eye of the storm

let me say a few words about the impeachment move by dennis kucinich. i think an impeachment is richly justified, but i would narrow down the indictment. kucinich's 35 articles throw the kitchen sink.
here's a piece by fred hiatt trying to show, with reference to the rockefeller report on prewar intelligence "failures," that bush did not lie about saddam's weapons programs. now hiatt, among other things, is still trying to defend his own position at the time, which is kind of sad. i think hiatt's conclusions are basically right, however. the admin did not contradict its own intelligence. it manufactured the intelligence, in the following way: it demanded evidence for a certain point of viewe. then it regarded every scrap that supported its position as being credible and ignored every bit that undermined that position as implausible. this is actually a process that is typical for human beings, albeit this is a particularly clear case with particularly disastrous consequences. i've been, um, married to people whose main hobby could be  described in the same way. they work so hard on believing what it serves their purposes or self-interests to believe that they can convince themselves of absolutely anything. the commitment is to the conclusion, not the process. we can call this rationalization, perhaps, or self-deception, although the bush admin case is so extreme that one must wonder whether they believed what they were saying. certainly they cannot have believed in as unqualified a way as they purported to. the powell performance at the un, for instance, just had all these glaring holes and weaknesses and contradictions. these could not have been completely invisible to anyone, i hope.
nevertheless, the question of "lying" in a case like this is complex and obscure - that's one reason one engages in the process of rationalization to begin with: so that one does not have to lie straight out. it's worth saying that in some ways the procedure is worse than lying because it puts you in a globally problematic relation to the truth: it falsifies a whole system, personality, government, rather than a mere assertion. the only solution for this kind of procedure in a democracy is political: people have to say "huh"? but they often don't. another example would be gulf of tonkin. blame bush. blame powell. blame the pussies in the senate, like hillary clinton and john kerry. and blame the, um, people. but the impeachment case on those grounds would be difficult, turning on who actually  believed what crap when. sadly, those people's own accounts are all you really get on matters like that.
at any rate, i would focus like a laser on illegal prisons, illegal detentions, illegal interrogations. there is no doubt, i tell you, that the administration starting with bush and cheney commanded a series of obvious fundamental violations of the constitution and international law; they commanded a series of outright felonies. it is irrelevant that some monsters, idiots, or weaklings in the justice department delivered "legal" opinions that such things were within the scope of presidential power; john yoo would have justified bush in selling crack in the oval office, and alberto gonzales would have acquiesced. i'm telling you that knowledge of a single black site interrogation facility or abduction is more than enough to impeach a president. here we have a true embarrassment of riches: hundreds of inyourface high crimes.

been watching the obama and clinton speeches at aipac. they are disgusting and cowardly: pure uncritical support for whatever israeli policies may be, pandering like mofos to the jewish vote. well. first of all, this "we don't talk to hamas" thing simply precludes a peace settlement. they both support the precise situation that stands today, have no interest in any policy that could actually lead to peace, which would be in israel's interests, of course. there is all this condemnation of hamas's terroism, missiles, holding israeli soldiers, etc, and i think that is appropriate. but not a single word about the devastating effects of israeli policies on  all those families and children in gaza: trying literally to starve them into submission, bulldozing their homes, and, of course, killing them, whether in some mistargeted retribution or not (which at this point is an impossible equation to elucidate). there is not a single candidate this time around who will make any difference, and it will be walls, oppression, and terroristic violence at the end of the next administration just as at the beginning. they both talked of "hope." but they are helping to kill any trace of it.

i'm disappointed that the libertarian party nominated bob barr, but on the up side there's liable to be a lot of attention and a fair number of votes. and barr more than any of the other candidates is liable to siphon directly from mccain. kinda wish they'd put me in charge of their rhetoric: i'd replace rand with thoreau, to begin with.

well, the libertarian pres debate, currently on c-span, is a bit embarrassing. the moderator, steve pinkerton, seems to be "defective" in some way; he's not making a lot of sense, and he forgot to let the candidates give their opening statements. the mighty bob barr called ayn rand "the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century," i guess after drenching himself thoroughly in russell, wittgenstein, quine, kripke, heidegger, sartre, bataille, foucault, rawls, nozick, baudrillard, habermas, etc. someone did say 'cicero,' but then said "probably none of you have ever heard of him." i think that was jingozian, who then admitted frankly that he had no idea what "the tragedy of the commons" means. whenever steve kubby speaks, a weird alien pinging starts up; perhaps a medical device near his clip-on. wayne root is one of these motivational speaker types whose self-declared youthful energy is enough to make more mellow human beings sob in despair. gravel seems to have what are closest to actual answers, though randian mary ruart keeps talking about "love" and stuff in a sort of inspiring way, and in a way that would make rand herself cringe, which is a good thing.

for what we might call a mainstream leftist, eugene robinson is an awfully good columnist. but here he makes (again) a truly wrong argument. he puts down the failures of the bush administration to what he thinks of as the traditional republican mistrust of government,  which we'd associate with goldwater and reagan. so bush supposedly set out to dismantle the government, leaving us all to starve etc. well. this is laughably anachronistic; it accepts at face value the occasional forays of bush and co into reagan rhetoric. but on the contrary, the bush administration has dramatically increased the size and power of the federal government, established whole new bureaucracies. etc. robinson probably is not a big fan of the conversion of the us into a security state, both at home and abroad, and the concomitant growth of budgets and bureaucracies and powers. but surely he can't argue that it expresses a mistrust of government. even programs such as no child left behind display the tremendous republican enthusiasm for centralized federal control of various aspects of people's lives. blaming the pathetic katrina response on the supposed mistrust of government is silly; it wasn't lack of resources, but of competence; indeed the whole response has been characterized by spendthrift waste of resources; consider the tens of thousands of useless trailers, etc.
it's a perfectly reasonable criticism not to like the spending priorities of the bush administration. but obviously, what we have these days is two parties who love government, want it to grow substantially, and think of it as the provider of all solutions, whether "keeping us safe" or addressing various social inequalities

the people contesting the libertarian party nomination are former senator mike gravel, wayne allyn root, and former representative bob barr. they're scheduled to debate friday (may 16) on fox business channel. barr is best remembered for grimly trying to nail bill clinton during the impeachment. for a libertarian he's awfully trad conservative; i don't see him talking about drug laws, and he's all about closing the borders. root is very trad libertarian: anti-tax, pro-gun. i just sent gravel $20; one thing i dig about what he's doing is a very elaborate set of proposals to bring about a direct democracy. but it would refreshing to have a leftish libertarian: the movement is, or should be, multi-ideological.

sorry to have had to pull down "demographics." it's in this morning's la times.

here is an excellent piece from reason on the bizarre way we've come to think of our presidents.

demographics is a lot less interesting in politics than, say, cable news makes it. i just saw someone assert that the election will turn on the vote of blue collar white men. but let's try to get this straight. let's say you're trying to explain an election in which candidate a beats candidate b at 54 to 46% (just for simplicity).
any demographic segment that constitutes , say, 10% of the elecorate that votes largely for one of the candidates can, with exactly equal propriety, be represented as having been decisive. this could be black folks, but it could be people between 35 and 45 years old, or people with graduate degrees, soccer moms, left-handers, blondes, what you like for your little account. now probably left-handers are split. but that of course just makes them even more decisive: a potential battleground. the fact that they, or white blue collor men, are split, is no less decisive and significant than that they go one way or another. had they not been split, they would have decided the election. therefore the split decided the election. none of these can be "the" explanation because they are all to a precisely equal degree an explanation. if barack could have split off the left-handers, or people with violet eyes, he would have won. in other words, this variety of analysis flows to any taxonomy you like, and then the idea that we're detecting the categories of race, religion, age, income, education shows much more about how we split people up - about our prejudices, say - than about anything substantive about an election.
here's a paradigm case: blame nader's 1.5% of the vote in florida for gore's loss of the state in 2000. well, any 1.5 percent segment of the population that didn't go to gore is exactly equally responsible: those who voted for buchanan, for instance, or practitioners of voodoo. the idea is that had these people not voted for nader, they would have voted for gore. then again, had the voodoo practitioners not voted for buchanan, they would have voted for bush. in other words, we also make a series of presumptions on which only a vote for one of the major candidates is sensible, in which counterfactuals are cast in terms of a two-party system etc.
all of these ideas are not things we detect: they are a priori categorizations that shape narratives. the methodology, in other words, is fundamentally non-empirical, though it all comes in the quasi-scientific numbers of the polling industry.

ok white guys the long version:

Identity Crisis For White Men
By Crispin Sartwell

     Black women face a profound choice of identities in the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Do they keep faith with their gender or their race? During the beauty-shop interview, you're not a real woman if you don't vote for Hillary; and you're not black enough if you don't vote for Barack. It's like being drawn and bifurcated.
    What's more rarely appreciated is that we white guys face precisely the same existential crisis around the inverse question: whom do we oppose? Do we go with our sexism (and reject Hillary), or do we go with our racism (and ditch Obama)?  If you vote for Hillary, you're not a real man. If you vote for Barack, you're not white enough.
      Where, in short, does our fundamental loyalty lie, to our gender or our race?
      Here's how my demographic in small-town Pennsylvania are thinking about this profound dilemma, in which the political becomes all-too personal.  We ask ourselves:
   To which group of incomprehensible Others do we owe more of our economic/social/political privilege? From which have we drawn greater profit and prestige: the exploitation of black people, or (e.g.) the unpaid homemaking labor of women? It is, of course, a matter of honor that our wealth, such as it is, is built on a heritage of slavery and sexual slavery, i.e. marriage. We kicked your ass!
    No demographic segment can be expected to vote against its own interest, so it is axiomatic that we white men should fight to preserve the more profitable of our oppressions. I wish there were reliable statistics on this matter.
    Perhaps more to the point, who, black men or women in general, do we ultimately regard with more condescension, or dismiss as more parochial, ignorant, and concerned with trivial and reprehensible matters?   
    Which do we regard with more derision and contempt: women or black men?
    Whom do we loathe more?
    I personally have a bigger gripe with women. But perhaps that's just because I don't hang around with black men.
    Who fills us most fully with an almost supernatural quasi-Freudian phobic fear? This would be an easy question of there were an (openly) gay candidate. But no.
     Our dilemma is made even harder to come to grips with because both our racism and our sexism are entirely unconscious; this whole electoral dynamic happens only in the deep interminable sub-conscious of the beer-swilling male American. Yet it is likely to determine the future of America.
    We wish black folks and women well, but the prospect that we'd be ruled by them is, obviously, absurd. And devastating.

Crispin Sartwell is Director of Polling at crispinsartwell.com.