The American Conservative

The Washington Post hasn’t had much luck with blogs by or about conservatives. The paper’s first foray into the uncharted waters of wingerdom ran aground when it emerged that the young Republican they’d hired, Ben Domenech, was a serial plagiarist. Now Dave Weigel — whose beat I interpreted as covering conservatives, not pretending to be one — has resigned after nasty comments he made to fellow journalists about “Paultards” and wishing to see Matt Drudge set himself on fire became public. (Weigel tweets that he was using “Paultard” ironically, which fits the context of the e-mail, where he’s complaining about the abundance of Tea Party activists on television relative to the lack of attention paid to Ron Paul and his supporters in 2007/8.)

There are two things I’ll say in defense of Weigel. First, his views should not come as a shock to anyone, least of all the editors of the Post. If what he was saying on “Journolist,” the official liberal media listserv run by fellow WaPo blogger Ezra Klein, was fine in private, why should the Post (or Weigel himself, for that matter) feel abashed now? Weigel’s language on the list was more intemperate than anything he or other Posties would say in public, but the attitudes on display were no different from what any intelligent reader could detect from Weigel’s Right Now blog. He doesn’t like most conservatives. Shocking.

The other thing I’ll say is that his blog, and his earlier work at the Washington Independent, was always interesting. That the blogger had a slant against his subjects only made things more lively. Weigel is also a very good interviewer and old-fashioned journalist, quite apart from his personal politics. In short, he’s worth reading, and you’ll often get information from him that you won’t find elsewhere. That’s what I want in a blogger.

The other defenses and excuses being offered for Weigel don’t wash. First there’s the canard that what he said was said in private. No it wasn’t — it was written in e-mails to a large number of journalists. But it was “off the record,” right? Wrong — there is no such thing as “off the record” or “on background” or “deep background” when you’re writing to a gaggle of reporters. One-on-one, a source and a journalist may be able to trust one another. But there is absolutely no excuse for thinking that mass mails to journalists won’t be treated as story fodder, no matter what disclaimers or secrecy oaths Journolist may require. To expect privacy in such circumstances is like expecting sharks not to tear apart a bloody carcass that’s dumped in the water. In fact, a good analogy for such naivete would be Timothy Treadwell, the “Grizzly Man” who was so, so sure that he was on friendly terms with bears who would never be so rude as to devour him (and his girlfriend) alive.

Why is there a “Journolist” in the first place, by the way? Journalists are supposed to make things public, especially (if they’re honest) their own biases. So here is a secret list where members get to sound off about things they don’t dare say in public. This is not merely a matter of journalists speaking private opinions among personal friends, since the list is organized on a professional basis, not a personal one. This would be like judges having a listserv only for judges where they talk about what they really think about the cases they’re supposed to be deciding. The whole thing is unethical and corrupt. If Post editors gave a damn about professional conduct, they would shut down the list, or at least ban their writers from joining it. [Update: As I was writing this, Klein announced that he's closing Journolist.] Read More…

In Year One of the Reagan Revolution, in which he was a shining star, Budget Director David Stockman told reporter William Greider: “Kemp-Roth (President Reagan’s 1981 tax cut) was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate. … It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”

An astounding admission. The president’s principal salesman of tax cuts was confessing that the altarpiece of the Reagan policy was a ruse — to cut tax rates of the richest Americans.

Stockman had dealt a pair of aces to the president’s enemies.

Yet a betrayed Reagan did not fire Stockman. Instead, he walked him down “to the White House woodshed.”

Few suggested that this showed that Reagan was weak. For Reagan had already survived an assassination attempt, summarily fired an entire union of air traffic controllers, and rammed through a hostile House led by Tip O’Neill the largest tax cut in history.

Yet most everyone here said Barack Obama had no choice but to fire General McChrystal, or reinforce the impression he is weak and indecisive.

The Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll out today confirms that the nation that entertained such high hopes for Barack Obama has lost confidence in his capacity to lead.

Sixty-two percent of all Americans believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. For the first time, more Americans disapprove of Obama than approve. Fifty-seven percent would prefer someone else, rather than the member of Congress they now have. Read More…

I keep looking for deeper meaning in the World Cup, particularly as General McChrystal reportedly called his band of Myrmidons “Team America.”  This morning reigning champion Italy played Slovakia.  As I am mezzo Italiano and polovicny Slovensko I was somewhat torn in expressing any preference at all.  I looked for clues in the two national anthems, noting that all the Slovaks but one sang along while the Italians really got into it, singing and waving arms about, almost like a final Rossini chorus at La Scala.  The game really mattered as the winner went into the round of 16 and the loser went home.  As an American, I like to see some points on the board so I was pleased to see five goals and two others by Italy that might have been allowed.  Italy, which won it all in 2006,  lost 3 to 2 and is now reported to be flying home on Alitalia in coach with no liquor allowed and a large and growing pile of rotten fruit awaiting for a coupe de grace at Leonardo da Vinci.

I have to see the Slovaks as the Taliban.  Wild, rough, and a little loose in their behavior, but highly motivated and feeling that they were the team of destiny.   Definite underdogs.  The Italians were pure Petraeus-McChrystal.  Professional, disciplined, and prepared to methodically grind down the opponent.  Using overwhelming force and relying on training.  Expected to win.  But sometimes it doesn’t turn out that way.  The McChrystal Team America Marjah offensive was definitely both a PR disaster and a loss and it looks like Kandahar is turning out to be an own-goal loss to Karzai’s brother and his band of thieves.  Will the new coach Petraeus be able to turn things around?  Stay tuned, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

Am I the only one who has noted that the demise of McChrystal might mean that we will no longer be hearing from the Kagans?  What a blessing that would be! He and she were McChrystal’s esteemed civilian advisers but they might not have Petraeus’ ear.

Congressman Ron Paul commented on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico over at Lew Rockwell.com.  Here’s the good part:

“It should be noted that BP is not exactly a bastion of free market capitalism. Rather, they are very vested in acquiring government subsidies, favorably slanted policies, and competition-hobbling regulation. BP has even been a major lobbying proponent of cap-and-trade because of certain provisions in the legislation it could profit from. Considering who lobbies for them and what they lobby for, my concern is that attempts to hold them strictly and fully accountable could end up being nothing more than a shell game, with taxpayers ultimately holding the bag.”

Ron Paul gets it. It’s too bad a lot Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and anyone else in politics unsure or incapable of figuring out what to call themselves, don’t.

You can argue whether British Petroleum’s contribution was forced or not, but I hope people weren’t expecting the taxpayer to pick up the tab for BP’s screw up.  The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company British Petroleum, like Congressman Paul stated, has benefited over the years from “slanted policies” and regulations in the energy sector to help its bottom line. In fact that’s true of much of the energy sector of our economy. If we truly want a free market in the economy, then Congress should repeal the Hot Oil Act of 1935 and abolish the oil-depletion allowance. But as Rep. Paul would point out, if anyone in Congress made the attempt to do so, big oil’s lobbyists would certainly squelch the effort. Read More…

In confiding to Rolling Stone their unflattering opinions of the military acumen of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, Dick Holbrooke and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff were guilty of colossal stupidity.

And President Obama had cause to cashier them. Yet his decision to fire McChrystal may prove both unwise and costly.

For McChrystal, unlike Gen. MacArthur, never challenged the war policy — he is carrying it out — and Barack Obama is no Harry Truman.

Moreover, the war strategy Obama is pursuing is the McChrystal Plan, devised by the general and being implemented by the general in Marja and Kandahar, perhaps the decisive campaign of the war.

Should that plan now fail, full responsibility falls on Obama.

He has made the Afghan war his war in a way it never was before.

If the McChrystal strategy fails, critics will charge Obama with causing the defeat by firing the best fighting general in the Army out of pique over some officers-club remarks that bruised the egos of West Wing warriors.

And though those remarks never should have appeared in print, they may well reflect the sentiments of not a few soldiers and Marine officers on third and fourth tours of duty in the Afghan theater.

Had Obama, instead of firing McChrystal, told him to shut up, can the interviews and go back to fighting the war until the December review of strategy, he could have shown those soldiers he is a bigger man than they or McChrystal’s team give him credit for.

And if success in Afghanistan is the highest goal, how does it help to fire the best fighting general? Do you relieve Gen. Patton during combat because he vents his prejudices or opinions?

This city may draw the parallel, but the Obama-McChrystal clash does not remotely rise to the historic level of the collision between MacArthur and Truman. Read More…

Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward, in her insightful review of Elaine Tyler May’s America + The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, reminds us that we all have motivations, some obvious, some not. Even knowledge-seeking scientists do. Conventional wisdom now has it that the Pill was pushed by Margaret Sanger, an advocate of eugenics, not just to free women from reproductive slavery, as some would have it, but to keep the wrong kind of women from reproducing. But early researchers and backers of the Pill had other things on the agenda—such as national security. It might get tiring now to hear pundits and pols connect everything, personal and political, to 9/11 and the War on Terror, but May’s book provides evidence that the sexual revolution was really far from the minds of the men who helped launch it.

In public rhetoric, the population bomb was linked closely to the hydrogen bomb. Before Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which sold 2 million copies between 1968 and 1974, there was Hugh Moore’s 1954 pamphlet “The Population Bomb.” Moore, who ran the Dixie Cup corporation, thought “voluntary sterilization” could be a weapon in the Cold War. His pamphlet, which was widely distributed by the Hugh Moore Fund for International Peace, declared: “We’re not primarily interested in the sociological or humanitarian aspects of birth control. We are interested in the use…which the Communists make of hungry people.” Overpopulation leads to hunger, Moore argued, and “hunger brings turmoil—and turmoil, as we have learned, creates the atmosphere in which the communists seek to conquer the earth.”

Moore may have been an extremist, but as May notes, even Margaret Sanger, who wasn’t shy about her extreme left-wing views, advocated “national security through birth control.” Not every Cold Warrior cared for contraception; Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) worried that the promotion of birth control in America was a plot to spread immorality. But the skeptics were in the minority.

Since healthy, happy people were thought less likely to go red, some alert citizens favored birth control at home to sow good cheer. As early as 1940, a statement from Planned Parenthood declared: “A nation’s strength does not depend upon armaments and manpower alone; it depends upon the contentment…of its people. To the extent that birth control contributes to the health and morale of our people, it makes them less receptive to subversive propaganda, more ready to defend our national system.” The worry then was about Nazis, not communists, but activists had no trouble updating the rhetoric when the Cold War followed World War II. By 1965 this view had percolated up to the mainstream, with President Johnson declaring in his State of the Union address that year, in a section entitled “The Non-Communist World,” that “I will seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity of world resources.”

One contraceptive researcher, John Rock, went so far as to say, “The greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.” It’s not clear whether he was saying that the release of sexual energy was resulting in too many mouths to feed or that a lack of contraception meant that sexual energy wasn’t getting enough release. Either way, it’s an example of how omnipresent the Cold War was in American social life—and, given the far-reaching effects of the Pill over the last 50 years, a good illustration of unintended consequences.

UPDATE: So President Obama has decided the only way to resolve the Rolling Stone fiasco — which is really a COIN fiasco – is to put Big Daddy COIN in command. Anyone else feel like we’re on Ozzy’s Crazy Train?

There were two major themes that I took away from the now infamous Rolling Stone piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The first is obvious: Stan the Man is an arrogant man’s man who prefers Bud Lite Lime over chardonnay, and who has surrounded himself with a “handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs,” and they are super-cool too. They get sloshed at places called “Kitty O’Shea’s” and crack jokes about wimpy Washington fops like Dick Holbrooke and Joe Biden. They are running the war, reporter Michael Hastings points out. Their swagger comes from the chief maniac himself, Stan the Man, who enthralls Hastings with such witty repartee as this:

“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

“Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”

With that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fu**ing  gay.”

Swell. But aside from getting himself in a pot of boiling water fired over these and other remarks he and his aides make about the President, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry, et al, McChrystal comes off as a real American ideal — that is , if you are a red-blooded, right wing cowboy who holds the military in much higher esteem than the rest of America’s civil institutions. McChrystal should at least be happy that all of his cliched mannerisms and affectations were given the famous Rolling Stone treatment — like being described as a classic fighting general who goes on regular patrols with his soldiers and whose “slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fu***d up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.” He’s so dedicated to the war effort and his men that he has seen his wife Annie less than 30 days a year since 2003. When he does see her on their 33rd wedding anniversary, he drags her out with his “inner circle” to dinner at “the least ‘Gucci’ place his staff could find.” Then there’s the cussing and kick-assing, his 100 demerits at West Point, the anti-Parisian-doesn’t-truck-with-no-fancy-schmantzy-bureaucrats ethos. He’s lean (that’s pointed out several times) and mean, and has the temerity to tell his aides that he’s underwhelmed and disappointed with the president when he meets for the first time. Now that’s the kind of guy today’s Republicans and tea partiers would line up behind in a heartbeat.

But aside from noting that Stan and his posse are pretty much “the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan” — and don’t they know it — and more so,  the unbelievable break Hastings got when McChrystal and his people said all of these crazy things about administration officials in front of him and on the record, there’s the real story.

Hastings points out what a godforesaken mess Afghanistan is, but he deftly underscores that COIN, and specifically the new rules of engagement handed down by McChrystal himself, are confusing and degrading the morale of the troops on the ground. This isn’t something that Barack Obama has done — Hastings notes early in the piece that McChrystal got nearly all the troops he needed for the 2010 surge — this is about the fundamentals of COIN, the very strategy that McChrystal and his patron Gen. David Petraeus, and friends like Gen. Raymond Odierno, own and have been pushing like a ramrod through  Afghanistan since 2009.

We know Rolling Stone has a skeptical if not outright anti-war agenda. But Hastings lets the combat soldiers do the talking and I feel this is the most explosive part of the report:

Read More…

Only one man cried,
To the hack at Rolling Stone,
And they say his mouth went astray,

Branded!
Marked with a traitor’s shame,
But how else to play such a bad hand,
When the think-tanks await?

Career prospects dying all about,
He sang a coward’s tune,
It’s a suicide mission and a rout,
that’s making him blue,

He arrived so innocent,
But that was long ago,
His disillusion is illuminant,
But no one wants to know,

Branded!
Scorned as the one who blabbed,
What do you do when you’re branded,
But still a yes-man?

Wherever you go,
to preserve your career,
The line you must toe,
To allay all their fears!

Branded!

Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his aides mocked President Obama’s national security team in a profile in Rolling Stone. McChrystal quickly extended his “sincerest apology for this profile” and expressed “enormous respect and admiration for President Obama and his national security team.” He’ll probably save face — Americans adore their military men.

Even as a majority of Americans oppose Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, we rarely hear anyone challenge any aspect of the military. But as McChrystal’s profuse apology demonstrates, he is fully beholden to President Obama. Civilians are too ready to accord the military a special status, when in fact it’s another branch of (big) government and just as answerable to a partisan leader as is any other agency. That means McChrystal has to think twice about criticizing his boss. But it also means the rest of us should be just as willing to criticize military leaders as we are cabinet secretaries and bureaucrats.

Perhaps one of the amazing things about the bailouts of large banks and financial institutions in the fall of 2008 is that the bailouts were not really a contentious point among candidates during the fall campaign, largely because the heads of both party tickets, Barack Obama and John McCain, supported them.

But two years later the bailouts have become an issue, at least among Republican primary voters, and a good example of this is taking place today in South Carolina, where two GOP congressmen, Bob Inglis running for re-election and Gresham Barrett running for governor, are seeing their votes for the bailouts used like a club against them in primary runoffs. Indeed, if they both lose, the bailouts will be the main reason.

One would have thought the idea of the little guy, the average Joe and Jane taxpayer, paying off the debts of institutions like J.P. Morgan or General Motors would have aroused the passions of the Left, yet it is on the Right that this has happened. Part of this is due to Obama’s election creating a populist vacuum on the Left as everyone was into hope and change. But one can argue that the main catalyst for creating the Tea Party movement, aside from a rant about mortgages, was the bailouts and not, as some would have you believe, excessive government spending. The Tea Partiers are far from united on that point. But what they almost all agree on is the feds had no business  trying to save large financial institutions that brought about their own demise through bad loans, bad mortgages, and derivatives trading. Doing so was a deep betrayal of everything these Main Street Americans believed in — a betrayal of their values by their so-called leaders  and the political party they supported. Thus the outrage and sense of wanting to do something about it was ready to be lit into flame.

That flame has burned up several GOP incumbents either running for re-election like Sen. Bob Bennett or Rep. Parker Griffith or running for other office like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (others have survived, but their bailout votes certainly encouraged primary contests they hadn’t expected). It would have zapped Sen. Arlen Specter if he stayed in the GOP. It may very well engulf  Sen. John McCain in his primary battle with former Congressman J.D. Hayworth.

The sad thing is, Inglis was a Republican who at least had some reflective capacity of what went wrong with the party during the last decade. Much like fellow Rep. Walter Jones Jr. of neighboring North Carolina, he voted against the “surge” in Iraq in 2007.  Unlike other Republican politicians, he’s not intimidated or a blind follower of the voices and the money of Conservative Inc. But the party loyalty and loyalty to the president which caused the GOP to fall out of power in 2006 and 2008 is still claiming victims in 2010. Many Republicans cast a vote against their better judgment, and they’re paying for it. Retrospective is a nice quality compared to the willful blindness so many on the Right have about the past. The problem is, right-thinking and regret amidst the ruins do not appeal to voters.