Dear Mr. Romney…

I write to tell you how much I value your bold, principled stand on the scourge of minds and drain on the treasury that is…a puppet.  May I encourage you, please, to stand fast on this; it is long past time that brave voices like yours made sure such travesties receive no support from right thinking Americans and their leaders….

…which is to say, dear Balloon-Juicers, that I deeply enjoyed this morning’s pundit roundup at the Great Orange Satan, in which was documented what seems to have been the only truly memorable moment from Wednesday’s debate. The shorter: in a venue in which the forces of darkness planned to unveil the RomneyBot v. 4.0, now with empathy module implemented, the programming turned out to be, well, not quite bug-free.

For all the alpha male stuff, and the energy level, and the spectacular and at least temporarily successful rewriting of the Romney plan and platform, what regular people and a fair subset of the punditocracy seem to recall was that awkward bit where the man who likes to fire people told everyone he was going to kill off a large, cuddly, yellow bird.

Hence, stuff like this from Mary Elizabeth Wallace at Salon:

[D]espite coming out of the evening looking stronger than he has in weeks — Romney made the error of looking like a man who is not on the side of innocence, whimsy, learning or childhood. Nor did he seem to grasp that Big Bird is an integral part of a show that was created for and remains at its core about community and diversity, one that has for decades been an essential tool in helping low-income children prepare for school. Going after Big Bird is like putting down baseball and rainbows and YouTube videos of otter pups. You just don’t.

Also, these metrics caught my eye:

The phrase “Big Bird” was appearing 17,000 times every minute on Twitter. At midnight, CNN reported that mentions of Big Bird on Facebook were up an astronomical 800,000%.  Facebook later said Big Bird was the fourth most-mentioned topic on Facebook during the debate, getting more attention than topics like jobs, taxes, Jim Lehrer and Obamacare.

(Both quotes via the original DKos roundup, btw.)

I remain amazed at the Romney campaign’s ability to spin lead out of gold.  Really: he had a good debate, just about as good as it was possible to imagine, given his own strong performance and President Obama’s seemingly tired and distracted one.  Leave aside for a moment the medium-to-long game of taking apart all the BS that he spewed, which is already putting in play the issues of trust and character that will IMHO flow to the President’s benefit.  The debate itself was clearly the best 90 minutes the Romney folks have had for a very long time.

Yet and yet and yet…Big Bird!

The line had all the sound of a prepared zinger, which, if true, means that someone with access to RomneyBot source code actually thought it was a good idea to personalize their device’s budget seriousness by cutting the throat of a fictional character beloved by millions.  And if it wasn’t rehearsed, that’s in some ways worse.  It means Romney revealed just a bit of himself, that gay-bashing bully-mean guy character that Ann keeps assuring us doesn’t exist.  If offing Big Bird just burbled out of his head and mouth on the spot?  Not a pretty window into the notional soul of a man who would be president.

Either way, of course, I’m grateful. Way to douse the glow of your big night, big fella.

Oh…and one more thing.  Mitt? Yo! Mr. Romney?

Can I ask a favor.  Really, not a big one.  OK?

Here goes:

Would you, oh could you, please, please, pleeeeeeze…

…..persist in your blanket hornpipe with that oversize fictive fowl?

Image: Peter Jakon Horemans, Still Life with Plucked Chicken, Apples and Beets, 1768.

Send In The Clowns

I’m late to the Ferguson party, partly because I’ve been travelling, and partly because I can’t easily get past my initial reaction:  it’s Ferguson, dudes.  Of course he’s a hack, someone who’s been trading on attitude and an accent since he arrived on these shores (and before, of course). But I want to pile on just a little bit, for a reason that I hope will become clear a little later on in this post. (And, as I look at the blog, later still.)

Still, just to refresh everyone’s memory after a couple of days of Akin folly, Ferguson attempted in the pages of Newsweek to disguise a polemic as an argument for Obama’s replacement by his preferred Ryan-Romney ticket. (Note — I’m not making an error in the order there.  Again, wait for it below.)  He lists a series of alleged policy failures and promises, now much debunked — Ezra Klein’s  more-in-sorrow flensing may be the best place to start, but Fallows, whom John linked, and Krugman, and Delong, and …. hell, perhaps most devastatingly Andrew Sullivan* have managed to shred whatever remains of Ferguson’s reputation.  It all gets worse in the “defense” Ferguson (no linky) has vomited up across the Newsweek/Daily Beast site, in which the angry not-so-young man Niall “demolishes” folks like DeLong by complaining that the UC professor hasn’t written his book fast enough for his taste. (See Fallows for a round-up of the derision the belligerant Scot’s second bite at the apple has earned.)

But all of Ferguson’s wind and wheeze can’t mask the underlying reality: he wrote a deliberately deceptive piece and his attempt at defense merely has us pondering which of these British officer fitness reports best applies to him.  I’m partial to number 12 (obvious, really), but on reflection, I think I’d go with 5.  Number 2 ain’t bad either.

But I digress.

Here I just want to look at one key point.  And that is that Ferguson, sorry as he is, is literally the best the Right has got when it comes to intellectual credibility.  So it’s worth looking at what now represents the gold standard of rigorous thought on the right.

Ferguson actually starts from a perfectly acceptable premise:  the economy sucks, and the Obama administration has not accomplished as much as Candidate Obama had hoped and predicted.  What Ferguson does with that premise is what has been so thoroughly demolished by just about everyone, so I’ll pass over most of what he wrote in silence.  Here, I just want to turn to his one affirmative argument:

Now Obama is going head-to-head with his nemesis: a politician who believes more in content than in form, more in reform than in rhetoric. In the past days much has been written about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. I know, like, and admire Paul Ryan. For me, the point about him is simple. He is one of only a handful of politicians in Washington who is truly sincere [italics in the original] about addressing this country’s fiscal crisis.

Note that Ferguson has Obama confronting Paul Ryan, not the emasculated and irrelevant Romney.**  And note too Ferguson here signs on to the favorite lie of the right-wing commentariat.  Let me illustrate.

What do you call a person who’s budgetary plan increases the federal deficit by $2.6 trillion over its first ten years?  Bonus question:  what do you call that person who has proposed such a fiscal Molotov cocktail in order to provide the richest among us with a tax cut?  Double Jeopardy round:  what do you call such a person who does so despite a rich trove of academic work demonstrating that the US is well below the revenue-maximizing top tax rate even keeping the current baroque tax code?***

If you are a member of the reality based community, one who retains honor enough to allow words their common meaning and actual data their sway over even cherished contrary preconceptions, then you would say that if that man claimed to be a serious fiscal thinker he was at best delusional, and much more likely a simple liar. A thief of sense.

OTOH, if you’re Niall Ferguson, you call that man, Paul Ryan, “sincere.”

On reflection, if Niall were right, that would be worse, certainly for Ryan (sincere buffoons are still risible), and, as it turns out, for Niall himself.  What does it say about a “historian” who so ignores the easily accessible world to spin a fantasy of saviors on their white steeds, ready to defend us from the usurper in the White House?

Nothin’ good.****

One more thing, really, the buried lede (or lead, if that’s how you roll) for this whole post.  Ferguson himself is just the insult to honest sex-workers that DennisG’s post describes.  The real insight we gain from his massive embarassment is what it tells us about the state of Republican intellectualism.  And what should scare you is that Niall is truly the best they’ve got.  Here’s The New Yorker’s John Cassidy thinking along the these lines:

Where are the real conservative intellectuals these days? Surely there must be some, but sometimes it seems like all the right has to offer is a soap-box mountebank like Ryan, a trio of embittered Supreme Court Justices, and a few gnarled old Washington fixtures like Bill Kristol, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer. Given this vacuum, it’s relatively easy for an energetic and disputatious blow-in like Ferguson to emerge as one of Obama’s most visible, if not exactly persuasive, critics.

Chew on that for a second.  What Cassidy is almost saying (though he doesn’t go all the way there, perhaps because he is very much still part of the inside-looking-out wing of modern American journalism) is that modern conservatism in America is simply a failure.  It’s wrong.  It doesn’t connect to the real world.  Its axioms are false and its prescriptions are disastrous, from Niall Ferguson’s unrequited demand that the US behave like a proper empire to the Ryan fantasy that lasting prosperity can be built on growing income inequality — and the earnest claim by so many over there that ours is the nation in which the error of extending the franchise to women can be in part rolled back by denying every double-X agency in their own persons.

It’s all a disaster; wrong, bad for the country, bad for the world, a ticket to Rome, c. 476 CE.

As for the party of the first part?  Pity Ferguson’s students.  And pity the nation that ever takes this hollow man seriously.

*When you’ve lost Sullivan:

As for Iraq, Niall says the exit was premature. It was negotiated by Bush. Maliki didn’t want us there any more. Niall thinks we should occupy a country with all the massive expense that entails – against its will? Seriously? And it’s Obama who is unserious on the debt?

** Does anyone besides me see a longer term problem developing for team Elephant in the steady rasp of that dull saw rowing away on Romney’s nether parts?  The press isn’t even bothering to ask him anymore — it’s what Ryan thinks that matters.  Akin gives him the classic one-finger salute and he has to say “please sir, may I have another.” Ann Romney, poor dear, gets trotted out to reassure a doubting America that he really isn’t a Red Lector from planet ten.  (Still don’t know what’s up with the watermelon.)  And…you get the point.  I’ve never seen anything like this. Is there going to be a recognizable homunculus to vote for come November?

**See e.g., Berkeley economist Emanuel Saenz’s comment in this survey:

Based on best estimates and even with current tax code, US top rate is still significantly below revenue maximizing tax rate

****I get the argument that DennisG channels from Stephen Marche that Ferguson makes much more as a monkey-boy for hedge fund MOTUs, but I do think that Ferguson actually cares a great deal about status; he derives enormous satisfaction from his persona as a credentialed wise man.  It hurts when folks he wants to defer to him instead disdain him.  It doesn’t kill; stacks of Benjamins do staunch the wounds.  But it does sting.

Images:  Alfred Dedreux, Pug Dog in an Armchair, 1853.

Hieronymous Bosch, Cutting the Stone, (alternate title: Extraction of the Stone of Folly), before 1516.  (I know I’ve used it before, but it works here…)

Abby Normal on Wall St.

Joe Nocera has a mostly perfectly OK column in today’s New York Times on the trading glitch that led Knight Capital to launch a rapid-fire spree of unsought trades that screwed up the stock exchange this past Wednesday.  The failure was the third major technology-mediated muddle in recent times.  The most famous of these f**k ups was the 2010 Flash Crash, after which academic researchers introduced the broader public to  the delightful phrase, “order flow toxicity,” which Wikipedia handily tells us “can be measured as the probability that informed traders (e.g., hedge funds) adversely select uninformed traders.”

Nocera’s main point that the continuing series of market failures is ruining investor confidence in the market as an institution.  He points out that not all the problems are technical — he points to the Facebook IPO as an example of insider treachery that had nothing to do with any computer jiggery-pokery.

But he still goes off the rails in one passage — and the way he does so is illustrative of the larger problem in both the exchanges themselves and in the VSP/elite framing of market society.  He writes:

Most rapid-fire trading has nothing to do with the core idea that drew people to the market in the first place — that if you picked good companies, and did your homework, you could make money.

No! No! No!

Or rather — Irrelevant! Move to strike!

Here’s the problem:  Nocera may be right in the narrow sense.  When I put my 401K (actually a 403B, but that’s a distinction without a difference) into mutual funds, I do hope that I’ve picked good securities, that my homework has extracted more or less accurate information, and that I’ll ultimately be able to retire in comfort.  Individual investors do indeed go to the exchanges to make a smaller pile of cash larger.

But Nocera misses the larger issue, and he does so in a very telling way.  The classical understanding of what a stock exchange is supposed to do is to allocate capital efficiently, driving investment to what will be, for the economy as a whole, its most productive uses.  Obviously, this is a mission often honored in the breach in the current markets in securities of all types (another post on that coming soon), but still, if we’re going to talk about market failures and their consequences, what trading scandals like this one reveal is the way our current pathological form of financial capitalism steals the life blood of a productive economy and transfers it to thieves. (Cough, cough, RMoney)

In that context the real fecklessness of high frequency trading and other tech-driven tactics becomes clear.  Trades entered and exited in seconds aren’t about capital allocation.  They are just a form of rent-seeking, trying to exploit some momentary imprecision in the markets to take a few bucks out of each transaction…and hence out of productive use, at least for a while.

I’m not an anti-capitalist.  I believe, and will argue in the book I’m just starting to write, that the invention of financial capitalism is one of the great goods human society has produced ever.  It is also prone to failure in predictable ways and depends acutely on a society’s willingness to enforce norms of public behavior.  Absent such a framework, you get what we’ve got: a system that the little guy has damn good reason not to trust — as Nocera says — and one that cannot do the single thing it is supposed to achieve:  organize society’s resources to the ends that deliver the most reward not just to given investors or owners, but to the economic life of the country or the world as a whole.

If we’re going to complain about crappy software and cheated investors, we should remember the full tally of what’s at stake in a market system transformed from public utility to rigged casino.

Oh — and one last thought:  if you want to talk about the middle class paying to provide the very wealthy a little bit more, Romney’s tax plans are trivial compared to the wealth transfer a vampire-ridden, corrupted financial system can achieve.

[Bonus link.  The perfect video for this title/topic]

Image:  Claude Vignon, Croesus Receiving Tribute from a Lydian Peasant, 1629.

Friends Can’t Let Friends Vote Republican

I believe I mentioned before that I’m celebrating my release from academic administration by trying to read a library.  I’ve been focusing on recent books, and I’m on a mini-run of political books.  In that context I’ve recently finished Chris Hayes Twilight of the Elites — I have some nitpicks, but much more admiration, and I hope to blog about it soon; Christopher Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt — again some disagreement, but a must read nontheless.

Along the way I’ve been looking at some books calculated to raise my blood pressure in other ways — Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion — which I found to be not really worth bothering to argue with (such an embarassing display of poor historiography)! I’ve also  been dipping into Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which combines an insight he shares with Hayes and a commitment to a prior conclusion that drives his core argument spectacularly off target.*  Still, it’s useful to get some sense of how the other side thinks and argues.

I do hope — I’d say plan, but I’ve learned how regularly day job stuff rises to intervene — to blog about at least some of these down the road. But I’ve just started the next book in the programme, Thomas E. Man and Norman J. Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. 

Right away — in the introduction — I came across a paragraph that sums up, in the most economical form yet, what’s really at stake 100 days from now.  So let me turn this post over to them, and let y’all draw the obvious inference about what to do between now and November 6:

The second [of two sources of dysfunction in current American politics] is the fact that, however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy  of its political opposition.  When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

I’d quibble with only a couple of words there.

I’d say the party has moved fromright of American politics over the last decade.  It took off from  the center in 1980 or so.  And “extremely difficult?”  Try, on the evidence that Mann and Ornstein go on to present in their first chapter (as far as I’ve gotten), “impossible.”

As I say.  Quibbles.  As a matter of sense, this is right on — made the more potent given who writes it: not a DFH like yours truly, but truly seasoned, deeply centrist, long term observers of the institutions of American politics.

More to the point:  there is no such thing as a good Republican candidate anymore, at any level.  Your city councilmember, your state rep., your congressional representative as individuals could be reasonable, smart, caring, trying to reform this failed party from within.  Mitt Romney himself may seem to the more credulous among our media elite to be a more thoughtful and moderate man than he is a candidate. (If you are truly credulous, or simply a hack, you may even bet on Romney’s “secret plan” to fix the economy.)

None of that matters.  “Good” Republicans are mere useful idiots, providing scraps of cover for the radical authoritarians wielding the real power.  The party is committed to public policy stance that is destructive, both of American prospects and those of folks all around the world.  They must be driven so far from the political arena as to be destroyed, until whatever emerges from its wreckage, even if it persists in operating under the label “Republican” is utterly transformed from the catastrophic clown show we now watch in horror.

Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.

Oh — and one last thing.   There are, I know, lots of flaws one can point to in the Obama administration.  There are plenty of warts on the Congressional Democratic caucus.  But the two parties are not the same and the consequences of getting it wrong this time are simply huge.  The politics of purity may be satisfying, but this time around such delicate sensibilities are a luxury we simply cannot afford.

And a very cheerful Sunday to you too.

*That would be — in cartoon form — his understanding of the way elites and the rest of (white) us now exist in geographical and social isolation, joined to his libertarian mandated conclusion that the obstacle to lower class advance is a cultural rather than a political or economic issue.  And while from within the assumptions of his project I can follow his argument as to why he focuses solely on white America, reading of Hedges and Sacco, for one example, makes it clear how doing is part of what allows Murray to ignore the ways in which can’t account for the economic and social outcomes he seeks to explain

Image: Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836.

Stopped Clocks and All That

John McCain and I don’t agree on much, I reckon.  I think the old man has been a net drag on American politics for a long time.

But I can’t find much to dispute in his take on Sheldon Adelson and Citizens United. (Via TPM):

“[M]uch of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from this casino in Macau,” McCain told Judy Woodruff in an interview that aired Thursday night. “Which says that, obviously, maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign.”

McCain, who once worked with former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a.k.a. the McCain-Feingold bill, called the Citizens United decision the Supreme Court’s “most misguided, naive, uninformed, egregious decision” in the 21st century.

“Look, I guarantee you, Judy, there will be scandals,” he said. “There is too much money washing around political campaigns today. And it will take scandals, and then maybe we can have the Supreme Court go back and revisit this issue. Remember, the Supreme Court rules on constitutionality. So just passing another law doesn’t get it. So I’m afraid we’re in for a very bleak period in American politics.”

Unlike Romney — who famously said last summer that “corporations are people” — McCain said he believes that “corporations are not people.”

“That’s why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens,” he said. “And so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made — that have been made in the past.”

Put this another way:  McCain actually seems to recognize that Mittens is setting up to be the front man for a presidency whose IOUs belong to Adelson’s Israel-first hunger and, as McCain himself points out, that Chinese connection that will surely disappoint those who actually credit Romney’s bluster on confrontation with Beijing.  (Not to mention all the other notes that will have to be paid to folks like the Kochs, et al.)

John McCain sees this as “a very bleak period in American politics.”

Grandpa: you’re on to something.

Image:  John Singer Sargent, Charles Deering at Brickell Point, Miami, 1917.

 

 

Blind Pig/Acorn (2) Alan Simpson edition

Via TPM (again):

“For heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you,” [Simpson] added. “He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress.”

…

“If you want to be a purist, go somewhere on a mountaintop and praise the East or something. But if you want to be in politics, you learn to compromise. And you learn to compromise on the issue without compromising yourself. Show me a guy who won’t compromise and I’ll show you a guy with rock for brains.”

Simpson admits that such heresies mark him as a RINO — which is truly amazing considering his actual politics over decades.  But there we are.  We have one centrist political party, and one gang of rocks-for-brains political suicide bombers.  And there is a non-trivial chance that said feral sociopathic children may control both houses of Congress and the White House next January.

We have a ton of work to do ‘twixt now and then, folks.

Image:  Albert Bierstadt, Farallon Islands, before 1902.  (Me mum loved Bierstadt, as do I.)

This is Why the Kristols and their Herd of Rampaging Ilk Haz a Sad

ABL and John have already hit this one hard, but, having dealt with the mouth puke that comes from reading the source text “outing” Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend as (horrors!) a Jew, I’m feeling the need to add my $0.02.

It’s probably not worth bothering with the historical idiocy used to underpin that source’s overt anti-Semitism, (no link to the asshole, but check out Tbogg for both righteous smackdowns and the connection if you want it).  But given the time I spent getting to know that notorious Jewish Socialist nutbag and traitor to all that is good and just in the world, Albert Einstein, I can’t pass without comment this one line:

New Bedford, MA, where Raphael Mutterperl ran the family’s manufacturing arm, was a hotbed of  Marxist trade-unionism in early 20th century America. Why? It was easy to “sell” radical trade-unionism to a whole people group who were brought up in the lap of Weimar Marxian ideology, because New Bedford had many new eastern-European Jewish immigrants living there at the time, including, of course, the Mutterperl family.

There truly aren’t enough integers to count the stupid in those two sentences, but just to offer one more of my futile nods to what we laughingly call “reality,” I’d like to point out that the Weimar Republic was, of course, an explicitly anti-Marxist political construction (see, e.g. the the decisions taken by the SPD government during the January Uprising, a of January 1919.

Hint: when the German Communist Party’s campaign to destabilize the the Social Democrat-led government turned into an insurrection, that government called for help from the old Kaiserene military elite, and deployed Freikorps, unofficial units of former soldiers led by right-wing officers, to crush the insurgency.)  The sense (sic!) of the phrase “Weimar Marxian ideology” is roughly analogous to this: “Pentacostal Islamic theology.”

Moran!

And then there’s the bizarre take on New Bedford as a hotbed of Weimar (read Jewish) degeneracy.*   I actually checked out this fine young idiot’s link, which led me to a truly anodyne pamphlet on New Bedford’s Jewish history.  There, using the man’s own source, I discovered that any German Jews in New Bedford in the early 20th century were mostly descendents of migrant peddlars who arrived in town in the mid-19th century — hardly a likely well spring for “radical trade-unionism” born amongst Berlin Reds in the 1920s.

Eastern European Jews started showing up after about 1875 — but they could no more be Weimar fifth columnists than their predecessors and, what’s more…

…Oh, hell.  Why bother.  You get the idea.  The actual facts about the American immigrant experience hardly matters, not when your eyeballs fill with blood and your eardrums throb and all you can see or hear is Jew, jeW, jEw, JeW, jEW, JEw, JEW.

It is a necessary condition in the formation of this style of antisemitism that bone ignorance be combined with utter certainty, so it’s no surprise that our little friend proves such a putz.**

That he should be shamed, ridiculed, and embarassed to within an inch of his capacity to scribble in crayon is fine by me, but what really struck me on reading his attempt to combine word strings into something that reads roughly like English was that here we have the real answer to the question that sometimes pops up in neo-con Jewish circles:  why won’t their co-religionists join them in voting Republican?

I’ll give y’all a hint:  It’s not because — or not simply because — we think Republican policies violate the injuction to tikkun olam — to heal the world.  Nor that the claims of both tzedek and tzedakah, justice and charity, are ones that the contemporary GOP denies at every turn.  Nor even the argument that reflexive support of the worst impulses in Israel is the surest way to do Israel great harm over time.

No, at least in part, and on some level of deeply sensed distrust,  it is because I and lots of both secular American Jews and deeply devout ones know that when you scratch enough of those with whom our co-religionists would have us ally, you get this kind of dreck.

Put it another way:  listening to a party whose dog whistles against our first African American President have become as audible as air raid sirens, it’s not that hard to remember the rest of the package bundled with such loathesomeness.

There are a lot of reasons to support Barack Obama in the coming weeks and months.  One big one is that you have to remember that the folks putting the hate on what an African American in the White House symbolizes have lots more rage  to go round.  That this lesson gets daily reinforcement helps make this election season at once so fascinating and so repulsive.  For today’s reminder, and for that service only,  I am grateful to the imbecile who decided that the Jewishness of Sandra Fluke’s partner is such a profound mark of shame.

Oh:  and f**k you with a rusty pitchfork, you spawn of history’s sewer.  Also too.

*That’s what I think really lodged in this unfortunate writer’s excuse for a brain: Weimar, we know, is associated with not just Jews, but gay Berlin (oh! That Isherwood fellow again) terrifyingly non-uplifting art (who is this George Grosz and why can’t he paint nice pictures of flowers and birds?) too much sex and who knows what else besides. Anything with that much going on is a priori evil, and given that Marxism is wretched to the root as well, then what the hell….

**And no, I’m not referring to the traditional Amish Christmas nativity scenes.  Why do you ask?

Image: Unknown photographer,  Karl Liebknecht delivering the funeral oration for Spartacist comrades, late 1918 or early 1919.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of an Old Jew, 1654.

 

A Thought I Wish I Could Get Out Of My Head

I read in TPM that Herman Cain said this in the debate tonight:

“I do not agree with torture, period,” Cain said to start the exchange. “However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.”

Asked specifically about waterboarding, Cain tipped his hand. “I don’t see it as torture,” he said. “I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.”

 

I hear that, and I find mindself performing a thought experiment that leaves my stomach in knots.  What if someone in State College had said something like this:

“I don’t see it as molestation….I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.”

The moral catastrophe speaks for itself, right?

That’s the problem with the failure to call things by their right name.  No one in the Penn State scandal has tried to term what happened there as anything other than the misery it was, child rape and a fundamental betrayal.  We aren’t that far gone yet.

But the repeated use — and the authorization at the highest level — of acts we hanged people for after World War II?  Those are just “enhanced techniques.”  To this day even the liberal New York Times can’t bring itself to say that inconvenient word “torture.”

That Herman Cain is no fit president is hardly news.  I just wish this particular pathology were confined to him.  It’s not.

Image:  Dieric Bouts, The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus,1470-1475.

We Live In Hope

From Bloomberg (via TPM):

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, received a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office seeking information on the firm’s activities leading into the credit crisis, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“We don’t comment on specific regulatory or legal issues, but subpoenas are a normal part of the information request process and, of course, when we receive them we cooperate fully,” said David Wells, a company spokesman.

It warms the cockles of my uncharitable heart that Goldman is taking at least a trivial hit where it hurts them next-to-most:

Goldman Sachs dropped 2.3 percent to $133.04 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading at 9:57 a.m., after falling as much as 3.4 percent following news of the subpoena.

The stock has slid 17 percent since the Senate subcommittee, led by Michigan Democrat Carl M. Levin, used the firm as a case study in a 640-page report on its findings released in April.

Alas, though, I haz a sad over this:

A subpoena is a request for information and doesn’t mean the company is a target of a criminal investigation. Analysts including Sanford C. Bernstein’s Brad Hintz have said they don’t expect the firm to be criminally prosecuted.

If they’ll nail individuals within the firm — enough of them — I’d be satisfied.  I live in hope.

Image:  Charles Wauters Der beim Diebstahl ertappte Hausdiener, (very loosely — the thieving servant, caught in the act), 1845

“That’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here…” Benjamin Franklin edition

I’m working on another volume in my Pequod-like pursuit of Megan McArdle* (see, after what went on here earlier today, I’ve got a Melville mindworm going), but just to show that I’m not dead yet, I thought I’d toss in a little lagniappe to a discussion begun here in John’s post of a day or so ago.

There, I learned that some idiot I’ve never before had the dystopic experience of encountering had this to say about the notion of an intellectual commons:

But Barton says that the Bible, Ben Franklin and the Pilgrims all opposed Net Neutrality because it violates the rights of huge corporations to charge higher rates and discriminate on content, calling it a “wicked” policyand “socialism on the Internet.”

Here’s David Barton’s own words on the subject, just to show that the snark version is, in fact, deadly accurate:

But we talk about it today because it is a principle of free market. That’s a Biblical principle, that’s a historical principle, we have all these quotes from Ben Franklin, and Jefferson and Washington and others on free market and how important that is to maintain.

Well, as it happens, I’m reading a really excellent book:  Common as Air by Lewis Hyde, which is, among much else, a detailed and beautifully written archaeology of what the founders — and Franklin primus inter pares — thought about ideas, ownership, and the commons.

One thing Hyde reminds us of is that Franklin himself did not claim ownership of ideas that he himself saw as the product of many, the inheritance of all, and the property of none.  He did not patent the lightening rod — instead communicating with David Hume, among others, to make sure that the world — at least those with access to learned journals — could make free use of both the research implications and the practical value of his investigations into the behavior of electricity. He didn’t try to hang on to the rights to the Franklin stove.

If he did choose to keep some trade secrets that advantaged the work that made him prosperous — the techniques he used to render early American paper money more secure against counterfeits — that was one exception against a life time of free public dissemination of discoveries and inventions that he understood to have been built on the work of predecessor and collaborators, to be improved upon still further by the efforts of strangers to come.  [FWIW -- I wrote about Franklin's role as a currency innovator in last October's American History. Sadly, the piece itself is not online, though I think a draft may show up in MIT's DSpace archive eventually.

You should all go get Hyde's book for yourselves, but just to shove Barton's ignorant lies back down his slimy, authoritarian-slime-filled cake-hole, consider this quote from the chapter Hyde titled "Benjamin Franklin, Founding Pirate":

Franklin believed that property should not command society, society should command property:  "Private Property..is a Creature of Society and is subject to the Cals of that Society whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing."  The contributions that private property makes to public needs are not, therefore, "to be considered as conferring a Benefit to the Public...but as the Return of an Obligation previously received or the Payment of a Just Debt."   (Common as Air, pp. 132-133.  The Franklin quote is from "Queries and Remarks on a Paper entitled 'Hints for the Members of [the Constitutional] Convention No II in teh Federal Gazette of Tuesday Nov 3d 1789.]

The shorter:  Franklin was down for net neutrality.

You can disagree with his argument, of course.  It’s a wingnut folly to accord the status of revolution to texts that they rarely, if ever read.  Mine are different pathologies, no doubt.

But while the fact that Ben Franklin said something does not make it inerrant truth, still, if I may, can I suggest to the Mr. Barton that before he yaps about what the founders thought about something, it might be a good idea to, you know, actually read what they had to say on the subject?

Just sayin….

*Absolutely no good can come of this metaphor.

Image:  David Martin, Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, 1767.  I’ve always loved this portrait for the fact that Franklin commissioned it while directing that he be painted with the bust of Newton watching over him.