Wednesday, June 3, 2009
THREE LITTLE WORDS
The White House has chosen to back away from Sotomayor's (one-time) claim that "a wise Latina" might be a better judge than a white male by saying that she made a poor choice of words. This suggests mainly using a word out of place, like calling the bankers and brokers who profited from trading in derivatives "embezzlers." But "a poor choice of words" might also mean using too many words or using too few. Sotomayor used too few. If she had simply qualilfied her claim for a wise Latina judge by limiting it expresslky to being a better judge "in some cases" -- three little words -- she would have made an interesting and defensible claim, and one that could have led to an illuminating debate, though not with the blowhards who took the lead in attacking her.
REPUBLICANS GONE CRAZY ON SOTOMAYOR
According to an ancient saying, "Those whom the gods mean to destroy, they first drive mad." For the safety, not to speak of the sanity, of their party Republicans are running too close in their attacks on Sotomayor to fulfilling this saying. The unspeakable (but continually speaking) Rush Limbaugh declaims that the only reason for nominating her to be a justice on the Supreme Court is that she is an ethnic activist (in short, a racist). One cannot presume in Limbaugh's case that he realizes to say as much is a lapse in logic, disregarding her outstanding educational qualifications or her long and varied experience as a private litigator, as a federal trial judge, as a judge in a federal appellate court. It is crazy to disregard these grounds for nominating her. However, other Republican spokesmen have been equally crazy, taking the qualifications up but belittling them. It is crazy to call Sotomayor not intelligent enough for the job in the face of her summa cum laude degree at Princeton and her brilliant record at Yale Law School. Those are not perhaps entirely perfect tests (I believe that the first President Bush was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Yale), but what better ones do the critics have in mind? It is crazy to disregard her legal experience as a litigator, trial judge, and appellate judge. On this and the other points about qualifications, the craziness has two dimensions: first, flying in the face of the known standards of judgment; second, wounding the justified pride of the Hispanic community in Sotomayor's accomplishments. Senators Cornyn and Sessions seem aware of this and are trying to steer a different course. One suspects, however, that the damage to the prospects of the Republican Party in winning votes from Hispanics has already been done.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
TRUE OR FALSE, LET'S KILL PEOPLE
Some commentators have specially deplored the use of torture by the Bush-Cheney administration to discover if possible a link between Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein. They have rightly pointed out that the (dubious) justification that the information sought would save American lives from an imminent threat does not apply in this case. What was at stake was giving some color to the Bush-Cheney pretexts for invading Iraq. However, they have gone too far (Olberman in particular has gone too far) in suggesting that in this use of torture Bush-Cheney were seeking a false confession that would give them color. They would have been happy enough to have a link between Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein established by a true confession. What they were guilty of in this instance -- guilty many times over as the tortures of the victim were repeated -- was ignoring the evidence that torture is all too likely to lead to a false confession; and not caring whether the confession was true or false, so long as it served their purposes. That is damnable.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
LOOK BACK TO PROSECUTE: OBAMA'S SUBTLE STRATEGY?
From time to time, as various commentators have multiplied daily instructions to Obama about what to do, it has occurred to me that they mght be having some difficulty dealing with him because he is smarter than they are: smarter than David Brooks, for example, and smarter than Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. Relfecting on my post yesterday under the title "Look Back to Prosecute," I wonder if I myself have been caught off guard and failed to allow duly for his subtlety. He is more than smart enough to know that it is a bad argument to say that going back to the past would be accomplish nothing in dealing with crimes like torture; and smart enough to have thought of the obvious rebuttal, which is pointing out that, generally speaking, crimes of all sorts have to be investigated and prosecuted by going back to the past. Has he set things up so that he is on record as being strongly disinclined himself to generating prosecutions of the people responsible for policies of torture; but ready to accept an independent decision to proceed by the Attorney General (or by Congress)? If so, he may succeed in minimizing the rage that will be directed at him regarding this issue by people who supported the former administration; and at the same time minimizing the opposition, strong among some of his key supporters, to letting the torture-generators off with impunity. He will be in a more favorable position to push for his grand reforms in health care, education, and energy.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
LOOK BACK TO PROSECUTE
President Obama is saying that it would accomplish nothing to prosecute U. S. officials who might be charged with torture. Instead of going back to the past, we should "move forward." This is a shockingly bad argument, and it is shocking that it has not been widely and vigorously denounced as such. Would Obama say the same of other crimes, murder or rape for example? His argument cannot be generalized without absurdity. Crimes are often, indeed almost alwaiys, prosecuted by recalling the past, uncomfortable as this might be, sometimes uncomfortable for all concerned.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
CONFUSION OVER THE STIMULUS PACKAGE
22 February 2009
Confusion has abounded about Obama’s stimulus package, but a lot of the confusion is easily dissipated. Is it a stimulus bill or a spending bill? Republicans in Congress made a great to-do saying the latter. Obama easily put them in their place by pointing out good-humoredly and without condescension (though condescension would have been appropriate enough) that a stimulus bill by its nature had to be a spending bill. He did not distinguish between its having to have spending features and its having spending in one way or another as an essential feature; Either would have refuted the Republican objection. But the Republicans, led by Boehner, went on to say that they could not find any stimulating, that is to say, job-creating feature, in the bill. Boehnerdid not explain how it could be that the proposed expenditures on infra-structure would not create jobs; or other expenditures (like assistance to the states) keep present jobs going, with a similar beneficial effect. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee rose above these dubious points to the stratosphere of hyperbolic absurdity: "No government," he said, "has ever created a job." Governments have created highway departments and staffed them with civil engineers. They have gone into the private sector to enlist contractors to build the highways that the engineers have designed. Governments create jobs for inspectors of food safety and occupational health; we may hope that after the drawdown in their numbers under the Bush regime, the Obama administration will create more of them. Is there any point in multiplying examples, which would be child’s play? These Republican statements all fall on their faces as soon as they are uttered in the presence of anyone with even a child’s knowledge of the world. A little trickier to deal with is a logical lapse on the other side: Liberal commentators like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow have mocked what they implied to be the inconsistency of certain Congressmen boasting about having amended the stimulus bill to include certain provisions beneficial to their districts; and then turning around to vote against the bill when it finally came up for a vote. A moment’s reflection shows that strictly speaking there is no inconsistency. If a bill has a chance of passing, then it could be improved even in the eyes of its opponents if it incorporated certain features that they wanted. Their amendments thus tend to minimize the damage that they foresee, but may leave the bill (in their eyes) still damaging overall. This is, to be sure, what logic says, strictly speaking. Neither the Congressmen nor the commentators may be aiming at strictly speaking . It is at least a rough approximation to hypocrisy and discredit, however, having amended the bill, to boast about the benefits of the features put in by the amendments and yet jeopardize those benefits by voting against the amended bill.
Confusion has abounded about Obama’s stimulus package, but a lot of the confusion is easily dissipated. Is it a stimulus bill or a spending bill? Republicans in Congress made a great to-do saying the latter. Obama easily put them in their place by pointing out good-humoredly and without condescension (though condescension would have been appropriate enough) that a stimulus bill by its nature had to be a spending bill. He did not distinguish between its having to have spending features and its having spending in one way or another as an essential feature; Either would have refuted the Republican objection. But the Republicans, led by Boehner, went on to say that they could not find any stimulating, that is to say, job-creating feature, in the bill. Boehnerdid not explain how it could be that the proposed expenditures on infra-structure would not create jobs; or other expenditures (like assistance to the states) keep present jobs going, with a similar beneficial effect. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee rose above these dubious points to the stratosphere of hyperbolic absurdity: "No government," he said, "has ever created a job." Governments have created highway departments and staffed them with civil engineers. They have gone into the private sector to enlist contractors to build the highways that the engineers have designed. Governments create jobs for inspectors of food safety and occupational health; we may hope that after the drawdown in their numbers under the Bush regime, the Obama administration will create more of them. Is there any point in multiplying examples, which would be child’s play? These Republican statements all fall on their faces as soon as they are uttered in the presence of anyone with even a child’s knowledge of the world. A little trickier to deal with is a logical lapse on the other side: Liberal commentators like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow have mocked what they implied to be the inconsistency of certain Congressmen boasting about having amended the stimulus bill to include certain provisions beneficial to their districts; and then turning around to vote against the bill when it finally came up for a vote. A moment’s reflection shows that strictly speaking there is no inconsistency. If a bill has a chance of passing, then it could be improved even in the eyes of its opponents if it incorporated certain features that they wanted. Their amendments thus tend to minimize the damage that they foresee, but may leave the bill (in their eyes) still damaging overall. This is, to be sure, what logic says, strictly speaking. Neither the Congressmen nor the commentators may be aiming at strictly speaking . It is at least a rough approximation to hypocrisy and discredit, however, having amended the bill, to boast about the benefits of the features put in by the amendments and yet jeopardize those benefits by voting against the amended bill.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
NOT LEARNING FROM A NEIGHBORING COLUMNIST
10 Jan 09
David Brooks, on the Newshour yesterday evening, once again gave the ideological blindness of the Republicans an urbane face, but one that fell short of being even plausible. "No stimulus package has ever worked," he intoned more than once. He had just cited the call by "his Nobel-prize winning colleague" Paul Krugman’s for a stimulus package much bigger than Obama’s current proposal, but ignored the implication that his Nobel-prize winning colleague did think that a stimulus package might work if it was big enough.. Brooks was running against history, too: World War II was not heralded as a stimulus package, but it was, and at last a big enough one to restore full employment and prosperity in the United States. Earlier "stimulus packages" put forward by the New Deal, moreover, had done something to increase employment and achieve worthwhile objectives in public works. The effectiveness of a stimulus package was not the only point on which Brooks’s ideology defied the opinion of Krugman and other economists. Brooks declared, with unqualified confidence, that tax cuts were the best way to assist economic recovery. He did not pause to recognize that it was at least controversial to say so, or again, that his Nobel-prize-winning colleague thought otherwise, favoring direct expenditures on employment. Evidently Brooks does not take the trouble to learn from a columnist who is a colleague and a neighbor at the Times.
David Brooks, on the Newshour yesterday evening, once again gave the ideological blindness of the Republicans an urbane face, but one that fell short of being even plausible. "No stimulus package has ever worked," he intoned more than once. He had just cited the call by "his Nobel-prize winning colleague" Paul Krugman’s for a stimulus package much bigger than Obama’s current proposal, but ignored the implication that his Nobel-prize winning colleague did think that a stimulus package might work if it was big enough.. Brooks was running against history, too: World War II was not heralded as a stimulus package, but it was, and at last a big enough one to restore full employment and prosperity in the United States. Earlier "stimulus packages" put forward by the New Deal, moreover, had done something to increase employment and achieve worthwhile objectives in public works. The effectiveness of a stimulus package was not the only point on which Brooks’s ideology defied the opinion of Krugman and other economists. Brooks declared, with unqualified confidence, that tax cuts were the best way to assist economic recovery. He did not pause to recognize that it was at least controversial to say so, or again, that his Nobel-prize-winning colleague thought otherwise, favoring direct expenditures on employment. Evidently Brooks does not take the trouble to learn from a columnist who is a colleague and a neighbor at the Times.
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