Saturday, February 25, 2006

What Civil War Could Look Like

What Civil War Could Look Like - New York Times:

"Surveying all the nightmare possibilities in an interview late last week, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, said: 'Those are issues that some people should be thinking about, but I do not believe that we are heading that way. The leaders of Iraq know that they came to the brink with the attack on the shrine, and there has been an evolution of their attitudes as a result. I simply believe that the leaders of Iraq do not want a civil war.'

Lincoln, however, said in retrospect that having leaders who do not want war is not enough - that the problem is whether there are things that they want more than war, and are willing to accept war to get. In Iraq, it seems, this will also determine whether the leaders will one day say with satisfaction that they stepped back from the brink or, sadly like Lincoln, that 'the war came.'"

Friday, February 17, 2006

Competence vs. Incompetence

As leaders and as statesmen, the members of the Bush administration are totally, completely incompetent. The only thing they can do well is carry out criminal acts. Criminally competent and civically incompetent is the only way to put it.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News

Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News:

"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"

Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News

Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News:

"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"

Quotations from Your Success, a Newsletter

"It takes less time to do things right than to
explain why you did it wrong." ─ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There is one quality which one must possess
to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the
knowledge of what one wants and a burning
desire to possess it." ─ Ronald Reagan

"Let your thoughts be positive for they will
become your words. Let your words be
positive for they will become your actions. Let
your actions be positive for they will become
your values. Let your values be positive for
they will become your destiny." ─ Mahatma Gandhi

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Rule of Laws

From The Washington Spectator:

In a 1977 interview, David Frost asked Richard Nixon if he thought the president could act illegally if he believes it is in the best interest of the nation.

Nixon replied, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

"I think our motto should be, post-9-11, 'Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" - Ann Coulter

You have to read it to believe it, don't you? My first impression would be the usual: another quote taken out of context. After hearing this woman talk, though, I think she probably meant it just the way it comes across.

Monday, February 13, 2006

European governments 'knew of' CIA flights

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | European governments 'knew of' CIA flights

A few words by and about Ronald Reagan

WorldNetDaily: A few words by and about Ronald Reagan

Krugman: Weak on Terror

From Krugman's New York Times Article:

"My most immediate priority," Spain's new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, declared yesterday, "will be to fight terrorism." But he and the voters who gave his party a stunning upset victory last Sunday don't believe the war in Iraq is part of that fight.

My brief response:

Here is an article by Paul Krugman in the NYT that agrees with my argument about the larger significance of Bush's war on Iraq. I need to write the arguments, address the opposition, and make the whole case against the war my own.

RonaldReagan.Com Message Board: How Reagan Won the Cold War - By Dinesh D'Souza

RonaldReagan.Com Message Board: How Reagan Won the Cold War - By Dinesh D'Souza

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Years Ahead

Last summer I wrote a three-part personal essay called The Years Ahead. Here are the entries:

August 7, 2005:

So what does make blogging so attractive? It's private, but it's not private. You write for yourself, but you have the possibility of an audience. You can write anything at all, and even your mother won't read it. But she could. It's fun.

I'd like to write about the years ahead. Perhaps when the years ahead are the years behind, people will read this and say that he (meaning me) laid it all out ahead of time. "It's all here," they'll say. They said that about Mein Kampf, too, and look where Hitler wound up. In a bunker with cyanide down his throat.

Well, that's way off topic. The comparison does show that you have to plan ahead a little bit. And that's what I'm going to do. But I sure don't want to write a book like Mein Kampf.

Where's the best place to start? Should I write about myself, or about things outside of myself? I'll write briefly about myself first.

A lot of people think about becoming president of the United States. Only a few people actually become president. But, whether you become president or not, no one can make fun of you for thinking about it. Plenty of people have thought about it, and some of those run for the office. Of those, a few have won enough electoral votes to win the office. In this country, anything can happen. Nothing is impossible. So I have to get past my self-consciousness about these thoughts. Would people make fun of me if they knew what I was thinking? Would they raise their eyebrows? So what? Why shouldn't I think about becoming president? If it makes me happy, who are you to say I shouldn't occupy my thoughts that way?

Here's a more practical way of stating this goal. We have to start work now to elect a president in 2016 who is not a Democrat or a Republican. I've already committed myself to that goal. Well, in our political system, you can't get elected president without some sort of political organization behind you. Call that organization a political party if you like. In a little less than three election cycles, we need to build an organization that's capable of electing a president. I want to help build that organization. And I know enough about working with groups that if you commit yourself to them and work hard to make them grow, you eventually get to lead them. Leadership in the case of a national political party means running for president.

Now let me write about some things outside of myself. America needs a new political party. The country's first two parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, were ill-formed groupings. They weren't especially well organized, and the names are more for the labeling convenience of historians than anything else. Out of those two loose groupings, and the conflict that occurred when Jefferson rose to the White House, we had the Democrats - Jefferson's party - and the Whigs - the party that eventually evolved from the Federalists. The Whigs didn't have staying power, though, and as their ability to win votes declined in the years before the Civil War, a new party rose to take their place. That party was the Republican party, and its leader was Abraham Lincoln.

Since the late 1850s, as the country slid toward its awful sectional conflict, we have not had a new, durable political party that was able to win votes in the electoral college.

As much as you like writing this entry, you have to sign off here.


August 8, 2005:

America needs a third party. Actually, it needs a new party that can become a force in American politics, and that can force a realignment in American politics. Let's start with some basics.

America does not have a parliamentary system. You need a parliamentary system with proportional representation for minority parties to flourish. Even in systems with proportional representation, like-minded minority parties tend to form durable coalitions so they can work together and exert more influence on national politics. The Labor and Likud parties in Israel are an example of that phenomenon.

The United States has a federal, winner take all system that favors the formation of two major parties. The basic rules of party competition at the national level won't change, so the structure of party politics won't change either. That means a couple of things. First, the emergence of a new party that can win the only national election we have - the one for the presidency - will cause a realignment in American party politics. We have a lot of instances where three people ran for the presidency and won a lot of votes. We have only one case - Lincoln's victory in 1860 - where the outcome of a three-way race led to a complete realignment. The important point is, even if three-way races are fairly common, the party competition resettles into the familiar two-party pattern pretty quickly. The Civil War disrupted all the usual patterns from 1860 to 1865, and the Republican party came out of the war as an established institution.

The second thing to note in the present situation is that we can't tell what the two parties will look like after the realignment. We don't know who will join what party. The most we can say is that one of the parties - the new one we're talking about here - will coalesce from independents, existing minority parties, disaffected Democrats and disaffected Republicans. The shape of the party that forms in opposition to the new party is anyone's guess. The Republican party is pretty cohesive right now, so a good guess is that the opposition will form from the core of the current Republican party. The realignment won't take place in a week or a month. It'll be a while in coming. But we know that a decade or more from now, party politics in this country won't look the same way they do now.

How do we know that? Some people say that an economic crisis during the next decade will cause profound changes in our party politics. We may in fact have a crisis like that. I would trace the changes we'll undergo to the war. I mean the war in Iraq, of course, but also the broader war that started in September 2001. We are losing the war in Iraq, and we have hardly started to fight the war against Al Qaeda. Lost wars always bring big changes in the politics of the country that loses them. That's what we're going to see here by the election of 2016.

It's a fair bet that the winner of the 2008 presidential election will be a Democrat. It's a fair bet too that the incumbent will lose to a Republican in 2012. That means we'll have Democratic or Republican winners in the White House for the next two election cycles. Then in 2016, our economic weakness and our defeats in war will make people vote for the leader of a new party. They'll say that the old parties have had a chance, and they ddn't come through. It's time for a change. A big one, when they begin to see the consequences of losing the war.

We have to be ready for the election in 2016.


August 9, 2005:

This is getting to be quite a series. Tonight I'm listening to Good Vibrations on the headphones, and I'm sure I may listen to some other songs before the night is done. The question is, can you write while you're listening to the music? Now Daydream Believer is playing, and you want to write about politics?

I told Leslie tonight: "What would you think if I said I wanted to be the leader of a new political party?" She said in her dry way, "Perhaps you should start with some small steps close to home." Yes, I said, that's just the thing, since politics in this country is organized state by state. You try to organize a party in Texas, and they'll say, "What are you doing here? Why don't you go to your own state?" Indeed, Massachusetts is the place to start.

But I added, I'm not sure why: "This kind of thing affects you, you know. I can't go this way and have it not affect you." She looked at me a little funny, and I finished: "I don't like to start anything, you know, and not think about the obstacles that might come up."

So that was it. I have Leslie's blessing now. She won't mind the invasion of privacy and all the things that go with politics. She'll go with me where I go. And she's got indignation to spare.

So let's move on to some practical steps... The writing is slow while you're listening to the music. What can you do here in Massachusetts? Well, you have to network, just as you have in other areas. Can the WTPC site give you any ideas about who to contact?

Yes, the e-mail posted to your Yahoo inbox contains full return addresses.

The Libertarian Party in the Current Political Environment

Yesterday I received an e-mail request for money from the Libertarian Party to support their current initiatives. I contributed a small amount, and wrote a short note in the online payment form. The party's executive director responded with a short note of his own right away. Here is my response to his message:

I wasn't even sure anyone would read my note. I didn't expect to get a prompt response from the guy in charge!

So, since you wrote that quick note, let me open the gates just a little and write some thoughts back to you. They may or may not be useful to you, depending on how you take them.

First, good work on the letter you sent to solicit donations. The penultimate sentence - "If you have made it this far, I'm relying on you to make a donation of $10 or more" - didn't grab me and make me think, "I have to contribute right now." The small amount requested was a positive factor, and so were your comments about the Democrats. In the middle of the letter, you said they're spineless, and used other severe language. Here's why that language is appropriate, admirable, and motivating, at least in my case.

I've been interested in politics for a long time, and I've been an independent for a long time. I admire Ronald Reagan because I've been a libertarian with a small _l_. I don't admire the Republican party, though. In fact, the Iraq war has made me angrier than I've ever been about our leadership. It's effect on me has been similar to the effect the Missouri Compromise had on Lincoln: it made him want to get involved with politics after attending to his law practice for some years. I sense I'm not the only voter who thinks that way.

The Democrats don't bear the same burden of blame right now that the Republicans do, but their behavior as the opposition party fits your description. How they could fail so miserably in the face of the leadership we have is so strange. It's interesting to see the contrasting reactions people have had to Howard Dean and John Murtha. The stands they've taken are so rare, they easily stand out against the timid backdrop the rest of the Democrats have created.

So what am I getting at here? Like a lot of other voters, I don't feel well represented by either party. Independents and minority party members make up thirty-five percent or more of the electorate, but they don't feel that they have any voice at all. I've been skeptical that the Libertarian party can give people that voice. It's not because I think their ideas are bad, or that they can't overcome some of the real obstacles that minority parties have to face in our political system. I think that the Libertarian party's image is such that not so many people will vote for Libertarian candidates.

My main perspective comes from Massachusetts. It's not my native state, but it's where I live now. (I come from the Upper Midwest, a region that actually has a two-party system.) The two-party system in Massachusetts is not healthy, to say the least. Many, many Democrats, incumbents and new office seekers alike, run unopposed on election day. The Republicans win the governor's race, and that's about it. The latest tally shows that almost fifty percent of the voters in the state are independents - they don't enroll in either party when they register to vote. Yet the Libertarian party lost its ballot access a few years ago because they didn't win 3% of the votes cast.

Why don't the Libertarians win more votes in a state that doesn't feel that comfortable with one-party governance? Well it could be that most voters really are Democrats at heart, and they elect a Republican governor entirely to exercise some restraint on the legislature. Perhaps the Libertarians seem to be extreme here because, given the Democratic sympathies of the electorate, they really are outliers in the state's political belief system.

I keep thinking, though, of the party's tag line - the party of principle - and the message that line conveys to ordinary voters. Its subtext is that Libertarians don't care about winning elections. Or, to put it more precisely: if we have to make a choice between winning votes and sticking with our principles, we'll stick with our principles. We'd rather be right and defeated than wrong and victorious. Well naturally the goal is to be right and victorious, but that's not the message that comes across, either in the tag line or in the rest of the state party's communications.

The Libertarian Party of Massachusetts is only one of fifty state organizations, and I know the flavor of party politics in the other forty-nine states is just as quirky and unique as it is here. You have a hard job, trying to promote the party in a political landscape that's so varied. I much admire the determination the national party has shown over the last several months, to transform itself from a group on the margins of politics into an organization that can compete in elections across the land. I want to believe that it'll be successful, and that the Libertarian party will emerge from the coming political turmoil in a strong position.

To do that, though, I think it has to change the image I've described above. It has to convey that it's open to more than one belief system. The Democrats and Republicans both try to stress, at election time, that their parties are like big tents. They want to welcome as many people as they can. They're right to do that, because in a country that's so pluralistic, and that's bound to have just two major parties because of its election rules, the two major parties have to embrace divergent beliefs and belief systems.

Well, that welcoming attitude only goes so far. A political party is going to have opponents no matter what it does. But the Reagan elections show that people do respond to a well articulated vision. No other president has ever won forty-nine of fifty states, as Reagan did in 1984. That shows that people can be loyal to a certain vision of themselves, and to certain core principles built into our Constitution. It shows that when the circumstances are right, a pluralistic people can achieve a certain degree of unity.

Your remark that the Democratic party is in a panic because it feels so threatened is interesting. The contrasting question is what will happen to the Republicans when people realize what has happened since 9/11 - when the damage the Republicans have done truly sinks in. I said that we're in for a period of turmoil. The grounds for that prediction lie in a pattern of change that's clear from a long view of history. States that lose wars don't survive the loss without going through painful and substantial changes. We've clearly not achieved our aims in Iraq, and we are on the way to losing the other war we should be fighting instead - the war against Al Qaeda that started on September 11.

When these losses begin to have their effects, we'll see changes in our current political system that we can't predict. These changes are already underway, but we can't see their direction yet. The Libertarian party is right to prepare for them, and to see if it can't strengthen itself during the conflict to come. The parties in Washington won't stop sniping at each other, while citizens who aren't part of either party's base get more and more fed up with their representation and leadership. The two parties are so focused on scoring advantages, on finding weaknesses they can exploit, I don’t think they recognize how unhappy their constituents are.

Shortly before the 2000 election, I wrote an article called "Where's a Candidate People Want?" Even then, it seemed to me, the parties had failed in their primary function in national politics, which is to recruit and nominate presidential candidates who can serve and lead Americans well. We have never had leadership as bad as President Bush's has been. Although Gore and Kerry had some strengths, they weren't adequate candidates for the times. That the Republicans managed to put Bush in the office, and then to reelect him, says quite a bit about the ability of the current two-party system to perform well. It is clearly not serving the country.

So what do all of these observations amount to? The Libertarian party has to find some way to appeal to more people. Training candidates, campaign managers and other staff to run effective bids for office is an essential start. The most effective campaign ever can't win votes, though, if people are suspicious or skeptical of the party to begin with. They have to have confidence in the character and competence of their leaders, and they also need to know that their leaders share some assumptions with them about the best way to organize a society. Right now, I think a lot of citizens see Libertarians as people who don't share those assumptions.

We know that the United States will always have two major parties while it has winner-take-all elections in each of the fifty states. We also know that the two-party system has evolved in interesting ways over 225 years, with some dramatic transformations in the system at key points. We are on the threshold of one of those transformations. In ten years, during the presidential election of 2016, we'll be past the threshold and perhaps even past the entry way. It's great that the Libertarian party and its leadership is thinking about how it can grow during the difficult changes that have already started. I hope it succeeds.

I also hope that I and others can lay aside skepticism, and work hard for the changes we want to see. We need hope that the obstacles in our current politics won't always be there: obstacles that block independents' voices, frustrate their efforts before they begin, and make voting seem ineffectual. In this environment, the Libertarian party's bold initiatives to have an effect do deserve respect and support.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Loose Lips Sink Spies - New York Times

Loose Lips Sink Spies - New York Times

What a huge, huge gap exists now! So many things that Goss says in this article make sense, or rather used to make sense. Coming from the head of the CIA in this administration, though, they are scary. Standard arguments about the tradeoff between national security and open democracy don't make sense anymore, when the source of the arguments is the government itself. These guys are willing to commit crimes wherever they look. No crime is too egregious for them. National security justifies anything they want to do. Now the head of the CIA announces his determination to bring criminal charges against anyone who tries to stop them. That's scary.

Reagan Mystery Solved: Pasadena Prophecy

Pasadena Star-News - News