Mubarak's thugs remind us that neocons & repressive dictators speak the same language: violence.

In the wake of Mubarak's announcement to the Egyptian people that he will resign from office at the end of his current presidential term (they have "terms"?!), we are reminded of Max Weber's famous observation in Economy and Society: "legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state."

We citizens of the modern bourgeois, cosmopolitan West ignore this relationship between violence and the state at our peril. A hundred years after the First World War, the fundamental premise of statehood remains unaltered: it is a form of social organization in whose name the use of violence is accorded legitimacy. It's through this lens that I've begun to view the recent eruptions of violence in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt.

Weeks of remarkably peaceful anti-Mubarak protests culminated yesterday in the collegial, civilized march of a million (or, anyway, a whole hell of a lot of) demonstrators. This was the moment Mubarak chose to make his LBJ-like announcement. And, within moments of his television address, he gave the signal to his police thugs, to paid-off petty criminals (the same criminals who'd previously been given free reign to loot stores, etc., all to increase the public's sense of chaos and instability), and to camel-riding mercenaries—apparently summoned from the tourism industry(!)—to confront the anti-Mubarak throng.

 The result? Violence and chaos. But this time, instead of operating behind the scenes, to cultivate an atmosphere of unease—a strategy that had failed—the incitement happened right in front of the television cameras of the international press. Some of the supposed Mubarak-lovers riding camels onto the scene! As blatant a coordinated provocation as can be imagined.

My first reaction to this orchestrated provocation from the obviously phony "pro-Mubarak protesters" was: How could Mubarak be so ham-fisted? I quickly realized that, of course, there was nothing ham-fisted about it: Its obviousness is the whole point.

Paying off petty criminals and/or plainclothes policemen to loot stores was a genuine attempt to generate a sense of chaos, undifferentiated violence, economic uncertainty, and a yearning for the 'law and order' among the civilian population (this yearning being Mubarak's—or any repressive dictator's—political trump card).

By contrast, the coordinated "pro-Mubarak" incitement of violence represents a deliberate and ostentatious flexing of the state's muscle: an example of 'legitimate' state violence. The message to the protesting masses is simple: "Okay, you've extracted the best concession you're gonna get from us; now go home."

There is a separate message simultaneously being beamed to the heavy-weights in the Egyptian business community (and members of the middle class whose livelihood depends upon the smooth functioning of the latter), which is: "You still need us to keep the order." In this sense, the contrast between the ruling regime's highly uncharacteristic use of restraint over the past week and the volatility of recent developments is being used as an illustration of what happens when the state does not maintain the order with its iron fist.

The army plays an interesting role in this process. Its restraint, over the past week, has served as a way in which to preserve its popularity with the Egyptian public. Now, when Mubarak's thugs have been dispatched to the scene—by the busload, apparently—in order to spill some blood, the Egyptian army's restraint and 'impartiality' takes on a particularly sinister quality.

And so, when we witness the pro-Mubarak stance of some prominent neoconservatives, we should not see it as a sudden, surprising neoconservative embrace of Realpolitik—a posture that these same figures so often claim to despise (take their supposed belief in 'democracy-building' in Iraq, for example).

Instead, the neoconservatives are showing a tendency that has consistently been at the very heart of their system of values: the neocons, just like Mubarak, just like Ahmadinejad, believe in violence.

The neocons, like these repressive dictators, are suspicious of messy, unpredictable things like political and religious liberty, the rule of law, intellectualism, political discourse, and democratic deliberation. Although the neocons might occasionally speak the language of democracy, in fact they they understand only the language of violence.

See also: Slavoj Žižek on the cynicism and hypocrisy in the attitudes of many Westerners toward democratic revolutions in the Middle East.

Happy New Year's. Or: in the words of the late John Lennon, "Just give me some truth."

We live in a time marked by corruption, double-speak, injustice, violence, superstition and the creeping specter of right-wing totalitarianism. None of this is anything that the human race hasn't faced or endured before. Still, several generations of middle- and working-class people in the United States have enjoyed comfortable existences. We have relied upon -- and participated wittingly or not in the production and reification of -- febrile illusions and convenient myths that blocked from our view various of the certitudes of human history, including: inequality, oppression, exploitation, and financial and militaristic power-jockeying.

But just because we've awoken to find the world around us -- internationally and domestically -- in tatters doesn't mean we have to stop enjoying life. Quite the opposite.

I see the project of political self-education as continuous with the project of being a human being. It's not easy, sometimes, to be a human being, and the very notion that it has ever been easy is a seductive (perhaps irresistibly so) fiction. Whatever our political orientations -- left or right -- each of us has an idealized notion of human life that necessarily draws its raw materials from the past. That this idealized picture never actually existed as such often gets lost somewhere in the course of our endless discussions about the meaning of life, liberty and property as the Founding Fathers meant it. We want to believe that their interpretations of these things were more-or-less like the ones we espouse today.

An obvious example of this phenomenon is Thomas Jefferson. Both the left and the right in this country are fond of claiming him as their own. After all, he was among the most eloquent architects of the United States as an Enlightenment project, poised precariously (if that's possible...) between the polarities of violent revolution and orderly, reasoned deliberation. To the far right, Jefferson was and remains the prophet of the Confederacy -- the defender of States' Rights and of Southern self-determination (read: slavery). To the far left, Jefferson is our founding Civil Libertarian, opponent of slavery (in theory...) and the instrumental force in banishing governmental intervention into our personal, intellectual, moral and religious lives.

The truth, of course, is that Jefferson -- especially taken over the course of his lifetime -- was a walking contradiction. For all of his brilliance, wisdom and passion, he was often inconsistent, self-contradictory, stubborn, tone deaf and even dumb.

I think I lost track of where I was going with all of this... Oh well. I guess I really just wanted to say that these ambiguities and contradictions are part of what make us human beings, and the better we become at understanding this about ourselves and one another, the more adept we will be at being and living amongst human beings. We live in a deeply conservative age in which power is horded by a very small number of people whose conceptions of political and economic justice, reason and freedom center upon one thing: the necessity of maintaining the status quo. In one sense, it has never been an easier time to articulate a critique of the status quo. The injustices perpetrated by crony-capitalist oligarchies -- and the degree to which our elected representatives are in the employ of these oligarchies -- has never been clearer for all to see. It's as though all one needs to do is point one's finger, like identifying a leak in one's bathroom plumbing.

Of course, the trouble is that pointing this out doesn't seem to accomplish all that much. Describing the problems fails to alert our fellow democratic citizens to the necessity of taking political action in order to redress these injustices. But we should take this not as a defeat but as a challenge. We're simply not articulating ourselves clearly enough. Or we're not talking to the right people. Or we're being arrogant, lazy and self-righteous (guilty as charged...). I guess what I'm trying to suggest here is not just that the pen is mightier than the sword, but also that the truth is more durable, valuable, penetrating and infectious than lies.

Sure, the far right (both the radical-laissez faire right and its cousin, the let's bomb everything all the time right) has got legions of oil-company-funded "think tanks" to come up with strategies and propaganda for various right-wing pet-projects, like wars, the privatization of public infrastructure and lowering taxes. They've got the guns, the money and the numbers.

The only thing that stands so much as a chance against so menacing a phalanx is the truth.

Ron Paul in conversation with Jon Stewart... ...prompts the question: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

Why do I seem to be getting a boner over Ron Paul?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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It's not just, I don't think, that he seems intellectually honest. Nor is it only because his response to Stewart's question about the authoritarian-populist teabaggers is hilarious. It's mainly an idea that I've had swishing around in my head for the last couple of years....

I'm not a libertarian (in the American sense...across the pond, it doesn't mean the same thing), not by any stretch of the imagination. In other words, I disagree vehemently with the central tenet of libertarian ideology: the notion that "big government" or "more government" is always bad.

Sure, I am skeptical and even fundamentally antagonistic toward the growth of certain sectors of government, and I am absolutely opposed to the frightening steps that our nation seems to be taking toward establishing a surveillance/police state. I think the military is way too big, and I think the people in government cooking up wars for us to get into are mostly cynical assholes who don't have the best interests of the American citizenry at heart.

But, in comparison to governmental power, I am worried more about the concentration of power and influence in the hands of business and financial interests. I can explain why I oppose unchecked business and financial power more than government power with one very simple statement:

The legitimate exercise of governmental and political power -- formally if seldom substantively (particularly lately) -- is conditioned upon the consent of the governed. By contrast, the legitimate exercise of power by business and financial interests is conditioned upon the dominance of those who exercise it over those who do not.

But, when speaking of reigning hegemonic structures with the greatest capacity and incentive to curtail individual liberty, it seems that the most pernicious of all is the unchecked, oligarchic interrelation of governmental and business power.

Since the latter, to lesser or greater degrees in given cases, is clearly what we have in the United States today (and -- to be sure -- have often had throughout history).

So here's the question to which I have been drawn lately: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

For now, let's leave it as a rhetorical question. It's a discourse that I shall undertake to explore in subsequent posts. As a food for thought, I might hypothesize that it's a problem of discourses, cultural politics and short-mindedness. But, honestly, despite my deep-seated opposition to Ron Paul's core libertarian ideology, I confess that I like a lot about the way he's thinking.

Progressives and libertarians both want a country that protects and promotes the free-exchange of ideas, the ability of individuals to live their lives as they please, to not be spied on, to eschew supporting an endless succession of neoconservative military adventures...

As is illustrated in this exchange between Ron Paul and Jon Stewart, the differences between each side have to do with conceptions of (or dedication to) social justice. I won't pretend that that isn't a lot. But the differences between the two tendencies on an array of issues pertaining to respect for the Constitution and individual liberty are fewer and smaller than we sometimes like to pretend.

Do we have to want to have a beer with someone or share her sense of fashion in order to share common political cause?

Is it a pipe dream to think that progressives and libertarians could place aside their many differences in the interest of political expediency, to forge a tactical/temporary political alliance against our common enemy: the forces of authoritarianism?

"War Is Hell!":The perfecters of chest-beating and their epigones.

Let's revisit our discussion of David Brooks's editorial in yesterday's New York Times, which Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald places alongside numerous previous instances in which this neoconservative, who usually plays 'good-cop', metamorphoses into a "grizzled warrior." As Greenwald illustrates, yesterday's transformation finds the usually ostensibly mild-mannered Brooks

perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...

Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*

We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).

And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!

Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).

I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!

Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

[...]

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.

Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?

I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.  [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.

Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:

...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...

I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...  [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.

I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.

Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.

I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....

__________________

* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.

David Brooks: Polite, bespectacled, unrepentant war propagandist again flashes his bloodthirsty fangs.

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing a pattern here.

By way of an item posted today on the blog PhuckPolitics.com, Crib From This is happy to find itself in the position of bringing to the reader's attention this week's (perhaps this month's) required reading: a piece -- unrelenting in its honesty and buttressed powerfully by a torrent of damning quotations -- exposé of the sophistic, tendentious, arrogant, and mendacious tactics and rhetoric of David Brooks.

Written by Glenn Greenwald, the piece, which appears in Salon.com, calls to our attention Brooks's repeated tendency suddenly to launch into a tough-guy routine whenever, according to his Realpolitik-style calculations, he senses the need to bully his readers his into supporting whatever military adventure it is that week serve the interests of his underlying, fanatical neoconservative interests.

But wait! you protest. David Brooks as nothing more than an arrogant neoconservative hack? David Brooks as a low-rent Joseph Goebbels?? But he's so polite. And those glasses he wears make him seem like a thoughtful person, an intellectual. Not an ideologue!

Well, shit, I'm not saying I wouldn't have a beer with the guy. But, you know, there are a lot of people with whom I'd be happy to have a beer. That doesn't mean that I'd entrust them with their own freaking column in The New York Times.

Greenwald, having noticed that Brooks is now bringing his tough guy game to the deadly, chaotic and increasingly unpopular American intervention in Afghanistan, reminds us that "Brooks was writing all the same things in late 2002 and early 2003 about Iraq -- though, back then, he did so from the pages of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard." Lest we forget all of the now-inconvenient statements that Brooks would prefer we forget about, Greenwald has come to our rescue:

In today's New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

When I went back to read some of that this morning, I was -- as always -- struck by how extreme and noxious it all was:  the snide, hubristic superiority combined with absolute wrongness about everything.  What people like David Brooks were saying back then was so severe -- so severely wrong, pompous, blind, warmongering and, as it turns out, destructive -- that no matter how many times one reviews the record of the leading opinion-makers of that era, one will never be inured to how poisonous they are.

All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past.  But they're not.  They're the opposite.  The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all.  They're doing the same things now that they did then.  When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy.  David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say:  because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard.  According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman.  Charles Krauthammer came in third.  Ponder that for a minute.


Just read some of what Brooks wrote about Iraq.  It's absolutely astounding that someone with this record doesn't refrain from prancing around as a war expert for the rest of their lives.  In fact, in a society where honor and integrity were valued just a minimal amount, a record like this would likely cause any decent and honorable person, wallowing in shame, to seriously contemplate throwing themselves off a bridge:

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003:

I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. . . . Then they brought on a single "expert" to analyze Powell's presentation. This fellow, who looked to be about 25 and quite pleased with himself, was completely dismissive. The Powell presentation was a mere TV show, he sniffed. It's impossible to trust any of the intelligence data Powell presented because the CIA is notorious for lying and manipulation. The presenter showed a photograph of a weapons plant, and then the same site after it had been sanitized and the soil scraped. The expert was unimpressed: The Americans could simply have lied about the dates when the pictures were taken. Maybe the clean site is actually the earlier picture, he said.

That was depressing enough. Then there were a series of interviews with French politicians of the left and right. They were worse. At least the TV expert had acknowledged that Powell did present some evidence, even if he thought it was fabricated. The politicians responded to Powell's address as if it had never taken place. They simply ignored what Powell said and repeated that there is no evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that, in any case, the inspection system is effective.
This was not a response. It was simple obliviousness, a powerful unwillingness to confront the question honestly. This made the politicians seem impervious to argument, reason, evidence, or anything else. Maybe in the bowels of the French elite there are people rethinking their nation's position, but there was no hint of it on the evening news.

Which made me think that maybe we are being ethnocentric. As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding.

But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. . . .

Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. . . . Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 7, 2003:

I do suspect that the decision to pursue this confrontational course emerges from Bush's own nature. He is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars. Bush wants them to do it in public, where history can easily judge them. Needless to say, neither the French nor the Russians nor the Chinese believe that honesty has anything to do with diplomacy. They see the process through an entirely different lens.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, January 29, 2003:

This was speech as autobiography. President Bush once again revealed his character, and demonstrated why so many Americans, whether they agree with this or that policy proposal, basically trust him and feel he shares their values. Most Americans will not follow the details of this or that line in the address. But they will go about their day on Wednesday knowing that whatever comes in the next few months, they have a good leader at the helm.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 21, 2003:

I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002:

In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully . . . The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed. . . . The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists. Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests. Certain people--many people, in fact--are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs. Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision. He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, September 30, 2002:

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .


You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. . . . For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003:

So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await.

Look at that last paragraph.  He proclaimed that "events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac."  On the eve of the war he cheered on, as he celebrated the fact that "the debate is over" and war was imminent and inevitable, he identically vowed:  "Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac."  Soon we would know.

Did Brooks ever tell his readers what we found out about that? [...]

You get one guess as to the the answer to this question. Seriously, though: read the whole piece. It gives you that creepy Orwellian feeling that you get when you notice that the people with power and influence in our country are lying to us not only about the present, but they are lying most of all about the past.

Is it mere coincidence that the same militaristic and neoconservative goons who are lying to us about the past and -- as Greenwald points out -- unwilling to hold themselves to an ethical standard that demands telling the truth to the best of your ability at all times, is it any surprise that these are the same ideologues that espouse the trashing of the American public school system and the transfer of that system into the hands of private, for-profit businesses? Or that they are the same people who want to trash public television and who have removed any and all former laws against the consolidation of media?

It's really regrettable, but Greenwald has a damn good point when he asks: what does this stuff say about us as a society?

By nature, the present blogger tends to eschew defeatism as much as possible. He endeavors always to channel his outrage into some kind of rational thinking or reflection or -- in very rare instances -- action. He does this because dwelling on how screwed-up the world is can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having said that, he also knows that he must nonetheless always continue to learn as much as he can about how screwed up the world is, because if he doesn't, that just makes him one of the hundreds of thousands of starving-artist-types who don't recognize that they're consigned to being culturally-bourgeois-as-hell hypocrites and that it's better simply to recognize this fact: the fact that pretty much anyone reading and I daresay writing a blog is by definition among an exceedingly lucky subsection of the world population which -- for all of its good intentions -- lives off of the past and present and -- in the case of our parents' generation -- future misery, death, misfortune and hopelessness of millions of others.

This poses an existential problem that we won't go into right now because frankly I need to eat lunch, and I'm sure that I'm sort of at low blood-sugar and am probably rambling incoherently.

But anyway, re: my cognizance of current deplorable political realities, I'm happy to say that I commented on the dark aspects of David Brooks previously, only in that case, I was main concerned with his views and writing on domestic policy/politics.

In an item posted approximately a year ago, Crib From This took to task the New York Times columnist and former Weekly Standard mainstay David Brooks for the mendacity, hypocrisy and tendentiousness of his putatively startled and dismayed response to the ascendancy of Sarah Palin, and the brand of hillbilly-resentment-populism espoused by the voters within the Republican Party whom she enthralled. To revisit these remarks briefly:

The subtext of [Brooks's] commentary is [...] that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.

The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.

In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?

To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through -- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like

• disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
  
• applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise'); [...]
• being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
  
• kissing the asses of Catholic people;
  
• in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
  
• lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
  
• and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."

Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!

Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.

But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS.

Now, the present blogger must have been in an exceedingly generous mood when he made the preceding observations. That probably had something to do with Barack Obama's fresh victory in the presidential election, which -- despite the fact that I hate having to be reminded of how ineffectual, wooden, bought-off and ruthlessly supportive of sinister neoliberal policy agendae, Democratic politicians are when they actually hold positions of power -- I maintain to have been a result that is preferable by far than handing keys to the White House to John "Decrepit Tough Guy" McCain.

Anyway, I put it to anyone who has stayed with this post all the way to the bottom: Which neoconservative political operative is more harmful to this country? The shrill and disingenuous William Kristol? Or the polite, bespectacled and occasionally shrill David Brooks?

The point about Sarah Palin is that she's amoral.

News about Sarah Palin: apparently she's blah blah blah blah blah.

Sarah Palin: theories as to why she apparently arouses hatred. I probably do hate her, and insofar as I do, I hate that I hate her. To inspire the hatred of others is to wield a peculiar kind of power. There's also a part of me that is in a sense unfazed by her personally, that sees in her a representation of many of contemporary America's most morally objectionable tendencies. It is these tendencies that I oppose with all my might, whether she's there to embody them or not. Right? ...

But, Sarah Palin: she's got to be a symptom of something rather than the other way around, right? Because what symptom could possibly be CAUSED by a Sarah Palin? No. She must be the symptom. The side effect.

Sarah Palin: a side effect. Like television commercials for various god-knows-what prescription medications marketed to Baby-Boomers, so that they don't have to poop at inopportune moments, or whatever it is. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE SARAH PALIN. Sometimes these advertisements -- the funniest of them, to be sure -- devote, like, over half of their running-time to the announcer guy reading out laundry lists of scary-ass side effects, which MAY INCLUDE MUCUS, SEIZURE, BLOOD CLOT, LOSS OF HEARING, OR -- IN RARE CASES -- SARAH PALIN...

I don't hate Palin so much as I fear the consolidation of political power among those who love her.

Sarah Palin -- to paraphrase the Sex Pistols -- She ain't no human being!, but a constellation of images, allusions and gestures.

The mediated phenomenon "Sara Palin" evokes nostalgia among a large number of Americans -- although, as far as I can tell, not a majority of them -- for a past that does not exist/that never existed.

I am reminded of accounts I have read of what it was like to witness the ascendancy of National Socialism in the tempestuous final days of the Weimar Republic: the celebration of ignorance, of seething, unfocused resentments.

The final revenge of style over content.

Sarah Palin makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. She makes Ronald Reagan look pro-education. Sarah Palin is worse than these men because, whereas their moral precepts were delusional, hers are non-existent.

She's amoral: she represents indifference toward morality, indifference toward the Constitution, indifference toward the quality of life -- and livelihoods -- of present and future generations, indifference toward science, indifference toward representative democracy, indifference toward the separation of the branches of government, indifference toward education, indifference toward art, toward culture, toward freedom, toward poverty, toward the pursuit of happiness, indifference toward the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, indifference toward religion in its meaningful sense, indifference toward history, indifference toward ideas, and indifference toward suffering.

The only thing toward which she is not indifferent is Sarah Palin. She doesn't care about the people who celebrate her. The people who celebrate her do so in the sense that they live vicariously through her. She embodies a collective, incoherent and self-contradictory dream. This dream pines for the destruction of all things unfamiliar in the interest of preserving the self as the self construes itself.

We really should be explaining the Left objection to her in moral terms: Sarah Palin is amoral.

Cadre of Iraq War propagandists/architects renames itself.Project for a New American Century = The Foreign Policy Initiative

I pass this along because it's essential to know who's who. Knowing who's behind the thinking (and the fundraising) of an ostensibly "brand new" Washington DC think tank is even more useful than knowing which evil international corporations with major image problems have changed names. In the case of the latter, a somewhat recent example that comes to mind is that of Clear Channel, which spawned Live Nation, which is attempting to conduct a merger with Ticketmaster.

Now the cadre of cynical propagandists who posed as "experts" recommending the invasion of Iraq, a group that once went under the name of Project for a New American Century, has reconstituted itself as The Foreign Policy Initiative. According to an item in The Huffington Post, which was posted on March 31, 2009:

Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force.

[...]

'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."

[...]

Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."

O.K., now, the thing is, I'm not really interested in things that Rachel Maddow has to say, and I have no idea who Matt Duss is. But the basic reporting here is sound, and as such, I pass it along to the reader. What with the creeping demise of actual journalism of any kind, one has to take bits of information as one finds them and simply resist the temptation to accept half-baked interpretations of it. Fewer actual reporters and dwindling budgets for overseas bureaus mean that formerly reputable news-reporting organizations are becoming, to an increasing extent, news-interpreting organizations, the task of thinking critically and reflectively becomes maybe more difficult. I don't know... Maybe it doesn't!

And also: I don't think it's bad for people -- even trigger-happy would-be Cold Warriors -- to formulate and express their ideas. I don't even think it's bad for them to, uh, strategize. I do think, however, that it's important to bear in mind the hypocrisy of Kristol in particular, who has been among the lunatics who have deployed the opportunistic and deeply ludicrous slogan Defund The Left! as a way of inveighing against ideas too bothersome to argue on their merits. The phrase attempted to popularize the specious notion that, for example, 'the media' and 'the academy' are spheres of American life that, perniciously, are pervaded by left-wingers, atheists, Marxists (strange, considering that Kristol's dad was, after all, a Trotskyist) and terrorist-coddlers.

I call this hypocrisy, because...well, in effect, Kristol is inviting his political opponents to have a gander at just which -- ahem -- 'disinterested' entities are footing the bill for his and Bob Kagan's singular brand of 'scholarship' and emm, 'journalism'. Or is 'advocacy' maybe a better word?

In the wake of the Iranian elections, it should be unsurprising that this exact same group of people -- whom we might call The "Bomb Iran" contingent -- has expressed a newfound concern for The Iranian People. An empathic bunch.

An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.

Did populism collapse the house that WFB built?Some thoughts as to the wheres, hows, whens & wherefores.

I. The "Palin farce" & Republican populism.

An article that should be required reading for the George Wills of the world appears in today's Wall Street Journal (which I spotted by way of Media Nation). Penned by a certain Mark Lilla, it's one of the bitter pills that I'd advise self-respecting Republicans to swallow:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. ...

... So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

... Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. ...

The article has something to say, namely that any portion of the educated Right should know better than to keep mum when a force like Sarah Palin is unleashed upon us, in the name of conservatism. And secondly, any conservative that should have known better but didn't, and who therefore didn't condemn Palin should now be ashamed of himself. (He -- predictably -- isn't). They should also be embarrassed. If they're not, then it's their loss, not the Left's. The less equipped these Palin-apologists are to spot the myriad internal contradictions in which the GOP identity is mired, the more likely it is that the USA can continue electing actual adults to national office.

II. However.

Not so sure I'm ready to buy into the premise that it wasn't until the 1980's that the Republican Party started playing the 'populist' (in both the euphemistic and straightforward senses) card. Or that it somehow wasn't until that shiny-chrome decade that the movement realized that, if it were to survive, it needed to appeal to racists and bigots. True, that commie-hating, loony-toony apologist for extremism Barry Goldwater failed to create an effective political alliance combining Northern industrialists with Southern segregationists. But it wasn't for lack of trying! His mistake? Perhaps he was a bit too forthright in his trigger-happy xenophobic militarist extremism?

III. How 'bout let's just say "the silent majority," wink wink?

Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, et al., perfected the much-ballyhooed 'Southern Strategy' in 1968. This maneuver capitalized on the widespread Southern opposition to Lyndon Johnson's having masterminded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Southern Strategy is an object lesson in Machiavellianism that the GOP milked for all (and I mean all) that the once-venerable, nominal "Party of Lincoln" could. And while I'm not aware that Nixon was specifically hateful toward black people, Tricky Dick earned his very nickname as a consequence of his use of bald-faced lies, smear-campaigns and McCarthyism in order to get elected to the House of Representatives. And, let's face it, everybody knows that Nixon was anti-semitic (a prejudice that then as now appears to walk hand-in-hand with pandering to the militarist far-Right fringe of the Zionist Movement, perpetuating dishonestly and dangerously a reprehensible ideology that equates 'good' Judaism with radical-Right-wing Zionism [See also: Hagee, John, John McCain's onetime anti-Catholic, anti-semitic pastor. See also: Kristol, William]).

Obviously, where Nixon benefited from the strategy electorally (with the exception of getting his ass handed to him by Jack Kennedy), it was with eight years of Ronald Reagan that the Goldwater Republicans could finally take their hatchet (the one that another Arizona politician, John McCain apparently inherited from them) to the public infrastructure, dismantling it limb from limb. Americans who so much as noticed -- it was, after all, the Spielberg 1980's -- greeted this carnage with either approval or indifference.

As impressively cynical a feat as Reaganomics turned out to be, perhaps even more striking was the unlikely election of George Herbert Walker Bush to the White House. People sometimes refer to Bush Senior's administration as the "Third Reagan Term." Uh...fair enough. But anyone who really wants to understand how the elder Bush managed to get elected had better come to grips with the singular, twisted genius of Lee Atwater. About whom: be sure to catch this documentary, which aired recently on PBS and will no doubt show up as a rerun in the near-future. Maybe Atwater was no Joseph Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl. He was a Karl Rove, only times infinity.

Whereas Karl Rove's talent in the area of fascistic disinformation-peddling is damn impressive -- even if it may now look rather quaint, now that it's failed miserably in 2006 and especially 2008 --, Atwater was a natural where Rove is a tables-and-figures man. Atwater was a blues-guitar-playing (literally) opportunist who made a deal with the Devil -- and paid for it dearly. Rove is an Adolf Eichmann-figure. Savvier and more clever than Eichmann, of course. But possessing precisely the deficient capacities for reflection and critical thinking for which history has fated that Eichmann shall forever stand as a one-man morality play.

IV. Lee Atwater & the election of 1988.

Anyway (what's a blog if it doesn't veer off onto wild tangents?): Atwater cobbled together a presidential campaign -- that is, that of Bush Senior, in case we've forgotten -- whose unlikely success was fueled by the mere exhaust fumes of decades of slow-burning resentments and fears. Pure Southern Strategy, straight out of the Nixon playbook. Except in a way that plumbed new depths of dishonesty, race-baiting, demagoguery, shamelessness, and -- most importantly -- the whole discourse it imposed upon the presidential race was pure theater.

Unlike Nixon, who was promising, in effect, "law and order" to Southern and suburban whites who were scared of the rebellion of black nationalists and civil rights demonstrators, unlike Reagan, who lowered taxes, Bush Senior wasn't offering anything serious in return for handing him your vote. The Atwater strategy of playing upon accumulated conscious- and subconscious racism, xenophobia, neo-McCarthyism, anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism was nothing but manipulation that had previously been the province of beer commercials. It was all just to (1) slime the other guy and (2) scorch, as it were, the earth underneath the election such that many people became so turned off by the tactics and rhetoric that they (a.) failed to look closely enough to see that it was all being generated by one side (the GOP), and (b.) therefore didn't bother to vote. And they didn't. That's it. It was shameful and mendacious and mean-spirited even by the standards of the McCain campaign.

V. Back to Buckley: forgive him not for his McCarthyist high jinks.

Ever seen the video footage, shot during the political conventions of 1968 in which William F. Buckley offers to smack Gore Vidal in the face, calling him a 'fucking queer' (or something like that)? Which...to give Buckley his due, was not an inaccurate statement. It wasn't, nevertheless, all that relevant to the discussion at hand, which was the Vietnam War. (I'm not even sure that it rises to the status of ad hominem. Sorry, if that's harsh, Bill; may you rest in peace.)

Sure, our few remaining thoughtful conservatives here in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Eight have every reason to light a candle in gratitude to Buckley when attending high mass. Not so much for leaving them with The National Review, whose quality has plummeted at an astonishing rate since the exceedingly stupid Rich Lowry took the helm. (Rich Lowry is an idiot. In case I wasn't being clear about that.) No, these remaining thoughtful conservatives should venerate their forefather for his well-calculated move of severing the overt ties of the conservative movement to anti-semitism and the John Birch Society. But let's not forget that this same Bill Buckley was a huge supporter of Joseph McCarthy, that he embraced Jim Crow.

VI. Conclusion

In other words, I'll allow that the 1980's saw the anti-intellectual and anti-'elite' streak beginning to gobble up the Republican Party, such that this strain has now come to define the GOP in its totality. But don't let it off the hook that easily. Buckley and the early neocons, etc., may have been intellectuals, but they were also strategists, and cashing in on resentments -- particularly the Southern varieties -- was always a matter of chief concern.