Karl Rove Resigns

Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is the outstanding Republican political operator of our time.  Between him and Bill Clinton it would be tough to choose. 

And think of what he achieved.  He got a rather unexciting candidate elected twice to the White House.  And he kept the Republicans in control of Congress up until the always-vulnerable second-term off-year election.

That is a stunning achievement.

Why is he leaving now?  New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg says he had to leave now or wait till the end of the administration.

[Rove] said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.

Of course the New York Times chappie can’t help salivating over the prospect of Congress calling Rove up to testify.

But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.

But we Republicans hope that Rove will get some rest, write a book, and get ready to resume his life’s work.

Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and... has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.

My own feeling is that it would be in the long-term interest of Republicans to lose the 2008 election.  Just like Karl Rove, Republicans need a rest—reculer pour mieux sauter as the French say.

Just wait till next year!

End of Civil Liberties?

Is the new warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress last weekend the end of civil liberties as we know it, or just a prudent measure to allow the government to monitor terrorists?

You can guess where liberal E.J. Dionne would stand:

The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.

Naturally, the Wall Street Journal edit page took a different tack. 

Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror.

When you read the Journal’s appreciation of the bill, you can see that there are a lot of issues that E.J. passed over in silence.  Like what kind of liability that telecommunications companies might have if they cooperate with the administration in monitoring terrorists.

The intriguing issue for me is the enormous energy that is brought to the wiretapping issue.  You can see why.  Liberals and their friends on the left live in fear that one day they will need to organize the overthrow of an evil fascist Republican administration.  With warrantless wiretapping they could be easily picked up by the police for plotting revolution.  Therefore all their communications should be private and off limits to government investigators.  Just in case

After all, if a liberal were plotting revolution, it would be justified as civil disobedience and the absolute right to oppose evil right-wing fascist oppression.

But for 97.3 percent (or thereabouts) of Americans, all this fuss over the monitoring of terrorist communications is a storm in a teacup.  After all, the only kind of trouble they are likely to get into with the government is on taxes.  And the government already has the power to look at everyone’s financial activity.  And it gets everyone’s wage information routinely every pay day and on W-2 day.

The civil liberties issue that conservative really care about is the right to give money to the candidate of your choice.  But that right is currently snagged in a web of restrictions and regulation.

But liberals don’t seem to care about that.

US Tipping Balance of Power in Mideast

It’s been notable to me that the o-called “surge” in Iraq has involved US troops ganging up with Sunni militias to drive Al Qaeda out of the Sunni heartlands.  There has been very little news about US forces doing anything about Shia militias. 

According to Robert Haddick the US policy has not gone down well with Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. al-Maliki has no interest in helping Sunnis.  “He sees the Sunnis whom General Petraeus is now arming as mortal enemies.”

But, of course, if the US can’t build a peaceful democracy in Iraq, then the next best thing is a balance of power in Iraq and in the region.

[T]he U.S. is pursuing a balance of power strategy in the Persian Gulf region...  Instinctively or not, it is U.S. policy to prevent any one player from achieving too much power in the Persian Gulf region.

Haddick provides quick review of the last half century to demonstrate how this has always been US strategy.  The problem right now is the power of Iran.  That means that the US wants Iraq as a counterweight to Iran.

And really, so long as oil fuels the Middle East it will be a trouble spot, and the US will want to make sure that no single power ever dominates the region.

Army Says Beauchamp Articles False

It looks like it could be time to start rolling out the long German words with respect to the anonymous New Republic Baghdad diarist now revealed as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp.  The word I am thinking of is Schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others.  Even the New York Times is getting into the act in a modest way.  Reports Patricia Cohen

An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

And it was the Weekly Standard and conservative bloggers that raised the alarm on Beauchamp’s writings. 

Well, actually, I don’t take much pleasure in the troubles of the New Republic.  It seems to me that both Beauchamp and the editor of the New Republic, Franklin Foer, are inexperienced young men who just got in too deep.

The big lesson to learn about politics is knowing when you can lie with impunity and when you cannot.  It’s a nice point, and it takes a bit of experience to master it.

Anyway, the New Republic is a liberal title and standards just aren’t as high for liberals as they are for conservatives.  This can give liberals a false sense of security, because they are used to getting the benefit of the doubt when they get into trouble.

A New Look at the Industrial Revolution

Why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain?  And why did it begin in the decades before 1800?  Economist Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms has thinks he has divined the answer from centuries-old data on births and deaths and wills.  Nicholas Wade (Before the Dawn) reviews his book in the New York Times.

What happened was the the rich in Britain had more children and the violent poor were slowly squeezed out of society.  Thus British society became more peaceful and cooperative.  Over the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution the population slowly exhibited more and more of the “middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save.”  The rest is history.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Before the growth of this middle-class culture, mankind was unable to escape the Malthusian Trap of overpopulation.  And indeed, agriculturalists were probably poorer and worked more hours than hunter-gatherers. 

But the result has ben a Great Divergence.  The peoples who have followed the British example have become unimaginably wealthy.  Those that have not have got poorer than ever. 

Education Fatties Won't Diet

The government education monopoly eats about $500 billion a year for K-12 education.  Check usgovernmentspending.com for the details.  And literacy hasn’t budged in 150 years.

So Newt Gingrich went on TV to tell folks to do something about it, reports Henry Payne.  Detroit seems to be as bad as anywhere.  So Newt burned in like a laser:

“The Detroit Public School system currently graduates 22 percent of its entering freshman. If you’re an African-American male, you have 73-percent unemployment in your 20s if you drop out of school.”

It may be worst in Detroit but it’s the same all over.  I talked to a twentysomething Canadian this weekend.  His mother said that she had been taught in school by nuns in India, and boy, were they strict.  “I was taught by morons,” he asserted.

As Randi Weingarten, New York teachers’ union leader puts it:  There are people out there who “just don’t care about kids.”  She means evil people who won’t vote more money for schools.

Henry Payne points to another possibility where Detroit is concerned. 

Trouble is, the locals don’t care. And no amount of bold national solutions will matter until they do.

Ignoring the staggering statistics Gingrich cited, Detroit leaders instantly manned the ramparts to shoot the messenger. Detroit Federation of Teachers President Virginia Cantrell said Gingrich should “leave Detroit alone.”

Hum.  It’s easy to take the Leninist strategy: The worse the better. 

But we are conservatives, and even liberal kids deserve better. 

Is DailyKos Really Rush for Liberals?

We right-wingnuts and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement.  Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited.  We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.

Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins. 

OK.  There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass.  Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.

[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they’re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.

Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites.  So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence?  Hawkins writes:

Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.

Yet now they think it is OK?

A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.

So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks?  Do they know something we don’t know?  E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.  Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.

Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh’s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.

But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force?  And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community?  According to Dionne:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They’re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game. No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.

But there’s a basic difference here.  Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media.  People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren’t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.

On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square.  After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee.  How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?

Here’s my two cents worth.  I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats.  I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.

Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic.  The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them.  But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift. 

And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.