Obsidian Wings

Jonah Goldberg: Wrong Again

by hilzoy

Jonah Goldberg, on the reactions to his admission that the Iraq war was a 'worthy mistake':

"I'm all for being on offense. But I think in retrospect we called the wrong play. But simply because you called the wrong play doesn't mean you walk off the field."

Let's think about that, shall we? It sounds very magnanimous and lofty, until you realize that the reason it sounds that way is because it's something someone else would normally say to the person who made the wrong call. The person who made the wrong call might be consumed by shame, tempted to give it all up, and some wise mentor rallies him to fight again by saying: just because you called the wrong play doesn't mean you walk off the field.

But it's not at all the sort of thing you normally get to say to yourself after you made a horrible mistake, any more than you get to tell your victims to get over it, or lecture them on the value of forgiveness. Other people can say that to them, and they may be right; but if you are the person who has wronged them you do not. Same here.

Moreover, consider the mistake Jonah Goldberg made. He helpfully identifies it for us in the same Corner comment:

"But, of the many arguments in favor of toppling Saddam in 2001-2002 one of the most important — in my mind and, I believe, in the mind of many others — was that toppling the Iraq domino and standing-up a stable, democratically inclined government was supposed to be comparatively easy." (Goldberg's italics.)

That's not a little mistake. It's an enormous one. Jonah Goldberg is paid to write about issues like Iraq; he does not get cut the same slack that I'd give someone who tried to figure out whether to support the war while working full time as an accountant or a janitor. This is Jonah Goldberg's job. And this mistake is on a par with a doctor saying, after a disastrous surgery: "oh, you mean that's the liver?"

If that doctor went on to say: "Simply because you called the wrong play doesn't mean you walk off the field", we'd laugh at him. For a doctor not to know which of those little doohickeys is the liver is not just a "wrong call"; it's a reason to take away his license. For someone who writes about foreign policy to a large audience to think that it would be easy to create a democracy in Iraq is exactly the same.

Of course, we knew that Jonah Goldberg wasn't serious about foreign policy (or, as far as I can tell, about much of anything.) Who can forget this pearl of wisdom, for instance:

"Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." (...)

For now let's fall back on the Ledeen Doctrine. The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense."

Only someone who had no idea at all of what war is like -- that it often means the deaths of large numbers of people, children left without parents, societies smashed to bits, and an enormous amount of hatred unleashed on the world; and moreover that both wars and their consequences wars are inherently unpredictable -- could possibly write that. And while I might cut my FedEx delivery guy some slack if he didn't know that, I cut people who make their living writing about and advocating war no slack at all.

If a surgeon killed someone because he didn't know which of those squishy bits was the liver, and if for some reason he wasn't thrown out of the profession, he should stop practicing of his own accord. And if someone who advocated a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, did incalculable damage to the interests and the moral standing of his own country, and resulted in bands of killers wandering around using power drills to torture people did it because he thought that creating a democracy in a brutalized and fractured country would be easy, the honorable thing would be to resign and take up some profession in which one's sheer lack of judgment would be unlikely to harm anyone ever again. Organic farming, say, or playing Mickey Mouse at Disney World.

He certainly wouldn't say something inane like: "simply because you called the wrong play doesn't mean you walk off the field." Because the truth is: it depends on just how wrong that call was.

But then, an honorable person would have thought a lot longer and a lot harder before advocating war in the first place.

Barack Obama

by hilzoy

Lots of people are talking about Barack Obama. Is he running for President, or positioning himself to be someone else's running mate? Does he live up to the hype? Is this all just one of those puzzling ephemeral media firestorms? Etc., etc., etc.

I have about as much interest in these questions as I have in polling about the 2008 Presidential race: that is, none whatsoever. I see the problem: he's young and doesn't have that much experience. I see the upsides: he's not Hillary Clinton, he's smart and decent and thoughtful; like a lot of the most successful candidates of recent years, he comes across as an actual human being rather than a stale droning political android, but unlike, say, Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura, he seems also to have the traits that make for good political leaders. (For instance, unlike Perot, he seems to be quite sane. Little things like that matter.)

All that said, though, I can't imagine why we're talking about this stuff when we haven't even had the 2006 elections yet. There are a number of people I could imagine getting behind, and I'll decide which of them to go for when the election is closer, and the question a bit less hypothetical. But I do want to add one little data point while people are talking about him, because it's something I haven't seen people say. And it's this: a lot of people are going on about how Obama has not sponsored legislation on any of the Vital Issues Of The Day. Personally, I think that he'd have to be delusional to introduce, say, his own solution to the health insurance crisis: no bill on such a topic introduced by a freshman senator from the minority party would have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding, and the only reason to introduce one would be to grandstand. For that reason, I think that his failure to do so tends to speak well of him.

(Besides, consider how many Senators must have been watching for any hint of self-importance when Obama arrived in the Senate, given the press he had coming in; how many of them would have had to have been waiting for any sign that he was thinking: here am I, the wondrous Barack Obama, ready to set the Senate straight! The fact that he seems to have disarmed most of them is, I think, an achievement in its own right; it would have been impossible had he introduced his own comprehensive anti-poverty program, or something.)

But I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn't wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama's bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)

So my little data point is: while Obama has not proposed his Cosmic Plan for World Peace, he has proposed a lot of interesting legislation on important but undercovered topics. I can't remember another freshman Senator who so routinely pops up when I'm doing research on some non-sexy but important topic, and pops up because he has proposed something genuinely good. Since I think that American politics doesn't do nearly enough to reward people who take a patient, craftsmanlike attitude towards legislation, caring as much about fixing the parts that no one will notice until they go wrong as about the flashy parts, I wanted to say this. Specifics below the fold.

Card Check And Popcorn

by hilzoy

Via Ezra Klein at TAPPED, an interesting study (pdf) on union card-checks versus elections. Ezra is more quotable than the study:

"A poll commissioned by American Rights at Work (a pro-union org), Rutgers University, and Jesuit Wheeling University surveyed 430 randomly-selected workers from worksites where employees had sought unions either through the NLRB election process or card-check. The survey included workers who voted both for and against the union, and included campaigns in which the unions both won and lost. The Eagleton Research Center and Rutgers conducted the calls over a couple of weeks in 2005.

The results were telling: 22% of workers surveyed said management "coerced them a great deal.' 6% said the same for unions. During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose (it's worth noting that in card-check elections, 23% of workers complained of management coercion -- more than complained of union coercion). Workers in NLRB elections were more than 53% as likely to report that management threatened to eliminate their jobs.

Even more interesting, fewer workers in card check campaigns said coworkers pressured them to join the union (17% to 22%). Workers in card check elections were more than twice as likely to report the employer took a neutral stance and let the workers decide. So, in fairness to Megan, neither options is perfect. But these results show that one is decidedly less perfect than the other."

The argument against card check, as I understand it, just is that workers will be more likely to feel coerced by their co-workers under card check. One counter-argument is that the types of coercion available to co-workers pale in comparison to those available to management. Co-workers can't threaten to fire people who don't vote their way, for example. But actual evidence about rates of coercion is the obvious way to settle the argument. And if this study is right, workers not only feel a lot less coercion under card-check, they feel less coercion from co-workers than from management under both systems, and they feel less coercion from their co-workers under card-check than under elections.

This matters a lot. I would imagine that most people would agree, in principle, that whether they like unions or not, it's much better to have a fair system of rules governing unions than an unfair one. Aside from the fact that employers engage in more coercion under elections than under card check, elections about whether or not to be represented by unions, under current law, are hugely time-consuming, with endless points of dispute that need to be arbitrated. Moreover, the penalties for employer violations of labor law are so small that lots of companies just disregard them.

Whatever one's views on unions, I would think that letting workers decide whether they want a union or not, enforcing existing laws, and changing them to make collective bargaining more straightforward and less of a feast for labor lawyers would be an unqualified good. If no one wanted to join a union under fair conditions, fine. If a lot of people did, that should also be fine with conservatives: both sides, it seems to me, should be able to agree that it's the workers' views, not ours, that should matter here.

However, I think there are lots of reasons to think that effective representation for workers would be a good thing right about now. I've put one, also via Ezra, below the fold.

Oh: Now I Get It!

by hilzoy

Over at TPM, I read that the FBI had given Jack Abramoff his own desk. Stupidly, I interpreted this to mean something like 'The news division has given City Hall its own desk', or 'the State Department has given Central Asia its own desk': i.e., they had assigned a whole person or unit to do nothing but Abramoff. And I wondered: gosh, they hadn't done that before?, and moved on.

Silly me. From USNews:

"Jack Abramoff, the lobbying scandal figure, has become such a chatty rat that probe insiders say he's been given a desk to work at in the FBI. We're told he spends up to four hours a day detailing his shady business to agents eager to nail more congressmen in the scandal. And when cooperative witnesses spend that much time inside, they get a desk. As a result of his help in the ever expanding investigation, we hear that the Feds hope to keep him in a nearby prison after he's sentenced on his conspiracy admission."

Now that's more like it! I hope he details every single illegal act he has ever heard of in minute detail. And I hope he has a very, very good memory.

For what it's worth, I'm not normally nearly this gleeful about people going to jail. But people who sell out their public offices are, in my opinion, aiming daggers at the heart of our system of government, and I feel about them the way I feel about the person I heard about a few decades ago, who used to fake a heart attack, and then when some helpful person had taken him into his or her home while calling for help, would rob that person at gunpoint. Robbery is bad, I thought, but robbing people while making it impossible for people with actual heart attacks to get help, and destroying the kind of basic trust between citizens that makes decent life possible, is utterly beneath contempt. I don't feel this way about public servants who turn out to have made some sort of comprehensible accounting error (although why anyone in public life doesn't just pay for everything that isn't obviously a work-related expense is beyond me.) But people who take bribes: I insert their names into prison blues songs and pound them out on my guitar with a special malicious glint in my eye.

(And yes, that includes Democrats. If, as seems likely, he is found guilty, I hope William Jefferson gets to reflect on his sins at length in our federal penitentiaries.)

On another note, I am thrilled that Spencer Ackerman, otherwise known as "the only reason I didn't cancel my subscription to TNR ages ago", has joined the Prospect staff and TAPPED. What with the likes of Ezra and Scott Lemieux and praktike and Charles "where has your prose been all my life?" Pierce, TAPPED is turning into one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Or something like that. Maybe the mot juste will occur to me while I'm off cancelling my TNR subscription. Heh heh.

Open Thread (Special Plastering Edition)

by hilzoy

Yesterday I was about to assemble some shelves to put in my dressing room (yes, my house has a dressing room tee hee), and I thought to myself: self, isn't the best time to deal with the bulging, cracking paint and/or plaster on that wall before, rather than after, you put shelves in front of it? And in a moment of folly, I thought: why yes, it is. And since there are a few other cracking places in this room (not many in the house as a whole; most are in this one room), before I knew it I had taken off a good bit of paint and plaster.

The relevant walls are exterior walls: they have about a quarter inch of plaster over a slightly thicker layer of some heavier substance (different plaster? I don't really think it's concrete), behind which are the bricks of the brick walls of the house. I have previously repaired lath and plaster walls, but it struck me, after I was well into the demolition phase of this, that I have never repaired exterior walls before, and that my knowledge of replastering, based as it is on the assumption that you have to deal with either a crack or a gaping hole, doesn't really include the answer to such questions as: what do you do when you just need to spread a bunch of plaster over a pretty large expanse of somewhat crumbly old wall? Are there tricks to prevent it from sagging and dripping, and to make sure it gets a grip on what's behind it?

Also: under one window, I discovered a bunch of crumbliness extending maybe a third of the width of the window. (The window itself seems to be quite well anchored.) Some part of it is crumbly wood -- not the main piece under the sill, but a piece that sits in front of that one, maybe half an inch deep and an inch high. Some part of it is, I think, crumbly mortar -- maybe an inch high, an inch deep, three inches wide of crumbly mortar. Should I put a new little piece of wood where the crumbly wood used to be? What should I replace the mortar with? Is there some way to take advantage of this situation to insulate/block drafts from underneath the window? And what should I do to diagnose and correct whatever problem led to crumbling, given that I do not have the capacity to do anything involving taking out the window?

I tried asking at Home Depot, but they were quite uncharacteristically ignorant. (I asked what the difference between normal and spackling plaster was, and in what circumstances one could use one in place of the other, and the guy in charge of that department looked at me as if I'd come from Mars and said: well, they're completely different. Spackling is a paste. (Duh.) My attempts to get even one molecule of information about the differences in their properties once they had dried were complete failures; as he said, "no one uses plaster anymore." -- Except those of us who live in houses with plaster walls!, I nearly said, but thought better of it.)

Anyways, if anyone has any useful advice for me, I'd love to hear it. I have all sorts of useful materials (including some sprayable insulating foam that I got yesterday -- I've never used anything like that, but it looked kind of fun and potentially relevant.)

Oh: and what does one do about a largish gap between the baseboard and the plaster that seems to open into a nameless void? -- This I'm sure I can deal with, one way or the other, but while I'm asking...

Thanks. Have a nice open thread!

BSG Blogging: Exodus, Part II

To avoid spoilers, I'll just say that Moore and company are going to have a tough time topping last night's episode. I think "Exodus, Part II" may have been the best episode I've seen since "33".

Plagues

by hilzoy

As I said in my last post, the ugliness is coming thick and fast -- so fast that I have had to combine it all into one post, which is below the fold. Regrettably, my chosen schema did not accommodate some flat-out lies, like this one. (See also here -- for factual details -- and here.)

The main post is longish, so I put it below the fold. It concerns the many horrible things that will happen if Democrats win in November. Be very, very afraid.

7:55 p.m. on October 18, 2006

by von

"I'm sorry, dear, I've only got a moment to talk.  Trial tomorrow."

"Somthing's happened."

"What is it?  I've got a ton of things to do. Can it wait? I'm really swamped."

"Jeff, your Uncle Jim is dead."

"What?  What the hell are you talking about?"

And that's what happenned.  With me in Orlando.  And my wife in Indiana with my father when he received the news.  And the rest of the family in Worcester and Boston and God-knows where else.  Including Jim.  Who loved life.  Who loved beer, which he sometimes brewed. Who was planning to live in my grandmother's cabin on the coast of Maine when he retired (soon). Who could crack like Robin Williams with a couple drinks in him.  Who could sit down and shoot the shit about most any kind of shit you'd want to shoot.  Who, on a rocky beach in Maine this August, rolled up his pantslegs and waded out into the cold ocean with my nephew and scattered his mother's ashes into the sea.  My grandmother, who I had watched slowly go into the dark. While I sat on a rock with my wife and my new son. And watched.  And nearly cried.  Because nearly cry is all that I have ever done since I was a child.  About the important things, at least.

So now my dad is now missing a mother and brother too.  And my niece (just married) and nephew (about to be married) are without a father.  And my aunt was with him when it happened, a heart attack (probably), gasping and dead before the ambulance came.  And me still in Orlando.  God damn it all.  God damn it all.  God damn you and everyone else.  It ain't fucking fair.  Fucking shit. Fuck you.  Fuck it all.

And the trial continues, as it has for the last five weeks.

Shrimp On A Treadmill! (Open Thread)

by hilzoy

Video here. Who knew they had such nimble little legs?

Discuss.

(h/t Politburo Diktat)

Vote Republican Or Democrats Will Kill Your Babies!

by hilzoy

Wow: the ugliness is coming thick and fast. Via Kevin Drum, a story in the NY Sun:

"A little-known Republican group that claims to have swayed the 2004 presidential election with provocative radio advertising aimed at black and Hispanic audiences is spending nearly $1 million this year to boost the GOP's chances of holding on to a majority in Congress.

The group, America's Pac, began running ads last month in more than two dozen congressional districts.The campaign discusses issues ranging from warrantless wiretapping to school choice, but the most inflammatory spots pertain to abortion.

"Black babies are terminated at triple the rate of white babies," a female announcer in one of the ads says, as rain, thunder, and a crying infant are heard in the background. "The Democratic Party supports these abortion laws that are decimating our people, but the individual's right to life is protected in the Republican platform. Democrats say they want our vote.Why don't they want our lives?"

Another ad features a dialogue between two men.

"If you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,' you'll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked," one of the men says.

"That's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed," the other replies.

"Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican," the first man says.

Another spot attempts to link Democrats to a white supremacist who served as a Republican in the Louisiana Legislature, David Duke.The ad makes reference to Duke's trip to Syria last year, where he spoke at an anti-war rally.

"I can understand why a Ku Klux Klan cracker like David Duke makes nice with the terrorists,"a male voice in the ad says. "What I want to know is why so many of the Democrat politicians I helped elect are on the same side of the Iraq war as David Duke."

In one of the communities where the ads are running, South Bend, Ind., some blacks were outraged."

Outraged? Gosh: I can't imagine why. I mean, don't all blacks talk about 'little mistakes with their hos'? And aren't they dumb enough not to remember that David Duke is a Republican, or to wonder which paragon of concern for the African-American community is behind this?

"America's Pac is the brainchild of a Kansas-based Republican consultant, Richard Nadler.He said Sunday that he is no longer affiliated with the group.

"Mr. Nadler is the genius.We basically follow his game plan," the group's new chief, Thomas Donelson of Marion, Iowa, said. In 2000, Mr. Nadler came under fire for a school choice-related ad in which parents said their son's violenceridden public school "was a bit more diversity than he could handle." Mr. Bush's campaign denounced the ad as "inappropriate," and the Republican National Committee called it "racist or race-baiting in intent.""

How on earth could they possibly take offense? What could possibly be wrong with this?