The American Conservative

The “conservative opinion elite” is coming apart says Rick Perlstein in Newsweek.

But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intellectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic…

Such discomfort has been dormant for some time. Under the influence of philosophical gurus like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol, the sotto voce tradition arose of flattering the sort of voter who drove a pickup truck even if he wasn’t the sort you might want to socialize with…But Palin has raised the “class” question publicly among conservatives as seldom before.

For Perlstein, the “conservative opinion elite” is primarily populated by neoconservatives. But the timing of his piece couldn’t be any better for disproving his thesis that the “elites” are ditching Palin. This week’s Weekly Standard, the flagship neoconservative publication headed by Bill Kristol, devotes its cover story to defending Palin, who they argue has been the victim of unjustified media attacks. “She cannot be ignored,” the piece concludes, “Hurricane Sarah is about to descend on the Lower 48.”

Perhaps more revealing about the conservative landscape described by Perlstein, though, is that for the mainstream media elite, the Right consists of (neo)conservative elites and GOP activists of the talk shows.  There isn’t room for thoughful traditional conservatives or libertarians (the latter apparently only consists of “nutty” tea party types).

Here’s a noisy, entertaining row about affirmative action. (It starts about five minutes in.)

Although heated, the debate remains civil. Say what you want about Maddow, she is at least able to treat Buchanan as a human being. Unfortunately, Ezra Klein, chock-full of bien-pensant indignation, seems unwilling to do the same on his Washington Post blog:

I was going to post this video with the description “Rachel Maddow exposes Pat Buchanan as a huge racist.” But that’s not quite right. It’s more that she re-exposes him as a huge racist. It’s a good reminder of how weird it is that a caveman like Buchanan has been normalized as a valued and sage political commentator in recent years.

Watch Pat Buchanan on that clip. This is man who got his start helping Nixon divide and demoralize this country. Who helped destroy the Republican Party in 1992 by running one of the most noxious presidential campaigns in recent memory. Today, he is a name-brand political commentator who draws a paycheck from NBC.

Not all forms of affirmative action benefit the dispossessed. Some benefit the powerful. And affirmative action for the powerful goes a whole lot further back than affirmative action for the powerless. The futile assault that Jeff Sessions and Pat Buchanan mounted against Sonia Sotomayor was a rearguard defense for the system of privilege that has served them so well, and so faithfully. But Sessions fell short in his struggle. And Buchanan ended his week being dismissed as “dated” on Maddow’s show. They are losing, and they know it.

The dreary Senate hearing on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court left me so in the doldrums that my only chance for solace was to dig out my copy of Freedom and the Law (1961) by Bruno Leoni.

My lastest TGIF column is here.

After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published “The People’s Pottage.” A year later, in 1954, he died. “The People’s Pottage” opens thus:

“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.

Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When “Silent Cal” Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.

And today? Obama’s first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II. Read More…

After a bad few weeks for British troops in Afghanistan–15 dead already this month–the anti-war movement in the UK seems to be gathering momentum. The Stop The War Coalition, with the help of Members of Military Families Against the War, is generating substantial public support. It’s got so serious that President Obama this week felt compelled to lavish praise on the British for their “extraordinary role” in the war effort.

But Brits remain unconvinced by the western alliance’s AfPak strategy. As Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian on Tuesday,

Obama made a serious error on coming to power. To honour his pledge to disown Iraq he felt obliged to “adopt” Afghanistan. What had begun as a punitive raid on the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden morphed into a neocon campaign of regime change, counter-insurgency and nation-building. Obama rashly identified himself with this crusade and leapt from the frying pan of Iraq into the fire of the Hindu Kush.

The president now owns Afghanistan. As a result, he and his British ally, Gordon Brown, are sucked into mendacity on the scale of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. They talk of “clearing, holding and building” Afghan territory, to make the world safe from terrorist bases. Brown talks of fighting “to prevent terrorism coming to the streets of Britain”. His helpless defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, tells troops they must stay until the Karzai government “can tackle the threat of the Taliban on its own”, which he knows is never.

Such explanations insult public intelligence. Terrorism does not need bases. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany. The safety of Britain’s streets is secured not by boys dying in poppy fields, but by sound intelligence and domestic policing. We learned last week that MI5′s former head, Eliza Manningham-Buller, specifically warned the government that British security would be harmed by intervention abroad. Ministers know this. Why do they lie?

Jenkins goes on to call on Brown “to act as he is known to believe and cut loose from the Americans in Helmand. It would take courage, but it would be the right thing to do.” There’s little chance of the prime minister following his advice. While the public grows furious about this unwinnable — and thus utterly futile — war, the debate in Westminster remains preoccupied with upping the ante. Do we need more helicopters? More troops? A civilians surge? It’s bad PR to cut and run.

Brown’s main opponents, terrified of being branded unpatriotic, offer no resistance to the war effort. The Tories want “visible progress in Afghanistan.” The best hope for the anti-war crowd should lie with Liberal Democrats on the Left. But Nick Clegg, the party’s leader, seems as dedicated as the rest of the political class to “achieving stability” in the AfPak region.

On the other hand, Canada, having suffered bad losses, has promised to pull all its troops out in 2011. If only Washington and Westminster were brave enough to admit defeat.

A new issue of The American Conservative goes to press today. Don’t miss it — the September-dated issue includes a skeptical look (two pieces by Ted Galen Carpenter and John Laughland) at Americans’ love for global revolutions and protests; Michael P. Farris on what the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child means for your family; takedowns of Ben Bernanke and Lawrence Summers by the Cunning Realist and Dennis Dale; Paul Gottfried’s memoir of his father; Reid Buckley on why higher education produces bad writing; Sean Scallon on what the GOP can learn from Andrew Jackson’s war on the second Bank of the United States (hint: it involves ending the Fed); and much more, including columns by Pat Buchanan, Bill Kauffman, Stuart Reid, and Eve Tushnet.

The issue begins arriving in stores in about 10 days, but of course the best way to make sure you get all the goodness that is TAC is to subscribe. And if you enjoy the website, please donate to keep it growing. Even $10 or $20 dollars is a great help.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald wonders why the Obama system of justice for the prisoners of GWOT is evolving in this way:

“…… If you really think about the argument Obama made yesterday — when he described the five categories of detainees and the procedures to which each will be subjected — it becomes manifest just how profound a violation of Western conceptions of justice this is. What Obama is saying is this: we’ll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don’t think we can convict in a real court, we’ll get convictions in the military commissions I’m creating. For those we can’t convict even in my military commissions, we’ll just imprison them anyway with no charges (“preventively detain” them).”

With this paragraph he basically answers his own question. The biggest fear the administration has is to have one of the detainees be found not guilty due to evidence provided by torture which would free that person on U.S. soil to where they could potential commit another terrorist act. And just imagine the reaction from the public if that happened. The Obamaites are no fools.

The strum und drang over the fate of our prisoners has always amused me. Perhaps I’m being naive or dumb, but it always seemed to me that the easiest solution was to declare our prisoners just that, prisoners of war. Make Gitmo or any place else that wants them a standard POW camp governed under the Geneva Convention and hold said prisoners for the duration of the war and then decide what to do with them afterward. Is some merit trials for war crimes, then establish a Nuremberg-like tribunal for them.

It’s that too simplistic? Maybe it is for the day of age when nations do not declare war against each other any more.  Certainly the U.S. has not done so since World War II. Is it any coincidence all the conflicts since then have not ended in clear cut victory? And yet we are constantly told we are a nation at war.  But how can that be when there are no bond drives, no conscription, no victory gardens or rationing or any kind of sacrifices or adjustments society usually makes when at war. Indeed, we may very well be the first wartime nation whose leaders ask the public not for sacrifice, but for more consumption.

And when one of our main leaders comes up with a plan to take out our enemies in this war, he orders the nation’s intelligence service to violate the law and keep it from the public’s elective representatives. Why would you need to do this if we are at war? Aren’t we all on the same team?

The Obama Administration is heading down the same path of “you can have it all” polices offered by its predecessors. Stimulus packages and public health care options perhaps would be more readily accepted if the didn’t add on to already fearful price tag of deficit spending. But apparently it has dawned on exactly nobody within the West Wing that ending the GWOT could help the nation’s economic picture. No, not withstanding out latest glorious offensive in Afghanistan, its going to take more money and U.S. troops to obtain something that could be at least called “victory” in a messy sort of way. That’s what Gen. McChrystal believes.

Thus you have another Administration unwilling to marshal the nation’s resources for war and yet also unwilling budget properly for war or to make it priority. Apparently the war is just another spending program.

And thus the Unwar continues on….

My sources are telling me that the secret CIA program involving a Dick Cheney coverup that is currently in the news consisted of dispatching assassination teams to various countries to kill individuals who were known to be al-Qaeda supporters but who, for various reasons, had not been detained by the governments of the countries in which they were residing.  A number of those being targeted were living freely in Latin America, Africa, and Europe.  The assassins were to be drawn from CIA’s own special ops group and also from delta force.  They would enter the target countries as businessmen on false passports, some of which would be non-American, obtain weapons sent ahead through the diplomatic pouch to the US Embassy, kill the target, turn the weapons back over to an embassy contact, and leave the country.  The program used delta soldiers initially because CIA SOG was fully engaged in Afghanistan.  The first hit attempt was in Kenya, was botched, and the deltas had to be bailed out by the Ambassador who had not been briefed on what was going on under his nose.  The program was suspended after that but never quite terminated.

The issues raised by such a program are obvious and it is clear that Dick Cheney knew that it would never fly through congress once the details were made clear.  First, assassination by the USGOV has been illegal since the Church hearings in 1976.  The Director of Central Intelligence can override the restriction, as can the president with a finding, but to do so in support of a program rather than a one-off would be risky.  Second, the use of false foreign passports would create problems with any number of friendly governments if exposed.  Third, killing terrorist suspects in countries that were friendly could easily escalate into major diplomatic incidents.  Fourth, the use of Embassies to smuggle in weapons was very risky indeed as many foreign governments surreptitiously x-ray diplomatic pouches and the ploy would likely have been discovered.  Finally, the entire scheme depends on excellent intelligence on the whereabouts and activities of the suspected terrorists, something that the US did not have then and does not have now.  There was real danger that innocent people would get hit, just as occured with a similar Israeli Mossad program in the 1970s that killed a waiter in Oslo.  The perpetrators in Kenya also quickly discovered that white boys born in the American south sporting crewcuts and speaking no foreign language had difficulties in blending in as foreign businessmen. 

In principle, if there had been some way to decapitate al-Qaeda in the immediate days after 9/11 even by using extraordinary means, I think many Americans including myself would have been supportive.  But in reality the capability to identify and hit the targets was never there, so it is best that the program never really took off.

A week ago (sorry, I missed it earlier), The Washington Post ran an op-ed by Roberto Suro denouncing Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus (“Give me your tired, your poor…”). (Hit tip Mark Krikorian.) Mark Steyn piled on here. It is indeed an awful poem. Almost everything about it is wrong, beginning with the opening spondee: “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame.” Actually, the Statue of Liberty is obviously quite like the Colossus of Rhodes. Both are/were huge metal statues overlooking a harbor and made to strike awe in the beholder. Lazarus should have written, “Much like the brazen giant of Greek fame.” She goes on to describe Liberty as a “mother” with “mild eyes” – which is a bizarre way to describe a muscular, sexless goddess, crowned like the sun, trampling shackles and holding aloft a flaming torch. She is leading and threatening, not nurturing and welcoming.

One could go on. Still, Lazarus’s poem is beloved of many, so it’s worth pointing out that there is an alternative reading of The New Colossus. Conventionally, it is taken to be a celebration of immigration; in reality, the message is anti-immigration and anti-multicultural.

Start with the statue’s first words: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp; give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” (This is an absurdly ungrateful message for a statue donated by France to send – but let that pass.) Lazarus’s New Colossus isn’t welcoming just anybody. On the contrary, she is welcoming only peoples from “ancient lands” inspired by the achievements of the Greeks – that is to say, Europe. America in Lazarus’s vision takes the wretched of royal, feudal Europe and places them in a classless, democratic society. There is no indication that Lazarus saw America as welcoming anybody else.

Second, Lazarus’s statue only welcomes oppressed peoples – and not just any oppressed, but those who are oppressed by traditional governments of “storied pomp,” viz. hereditary monarchies. Peoples who are oppressed by other forms of government are not welcome. One presumes that they are double unwelcome if they have popular governments of their own.

Third, Lazarus’s “huddled masses” who come to America are utterly lacking in nationality or culture. They are “homeless” – that is to say, they are not tied to any place. Lazarus’s poem does not say what kind of country these people will encounter in America. Still, one can infer that America is not multicultural, as the people who come to it apparently bring no culture with them. Discarded as “wretched refuse” by aristocratic, honor-based societies, they are too poor to have known any culture before coming to America.

In short, The New Colossus envisions a very different kind of immigration than what we have now. If anything, the poem argues that America cannot welcome peoples from the Third World. First, the peoples of the Third World are not oppressed in the way that Lazarus believes the peoples of Europe were oppressed. On the contrary, they have nearly all thrown off the yoke of the “ancient lands” of Europe and set up independent governments. They have no need for America because they already are free. Second, they are not homeless. On the contrary, the peoples of the Third World have their own nations, peoples and traditions, which they retain when they come here, often with the encouragement of their home countries. Under a proper reading of The New Colossus, America has already fulfilled its role in history by taking in the masses of Europe. To create a multicultural America, another myth is needed. The New Colossus doesn’t supply it.

Gruesome details of the CIA’s interrogation practices may be on the way. Government lawyers are reportedly meeting tomorrow to consider “accelerating” the release of a long-awaited inspector general’s report that could blow apart the Republicans’ best attempt to underplay the torture issue and to dissuade the White House from pursuing a probe into the Bush Administration’s troubling execution of the so-called War on Terror.

According to an article by Daniel Klaidman published in Newsweek on Saturday, Attorney General Eric Holder may reverse the Obama Administration’s earlier stance not “to look backwards” at potential improprieties and crimes of the Bush Administration. In fact, he may now be leaning toward appointing a  prosecutor to investigate “brutal interrogation practices,” in Bush and Cheney’s terror war.

An announcement may come as “in a matter of weeks.” Such a decision, Klaidman writes, “would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months”

Apparently, according to Klaidman, Holder read and was emotionally impacted by the CIA inspector general’s report on interrogation abuses — the one the ACLU has been fighting to get released in full but so far the White House has delayed several times. Now, as Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent reports, government lawyers may be meeting on Wednesday to consider “accelerating its schedule of production.”

The Klaidman piece is mostly a padded profile of Holder (asserting the portrait of a career prosecutor, gently independent of White House politics, loyal to his DOJ roots), but buried inside is the obvious trial balloon (emphasis mine):

As he pored over reports and listened to briefings, he became increasingly troubled. There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial. He told one intimate that what he saw “turned my stomach.”

It was soon clear to Holder that he might have to launch an investigation to determine whether crimes were committed under the Bush administration and prosecutions warranted. The obstacles were obvious. For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented. After having been deeply involved in the decision to authorize Ken Starr to investigate Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Holder well knew how politicized things could get. He worried about the impact on the CIA, whose operatives would be at the center of any probe. And he could clearly read the signals coming out of the White House. President Obama had already deflected the left wing of his party and human-rights organizations by saying, “We should be looking forward and not backwards” when it came to Bush-era abuses.

Still, Holder couldn’t shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA’s “black sites.” If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe.

If this IG report is finally released, un-redacted, it could be the Republicans’ worst nightmare (and Obama’s, if the White House truly is determined to plow through with “domestic priorities” rather than hold the Bush Administration responsible for these alleged crimes). Holder reportedly read a copy of the report twice in June the first time as a prosecutor, “the second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was ‘shocked and saddened,’ he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America’s name.”

We’ll see if the White House, too, is “shocked” enough to follow this through.

UPDATE: Another sympathetic profile of Holder. One wonders.

UPDATE II : Looks like we’re going to have to wait for that unclassified IG report a little longer: Spencer Ackerman is now reporting that the government was granted another delay for its release — until Aug. 24.