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One of the few nuggets of wisdom which has remained with me since university was drummed into my head by an eminent if slightly boring professor called Geoffrey Hosking. His golden rule for any would-be revolutionary was that without control of the army you have no chance of success. This gem comes back to . . . → Read More: A Question of Control Slate’s Chris Suellentrop offers up the latest in a long series of commentary speculating that maybe the second Bush term won’t be so bad. Soon after, the president himself notes that Suellentrop is delusional. Liberals may have more reason for hope on domestic policy. Bush doesn’t embrace what Slate’s William Saletan has dubbed “Reagan’s Law,” the belief that, as Reagan explained in his farewell address, “As government expands, liberty contracts.” Rather, Bush believes in using government to expand individual choice in programs like Medicare and Social Security, as Jonathan Rauch explained in a 2003 essay for National Journal that remains the most compelling explanation of Bush’s political philosophy. “For Bush,” Rauch wrote, “individual responsibility and Big Government are not necessarily opposed to each other.” Liberals could find much to like, for example, in a further expansion of the federal role in education. Bush’s immigration reforms might be to liberals’ liking, too. Liberals could also just codify the wholesale abandonment of liberalism currently in progress and get born again as evangelical kleptocrats with a sprinkling of social darwinism. The US has perhaps six months to get Iraq’s electricity supply up to at least the levels enjoyed by Iraqis just prior to the US invasion. In a press release issued by the Pentagon, Army Corps of Engineers commander Thomas Bostwick acknowledged that although the electrical generation capacity in Iraq now amounts to about 5,500 kilowatts, compared to 4,400 just before the invasion, “the typical Iraqi citizen doesn’t recognize this increase because much of the new capacity is cut during both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance.” That lack of recognition coincides with a lack of electricity. According to this AFP piece, which also cites Bostwick, Iraqis dependent upon the state grid receive about three hours of electricity from an estimated 3,500-3,600 kilowatts generated daily, or 25% less than before the invasion. One of the first subjects I wrote extensively on was gerrymandering. It is a gigantic political problem which has gotten a lot of attention in liberal circles with Scwarzeneggar’s proposal to reform the re-districting process, so after some delay I am chiming in. The prerequisite to real reform is to remove the redistricting process . . . → Read More: Gerrymandering Michael Chertoff is in many ways the perfect Homeland Security nominee for this administration. He began his Washington career in 1994 with a two-year stint investigating phantom crimes and phantom criminals as special counsel to the senate Whitewater committee, and resumed it in 2001 as the head of the criminal division at the Ashcroft Justice Department. It was Chertoff who designed and shepherded the mass post-911 roundup and detention of Arab and Muslim immigrants and visitors, encouraging his subordinates to hold many of them indefinitely for minor immigration statute violations, with no access to attorneys and no possibility of bail. The policy eventually resulted in a total of no 911-related charges and, along with its author, was thoroughly dissed in two reports issued in 2003 by the Department’s inspector general. Hi Publius here, from the Third Estate. First I just want to thank BTC News for inviting me to post here. It’s a real treat. Now to business. On Saturday Nicholas Kristoff in the NYT Editorial Page suggested that we return to spraying DDT in order to combat malaria in the Third World. We . . . → Read More: DDT Madness An elegantly worded “story” entitled, The Myth of the UN’s Moral Authority, appeared in the New York Sun today courtesy of David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush and co-author with Richard Perle of “An End to Evil: How To Win the War on Terror.” Needless to say, the opinion piece (which curiously . . . → Read More: The Petulant Child Larry Diamond has joined the ranks of vocally “disgruntled” ex-Bush administration employees, a parade memorably kicked off (although not led) by John DiIulio almost exactly two years ago. The reason Diamond is turning up in the news on the eve of elections in Iraq is this September 2004 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, the . . . → Read More: Sandbagged in Sumeria Fred Kaplan, one of the few Slate writers for whom I have pretty much unbridled admiration, has a short piece today about Condi Rice’s apparent triumph, as represented by her selection of someone other than Freddy Krueger or John Bolton to be her deputy at the State Department, over the administration’s headbangers. He may . . . → Read More: Rice doesn’t mean beans |
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Imaginary Iraq
“By August, it was taking me two weeks to negotiate my dubious safety for a mere 80-mile journey outside Baghdad.” . . . → Read More: Imaginary Iraq