The Trial of Tony Blair: Well, I saw it, and I can't say I was overwhelmed. The actors, particularly the Blogmuse, were terrific (saying "Phoebe Nicholls was superb" is like saying "water is wet," or "the San Antonio Spurs are spirit-crushingly dull"), but the story itself left a lot to be desired. If you intend to make the case that Blair, Bush, Cheney et al., should be held accountable before a legal tribunal for the mendacity in which they took their countries to war, a case which I wholeheartedly endorse, it might make more sense not to make your "villain" the only person in the movie who acts out of a sense of principal and conviction, nor to invest everyone who advocates putting him on trial as motivated only by cynicism. I suppose the filmmakers might respond by saying that the only way a fairy tale notion that a Western leader could actually face what has traditionally been "victor's justice" is for his erstwhile allies to believe that political expediency leaves them with no other choice, but it doesn't do the cause of international law any good when its advocates are portrayed as a bunch of conniving a-holes, and the process itself as little more than a formality before a guilty verdict is imposed.

I also had the impression that a lot of the film had been cut out for its American debut, on BBC America. Like ESPN Classic, BBC America is a cable channel that is inexplicably bad; other than its news broadcasts in the early morning, and the occasional showings of "Little Britain," its programming leaves a lot to be desired. I have the impression that PBS gets dibs on all the really good programs from the U.K., while BBC America gets stuck with reruns of "Footballers' Wives," "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" or what it aired tonight, which ironically wasn't even shown on the BBC in Great Britain, but was instead on the cable off-shoot of Channel Four, a competing network. If BBC America is an attempt to convince Americans that the vast majority of British television is stale and schlocky fare, it is succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Since we're coming up on the fourth anniversary of the war, I thought this would be a good time to look back at what I wrote the day the war started, at least to see how prescient I was at the time:

D-Hour has passed, and our country is about to go to war. Here are a dozen things we need to keep in mind:

1. Saddam Hussein is bad, and he has bad intentions;

2. Iraq has not attacked us, and is not presently attacking its neighbors;

3. Iraq has not been shown to be involved with the attack on September 11;

4. For the first time in our history, we are attacking a nation that is not engaged in hostilities with us or its neighbors; in fact, we are not even claiming a pretext that they are, as we did with Mexico and Spain in the nineteenth century;

5. There has been no failure in the inspection regime under Resolution 1441 to require that we go to war this instant;

6. The U.S. withheld evidence from the inspectors that might have made discovery of WMD’s possible, but didn’t provide it so as to not minimize the case for going to war;

7. The difference between the relative strength of the US and Iraqi armies is enormous; we are literally going to be tearing the wings off of a fly;

8. Many thousands of civilians will be killed;

9. Most of what we will hear being reported on American television will be untrue, especially in the first few days of conflict; overseas reporting, even Al Jazeera, will be more accurate;

10. No matter how lopsided the battles will be, each soldier and sailor has family back home, who will be worried no end over the fate of their loved ones, EVERY DAY OF THIS WAR;

11. We will discover the full extent of Hussein’s brutality and tyranny when Baghdad is “liberated”;

12. History will not look kindly at us for our prevarications used to justify going to war, for our manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to justify these acts, and for the bloody-minded lust that this Administration has pursued this war.

I am amazed at how well that held up, considering that I don't make any claims to being a foreign policy expert, and especially considering how bad my predictions usually are in those things that I do pretend to have knowledge, like sports. Of those, only number six, with its assumption that there were WMD's in Iraq, seems to have fallen short. And while I correctly predicted the cakewalk our army would have getting to Baghdad, I didn't foresee the size and scope of the subsequent insurgency, possibly because I couldn't believe the Bushies were so completely devoid of competence.

Still, not too shabby....

Ouch:

And although they all praised the troops before they dissed the troops, we're also starting to see some in the pro-war crowd place the blame for the coming defeat on the troops themselves. Here's NRO's Michael Ledeen slagging the soldiers last week:

Note that an increase in embeds [U.S. troops embedding in Iraqi military units] doesn’t necessarily require an increase in overall troop strength. We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.

Could you imagine the reaction from Ledeen's pals at Pajamas Media if Markos Moulitsas (or God forbid, John Kerry) had said exactly the same thing in the exactly the same context? It would have been a pure shitstorm of indignation. Roger Simon would have written a cute little post about liberal reactionaries that incorporated a Buddy Holly song, Charles Johnson would have cited it as inconvertible proof of the worldwide conspiracy between Islam and The Left to enslave us all using the Vulcan Mindmeld, Glenn Reynolds would have sputtered something about Markos (and/or Kerry) hating America and the troops, while Michelle Malkin synthesized it all into a really stupid post of fifteen or so very small words.

In any event, per Ledeen, the war is being lost because our goldbricking soldiers are sitting around drinking latte instead of shooting Muslims. That sounds pretty bitter, too.

--Dennis the Peasant.

DTP used to brutalize me over at Roger Simon's comments, so I do feel empathy for Malkin, et al.'s for being his latest targets...but not a lot. Better them than me. [link via James Wolcott]

After an embarassingly shabby show trial, Saddam Hussein may go to meet his maker on the morrow, and Josh Marshall has a good overview as to what it signifies:

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one -- claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade "prissy and finicky." Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

Putting Saddam on trial was always going to be hard; the more internationally-legitimate tribunal at The Hague for Slobodan Milosevic lasted four years, and was as much a debacle as the Hussein "trial", ending only because the former dictator died. Obviously, though, there is no a way a fair trial could have taken place in Iraq, and the fact that they're still debating whether the execution should be televised is an indication that only the names of the rulers have changed.

Turns out Brownie wasn't the bottom of the Bush Crony Barrell:

A top Air Force lawyer who served at the White House and in a senior position in Iraq turns out to have been practicing law for 23 years without a license.

Col. Michael D. Murphy was most recently commander of the Air Force Legal Operations Agency at Bolling Air Force Base in the District.

He was the general counsel for the White House Military Office from December 2001 to January 2003, and from August 2003 to January 2005. In between those tours, he was the legal adviser to the reconstruction effort in Iraq, an Air Force spokesman said.

Murphy later served in 2005 as commandant of the Air Force Judge Advocate General's School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala.

He was relieved of his command at Bolling on Nov. 30 after the Air Force learned that he had been disbarred for professional misconduct in Texas in 1984 but hadn't informed his superiors, according to Air Force Times, an independent newspaper that first reported the action. It said that his status was discovered in the course of an unrelated review.

In fact, Michael Murphy's status as an attorney has been publicly available for some time at the Texas State Bar website; anyone performing due diligence could have obtained his status in seconds. [link via Balloon Juice]

Between 420,000 and 790,000 655,000 Iraqi dead, according to the Lancet.

Atrios is my friend: A list of the Democratic Senators who so courageously went to the matt defending the interests of Visa and AmEx last year: Baucus(MT), Bayh(IN), Biden(DE), Bingaman(NM), Byrd(WV), Carper(DE), Conrad(ND), Inouye(HI), Johnson(SD), Kohl(WI), Landrieu(LA), Lincoln(AR), Nelson (FL), Nelson(NE), Pryor(AR), Reid(NV), Salazar(CO), and Stabenow(MI).

Again, bold means they're up for reelection in November, and blue means they're from a state carried by Democrats in each of the last four elections. I've also italicized the names of those Heirs to FDR and JFK who last week voted to criminalize the assistance of minors crossing a state border to obtain a legal abortion.

Funny how the same names appear on both lists, and Lieberman doesn't appear on either.

UPDATE: But he does appear on this list, of Democratic Senators who voted to invoke cloture on the nomination of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court: Akaka (HI), Baucus (MT), Bingaman (NM), Byrd (WV), Cantwell (WA), Carper (DE), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lieberman (CT), Lincoln (AR), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), Rockefeller (WV), and Salazar (CO). Again, the italicized names are those Senators who voted the wrong way on the other two issues (abortion and bankruptcy). There are eleven Democrats who fit that category, including two Blue State Senators up for reelection this November, and none of them are named Joseph.

UPDATE [II]: Mark Schmitt, writing an early post-mortem for the junior Senator from the Nutmeg State, issues this howler:

...Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society.

The problem with that example is Lieberman voted against the bankruptcy bill last year, as my list above shows. He may have voted in favor of cloture beforehand, but since the bill had the support of seventeen other Democratic Senators, and had been debated, in one form or another, for some six years, voting in favor of finally ending debate on the matter was certainly defensible (unlike the Alito vote, which dealt with a judicial nomination only two months old, and which had the support of only four Democrats). With less than 30 Democrats in support of the bill, the cloture vote simply wasn't very important; the horses had already left the barn, if you will. Saying Lieberman "supported" the bankruptcy bill is not unlike the frequent refrain of the chickenhawks claiming that those who opposed the Iraq War were "supporting" Saddam.

The Virtue of Principles: Digby, again, gets it right:

The president's approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it's pretty clear that it isn't the reporting in the mainstream media or by the "reasonable" Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don't say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush's approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catasprophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush's powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections ---- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

I would add that one of the most potent, albeit frustrating, aspects of the lefty blogosphere is it's tenacity in the area of media criticism. I say frustrating, because it is often a distraction we can ill afford when it comes to focusing our efforts on something that has true, long-term importance; obsessing about the wording of a Washington Post ombudsman's article seems pretty trivial when compared with something like, say, the Alito nomination (whose endorsement by the Senate was clinched the same week).

But the passion, the intensity that goes into leading such airheadish campaigns does have a very important purpose: it changes the terms of the debate, something that is of paramount importance when the electoral numbers are against you. Liberals have been losing elections for decades in America (the only time we win is when there is a national calamity or event that has discredited the party in power, such as the Great Depression or the Dred Scott decision), so crafting a winning message for national elections every 2-4 years can't be a serious priority for those of us on the sidelines. Mau-mauing the media, putting the fear of God into the hearts of opinion-crafters, making pundits believe that if they simply regurgitate Rove's spinpoints, they are going to receive a world of hurtin', now that's a strategy that anyone who is locked out of power can follow without having to compromise principles.

And as I've said before, we don't need to win every election, or even most elections, for our ideas to prevail. I wasn't put on this planet to serve the Democratic Party, and I'd desert it an instant if I ever thought it wasn't anything more than GOP-lite. Our blogosphere gives us that option, an ability to create a politics that doesn't rely on winning elections, where even those of us in the minority can quash the policy prescriptions of the majority party (read, Social Security "reform"). You don't need 50 Senators when the other side is terrified of you could do to them if you don't get what you want.

Digby concludes:

I see that the press does not know what to make of this. And I see that many Joementum Democrats don't get it either. They remain convinced that the country will wake up one day and see that our arguments are superior. They are wrong. This political era will be remembered for its brutal partisanship and sophisticated media manipulation in a 50/50 political environment. Democrats have been at a huge disadvantage because of the Republican message infrastructure and the strange servility of the mainstream press. So, we are pushing back with the one tough, aggressive partisan communication tool we have: the blogosphere.

Amen.

OIL FOR FOOD!!! OIL FOR FOOD!!! OIL FOR FOOD!!!: I wonder how much play this story is going to get from our Brethren on the Right:

In the United States, a former official has admitted stealing millions of dollars meant for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Robert Stein held a senior position in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which administered Iraq after American and allied forces invaded in 2003. In a Washington court, he admitted to stealing more than $2m (£1.12m) and taking bribes in return for contracts. He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

Robert Stein's story is one of extraordinary corruption and excess amid the ruins of Iraq. He was in charge of overseeing money for the rebuilding of shattered infrastructure in south-central Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

Mr Stein admitted in court to conspiring to give out contracts worth $8m to a certain company in return for bribes. He also received gifts and sexual favours lavished on him at a special villa in Baghdad.

But it didn't stop there. Robert Stein admitted to stealing $2m from reconstruction funds. Some of that money, the court heard, was smuggled onto aircraft and flown back to the United States in suitcases.

Book him a slot on "Big Brother"...but wait, there's more:

Robert Stein, 50, was entrusted with the reconstruction of the central city of Hillah despite a fraud conviction that was apparently overlooked in his Pentagon background check. The former contracting official admitted yesterday that he had conspired to steal more than $2 million in reconstruction money and take kickbacks worth more than $1 million in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. Stein used the money to buy a single-engine Cessna aircraft, a Porsche and a Lexus, as well as other cars, grenade launchers, machineguns, jewellery and property. In a plea deal, he agreed to plead guilty to five felony counts: conspiracy, bribery, moneylaundering, possession of a machinegun and being a felon in possession of a handgun.

The case, which was initiated by a US audit of reconstruction spending, provides a stark look at corruption inside the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that governed Iraq after the invasion in March 2003 until June 2004. Five US Army Reserve officers were also allegedly part of the conspiracy. Two have been arrested. An American businessman based in Romania has also been charged.

Stein admitted accepting at least $1 million in cash and cars, jewellery and sexual favours from women, provided by a co-conspirator previously identified as Philip Bloom. Stein said that he helped to steer more than $8.6 million in contracts to companies controlled by Mr Bloom.

The New York Times has even more on Mr. Stein, who apparently was under the impression (accurately, if only for a time) that he didn't have to make any effort to hide what he was doing. Considering that a little under $9 billion disappeared from the control of the CPA, what this guy did was the proverbial drop in the bucket.

Murtha for President: Mickey Kaus links to a remarkeably prescient interview given by Representative Jack Murtha in October, 2002, several months before hostilities commenced in Iraq. Murtha was clearly moving down the path from strident Cold War Scoop Jackson Democrat to skeptic of Pax Americana, long before the casualties began coming home from this war; reading this interview puts the anguish and dismay so evident in last week's now-historic press conference into a much more interesting context than the initial media reaction, which only served to paint him as a fair weather dove. If John Kerry had been able to make as cogent an argument back then against the rush to arms without due diligence, the 2004 election would have had a different result.

It was bad enough they called Jack Murtha a coward, but now they have to dowdify him. The usually-sensible John Cole, in trying to justify that debacle yesterday in the House, writes:

Murtha stated he wants immediate withdrawal of the troops. His bill asked for deployment to be ‘hereby terminated.’ The GOP bill removes all the bullshit, and states that a vote of ‘aye’ means that you favbor exactly what Murtha said yesterday and proposed in his bill.

(snip)

So shut up, quit your damned whining, reach down between your legs and grab a pair of grapes, and vote on the resolution. It is as simple as it gets. Do you favor immediate withdrawal of the troops from Iraq? Yes or no.

Even an unnuanced simpleton like me can figure this one out.

Okay, I'll bite: since when is it up to the GOP to "remove all the bullshit" from the resolutions of Congressmen from the other party? It would be unacceptable if their editing didn't change the meaning of the proposal, but in this instance, they clearly did. Murtha's resolution called for the immediate commencement of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, an event that would clearly take place over a period of time, and according to the resolution, only "at the earliest practicable date". The GOP resolution purports to simply order the troops home, yesterday.

Language is important, a fact reinforced by the circumstances by which the Bush Administration conned into this quagmire in the first place. Justifying the revision of a sitting Representative's resolution in an effort to embarass the other side is not only demogogic, it's wrong. One can just as easily argue that the President is correct when he says, “we don’t do torture”. Clearly, all the President, the Attorney General, the Defense Secretary and the rest of his thugs have done is taken the Geneva Conventions, as well as basic standards of human decency, and “removed all the bullshit” about the appropriate way to treat enemy combatants, etc. It's the same damn thing, and the lucky fact that Jean Schmidt dropped a turd in the punch bowl during yesterday's debate only shows that the Supreme Deity has a wicked sense of humor when it comes to striking back at those who have lost the Mandate of Heaven.

What he said:

As the Iraqi government assumes more responsibility for governing Iraq, so too must Iraq’s forces continue to take on more responsibility to defend their country. The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, underscored this point on October 25 when he told Gwen Ifill on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that he believes that the United States is, “on the right track to start significant reductions [of U.S. military forces] in the coming year.” I believe the United States should begin drawing down forces in Iraq next year. U.S. military power is not a surrogate force upon which Iraq can indefinitely depend. The current Iraqi government’s announcement on November 2 to accept the return of junior officers of the former Iraqi army – reversing U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer’s decision to disband Hussein’s armed forces – was a critically important development. Political confidence and military capability will reinforce and strengthen Iraq’s ability to govern and defend itself and sustain that confidence. We should not obstruct this development. The United States must encourage and expect demonstrations of new Iraqi independence and decision-making.

(snip)

The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. War is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years. The Democrats have an obligation to challenge in a serious and responsible manner, offering solutions and alternatives to the Administration’s policies. Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late. Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again. To question your government is not unpatriotic – to not question your government is unpatriotic. America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices. (emphasis added)

--Sen. Chuck Hagel [R-NE]

I admit to being confused by the Bushies' latest tactic, which is to justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that many "on the other side" believed the same thing. Yeah, I think we already knew that a lot of Democrats were just as cravenly idiotic on the subject as the President, and it helps to remember that in the run-up to all wars, including the aforementioned adventure, hawkishness has historically been a safe fall-back. In the almost 230 years of our national existence, no politician running for high office in America has ever lost his seat because he was too hawkish.

But it ignores the more fundamental problem: Bush is the President of the United States. He can't use, as justification for his policies, the fact that other people were also conned. He's not only supposed to be a leader; he occupies a unique position, a perch from which the nation expects to follow his lead. Americans typically don't like to assume that their President might be telling the truth, depending on his whims. On an issue like whether to send our young off to battle, we need to have that confidence, especially coming from a President who avoided military service in his youth, and who has kept his daughters out of harm's way in theirs'.

Thus, it leaves a rather stale taste in our mouths when the President tries to argue that he didn't really lie in this instance, since the other side believed the same things. He was the one getting intelligence briefings telling him that Saddam's WMD capacity was vastly overstated, that stories of Iraq's role in 9/11 and its efforts to purchase yellowcake from Niger were false, that the cost, in both blood and money, in rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq was going to grow at a geometrical scale. The kindest interpretation of that is to say that Bush ignored the intelligence he didn't want to hear; the less kind interpretation is that he out-and-out lied. In either case, he and his advisors, almost all of whom to a man had avoided serving in Vietnam even though they also supported that adventure, treated the spectre of war too casually, and that shame cannot be palmed off on the Democrats.

The Bill Bidwill of Politics:

Bush isn’t going to make a comeback. He’s fallen and he can’t get up.

A comeback presupposes substance and ability. A worthy character who has suffered some setbacks, bad luck or simple human mistakes can make a comeback because he has it in him. Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, Michael Jordan, the Boston Red Sox can mount comebacks. The Arizona Cardinals are not making a comeback this season. They don’t have the team and the ability to straighten out what has gone wrong. They will continue to lose until the end of the season.

George Bush is the Arizona Cardinals. His team is terrible and he refuses to change any of his players. He doesn’t have the personality suited for making necessary changes. Quickly adjusting to changing circumstances is not his forte, stubbornness is. Even if he had the inclination to make a change, he doesn’t have the ability. He simply doesn’t know what the hell he is doing.

(snip)

He is lazy, uninterested and incompetent. He views the presidency as homework. He seems to enjoy politics (at least while he’s up), but he doesn’t enjoy policy. He is detached from decision making and his decision makers have led him dangerously astray. Finally and most importantly, he doesn’t care to get it right.

George W. Bush will never put in the long hours to make sure we have the right policy in Iraq, in the war on terror, in the budget or anything else that concerns actual governing. He finds these things to be tedious. In reality, they are essential to the job of being President. He is overmatched.

And when you’re overmatched, you don’t put together second half comebacks. You get crushed.

--Cenk Uygur, HuffPost

Quote of the Day:

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I'd seen it in the theater, but I'd brought Apple, and she was tiny, so I left like 70 times because I was trying to calm her down and I missed the end and stuff. And now, since the film has finished, what's going on in Iraq and what's going on every day? And you see that footage of Bush landing and saying 'Mission accomplished' and he just looks like the biggest moron of all time.

--Gwyneth Paltrow

Norquist's Bathtub: In many respects, August 29, 2005 is already turning out to be a more important date than 9/11, and not just because the number of fatalities caused by Hurricane Katrina will dwarf the best efforts at savagery by Osama's thugs. The collapse of the levees of Lake Ponchartrain seems to have awakened us to the rotten underpinnings of our institutions, our government, our leaders.

We are undergoing an ideological, not a partisan, reawakening. Historian Timothy Naftali compared the events of the past week to the core meltdown at Chernobyl, where the inability of the Soviet Union to protect its own people was laid bare, leading to the fall of Communism, but we need not look overseas for historical precedent. The combination of the Watts Riots and the first heavy casualty figures from Southeast Asia in 1965 brought about the beginning of the end of Cold War liberalism, coincidentally in the first year following the reelection of a President, just as the ineffectual responses to crises led to the obliteration of the Republicans in 1932 and the Democrats in 1980.

Although the blame has deservedly focused on the Bush Administration, and their typically inept response to Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats bear a great deal of responsibility for what happened. Obviously, there were failures at the state and local level to quickly respond to the impending disaster; the call to evacuate came less than 48 hours from impact, not enough time to get safely away from the storm, and certainly not enough time to prepare the mass evacuations of the destitute. If anything symbolizes the local failure, it was the row after row of empty buses that were parked in a flooded lot in New Orleans, instead of being used to transport people out of the area. That neither the state of Louisiana nor New Orleans and its surrounding parishes can be considered well-governed sovereignties even in the best of times (a problem shared throughout the South, as the slothlike measures taken by the buffoonish Governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, while his state's coastline disappeared, attest) exacerbated the problem, particularly afterwards.

More important than the failure of its local politicians, though, the Democrats have failed to provide any effective opposition. Just as with 9/11, we were victimized by our own lack of imagination. You can go through all the preparedness drills and make all the contingency plans that you like, but if you don't have political leaders who will make a stand and insist that we be prepared for any contingency, if your party lacks the will to stake out unpopular stands, even in the best of times, then democracy fails. The most telling fact so far is that even if the funding to repair the levees had come through, in full, they still probably wouldn't have been ready in time to stop what happened.

So, Republicans didn't think that budgeting money to protect a city from a semi-centennial disaster was important, and the Democrats didn't put up enough of a fight. Bush nominates a political crony to head FEMA, then a small-town lawyer straight from the world of show horse competitions, and the Democrats silently assent; both Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown breezed to confirmation, with no Democratic filibuster. This disaster was predictable, inevitable, and overdue, something we knew for decades, and still the Democrats failed to do enough, either in opposition, or even in those brief times we controlled the government. No wonder Clinton was so reticent about attacking his successor over what happened last week.

But in the end, the events of the past week, when combined with the ongoing debacle in Iraq, has thoroughly discredited the governing ideology this country has had since 1980. It is a philosophy that holds that tax cuts are the panacea to prosperity, that no one need sacrifice for the common good, and is best encapsulated by Grover Norquist's infamous phrase that his aim was "...to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub". Although the federal budget has increased during the Reagan-Bush Era, its effectiveness, its ability to accomplish things, has diminished. "Conservatives" have, with malice aforethought, strangled the initiative of society to publicly confront issues of poverty, racism, and inequality, and to adequately protect the safety of the public. This week, the Gulf Coast is that bathtub.

It is the Republican philosophy of governance. Our infrastructure rots, our military is undermanned, our environmental protections are being sabotaged. Starve the beast, and let the private sphere, the realm of Enron and Halliburton, take care of things. As Naftali points out,

Not all of the questioning about the rapid growth in government since the 1960s was wrongheaded and Reagan at least admired Franklin Roosevelt and having experienced the depression first hand understood that government had a positive role to play. But Reagan's imitators ever since, mainly Republicans but also some Democrats, have lacked that historical perspective and have mechanically espoused the view that government had to be lean and mean and, when in doubt, could be underfunded lest money be taken from the pockets of "ordinary Americans," who knew best how to spend it. Underlying this was another, more amoral, message that those who fall behind in this society get what they deserve.

For a quarter of a century, we have also been told we could have our cake and eat it, too. Local property taxes could be kept low, state budgets could be balanced and federal taxes could be reduced progressively with nothing but a positive effect on our national quality of living. For fifteen years, we have been told that the US military is large enough to handle every conceivable threat to the country because high technology would allow us to project force more efficiently. For three years we have been assured that our government is reorganizing to ensure that an urban disaster such as we witnessed on 9/11 would not happen again. Many Americans, unfortunately, came to believe these assertions and forgot not only the value of good government but that it costs money.

This week we saw the cumulative effect of these illusions. For six days thousands of babies were starved of formula, countless old people died of exposure and families lived with almost no water and had to defecate in public by a city Convention Center because the federal government lacked the resources, skill and troops to rescue them.

David Brooks, who is no liberal, noted over the weekend that "the first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield." It is pathetic that the Bush Administration, whose greatest innovation to conservatism has been to honor political loyalty at the expense of talent or competence, would attempt to (dishonestly, as it turns out) shift the blame to local officials. Ineffectual local government is to be expected when dealing with a Category-4 hurricane; in Mississippi and Louisiana, corrupt politicians are a feature, not a bug. In the post-9/11 world, we expected the Federal Government to handle the big stuff, and, as in the War against Terrorism, the Bush Administration was not up to the task.

If any good is to come out of the horrors of this past week, it will require us to abandon the notion that the public sphere can accomplish nothing worthwhile, that people must settle for inefficient, cheap government, or that individual desires must always trump the needs of the rest. I have a feeling we might have already begun to turn down that path.

One area where it is fair to take the current regime to task is their complete lack of preparation for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was not simply a matter of levee repairs that were never funded, or grasslands that were allowed to atrophy; those were problems that existed before the 2000 Election, and the fact that Democrats never used their position in the opposition to draw a line in the sand on those issues is a pretty good indicator that blame for those problems crossed party lines.

Instead, FEMA has been made to look utterly incompetent over the last few days, dealing with problems that one would have thought would have been in the forefront of this Administration's priorities, since those were problems dealing with refugees, emergency rescue and damage control: in other words, the same problems that would exist after a major terrorist attack. Bush chose to handpick political cronies to run the agency, and the utter lack of preparation in evacuating masses of people without access to cars, getting food and water to survivors, and having immediate access to medical care is unforgivable. [link via Smirking Chimp]

Ironically, the professional ran FEMA during the Clinton Administration, James Lee Witt, is a major reason why Bush made it to the White House in the first place. Prior to their first debate in 2000, major fires broke out in Texas, and FEMA assistance was required. In that debate, Mr. Witt's decisive actions drew praise from then-Governor Bush, and Vice President Gore seconded that praise, stating that he had accompanied Mr. Witt down to Texas. It turned out that he had accompanied Mr. Witt's assistant, and hadn't spoken to the FEMA director until later, but the Bush camp was able to spin that discrepancy into yet another Gore "prevarication" (in an age of fictitious WMD's, Nigerian Yellow Cake, and the billions of dollars that have disappeared in the reconstruction of Iraq, it is poignant what we used to be consider "dishonest"). What had been a debate that most of the public thought had been decisively won by Al Gore suddenly shifted, and Bush moved out to a lead in the polls that he didn't relinquish until Election Day.

Why Bush sucks, or at least why that suckiness has brought us to defeat in the War on Terror. To put it another way, if Clinton had been President, is there any doubt that at the very least, bin Laden would have been killed or captured by now? Or that Iraq would have been pacified? Of course not. I'm not saying he could have prevented 9/11, or that there wouldn't have been other problems with terrorism, but Clinton would have done a better job managing them. Elvis was knowledgeable, listened to other people, and knew how to charm his political adversaries. Bush, on the other hand, is an asshole, perhaps the biggest asshole in the White House since Nixon, but without Tricky Dick's shrewdness and understanding of the big picture.

To answer Prof. Kleiman's question, the last (and heretofore only) child of a President who was eligible to serve in the Armed Forces at a time of war, but failed to do so was...John Payne Todd, step-son of James Madison. Very interesting character, that Mr. Todd. He was the only surviving son of Dolley Madison from her first marriage, and was still a toddler when his mother met the future President in 1794 (at the time, Todd's guardian was a friend and political ally of Madison's named Aaron Burr). When the War of 1812 started, he had just turned 20.

He seems to have been spoiled by his mother, and spent much of his early years at school, far away from the political world his parents occupied. He quickly gathered some worrisome vices, including a proclivity for drinking and gambling that would, over the fullness of time, bankrupt his widowed mother. Rather than putting the boy in harm's way, at a time when the British were sacking the White House, his step-father sent him on a diplomatic mission to Europe in 1813. By all accounts, he embarrassed himself on the junket with his public drunkenness, and the nation remained at war for two more years.

In short, nothing at all like the current situation....

In a column from last week that has been approvingly cited elsewhere, New Republic writer Jonathon Chait questions the validity of the notion that a veteran has a special moral claim to comment on foreign policy, asking:

One of the important ideas of a democratic culture is that we all have equal standing in the public square. That doesn't mean stupid ideas should be taken as seriously as smart ones. It means that the content of an argument should be judged on its own merits.

The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked "moral authority" to send troops into battle because he had avoided the draft as a youth or, later, because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry's candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on "chicken hawk" conservatives who support the war but never served in the military.

(snip)

The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing.

Or maybe liberals think that having served in war, or losing a loved one in war, gives you standing to oppose wars but not to support them. The trouble is, any war, no matter how justified, has a war hero or relative who opposes it.

Sheehan also criticizes the Afghanistan war. One of the most common (and strongest) liberal indictments of the Iraq war is that it diverted troops that could have been deployed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Are liberals who make that case, yet failed to enlist themselves, chicken hawks too?

To answer Mr. Chait's question, yes, absolutely. I don't happen to care for the word "chickenhawk", as it conjures up an association with pederasty, preferring instead the word "coward", but liberals like myself who support sending our troops to fight the remnants of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan without being willing to volunteer myself are as cowardly and gutless as Cheney, Bush, Hitchens, and the rest of the neocons, all of whom became more vociferous in support of an aggressive foreign policy once they were safely out of harm's way.

In fact, I have less of an excuse. When the President commenced hostilities with the Taliban in October, 2001, I was 38 years old. I probably wouldn't have been the optimal material for a recruit (think "Private Pyle" from Full Metal Jacket in terms of body type), but older men than I volunteered. I'm single, with no children, and the type of legal practice where I could afford to suspend operations for a time without hurting my clients. And I supported our fight in Afghanistan, as did most of the rest of the human race.

When Pat Tillman volunteered for duty, almost a full year after 9/11, and months after the Taliban had fled into the mountains, he wasn't much younger than I, and he was in an occupation that had a very narrow timeframe for him to excel. He went anyways, and never came back. Tillman was a hero; I'm not.

And that is why the story of Casey Sheehan resonates, and why his mom's vigil has so captured the public's imagination. Casey Sheehan did not have to die in the service of his country, but he chose to do so. I have no idea what mixture of idealism and calculation went into his decision, but he made a choice to put himself in danger, because our democratically-elected leaders told him that his country needed him. And as a result, he's dead.

Now that his life is over, his mother, like so many other parents who've gone through the hell of having to bury a child, asks why he had to die. Was it to punish Iraq for the deaths of September 11? There's no evidence Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. To protect the "homeland" from WMD's? Iraq, as it turns out, didn't have any. To fight "Islamofascism"? Saddam was one of the most repugnant dictators who ever lived, but he was kind of weak on the "islamo-" part of the equation, and anyways, the constitution that's being drafted doesn't seem that much different than the laws governing Iran or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, Al Qaeda is more powerful than ever.

I'd say Ms. Sheehan has a right to some answers, as do the rest of us. And yes, Mr. Chait, giving greater moral weight to the opinions of those, like Ms. Sheehan, who've paid the ultimate price, while disregarding the views of those who claim that in spite of this being the most important cause of their generation, they don't have to sacrifice, is only fair. Realizing that such a cost must be borne by people like the Sheehan family is the only way one the "content of an argument" should be judged on its merits.