additional status as an anti-US force and produce sympathy and sycophantism toward the big dog on the block. That may significantly limit US options, or it may further convince leaders that Iran needs to be checked before its power and sociopathic proclivities spiral out of control.

The United States has been playing a high-stakes game of engagement in the Middle East for some time now, but the intensity has ratcheted up considerably with Israel’s recent military incursion. We’re in a war now, and our enemy is Iran. God have mercy.

The Value of Primaries

2006-07-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

By Anthony Vitarelli

This year’s Connecticut Democratic Senatorial primary offers a compelling case study as to the value of intraparty primaries and how national players view their role. Incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman has faced a strong challenge from anti-war activist Ned Lamont–stemming from the Senator’s vote to authorize the President’s use of force in Iraq. At the time of this writing, the primary outlook does not look bright for the former Vice Presidential candidate.

A Lamont victory would create a situation for national Democrats that will be at least uncomfortable and likely excruciating. Lieberman declared in early July that he will begin gathering signatures to place his name on the statewide ballot as an independent if Lamont bests him in the Aug. 8 primary.

Lieberman has sought to line up support from national Democrats in advance of the primary, particularly aiming to secure commitment of support even if he does not win the party line. While Lieberman has been successful in obtaining a few such endorsements (notably from fellow Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd), Senator Chuck Schumer of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee issued a stunning statement on June 14, asserting that he “fully supports [Lieberman] and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.”

If the DSCC supports Lieberman as an independent, Schumer will have effectively devalued the economies of scale gained by having a national party. When money flows into the DSCC from the Democratic fundraising base, donors likely assume that their funds will be directed to candidates running under the banner of the Democratic Party. National Democratic support against a Democratic candidate would strike a devastating blow to party unity and would certainly ruffled some feathers within the donor community.

Primaries are intended to winnow the field such that voters who identify with the general values of the Democratic Party (whatever those may be at the moment) can collectively support one candidate in the general election. Since they would prefer any Democrat over a Republican (the theory goes), Democratic primary voters will support the eventual party nominee.

All that being said, Schumer’s position has some merit. He genuinely believes that Lieberman has the greatest chance of winning the general election. Lieberman is a moderate incumbent and has access to a broad, national fund-raising base. Additionally, if the DSCC’s greatest goal is a Senate majority, Schumer’s position does not run counter to that mission. Defending his support of Lieberman, Schumer remarked, “you can run as an independent [or] you can run as an independent Democrat who pledges to vote for Harry Reid as Majority Leader.” This theory would similarly have national Democratic money flowing into the pocket of independent Senator James Jeffords.

Despite that caveat, the DSCC is essentially promising to ignore the results of a primary, in which the registered Democrats of Connecticut will collective decide who they wish to represent them in the fall. Others within the Democratic Party, such as Hillary Clinton, have pledged to support the winner of the primary. In discussing her decision, Clinton stated, “The challenges before us in 2006 call for a strong, united party, in which we all support and work for the candidates who are selected in the Democratic process.” Even Al Gore (Lieberman’s former running mate) said he would not get involved.

In polling released on July 20, Lamont holds a lead over Lieberman of 51 percent to 47 percent among Democratic primary voters. However, the same poll shows that if Lieberman runs as an independent in the general election, he will receive a whopping 51 percent of the entire state, compared to Lamont’s 27 percent and Republican Alan Schlesinger’s 9 percent. With Lieberman’s pledge to continue running as an independent regardless of the primary, the stage is set for a perfect storm scenario in which the entire primary process becomes hijacked by general election strategy. Although retaking the Senate must remain the crucial goal, don’t primaries mean anything any more?

Bush Drops the I-bomb

2006-07-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

As if to make the prospect of continued war in the Middle East more psychologically manageable, and because we have the luxury to do so, we decided that Monday’s top headline was not going to be the continued rocket attacks into northern Israel, or the aerial bombardment of Beirut, but rather that President Bush said a swear. During a photo opportunity at the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, an open microphone picked up the following exchange between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair:

Blair: See, if [Condoleezza Rice] goes out she’s got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can just go out and talk.

Bush: See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.

While media attention centered on the scatological expletive, I myself don’t find it all that objectionable, and I’m not the only one. Hezbollah does need to stop this shit. I’m more concerned with Bush’s possible misuse of another potentially offensive word, and because politics stops at the water’s edge, and because I respect the office of the Presidency, I’d like to try to parse and rehabilitate Bush’s understanding of the concept of irony.

At first glance, there’s nothing ironic whatsoever about the situation Bush describes, which puts him in the embarrassing position of committing a rhetorical gaffe in conversation with a partner who can correctly use the expression “as it were” in a British accent. But before we condemn, let’s investigate.

Dating back to Aristotle, rhetoric has traditionally recognized three forms of irony, all of which “revolve around the notion of incongruity, or a gap between our understanding and what actually happens.” The three forms may awaken some memories of high school English, and since I’ve just spent a year teaching high school English, I thought I’d provide a refresher, with an eye toward the form of irony, if any, that best embraces Bush’s meaning.

Verbal irony: Verbal irony is an incongruity between what is said and what is meant, as in, “A seven-way war in the Middle East would be super-duper.” Sarcasm (literally, “flesh-tearing”) is a form of verbal irony intended to hurt or insult.

Since Bush’s response to Blair is characterizing action, not words, it’s hard to argue that he’s recognizing verbal irony. If pressed, I could make the case that Syria and Iran are making a belligerent “statement” on the world stage, and that Bush is using the metaphor of verbal irony to construe their actions as a form of speech, but that seems like a stretch.

Situational irony: Situational irony is an incongruity between expected results and actual results, as here.

This is more promising. It seems that the “they” in Bush’s remark signifies the United Nations, as Bush had earlier complained to Blair: “What about [Secretary-General] Kofi Annan? I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and everything else happens.” In other words, Bush is criticizing Annan for the rather predictable fault of expecting a UN-brokered cease-fire to solve everything without addressing the underlying issues. On the other hand, in Bush’s view, “The irony is that what they need to do is get Syria….”

So Annan is wasting his efforts, “crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace,” working for a general halt to the fighting when he ought to be targeting the conflict’s instigator. In this reading, the ironic incongruity is between Annan’s multilateralist perception of the situation and Bush’s realist reality. This is ironic because Annan, as diplomat-in-chief, really ought to know better.

This reading strikes me as entirely plausible and as a sufficient apologia against Bush’s critics. But let’s move on to the third form, to see whether Bush is operating simultaneously on two levels.

Dramatic irony: Dramatic, or tragic, irony is traditionally a theatrical form and concerns an incongruity between the knowledge of the characters and the knowledge of the audience. Of course, the classic example is Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus searches for his father’s murderer, whom, as we all know, is Oedipus himself.

This category is the most difficult to assess, because it hinges on what Bush and Blair may or may not know. I have no knowledge that could make the necessity of Syria getting Hezbollah to stop doing this shit dramatically ironic, but then the leaders of the world see much that is hidden. Is it ironic that Syria needs to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit because Hezbollah is in secret negotiations with Israel? Is it ironic that Syria needs to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit because Iran is about to test a nuclear device? Is it ironic that Syria needs to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit because the leaders of the G-8 secretly know that Ehud Olmert and Hassan Nasrallah are long-lost identical twins separated at birth in a shipwreck?

At least, we know this: If Bush is smart enough to simultaneously use situational and dramatic irony in impromptu conversation, he damn sure is smart enough to know that microphone was on. It could be that he’s taking steps to prepare us for a revelation in the coming days that would be too momentous to digest in one sitting.

I feel, then, that Bush is on quite solid ground in his characterization of this shit-producing situation as ironic. Whatever form of irony we deem most likely, we have seen that they all have in common a sense of the incongruous, the absurd or the hole in our understanding. As H.W. Fowler puts it in Modern English Usage:

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that “more” and of the outsider’s incomprehension.

With this in mind, Bush’s I-bomb was eminently on target. Who of us hasn’t seen the chaos of the last weeks and felt that we were missing part of the script, that we have heard and heard and not understood, that the key that explains all of this is lost, or damaged, or untranslatable? Bush’s triumph here is to postulate that necessary second audience, that awareness keeping us from the brink by retaining its power to appreciate absurdity, that knowing spectatorship imposing order simply by the act of its wise, concentrated, ironic perception. I hope that, in the weeks ahead, we can share his faith.

Footnote: I should add that some textbooks recognize a fourth form of irony, Socratic irony, in which “someone pretends to be foolish or ignorant, but is not”; I would have considered this form in the above discussion but find myself unable to credit President Bush with a six-year endurance record.

We'll Get By

2006-07-17T06:00:00.000-04:00

By Andrew Collins

Seventy percent of Americans—basically everyone except your grandfather, the Deep South, and Pat Robertson—are presently engaged in a collective “yikes.” President Bush has really done it now.

Back in 2000, we thought it didn’t matter who we elected. Bush, Gore, Gush, Bore. Didn’t see 9/11 and a War on Terror looming behind the corner of the millennium. Didn’t exactly realize “machine politician” implied a powerful, ideologically driven, corrupt, callous, and unbelievably ham-handed political machine behind the smirk. Frankly, we thought George W. Bush was relatable, had a few good ideas for schools, and wouldn’t haul off and do anything embarrassing.

Now just look. North Korea is testing intercontinental missiles. Iran is calling for the end of Israel and amping up the nuclear arsenal. Israel is shellacking Lebanon. Iraq is costing billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, and still seems headed for civil war. The environment is going down a disastrous track with President Bush having mischievously sabotaged the brakes; the trade and budget deficits are behaving like 1990s dot-com stocks; Social Security is still not fixed; it cost me $55 to fill up a Pontiac the other day; New Orleans is in shambles; the government is illegally spying on us; White House corruption allegations are still outstanding; and the massive tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent still exists!

It’s enough to make a person howl at the moon. Even my mother—a paragon of blissful political apathy if there ever were one—is taking about how bad things have gotten.

But as bleak as the scene is outside, we will get through the storm. In addition to timeless qualities like the resilience of our people, the strength of our faith, and the fertility of our land, there are several realities specific to this moment in history that will help us carry through to a better day.

1) The 2008 Presidential candidates are pretty sharp. The frontrunners to be the next President are John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, George Allen, Mitt Romney, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, and Al Gore, in no particular order. All but Allen and Edwards are pretty moderate, and all but Allen have the potential to be quality Presidents. Even “Old Confederate” would be a step up from George W. Bush.

2) Global warming is nearing a different sort of tipping point. In his new film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore warns that global warming may accelerate to the point that it is not easily reversible. True enough. But the debate itself is also nearing a “tipping point”: the publicity generated by Gore’s movie and brave scientists are on the verge of making global warming a huge, mainstream issue, much like immigration was in the spring. That can only bode well for forcing government and businesses to make meaningful changes.

3) Democracy is on the march. Give President Bush credit for taking up the mantle of morality in US foreign policy that had been previously advanced by Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. Afghanistan is a republic, not an Islamist theocracy. Syria is out of Lebanon. Even Iraq is free, albeit troubled, and thank God Saddam is gone. One radical reversal of longtime policy that was actually wise was the administration’s choice of messy democracy over stable autocracy in several key locations. It is a liberal’s dream—and yet few, if any, appear pleased about this spread of freedom. Did we think it was going to be seamless?

4) Private philanthropy has entered a new dimension. We are in a neo-Gilded Age, where our laws, institutions, and tax code enable a few individuals to amass extreme wealth and leave ever-increasing numbers of people impoverished. However, we have lucked out with the epic generosity of this age’s financial aristocracy. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and entertainment stars like Angelina Jolie and Bono have given billions to public health, nutrition, and other causes throughout the world. Ordinary Americans have stepped up their philanthropy in recent years, too, becoming the most generous in the world in helping the far-off (Islamic) victims of 2005’s Southeast Asian tsunami and Kashmiri earthquake. In the face of our government’s ineptitude, our people are guiding us back on track. It is inspiring. And it’s how it has always been.

5) Other countries are learning that we do not cause all their problems. In recent years, due to our overweening power, the United States has become the too-easy scapegoat for other countries’ ills. The characterization was always unfair, but now, with our international engagement and cache at an ebb, the hard truth is starting to sink in. People facing strife around the world are learning that destroying and defaming the United States is a false remedy for their societies’ blighted condition. This realization—a textbook silver lining on a dark cloud—will gradually help defuse the simmering hatred that leads to terrorism.

6) We are all the wiser. Six years of President Bush have been immensely difficult, but as with all mistakes, this experience has been beneficial in that we can draw invaluable lessons:

Media and voters must watch the candidate’s advisors and allies closely, particularly if he or she is a “machine politician.” The man in the Oval Office isn't the only one getting elected.
Beware of applying ideology blindly—yes, even the ideology of freedom. Everything occurs in a context, and ignoring extant realities is a recipe for failure.
Cronyism and corruption don’t pay, politically. The Michael Brown and Harriet Miers fiascos hopefully showed a generation of politicians that appointing your buddy to an important post, more often than not, just isn’t worth it.
Never underestimate the American people. President Bush, riding high after Afghanistan and his reelection, both doubted the willingness of the American people to sacrifice for righteous causes and assumed he was secure in his popularity. We would have given much to help had President Bush called, but we were not prepared to lay down and let him mislead the country.

The American people are more generous and wise than President Bush ever appreciated. That is the biggest single reason why we will get through this, with flying colors, as we always have and will again.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: The Duke Lacrosse Tragedy

2006-07-14T12:06:00.000-04:00

By Jay Ganatra

I have truly never seen anything like it.

For about eight weeks running from mid-March to mid-May, I could not pick up a newspaper, watch cable news, or peruse the Internet without reading about the latest developments in Durham. My casual conversations quickly were redirected with questions concerning “lacrosse culture,” the motivations of Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, or how the university had handled the allegations to date.

And, now, there’s nothing.

Back then, we only knew a few things for sure. On Mar. 13, the lacrosse team had had a team party at 610 Buchanan Street involving underage drinking and had invited two exotic dancers. After a disagreement of some kind, a racial epithet had been heard used by a player and the dancers left the party. The next morning one of the dancers reported to the police that she had been raped.

In response to the party--not the allegations of sexual assault--President Brodhead and Athletic Director Joe Alleva forfeited the subsequent two games of the regular season. At this time, the members of the Duke lacrosse team volunteered their DNA samples to the Durham police and released a statement in which they asserted “unequivocally that any allegation that a sexual assault or rape occurred is totally and transparently false.”

Concurrently, the university began an introspective process of determining how the university may or may not have been responsible for the conditions under which such an allegation would appear to be credible. At a Mar. 28 press conference, President Brodhead said, “Universities show their mettle by the way they respond to difficult circumstances, not by their absolute ability to prevent such circumstances from ever happening.” Accordingly, he charged five committees composed of university and non-university stakeholders to examine the following topics:

The culture of the lacrosse team
Duke administration’s response
Duke’s student judicial process
The ways Duke educates students in the values of personal responsibility
An overall review by people from the Durham community, national higher education circles and Duke, that will scrutinize Duke’s responses to the lacrosse team incident

The groups completed their reviews exhaustively and critically, and the national press covered their release quite positively.

The intervening weeks brought the resignation of lacrosse coach Mike Pressler and the formal indictments by a Durham grand jury of three members of the team, Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans. At a press conference following his indictment, Evans stoically stated, “You have all been told some fantastic lies.”

It appears that some of these fantastic lies may now have been brought to light.

Kim Roberts, the second dancers from the Mar. 13 parties has claimed that the assertions of her co-dancer are “a crock” and that they were never separated for longer than five minutes during the party. The indicted players have offered potentially exculpatory evidence to Nifong, including ATM receipts from locations away from the house and testimony from a cab driver who verifies that at least one of the players was not present during the time of the alleged assault.

Perhaps most importantly, there has yet to be a DNA match from the accused to any of the 46 members of the team who offered samples, despite Mike Nifong’s claims of the woman having been raped orally, vaginally, and anally. Additionally, the accuser’s claims of the evening’s events have changed drastically since March--altering the number of her assailants from 20 to three, among other disparities. Finally, the lineup that produced the three indictments may not even be admissible in court, as the lineups were composed solely of Duke lacrosse players, rather than the standard practice of including many similar looking potential suspects. To be clear, it seems that if she had selected randomly from the lineup, three lacrosse players would still have been indicted.

A number of great tragedies will have been precipitated from this event if the accuser’s charges are ultimately found to be groundless.

First and foremost, the three accused students will have had their reputations tarnished for the rest of their lives. Finnerty and Seligmann have missed a semester of school and have been placed on suspension. Evans, a 2005 graduate, had a job offer withdrawn following his indictment. Their lives will never be the same, after having their faces on the cover of Newsweek and their houses staked out by news teams. Regrettably, they always will be, “the Duke lax guys that got accused of raping a stripper.”

Second, whenever an alleged sexual assault is proved unfounded, future allegations of sexual assault receive less credibility. If this comes to pass, a deep, meaningful harm will have been committed to future victims of sexual assault who make the difficult decision to come forward and confront their assailant.

Third, Mike Nifong’s abuse of the Durham County electoral process has been a sad commentary on personal ambition. Following the initial wave of allegations, Nifong gave over 70 national interviews on television and radio, while gearing up for his difficult reelection campaign. Coincidently, the first two indictments were unsealed about two weeks before Election Day. His behavior has been nothing short of shameful, and I hope that someone at the North Carolina Bar Association has the courage to investigate it further.

Fourth, the media, particularly cable news anchors such as Nancy Grace, have acted with a nearly undeniable presumption of guilt even while facts remained unclear. If the media intends to cover events with such great prominence during the early stages of such an investigation, they have a responsibility to give a similar degree of visibility to “less sexy” but unequivocal facts as they become certain. Placing allegations on page one, denials on page six, and exculpatory evidence on page four strikes me as a bizarre method of reporting the news.

In his recent New York Times column, David Brooks wrote, “Witch hunts go in stages. First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don't know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in. Then deafening silence, as everybody studiously ignores the vicious slanders they uttered during the moment of maximum hysteria.” In this regard, perhaps deafening silence is best though. If the judicial system ultimately clears these young men, I do not anticipate their receiving an apology from Mike Nifong. Wouldn’t you just want your life back?

Jay Ganatra is a senior at Duke University.

Ann Coulter's 320-Page Apology

2006-07-12T14:40:00.000-04:00

By Rob Goodman

I hope you’ll excuse me for waiting this long to write on Ann Coulter’s most recent book. I think it deserved a careful reading and some detailed thought; I also think that for quite a while I resisted the conclusions I was forming, because they were so far out of line with the conclusions of other commentators whose work I respect. But I believe that my conclusions offer the most thorough summation of what is, at times, a very difficult work. Let me try to explain them.

Briefly, Coulter’s new book, Godless, advances the thesis that political liberalism is, in itself, an organized religion. The “Church of Liberalism” has, according to Coulter, “its sacraments (abortion), its holy writ (Roe v. Wade), its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), its clergy (public school teachers), its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free), its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the ‘absolute moral authority’ of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland), and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident).”

Putting aside the pejorative language—the necessity of which I justify below—it’s clear that Coulter is being quite literal. Liberalism is Godless because, in her estimation, it rejects the Judeo-Christian deity, but it has every other hallmark of a real church, which is, after all, a system of organized and regulated belief. She herself writes that “the absence of a divinity makes liberals’ belief system no less religious…. Shintoism [sic] and Buddhism have no Creator God either, and they are considered religions.”

In this, Coulter seems to me to be following William James, who determined in The Varieties of Religious Experience that “religion…shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (emphasis added). Therefore, the object of the religious attitude is irrelevant to the systematic study of religion; I might very well find no objective evidence for what you claim to be worshiping, but if I observe the feelings, acts, and experiences of the Jamesian faith-state, I cannot deny that you are practicing religion. A conservative might deny the object of the Church of Liberalism—he might hate abortion, and Darwin, and public school teachers—but he cannot deny that liberals are practicing a religion, by the only definition of “religion” that works objectively. That seems to be Coulter’s argument; and so her references to “sacraments,” “holy writ,” “clergy,” “cosmology,” and so on, are not meant to be taken ironically—they are, as I said, very literal.

Why is this significant? Well, religion has a special place in our public discourse. That place is a protected place. I can ruthlessly criticize your politics, your economics, your parenting style, even your sexual orientation, and there will still be room for me in the general debate. But I can never question your theology. If I ever, in a political context, made you defend the doctrine of the Trinity, or Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, or the literal truth of Mohammed’s revelation, I would be shouted down and not invited back. Those are the rules of the game, and Coulter’s right-wing allies take them for granted when they denounce “anti-Christian prejudice.”

If you don’t believe me, try this thought experiment. Imagine that instead of this column, you’re reading another one I’ve written, entitled “The Mormons.” In it, I argue that Mormons are habitual liars, traitorously un-American, and, in general, not very pleasant company. What would you do when you hit the Comment button? What’s the word for someone who could write such a thing?

The word is bigot. Not because I accused someone of lying, or treason, or poor conversational etiquette—but because I did it on a religious basis.

And now comes Coulter urging us to give liberalism religious recognition. While recognition stops short of agreement—just as I can disagree with my Hindu friends but refrain from mocking their beliefs—Coulter is arguing that the religion of liberalism deserves special treatment. In effect, she wants us to enlarge the protective space and place liberalism under the aegis. And once we call liberalism a religion, we put it beyond criticism. Anti-liberalism goes on a par with anti-Semitism. Liberal-bashing becomes bigotry.

So what do we do with the fact that Coulter is now making this plea for tolerance, where before she had labeled liberals traitors and all but argued for their exile? I think there’s only one way to reconcile this new book with her entire previous oeuvre.

That is: Godless is a book of career-repudiating magnitude. In one blast, Coulter is retracting all her liberal-hating zeal, all her harshest words, and at the same time courageously castigating the right wing’s anti-liberal bigotry. Yes, Coulter did a great deal to foster that bigotry. But now, she’s decided to make amends. Godless is the apology, all 320 pages of it.

True, Coulter has couched that apology in a book that accuses liberals of “worshiping sex and death,” halting industrial progress in the name of “weeds and vermin,” defending pedophiles, and “believing that the following sentence makes sense: President Clinton saved the Constitution by repeatedly ejaculating on a fat Jewish girl in the Oval Office.” True, Coulter has promoted the book in which her apology is couched by accusing 9/11 widows of enjoying their husbands’ deaths. But Coulter didn’t create this political climate, and neither did you or I; and still you and I and Ann Coulter have to live in it. The fact is that, in 2006, a heartfelt apology demands to be spoken in words of utmost vituperation. Coulter has grasped that fact, and she’s done the best she can.

Would you like some fries with that pathos?

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: My Parents Ate My Homework

2006-07-10T15:05:00.000-04:00

By Jimmy Soni

I recall a vivid memory from my family trip to India in the fourth grade: my cousins leaning forward to support the weight of their backpacks. These bags were cavernous, and put to shame my rinky-dinky, single-pocket pack. Each day, my cousins would fill them to the breakpoint with their textbooks, which were equally weighty. Another image I’ll never forget: I opened my second-grade cousin’s math book, only to find that he was at least a level ahead of me.

My cousins were incredibly hard workers, but they were not the exception to the rule. India has a storied tradition of challenging its youngsters in the classroom, especially in math and science, where their diligence is legendary. Summer lasts a little over a month in my parents’ motherland, and high-stakes testing enables a largely meritocratic system of higher education.

America could stand to in-source some of this vigor. Two weeks ago, on the editorial page of The New York Times, Sarah Bennet and Nancy Kannish, authors of The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It, argued that schools are unfairly and unwisely burdening students with summer homework. Relying on research from Duke University’s Harris Cooper, they claimed that the connection between homework and achievement is tenuous, that homework prevents the “consolidation” of newly learned information, and that homework steals time away from reading for pleasure.

Their piece is long on angst, but short on analysis. Pulling isolated examples from school districts around the country, Bennet and Kannish practically accuse school districts of robbing students of their childhood. But here’s an example of one of the so-called grueling assignments: “Fifth and sixth graders in a Golden, Col., public middle school are required to keep a journal on a different math topic each week this summer, read three books and complete a written and artistic report on two of them.” Three books… for three months of summer. Here’s another: “One ninth grader we know was assigned a packet of materials on the Holocaust.” Twelve weeks with no obligations; obviously a “packet of materials” is just too much to ask.

Bennet and Kannish advise parents to petition their school boards about this “vacation homework” and, if that doesn’t work, to allow their children to ignore it. This is justified, they argue, since teachers are not well-schooled on the “science of homework.” But Bennet and Kannish are themselves not up-to-date on the science; they selectively ignore Cooper’s other research, which concludes that summer vacation actually strips away close to three months of learning from the school year. Over three years of school, your child will lose nearly a grade-level’s worth of material. By the time they finish high school, they have lost four years worth. According to the Center for Summer Learning, the summer brain drain is felt most acutely in math and hits lower and middle-income communities especially hard.

The solution, according to Bennet and Kannish, is for parents to set aside time for reading and other intellectual activities. Read: Homework, assigned by parents. The trouble is that even the most committed parents will have a tough time determining grade-level appropriate material, particularly in math. And without the specter of grades, parents will bear the burden of tracking progress and tacking punishments onto incomplete assignments.

Summer learning loss is a serious issue for policymakers and parents alike. Local school board officials must recognize that students are effectively stuck in reverse during the summer. They ought to assign appropriate, engaging work, and then stand tough when parents complain. The first step for parents is to ignore Bennet and Kannish, embrace their children’s summer work, and encourage them to use their summer freedom to both finish their homework and complete other constructive projects.

The question of summer learning has implications for the country as a whole. My cousins with their advanced textbooks, larger backpacks, and month-long summers are now snatching up jobs that once belonged to Americans, in part because of their math and science prowess. Many have moved to Bangalore, a boom town that plays host to the world’s top technology firms (think Silicon Valley only with more dust and enormous construction). The Bennet and Kannish types pose a threat not only to families, but to our country’s competitive advantage—it’s high time we tune them out, turn the television off, and toss out our inferior backpacks.

Jimmy Soni is a senior at Duke University.

Holiday Notice

2006-07-03T18:16:00.000-04:00

The 18-to-24 Bracket wishes its readers a happy Independence Day. Columns will return next week.