What's Illiberal About the Conservative Arts?

Throne and altar: Bauerline on Berube:

: [A] weakness in Bérubé’s argument and to contemporary liberalism in general (in educational contexts). The procedures he details are evenhanded and rousing, but the ensuing liberal tenets of liberal education are just that: all procedural. They lay out how to argue and how to disagree, how to relate to one’s own beliefs and how to relate to others’. True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct.... The real debate lies not over debating tactics, but over course content.... Bérubé barely touches upon these, leaving What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with a hole at the center....

[A]n assigned essay topic [by Berube].... the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence:

Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.

And here is Bérubé’s comment:

If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.

What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over.... And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries.

The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let’s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.

The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility.... When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table.... [T]he humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook-—not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies...

The only reaction I can think of that is appropriate to Bauerline is to echo the Monty Python innkeeper's reaction to the German tourists: "Don't mention the war!" Bauerline's "substantive points" seem to be: "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder!" "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves!" "Don't mention that Sally Hemings's options when Thomas Jefferson came a-callin' were... limited!" "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson tried to swiftboat Alexander Hamilton!" "Don't mention that George Washington thought Alexander Hamilton was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

The key is, I think, that Bauerline believes that inculcating respect for the throne and the altar--whether warranted or not--are the proper aims of education.

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Bauerline on Berube:

:

The chapters contain lively characterizations of students, careful expositions of American fiction, and, in contrast to the regret cited above, blithe vilifications of conservatives. Yes, conservatives are, to Bérubé, a more or less deranged and ignoble crew. Some thoughtful “arts-and-humanities” conservatives are out there, he observes, but their kind is fading. In their stead, we have angry, hypocritical figures unhinged by the presence of liberals in classrooms. Their criticisms have reached a “fever pitch,” and are “hysterically overblown.” Their “mind-bending charge[s]” strike the profs as “surreal.”

But these insults appear mainly in the opening chapters of the book and don’t advance the core issue, which is how the tenets of liberalism enhance education. For that, Bérubé relies on lengthy demonstrations of his classroom practice. He counsels students to read closely, gather evidence, consider counter-evidence, address claims that dispute their deepest beliefs, and treat opponents with respect. Open your minds, face verbal challenges, keep complacency at bay, and play fair, he presses. These are the protocols of John Stuart Mill, and one has no difficulty believing that Bérubé runs a stimulating, reasonable classroom.

The strengths of the presentation, however, point to a weakness in Bérubé’s argument and to contemporary liberalism in general (in educational contexts). The procedures he details are evenhanded and rousing, but the ensuing liberal tenets of liberal education are just that: all procedural. They lay out how to argue and how to disagree, how to relate to one’s own beliefs and how to relate to others’. True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct.... The real debate lies not over debating tactics, but over course content.... Bérubé barely touches upon these, leaving What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with a hole at the center....

[A]n assigned essay topic that was claimed by a conservative student to be anti-American, a claim rightly judged by Bérubé a silly exaggeration. Still, the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence:

Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.

And here is Bérubé’s comment:

If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.

What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over.... And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries.

The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let’s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.

That Bérubé accepts such assignments as straightforward history goes a long way toward explaining why conservative criticisms appear unbalanced or cynical. The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility. This makes it almost impossible for conservative reformers in higher education to question, much less alter, the curriculum.

It’s a frustrating impasse. Liberal approaches to the curriculum are so embedded that conservative attacks look suspect on procedural grounds. Say that multiculturalism as commonly practiced is incompatible with the training of erudite students and you offend the other parties. Describe “diversity” as a coercive and illusory term that will be remembered as nothing but a curious example of the mores of the early twenty-first century and you become an unprofessional crank. The substance of your criticism is waylaid by its impropriety.

When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table. Someone as professionally aware as Professor Bérubé should recognize that, and he has at other times done so. But here, he overlooks the situation, because, I think, the aggressive actions of David Horowitz and others have raised the threat level. What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, the major statement on the issue by a major academic voice, never outlines the most important aspect of any educational program, its curriculum. On the evidence of its arguments, we may safely assume that in spite of all the publicized assaults from the outside (such as the Academic Bill of Rights) and all the humiliating episodes on the inside (such as Ward Churchill), the humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook-—not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies.

Impeach Condi Rice

Impeach Condi Rice. Impeach Condi Rice now:

Hullabaloo: Secretary of Hack: by digby: Wow. Andrea Mitchell just reported that the Secretary of State went on Laura Ingraham's wingnut propaganda show and said the "Army of Davids" documents proved that Saddam was working on a nuclear program. Lucky for us that Mitchell pointed out that the documents were from before the first Gulf War. I understand that hacks like Limbaugh and Instapundit would try to pass this nonsense off to the neanderthal base, but for the Secretary of State to lower herself and her office to say such a thing is shocking. Even for these people. Update: Dan Bartlet's out there right now saying exactly the same thing. Mitchell corrected him, but this looks like the official party line. They really do think their base is completely braindead. They would know...

Duty, Honor, Country

Ezra Klein:

TAPPED: I loathe the tendency -- by politicians and pundits, liberals and conservatives -- to dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It's bullshit. And it's bullshit designed to make us feel better, so we don't have to face what we've done to these young people, and don't have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen.

They're not doing a magnificent job. They're not approaching each day with stoic courage and endless optimism. They're doing their best. These are kids. I knew them in high school. They entered the military because they sought discipline, or loans, or redemption, or very occasionally, honor. They were not a wiser breed, or a braver strain -- they were just kids, they made a decision that seemed right at the time, and now they're doing their damnedest to survive. It comforts us to speak of them all as Rhode Scholars, automatons who run on courage and faith and perform with grace and cheer. It comforts us to speak of them like that because it allows us to deny the image of twentysomethings lying terrified in the desert, straining to make it through that day, and the next, and the one after it. By so lavishly honoring them, we transform our mental picture of who fights in this war, and we allow their imagined stoicism to ease our onrushing guilt....

The difference between going to war and imagining it is that when you daydream about battle, it's hellishness takes on a sort of beauty, it allows men to emerge heroes and courage to reign. In our minds, it can be magnificent. For those fighting it, it isn't. Homelife takes on the glow of heaven.

That doesn't mean war is never necessary, or battles should never be fought. But society must reckon with their toll more realistically. We shouldn't deny the horrors of combat by overwriting the humanity of those conducting it.... [T]hose who went endured despite their unreadiness. And we who stayed behind do them a disservice, we dishonor the troops, if we pretend they were somehow prepared for this life, rather than thrust into it.

Marginal Revolution: The Stern report on global warming

Tyler Cowen plumps for extremely low social rates of discount for policy evaluation:

Marginal Revolution: The Stern report on global warming: No, I am not going to read the whole 645-page report.... The resources that would have gone into consumption are harder to discount, especially if we are comparing those resources across the generations, and if the change in question is "large" rather than "small." I tend to favor a very low or zero discount rate in these settings, if only because there is no pure time preference across the generations. (Before you are born, you are not sitting around impatiently, waiting, unless of course you are a character in Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird.) In any case this is predominantly an ethical question, and no correct answer follows directly from examining marginal analysis and market prices...

To Spend Is to Tax

John Berry takes on the claim of Republican hacks that George W. Bush has in any meaningful sense "cut taxes":

Bloomberg.com: Opinion: V.V. Chari of the University of Minnesota explained at a conference for journalists on Oct. 17, "The true burden of government is what it spends today and in the future.'' When a politician brags, "I cut your taxes,'' that's not what really matters.... When a government spends money, it commands resources that are no longer available for use by the private sector. If it chooses to borrow the money rather than levying taxes to finance transfer payments and the purchase of goods and services, the government is only postponing the inevitable taxes, Chari said.

``The political system works very hard to obfuscate this issue,'' he said.

A good example of such obfuscation is a White House fact sheet about the fiscal 2006 budget results released on Oct. 11. The fact sheet said the Bush tax cuts ``have helped fuel economic activity that has produced two years of record revenue growth,'' 14.5 percent and 11.8 percent in fiscal 2005 and 2006, respectively. It conveniently overlooks the fact that revenue in 2004 was lower than back in 2001.... One result of spending rising twice as fast as revenue was that the budget swung from surplus to deficit in a big way. The inevitable consequence was a large increase in the sale of Treasury securities to the public.... Over the last five years, debt held by the public rose by more than $1.5 trillion, to $4.84 trillion, a 46 percent increase...

Henry Kissinger and the "Decent Interval"

Rick Perlstein on Henry Kissinger and the "decent interval":

Henry Kissinger, Oval Office therapist: DR. KISSINGER'S THERAPY. The Unrealist: by Rick Perlstein: For all its mind-blowing details of administration ineptitude, Bob Woodward's third installment in his Bush at War trilogy hardly tells you much that you didn't already know. Of course George W. Bush lacks intellectual curiosity. Of course Donald Rumsfeld is a villain for the ages.

But there's one particular revelation in the book that stands out for its plain weirdness: Henry Kissinger's presence in the Oval Office. According to Woodward, Bush treats Kissinger "almost like a member of the family," free to visit as he pleases. It's strange to see him welcomed like a wise old uncle, because an entire generation of conservatives consider Kissinger an incarnation of Beelzebub. And that's a sentiment you would imagine the current administration feels even more deeply. "Kissingerian realism," after all, is the exact opposite of President Bush's "freedom agenda." It eschews gauzy sentimentalities like "freedom" in favor of global equilibrium and stability. But now, Woodward tells us, Bush and Kissinger have made common cause. On his surreptitious visits, Kissinger preaches the president a spine-stiffening gospel, imploring him to stay the course in Iraq. "Don't give an inch," Kissinger is said to have advised, "or else the media, the Congress, and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back."

Woodward isn't a noted skeptic and he certainly doesn't apply any skepticism to the descriptions of Kissinger's visits--even though they come courtesy of noted truth-teller Dick Cheney. Kissinger, however, is one of history's greatest Machiavellians, a master manipulator of presidents, the press, and the people. His statements, even about the weather, require parsing for double and triple meanings--and particularly when they suggest strategy for failed wars.

To begin unraveling the true meaning of Kissinger's advice to the White House, we have to go back to August 3, 1972. On that date, President Nixon repeated to the good doctor, his national security adviser, what he'd been saying in private since 1966: America's war aim (standing up a pro-American and anti-Communist South Vietnamese government in Saigon) was a fantasy. "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway," the president sighed. But a presidential election was coming up. He had long before promised he was removing the U.S. presence, more-or-less victoriously (though "victory" was a word Nixon, by then, wisely avoided; instead, he called it "peace with honor").

It was Kissinger, who had been shuttling back and forth to Paris for peace negotiations with the enemy, who named the dilemma: "We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which--after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74, no one will give a damn."

Thus was confirmed what historians would come to call the "decent interval" strategy. Having pledged to Saigon--and American conservatives--that Communist troops would not be allowed in South Vietnam after a peace deal was signed, Kissinger negotiated the opposite. "Peace is at hand," he announced on the eve of the 1972 presidential election, in one of his rare appearances before the TV cameras. The United States left the following spring; the Communists moved in; Saigon fell.

That's not how Nixon and Kissinger told the story, of course. They blamed the defeat on a combination of the liberal congressmen who refused to vote for continued aid to South Vietnam in 1974 and Saigon's own unfortunate lack of will. And, just as Kissinger had privately predicted, no one gave a damn. You might not associate Kissinger with withdrawal, because that's not how he has retold events. "While history never repeats itself directly," he wrote in his book, Ending the Vietnam War, "there is at least one lesson to be learned from the tragedy described in these pages: that America must never again permit its promise to be overwhelmed by its divisions."

If Kissinger wasn't truly a stay-the-course man in Vietnam but just sold himself to posterity as one, is it possible that the sorcerer is teaching his new apprentice the same trick--how to end a war with a retreat and blame it on anyone but himself? That's not very hard to imagine. A growing body of data suggests that the Bush administration is edging ever closer to withdrawal. We have heard strong hints that the president will make one last desperate stand--pacifying militia-filled Baghdad, convening an international conference, dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions--before finally departing. James Baker's Iraq Study Group will likely be recommending some variation of this to the White House after the November elections.

You can almost hear the famous thick German accent: "Mr. President, you have to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two--after which, Mr. President, Iraq will be a backwater." Maybe that is just what Henry Kissinger is advising: Something like a tripartite Iraq could be Bush's "decent interval" strategy, removing his own responsibility for the ultimate collapse in the eyes of posterity, parceling out the onus for failure between the Iraqis themselves and the American liberals who tied his hands. You can almost hear the president sighing in return, with a newfound, world-weary sense of realism: "Might as well. Iraq probably can never even survive anyway."

Henry Kissinger is a conniver. His defining trait is not anything so honorable as an intellectual doctrine. It is his ability to command the empyrean heights of power through sinuous flattery, to seduce the ascendant powers at any given moment into attaching themselves to him, from John F. Kennedy to Nelson Rockefeller--and now George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. That is the soul of Kissingerian realism. It has even included an interval in the 1980s, when, plus royalist que le roi, he courted the neoconservative maximalists by excoriating the same brand of arms control deal with the Soviets that he himself had initiated.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Bush, the ur-"freedom agenda" sentimentalist, ended up (in words Woodward attributes to Cheney) "a big fan" of Kissinger. And, in the passages Woodward attributes to Kissinger in State of Denial, you can see how he insinuated himself: with a masterful understanding of Bush's psychology. The passages that leap out are the ones that serve to salve an imperiled sense of presidential masculinity in the face of failure: "For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out"; "Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory"; "Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of weakened resolve"--the weakened resolve of others.

At least, that's what the book reports Kissinger told Bush.

What Kissinger truly has to offer Bush, I fear, is not strategy but therapy. Or, as it were, therapy as strategy. He teaches Bush how to see himself in the future, as an old man: as a future prophet without honor. It doesn't feel so bad, Bush can tell himself: Kissinger, after all, has an open door to the White House.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.

The Shiite Fanatics Have Won

Spencer Ackerman on how the elected Iraqi goernment is full of really bad guys:

toohotfortnr: The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles: Consider this. In the midst of a Shiite push to constrain the U.S. military's operational freedom of action in Iraq -- a reaction to Bush's attempt to impose "deadlines" on the Maliki government --comes this declaration of independence. It clarifies, well, everything about the current moment in Iraq:

“Iraqi leaders are handcuffed,” by the United Nations agreement, said Hadi al-Ameri, a member of the committee and the leader of the Defense and Security Committee in Parliament. “We will not tell the Americans to go, but if they stay it should be according to conditions.”

What's significant about this? The speaker. Hadi al-Ameri is not simply the leader of the Iraqi parliament's Defense and Security Committee. He's the leader of the Badr Corps, the militia/death squad of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the dominant faction of the dominant Iraqi sect.

Once upon a time, the U.S. -- led by two extremely well-intentioned and capable security experts, Terry Kelly and David Gompert -- constructed a "transition and reintegration" plan for Iraq's militias. Gompert told me last year that the purpose of the plan was simple: "The issue was always the Badr Corps," Gompert emphasizes, "because of the fear of what the Badr Corps would turn into: It would mutate from a former resistance group into a tool of Shia political Islam, a tool that could be used to influence both local politics and national politics."

Gompert is home from Iraq. The man who leads the Badr Corps, which Gompert sought to marginalize, is now a crucial decision-maker in telling the U.S. how it may behave that country. If ever you find yourself starting to believe that the militias can be "dealt with" or "cracked down on," remember this basic, basic fact. Ameri has won, and the U.S. has lost.

What do you suppose Ameri will do when he and his colleagues are no longer "handcuffed"?

He's right: bigger bloodbaths look likely in Baghdad.

Chinese Growth Prospects

China's dual economy:

Will Super-High Chinese Growth Continue?: With an average annual increase in GDP over the last two decades of more than 9 percent, China's economic development has been nothing short of spectacular. But such astonishing growth inevitably inspires the perennial question: How long can China keep it up?

In China's FDI and Non-FDI Economies and the Sustainability of Future High Chinese Growth (NBER Working Paper No. 12249), co-authors John Whalley and Xian Xin attempt to answer the question with data supplied by the National Bureau of Statistics of China. They consider, in particular, the roles of... the mainly manufacturing-based Foreign Invested Enterprises (FIEs), which are often joint ventures between Chinese enterprises (usually state-owned) and overseas companies supplying Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), product designs, and international sales networks. The second sub-economy is the non-FIE portion of China's economy in manufacturing, agriculture, and services....

FIEs employ only 24 million workers out of a total workforce of 752 million, and their labor productivity is around 9 times that of the workers in the non-FIE sub-economy. The FIEs account for over half of exports and 60 percent of imports. Industrial FIEs are responsible for over 30 percent of China's industrial output.... FIEs are concentrated in Southern and Eastern China.... The FIE sub-economy currently is growing at around 18 percent per year, while the non-FDI portion is growing at about 5-6 percent annually....

In dollar terms, annual FDI inflows to China were less than $2 billion in 1985, but had ballooned to $61 billion by 2004.... By 1997, China had FDI inflows of $49 billion.... China's FDI inflows fall into two categories: horizontal FDI, which involves the transfer of production (mainly from North America and Western Europe) to service the Chinese internal market; and vertical FDI, which takes advantage of low-cost production in China for products to be exported and which is fueled mostly by China's Asian neighbors....

About 84 percent of China's inward FDI occurs in nine coastal provinces, leaving the remaining 20 provinces with 12 percent of inward FDI and resulting in great disparities in income....

Matt Nesvisky

David Wessel Writes About CEO Pay

David Wessel on CEO pay:

Capital - WSJ.com: It is obvious that the bigger the company, the more the CEO gets paid. That fact has inspired more than a few big acquisitions. An old rule of thumb holds that for every 10% increase in a company's size, the CEO's pay goes up 3%. But that doesn't explain recent patterns.

Messrs. Gabaix and Landier, squash partners who majored in mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, realized that it isn't only how big a company is that matters; it is how big other companies are. It is about keeping up with the corporate Joneses.

And how much did U.S. companies grow in the past 25 years as CEO pay rose sixfold? Measured by stock-market capitalization, the value of all their shares, the companies grew sixfold, the pair discovered. "If all companies increase in size," Mr. Landier says, "the amount people are willing to pay for the same talent goes up."... CEOs aren't better than they were a quarter century ago, and there isn't much difference among them. But being a little bit better CEO than your competitor is worth a lot of money, just as it is to superstars in opera or baseball....

If Messrs. Gabaix and Landier are right, tweaking corporate-governance rules won't restrain CEO pay. "Firms with bad corporate governance pay the CEO more, but it's a really small effect -- only about 10% on average," Mr. Gabaix says....

Perhaps. But Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz points out that the Gabaix-Landier model suggests that if the No. 15 company has a deviously clever CEO who finds a new way to engorge himself (think backdating, again), then the impact of that behavior will be magnified as it spreads to CEOs of even bigger companies.

And if they are right, then CEO pay hasn't much to do with motivating CEOs to work harder, and there is little economic harm to be done by taxing them more heavily.

"CEOs are paid what they're worth to their companies, and their high pay reflects the extraordinary value of their talent," Gregory Mankiw, another Harvard economist and a former adviser to President Bush, wrote on his blog after a Gabaix seminar. "But the supply of talent is inelastic" -- that is, paying more wouldn't produce more Jack Welches -- "and the allocation of talent would not be affected if everyone faced high tax rates." (Messrs. Gabaix and Landier shudder at this suggestion.)...

The market cap of U.S. companies rose mightily from the 1940s through the 1970s, yet CEO compensation didn't soar much faster than the typical worker's pay.

What changed? Frank Levy, an MIT economist, has a hunch: "Coming out of World War II, and the Great Depression before that, a lot of people were very afraid of extensive labor unrest. The whole framework of collective bargaining, a decent minimum wage, high marginal tax rates, etc., were all designed to head that off."

For a while, fear topped greed. But fear of unions and of government restraints on the market forces Messrs. Gabaix and Landier describe faded around 1980. Greed took over.

The Seven Horsemen of the Neoconservative Apocalypse Are All Shrill!

Six years ago, every Republican I talked to who would let his or her hair down agreed that George W. Bush was incompetent to be president.

It did not matter, they said, that we were electing somebody unqualified for the job.

George W. Bush was smart enough, they said, to know that he was a good face man--a good head-of-state--and a bad head of government. He would take advice. Paul O'Neill would contruct a reality-based economic policy, and Bush would approve it. Condi Rice and Colin Powell would contruct a reality-based foreign policy, and Bush would approve it. Rumsfeld would corral the Pentagon and get good money for our defense dollars. Cheney and Card would make sure the trains ran on time, that the policy process was orderly and fair, and that George W. Bush was persuaded by the various consensuses reached by his NSC, NEC, and other policy-forming bodies. That's what they said would happen.

Needless to say, it did not work out that way.

Today, David Rose watches the seven horsemen of the neoconservative apocalypse conduct the unspeakable dawn rites of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill as they denounce the mendacity, incompetence, disconnection from reality, and malevolence of George W. Bush and his administration:

Neo Culpa: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com: Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk... chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee... this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty." Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq.... I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel?... What I find... is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration....

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable... This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"--starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."...

I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played....

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."

Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer%u2014three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.%... Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.%... I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.... I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.... The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

Where Oh Where Is My Foreign Exchange Uncovered Interest Parity?

Uncovered interest parity. The world would be a much more comprehensible place if uncovered interest parity held.

Mark Thoma quotes Brad Setser:

Brad Setser is also puzzled:

The club of puzzled dollar bears grows bigger, by Brad Setser: I am -- and probably always will be -- a big Robert Rubin fan.... [A]ll those of us who thought there was a big risk that the US would have a Wile E. Coyote moment two years ago can take comfort that both Bob Rubin and Paul Volcker thought so too....

I share Rubin's deep sense of puzzlement. Not about the dollar. Central banks are clearly responsible for propping it up.... [W]hat really puzzles me is the absence of volatility in the foreign exchange market.... I would expect, based on the collapse of capital flows to emerging economies in the 1990s, that a more unbalanced world will prove, over time, to be a more volatile world. But so far, though, it has been -- at least in some key markets -- a less volatile world. That puzzles me....

But at least I seem to be in good company...

Could the U.S. continue to spend $800 billion a year more than it makes for a long time to come? Yes. Is that the way to bet? No. The market should be pricing in a high probability of a steep fall in the U.S. trade deficit over the next five years--and if the trade deficit does fall, being short dollars will be a very good bet.

But uncovered interest parity does not hold in the world we live in. And that makes life so very confusing.

Macaque Says: Vote on November 7!

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (A David Brooks/New York Times Edition)

David Brooks inspires me add the New York Times to the list of organizations I think will be gone in a decade. An organization that cannot figure out that Brooks is peddling garbage cannot be adaptable enough to survive. Bird-cage liner. Bad-quality bird-cage liner. Today:

David Brooks: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today's crisis is not three years old... the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.... There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians.... Children... gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars.... A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution....

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. "The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination," a British official reported in 1923.... Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise.... Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility.... Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion....

Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad. But... if Iraqi ministries remain dysfunctional and the national institutions remain sectarian... it will be time to accede to reality. It will be time to effectively end Iraq... diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable -- the clan, tribe or sect.... The war was an attempt to lift a unified Iraq out of its awful history, but history has proved stubborn. It's time to adjust the plans to reality.

And Dennis Best presents us with his favorite David Brooks quotes from the past:

I David Brooks: September 23, 2003: The good things that are happening in Iraq are taking place far below the level of grand strategy.... bankers and civil servants from 11 central and Eastern European countries came to Iraq to describe the lessons they had learned in moving from tyranny to democracy.... U.N. humanitarian workers, far removed from the marble halls of the Security Council, risk their lives to feed and clothe Iraqis.... U.S. military officers spend millions of dollars building schools and tackling neighborhood issues. That's the work that gives Iraqis hope. Seventy percent of Iraqis expect their lives to improve over the next five years...

October 7, 2003: Washington will continue to get distracted by microscandals about leaks and such, but the Iraqi constitutional process is the most important thing.... Iraq really will be a beacon of freedom in the Middle East. The Americans who have died in Iraq will have given their lives in a truly noble cause...

April 10, 2004: Come on people, let's get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit....

April 17, 2004: Despite all this... in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing. To his enormous credit, the president has been ruthlessly flexible over the past months and absolutely committed to seeing this through...

May 18, 2004: There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American.... No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success...

January 11, 2005: The new, Shiite-led government will begin debating when the Americans should leave. The new government will remake the intelligence service. It will transform the military... its soldiers will finally have an authentic Iraqi government to fight for...

February 1, 2005: Ted Kennedy... blithely insisting that the terrorists are winning the war.... Brent Scowcroft warned of incipient civil war, denigrating the Iraqis' ability to manage their own tensions.... These are a people who have used the campaign as a process of therapy and self-education. These people have just built the most democratic government in the Arab world...

November 20, 2005: Re-enlistment rates are high because most American troops believe they can create a better Iraq.... Most important, the training of Iraqi troops has been going well. Authoritative investigators like Jack Keane, the retired Army general, report that the Iraqi troops are becoming effective fighters and their morale is high...

December 18, 2005: At the very moment that American gloom-mongers are opting for panicked withdrawal, there's been a pileup of good news on Iraq: the improved training of Iraqi troops, the more effective counterinsurgency strategies, the booming Iraqi economy, the vastly improved White House communication strategy, the amazing confidence of the Iraqi people and, most of all, this glorious election...

Has David Brooks always been a fool, or a liar? Yes.

Most Dishonest Intellectual Alive

The excellent Matthew Yglesias rends Joshua Miravchik into shreds and gobbets, and then devours the gobbets:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: "Operation Comeback": Joshua Muravchik writes in Foreign Policy about how to save neoconservatism. The main priorities will be surprising -- it involves a lot of lying, and a lot of smearing of one's enemies. For example, "'Neocon' is now widely synonymous with 'ultraconservative' or, for some, 'dirty Jew.'" Yes, it's true. Neocon is in disrepute not because neoconservative ideas make very little sense and the policies they've advocated have proven disastrous -- it's because we hate the Jews. Similarly, here's step one:

Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently reconstructed Stalinists.

What crazy canards! This here is the Amazon page for Irving Kristol's 1995 book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. John J. Miller writes that in the book, "Kristol sketches his intellectual growth, which began while he was a young man attending neo-Trotskyite meetings in Brooklyn (where he met his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb) and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., where today he is a fixture at right-of-center political gatherings." Canard! Publisher's Weekly writes, "Particularly interesting is his previously unpublished opening memoir concerning influences such as Lionel Trilling, Leo Strauss and army life as well as the founding of his magazine and his work with the American Enterprise Institute to extend conservatism beyond free enterprise to reflect "on the roots of social and cultural stability." Canard!

In his essay "A Man Without Footnotes" included in The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer recounts that "Irving Kristol at one point wrote that the two chief influences on his thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss." Canard!

Why is Foreign Policy publishing this crap?

Why shouldn't Foreign Policy? Are they in the business of publishing smart things by intelligent people seeking to understand the world? Or are they in some other business?

Notes for a Talk on Teaching the Very Basics of Monetary Policy...

Notes on teaching the very basics of monetary policy

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Teaching Monetary Policy

Bradford DeLong

November 3, 2006; Amelia Island, FL

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The Federal Reserve Acts:

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We Would Like Our Students to Be Able to Read the Wall Street Journal:

Like http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116179074182303451-search.html?KEYWORDS=bernanke&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month

Greg Ip:

Mr. Bernanke has faced shifting challenges since taking office. Core inflation has risen to 2.9% from 2.1%, the highest level in a decade…. That led the Fed to raise rates at its first three meetings under Mr. Bernanke…. [E]conomic growth, under the weight of falling home and automobile sales, began to slow, to an estimated annual rate of about 2% in the third quarter. That would be the second-lowest level since 2003. In recent weeks, though, both inflation and growth worries have eased. Energy prices have plunged, and the Fed expects the indirect impact of that drop to pull down core inflation in the coming year or so. Yesterday's Fed statement dropped a reference from the previous month to energy and commodity prices as a source of inflation pressure. There is little sign the economy outside housing and cars has slowed much...

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What We Want to Teach Them So They Can Do So?

Federal Reserve objectives:

• Effective price stability *Given that, unemployment as low as possible--at the natural rate

Federal Reserve tools:

• Controls short-term, safe, nominal interest rates

Economic environment:

• Term structure: what matters most are long-term, real, risky interest rates
• Which affect investment spending (primarily construction) and exports
  • Multiplier *Long and variable lags

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How Do We Teach Them?

• Keynesian cross?
  • Is it worth spending time on the multiplier?
• AS-AD?
  • What gives the AD curve its downward slope?
• Quantity Theory of Money?
  • How to get from MV=PY to the Fed announcements?
• IS-LM?
  • Too complicated for Principles--which means not retained well in intermediate…

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And How Do We Get Them to Retain Enough to Be Economically Literate?

To be able, for example, to talk coherently about U.S.-China economic relations:

• Trade side:
  • Gains from trade…
  • Long-term political benefits from a richer and more democratic China…
  • Long-term political costs…
  • U.S. manufacturing employment…
  • Other U.S. distributional issues
• Macro side:
  • Crowding in via PBoC purchases of U.S. Treasuries and other assets…
  • Cost of repaying foreign debt…
  • Possibility of foreign-exchange crisis…
• Need to connect the syllabus up to the issues: How?

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For McGraw-Hill Amelia Island, FL conference, Nov. 2-4, 2006

Gurk?!

No sooner do I hear people say "Where is the slowdown in consumer spending?" then this comes over the wire:

Wal-Mart Outlook May Damp Holidays As Retailers Post Mixed October Sales - WSJ.com: By KRIS HUDSON: November 2, 2006 3:18 p.m.: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. predicted its November sales will show no gain over its results from the same month a year ago, signaling a weak start to the holiday season for the giant retailer as it struggles with an image overhaul and weak apparel sales.

Wal-Mart, Bentonville, Ark., on Thursday reported a gain in October same-store sales -- or sales at stores open for at least a year -- of 0.5% for its U.S. stores. That aggregate figure included a 2% gain by its Sam's Club membership-warehouse division and a 0.3% gain by its larger Wal-Mart Stores division of 3,200 supercenters, discount stores and Neighborhood Market grocery stores. The company's shares fell 1.8% to $47.97 in late morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday.

As shoppers bundled up in new clothes in the autumn chill, some major retailers were celebrating but others were left out in the cold. Chart data for a dozen major retailers and see highlights and lowlights from the past year.

Wal-Mart's announcement came as retailers posted a mixed sales performance for October, as consumers appeared to take a break from September's shopping spree.

Department stores and specialty chains posted some strong gains, helped by demand for coats, sweaters and other cold-weather gear amid one of the chillier October periods on record. Discount retailers, however, struggled, as lower-income shoppers have been slow to ramp up spending following an August drop in gasoline prices.

Wal-Mart logged global sales in October of $25.7 billion, up 11.7% from October 2005. Its core Wal-Mart Stores division notched a 7.7% gain to $16.6 billion in sales. Sam's Club posted $3.1 billion in sales, a 1.2% gain. And Wal-Mart's more than 2.700 international stores posted $6 billion in sales, up 32.1%.

Wal-Mart blamed the weak October showing on difficulty surpassing its 4.7% gain from October 2005, which was fueled by shoppers in the Southeast stocking up on goods in the wakes of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. To that point, Wal-Mart said that, factoring out the hurricane-influenced stores in the Southeast, the balance of its stores posted a cumulative 1.7% same-store gain last month. Its strongest regions last month were in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest....

"Price rollbacks on key toys that went into effect in mid-October generated significant lift in unit volume," Chief Financial Officer Tom Schoewe said in a release issued Thursday. "In electronics, another dynamic category for the holiday season, we have several initiatives planned to drive holiday sales. We have expanded our brand offerings, improved our product presentations in the store, reinforced our value pricing and doubled the assortment of accessories."...

Yet Wal-Mart's October same-store gain was its lowest since December 2000. And the retailer predicts its November gain to fall even lower than that, only matching its sales from November 2005. That bar is set relatively high by the 4.7% gain the retailer posted a year ago.

"November's outlook for only flat same-store-sales is disturbing provided the expected [same-store sales] lift from the company's remodeling program and $4 generic drug program," JP Morgan Securities analyst Charles Grom said, referring to Wal-Mart's program to offer 30-day prescriptions of some generic drugs for $4 in 27 states. "Moreover, provided the continued weakness in apparel sales, largely womens, we remain concerned that Wal-Mart's upcoming holiday could be weaker-than-expected"...

Paul Krugman's Correct Views on Everything

Mark Thoma publishes notes James Crabtree took of the current version of Paul Krugman's "economic situation" talk:

Economist's View: NDN: Krugman's Remarks at the New America Foundation Economic Conference: In general economic terms we are off the map - in two ways on (1) housing and (2) the trade deficit. Because we are off the map, we are struggling to use our fundamental understanding of economics, and some dubious number crunching, to make sense of a situation that doesn't look like anything we've seen before.

1. Housing. Adjusted for inflation house prices are up 50% by 2000. If this was the end of the story you could just about justify this in terms of lower interest rates and other things. But that isn't the right comparison. It depends on where you look. 1/3rd of the US lives in areas of land scarcity and restrictive zoning. 2/3rds live elsewhere, where land is plentiful.... In... that 1/3rd. you find that house prices are up 80 - 100%. Here it really does look like a bubble. People have extrapolated from rising prices that things will keep rising. The result is a surge in housing demand, with huge impact on the economy. Residential constructions was up to 6.3% of GDP, up from 4%... a bigger GDP stimulus than all of the bush tax cuts.

2. Trade Deficit. We finance our deficit by borrowing. This cannot go on indefinitely... any kind of scenario will have to involve a substantial fall in the dollar. And the markets are not taking this into account. Inflation adjusted bond rates seem incorrectly priced, compared to the EU or Japan. Some bonds are being bought by foreign based banks for non-market reasons. But many are not. So the market, if it took the dollar decline into account, would price this in. There will be a Wile E. Coyote moment. When? I would have said the answer was two years ago, so I've been wrong before. But it will happen at some point.

So here is the economic problem. We have a big trade deficit and a highly inflated housing sector. One result has been that we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs.... Eventually this will slide back, and we'll see more jobs in manufacturing if exports pick up. The thing is that the transition will be unlikely to be smooth.

What will happen? If you asked me a year ago I thought... a rise in interest rates, and then a collapse in the housing boom. Then the question would be could exports rise to take up the slack? But this hasn't happened... housing is falling first, without any fall in the dollar.... I've never seen economists disagreeing so much. Not about what will happen in 1 year, but what will happen in the 4th quarter, which we are half way through. Some people say rebounding. Some say worse is to come. The reason for this is conflicting trends. Housing is falling like a stone. Maybe it has hit bottom. But probably not. The fundamentals still look like housing has a long way down to go. The norm for housing construction is 4%, its now down to 5.7% down from above 6%. So I think housing will be much worse.

But as Larry Summers likes to say "you don't have to fill a flat tire through a hole." There are reasons for optimism. Business investment is still good.... Consumer spending is still going up.... I'm with the pessimists. But I'm not sure how solid my ground is.... Merrill Lynch projects a sharp rise in unemployment... it would feel like a recession.

The thing to be worried about is the difficulty of a policy response. We normally count on the Fed to respond. (Bernanke, on the whole, has had his judgment on rates vindicated.) But if this turns nasty, what will the Fed do? They will cut rates. And will this help? Where is the traction on the real economy? The problem is that rate cuts stimulate the economy mostly through the housing and construction market. In truth, business investment is not sensitive to the Fed.... Housing is where the rubber meets the road. So that is a worry...

Most Dishonest Intellectual Alive

The excellent Matthew Yglesias rends Joshua Miravchik into shreds and gobbets, and then devours the gobbets:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: "Operation Comeback": Joshua Muravchik writes in Foreign Policy about how to save neoconservatism. The main priorities will be surprising -- it involves a lot of lying, and a lot of smearing of one's enemies. For example, "'Neocon' is now widely synonymous with 'ultraconservative' or, for some, 'dirty Jew.'" Yes, it's true. Neocon is in disrepute not because neoconservative ideas make very little sense and the policies they've advocated have proven disastrous -- it's because we hate the Jews. Similarly, here's step one:

Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently reconstructed Stalinists.

What crazy canards! This here is the Amazon page for Irving Kristol's 1995 book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. John J. Miller writes that in the book, "Kristol sketches his intellectual growth, which began while he was a young man attending neo-Trotskyite meetings in Brooklyn (where he met his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb) and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., where today he is a fixture at right-of-center political gatherings." Canard! Publisher's Weekly writes, "Particularly interesting is his previously unpublished opening memoir concerning influences such as Lionel Trilling, Leo Strauss and army life as well as the founding of his magazine and his work with the American Enterprise Institute to extend conservatism beyond free enterprise to reflect "on the roots of social and cultural stability." Canard!

In his essay "A Man Without Footnotes" included in The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer recounts that "Irving Kristol at one point wrote that the two chief influences on his thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss." Canard!

Why is Foreign Policy publishing this crap?

Why shouldn't Foreign Policy? Are they in the business of publishing smart things by intelligent people seeking to understand the world? Or are they in some other business?

Matthew Yglesias on Sheri Berman's "The Primacy of Politics"

He writes:

Matthew Yglesias: [O]ne has to see the postwar era as less a triumph of social democracy per se than a coming together of diverse brands of political thought. In particular, Berman seems to badly neglect the existence of divisions within the liberal camp that proved crucial as well.... [W]hich parties would a socialist be tempted to collaborate with? Well, with the more left-wing of the liberals, it would seem, and, indeed, most of the examples Berman discusses bear that prediction out. But then who were these progressive liberals? Why did they disagree with their classical brethren? And what distinguished them from socialist reformers? Why were they interested in collaborating with the right-wing of the socialist movement?

To complain that Berman wrote a book about right-wing socialists when she should have written one about left-wing liberals would be churlish. Rather than do that, let me simply suggest that the timing of the post-war settlement (after the war, obviously) suggests that movement within the liberal camp may have been more causally decisive.... [L]ittle... happened during the fifteen years before the end of the war... to make the left more confident about the possibilities of free markets or democracy....

What the Depression, the war, and the dawning of the Cold War did bolster was the left-hand side of the argument within liberalism. Unmitigated capitalism seemed to risk not only a large dose of human suffering, but the total collapse of the liberal political order and, potentially, the triumph of Soviet Communism. Under the circumstances, a rapprochement with moderate elements within socialism starts to look rather more appealing... a growing sense... that capitalism needed to be compromised... to be saved... la[id] the groundwork for rapid... social reform.... [C]ountries that had never had a strong Marxist presence--England, the United States, Canada--also moved... much more elaborate welfare and regulatory states.... In the American case... entirely by liberals shifting to the left... even without the presence of social democracy on the ground.

This way of looking at things also casts some doubt on the view that a revival of social democracy requires merely a higher level of confidence, creativity, and elan on the part of social democrats.... [S]ocial democracy simply suffers from being redefined as the left pole of the political spectrum rather than as a "third way" in a dynamic where Communism or orthodox Marxism anchors the left.... Pre-war social democracy is an interesting intellectual movement with a story worth telling, but its moment in the sun came not because its arguments became suddenly more persuasive, but because the situation changed to one that was much more favorable to its success. With the passage of time, the situation has changed again and social democracy's position is substantially weakened...

Chris Matthews and Dick Army Are Shrill!

Former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey and current Republican Cheerleader Chris Matthews are shrill! Welcome guys!

Daily Kos: The John Kerry nonsense: One surprise: just heard Tweety [Chris Matthews] say flat out that reading the full transcript it's clear that Kerry was insulting the president, not the troops. Dick Armey was on at the time and essentially agreed and laughed about how funny it was that the GOP was feigning mock outrage. Ha ha. Ha ha. Funny funny GOP...

Wow. I used to say that everybody who wasn't on the payroll was shrill. I'm guess I'm going to have to rethink that: even people on the Republican establishment gravy train are now joining the Order of the Shrill. It's a remarkable sight.

James Glassman and Kevin Hassett Rear Their Ugly Heads Yet Again `Dow 36,000' optimists unbowed | Chicago Tribune

Ezra Klein directs us to a Bloomberg column in which James Glassman and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute continue to defend their claim back in 1999 that the DJIA would reach 36000 "very quickly," "perhaps in "three to five years":

[`Dow 36,000' optimists unbowed | Chicago Tribune

](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-061024dow-story,0,4983050.story?coll=chi-business-hed): James Glassman says his seven-year- old prediction that the Dow Jones Industrial Average will rise to 36,000 wasn't wrong, just early. Two years after Glassman and co-author Kevin Hassett published their theory, the Dow average had sunk 29 percent. Their "Dow 36,000... became metaphors for the investing excesses of the late 1990s.... "Anyone who followed their advice in 2000 got their butts handed to them," said Barry Ritholtz, chief investment officer of Ritholtz Capital Partners in New York, which manages about $100 million. "These guys come out of the woodwork when society is foaming at the mouth and receptive to these things."...

The Dow has since recovered.... The surge has improved some portfolios and may eventually do the same for the reputations of the authors, who stand by their forecasts.... Glassman, 59, defends "Dow 36,000's" original premise as well. The prediction -- that the Dow would triple by 2005 -- is still valid, he says, although he's pushed the deadline out to 2021.... "There's nothing that's occurred over the past few years that's changed our minds about the original thesis," said Glassman, who writes a syndicated investing column and is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank...

Bloomberg can surely find better people to report this than Demian McLean. You cannot validate Glassman and Hassett's original thesis by pointing to its likely value in 2021 or 2121. The original thesis was not that the Dow would rise to 36000 "someday" but that "the rise will take some time, perhaps three to five years..." (p. 18).

A better reporter than Demian McLean would have had a follow-up question, like:

Mr. Glassman: In your book, on pages 18 and 19, you sneer at one of your American Enterprise Institute colleagues who you say gave a cynical laugh at your title Dow 36000 and said, "As long as you don't say when [the Dow will reach 36000], I suppose it is all right." Your claim in your book was: "we aren't laughing. The case is compelling.... 36000 is a fair value for the Dow today... stocks should rise to such heights very quickly.... [Our readers will] learn to invest in ways that take advantage of [this] remarkable time in financial history..." Don't you owe everybody who bought your book in 1999 and 2000 at least ten times their money back?

But Demian McLean doesn't.

Econ 210a: Fall 2006: Memo Question for November 8

Memo Question for November 8:

Adam Smith's 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is not what we would call a work of "economics." What kind of a book is it? Who do you think its intended audience is? Of what is Smith trying to persuade his audience? Which of the conclusions that Smith reaches--and of which he is trying to persuade his audience--would we think of today as conclusions of "economics"?

The Unlikely Chance Victory of Social Democracy

Mark Blyth:

The Primacy of Politics: The Past, Present, and Contested Future of Social Democracy: Posted by mblyth: One of the most interesting aspects of the period discussed in Primacy was how both orthodox Marxists and orthodox liberals... "did nothing" [to try to cure the Great Depression] for different reasons, due to different (but strangely similar) interpretations of the same social reality; and both were destroyed in the maelstrom that followed their passivity.

Those who were not so blinded were a diverse bunch of revisionists.... What united them were those real-world developments that Marxism could only explain away (such as the persistence of small-scale agriculture, the growth of "middle" classes, etc.) and that required an explanation (such as the appeal of nationalism and notions of communal identity independent of supposed class position). Embracing, rather than denying such factors, Italian syndicalism grew into fascism, French reformism fell to nationalism, and German conservatism gave way to a murderous racist variant of the same. Only in Sweden did the democratic reformist project flower....

[T]o say that the failure of Marxist and Liberal ideologies opened the door to reformists who took the same materials and bricolaged them into reformist projects that were more similar than one commonly thinks is not to say that the variation between them disappears. One could see these movements as essentially similar, but to do so would be wrong. The role of race and nation in each movement is the most obvious example here.... [W]hile the embrace of reflationary economics and the primacy of domestic demand over international liquidity marks both experiments, only one of them has autarky and empire as a "built in" part of the project....

[W]hat doesn't come across in the analysis is that with the exception of the Swedish exception, these [social democratic] reformers failed, and failed just as spectacularly as their Marxist forebears. They failed in France, Germany, Spain, all of Eastern Europe.... In contrast, fascism was an astonishing success. It was popular, stable, and if it had not been for one thing, the racial Darwinism of fascist elites leading them to war with powers far stronger than they were, it might have survived.

Social democracy may have been a good idea, but it was also a post-war phenomenon brought about by the devastation fascism brought upon itself. If World War Two hadn't happened, if Strasser had bested Hitler, if the xenophobia had stayed in the bottle, would fascism have fallen?... [I]f the alternative of the Soviet Union had not risen to post-war prominence, would the need to placate the working classes of Europe with welfarism and democracy been so pressing? Would the victory have come about at all, never mind later than advertised...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (An Anne Applebaum/Washington Post Edition)

Why on earth should anybody pay money to read this?

Anne Applebaum:

Supporting Democracy -- Or Not - washingtonpost.com: [N]o one can claim that the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has gone unmarked.... But as the anniversary moves into its second week, I'd like to celebrate in a different way -- by asking what, if anything, we in the West have learned since 1956. As many have observed, the American role in the Hungarian Revolution was hardly admirable. Although American governments had spent much of the previous decade encouraging Hungary and other Soviet satellite states to rebel -- using radio broadcasts, speeches, even balloons carrying anti-communist pamphlets -- no one was prepared for the real thing...

No, no, no, no, no! None of this "much of the previous decade" stuff. The Truman administration's policy was "containment." The Eisenhower administration's policy was also "containment"--but as boob bait for the bubbas Eisenhower, Nixon, Dulles, McCarthy, and company all pretended to be for "rollback."

[T]he initial American reaction was confused.... Only after four days of street fighting did the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles -- a man who had spoken often of liberating the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe -- finally declare that the U.S. government did not consider the Hungarians "potential allies." The message was clear: The West would not intervene.... [But] Radio Free Europe was explaining to its listeners how to make molotov cocktails and hinting at the American invasion to come.... The result was a bloody mess.The Hungarians kept fighting even after Soviet tanks arrived, believing help was on the way. Hundreds died. And Western policy in the region suffered a setback from which it took nearly 40 years to recover....

Once again we have an American president who speaks openly and no doubt sincerely about human rights and democracy... Congress, the media and even whole fiefdoms of the State Department that dedicate themselves to democracy promotion.... Try to imagine what would happen if an imaginary group of pro-democracy Saudis staged a street rebellion in Riyadh. No one, of course, would be prepared.... By simultaneously supporting democracy and stability, we would anger the rest of the Arab world, make U.S.-Saudi relations impossible however the rebellion was resolved, and probably damage, in multiple unforeseeable ways, U.S. interests all over the world....

[T]he moral? Don't blame George W. Bush: Chaos in U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. But pity those, whether the Hungarians in 1956, or the Shiites in 1991, who take our democracy rhetoric too literally...

Nonsense. Blame Bush. And blame Eisenhower and Dulles too--Eisenhower and Dulles both knew better, but got into bed with Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy with unseemly enthusiasm.

With writers like Anne Applebaum so eager to whitewash George W. Bush, I don't think the Washington Post will last a decade.

Hoisted From Comments: Dean Baker on the Auto Sector and Quarterly GDP Estimates

Sounds right to me:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Now I'm Confused About the Q3 Auto Production Numbers...: Okay, it seems that we have a 3rd quarter problem here. Here's the data for the last 3 years:

2004 Q2 -- -7.1%
2004 Q3 -- 16.6%
2004 Q4 -- 1.9%

2005 Q2 -- -0.7%
2005 Q3 -- 22.6%
2005 Q4 -- -19.1%

2006 Q2 -- -9.4%
2006 Q3 -- 25.7%

So, we seem left with 2 theories. Auto makers have become very pessimistic in the second quarters of the last 3 years, very optimistic in the third, and then very pessimistic again in the 4th, or that BEA has messed up its seasonal adjustment factors. (They assume that automakers will retool in the 3rd quarter and instead they are doing it earlier or later).

I vote for the second theory. The implication is that we overstated growth in the 3rd quarter by somewhere around 0.8 pp (and we did the same last year) and that the BEA numbers will understate true growth in the 4th quarter by perhaps 0.5 pp. Get your recession hats out.

Why Oh Why Can't Berkeley Have Better Law Professors?

Michiko Kakutani thinks that John Yoo is a shoddy and dishonest writer:

War by Other Means By John Yoo - Books - Review - New York Times: What Torture Is and Isn’t: A Hard-Liner’s Argument: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Published: October 31, 2006: In the tumultuous days and weeks after 9/11, a young lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel named John Yoo became a key architect of the Bush administration’s legal response to the terrorist threat and a strong advocate of its expansive view of presidential power. The controversial opinions he worked on would elicit charges that the administration was subverting the Constitution, tipping the balance of power among the three branches of government, trampling the civil rights of detainees and authorizing coercive interrogation.

Mr. Yoo worked on memos and opinions that determinedly attempted to redefine torture. He also argued that the terrorist attacks created “an emergency situation” in America, and that given this situation, “the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties.”

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Yoo wrote a memorandum opinion, which declared that “the President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.” And in January 2002, he was a co-author of a memo arguing that “customary international law has no binding legal effect on either the President or the military” and that “neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention conditions in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or to trial by military commission of al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners.”

In his combative new book, “War by Other Means,” Mr. Yoo — who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law — lays out the thinking behind the Bush White House’s legal maneuvers. While he makes many of the same arguments that other members of the administration have used to defend its aggressive post-9/11 policies, he is more candid than many of his colleagues about his fervent belief in unfettered executive power. And his book makes timely if often disturbing reading, given the Supreme Court’s recent Hamdan ruling (which repudiated the military tribunals created by the administration to put Guantánamo detainees on trial without due process) and Congress’s subsequent passage, in September, of a detainee treatment bill, which gives the president new power over terrorism suspects and deprives foreigners detained in United States military prisons of the right to challenge their imprisonment.

Mr. Yoo suggests in these pages that the war on terror is a new paradigm that calls for new tactics; that the judiciary should defer to the executive branch in wartime; and that those who quarrel with the Bush White House are soft on fighting terrorism. One of his favorite tactics in this book is to create a ridiculous caricature of administration critics’ views and then dismiss them. For instance, he writes: “A Geneva Convention POW camp is supposed to look like the World War II camps seen in movies like ‘Stalag 17’ or ‘The Great Escape.’ But because Gitmo does not look like this, critics automatically declare that detainees’ human rights are being violated.”

In this volume, Mr. Yoo argues that the Constitution grants the president “the leading role in foreign affairs,” and that the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress a week after 9/11, gives the president broad powers to wage the war on terror the way he wants to. Indeed, Mr. Yoo says, “We wrote the law as broadly as we did” to “make sure there could be no claim in the future that the President was acting in the war on terrorism without congressional support.”

Major figures in Congress have said repeatedly that this law does not give the president such sweeping powers; Mr. Yoo, meanwhile, contends that the ambiguous wording covers everything from the implicit power “to detain enemy combatants” to the implicit authority “to carry out electronic surveillance to prevent further attacks.”

Mr. Yoo has not used his academic background in the legal aspects of war powers issues and executive authority to make a persuasive case here for the administration’s actions. Instead, he has written a book that reads like a combination of White House talking points and a partisan brief on presidential prerogatives — a book that is strewn with preposterous assertions, contorted reasoning and illogical conclusions. He writes that “because of our aggressive policies post 9/11, al Qaeda is no longer the threat it was.” He suggests that might makes right: “At this moment in world history the United States’ conduct should bear the most weight in defining the customs of war. Our defense budget is greater than the defense spending of the next fifteen nations combined.”

And he contends that President Bush’s decision to secretly authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans in search of evidence of terrorist activity without court-approved warrants “does not signal that we live under a dictator, or that the separation of powers has failed,” because Congress, which “has total control over funding and significant powers of oversight,” could simply decide to “do away with the NSA as a whole.”

Just as the administration cherry-picked intelligence to make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, so Mr. Yoo cherry-picks information in this volume. Of the Schlesinger report on the Abu Ghraib prison, Mr. Yoo says it found that the abuses there “resulted not from orders out of Washington, but from flagrant disregard of interrogation and detention rules by the guards.” He does not grapple with those portions of the report that found “there is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.”

August 2002 memos worked on by Mr. Yoo addressed the question of what constituted torture and just what might lead to prosecution by the International Criminal Court. In this book he amplifies his views on this subject, quibbling over the meaning of phrases like “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” and “prolonged mental harm.”

In addition, he makes much of wording in the Convention Against Torture (ratified by the United States in 1994), that requires the criminalization of torture and also declares that parties “undertake to prevent ... other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture.” He uses these passages to argue that there is an important distinction to be made “between torture on the one hand, and harsh measures characterized as ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment’ on the other.”

Concerning a 2004 decision by the Justice Department to revise an earlier opinion (which had been widely condemned in Congress and by human rights groups as laying the groundwork for the abuses at Abu Ghraib), Mr. Yoo, intentionally or not, seems to buttress arguments made by critics of the administration, writing that it was an “exercise in political image-making” designed to help ease the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.

He adds that this 2004 opinion “included a footnote to say that all interrogation methods that earlier opinions had said were legal were still legal. In other words, the differences in the opinions were for appearances’ sake. In the real world of interrogation policy nothing had changed. The new opinion just reread the statute to deliberately blur the interpretation of torture as a short-term political maneuver in response to public criticism.”

Mr. Yoo is cavalierly dismissive in this book of critics of administration policy, shrugging off concerns about violations of civil rights and presidential overreaching. “Is the Bush administration using public fear to consolidate political power?” he asks. “If it is, it has only another two years to go, and new security policies generally last only as long as the emergency. Lincoln’s military courts and military justice did not last beyond the Civil War and Reconstruction. FDR’s internments ended after World War II. The President and Congress usually give up their emergency powers voluntarily, and if they don’t, courts step in.”

Never mind that there is no foreseeable end date to the war on terror. Never mind that the judiciary, which Mr. Yoo says in this passage can be counted on to curb any possible overstepping by the Bush White House, may have had its power to review the treatment of detainees sharply curtailed by Congress’s recent passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — the same judiciary Mr. Yoo repeatedly berates in this tendentious book for “pushing into matters where it didn’t belong,” and for impinging upon the powers of the presidency, an office whose function he asserts is “to act forcefully and independently to repel serious threats to the nation.”

If I were Chancellor Birgeneau, I would be scrutinizing Berkeley Law School's tenure-vetting process very, very carefully right now. We have evidence that it doesn't work too well.

Wolf Blitzer Is Unhappy...

Billmon at the Whiskey Bar watches Wolf Blitzer. Wolf Blitzer is upset because Lynne Cheney called him a traitor:

Whiskey Bar: Crying Uncle: BLITZER: I have been covering the Cheneys for many years, including on a day-to-day basis when he was the defense secretary during the first Gulf War and I was CNN's Pentagon correspondent.... I was surprised when she came out swinging on Friday, surprised... at her sniping at my patriotism. [CNN Late Edition: October 29, 2006]

Why was Blitzer surprised? Did he really think that carrying the Cheneys' water for two decades means that the Cheneys owe him something?

Theological Bait-and-Switch

P.Z. Myers on theological bait-and-switch:

Pharyngula: Carroll steps up to the plate...: Category: GodlessnessPosted on: October 30, 2006 6:00 AM, by PZ Myers: The physicist Sean Carroll takes on Eagleton, and also makes a few comments on The God Delusion--key point, I think: Dawkins took on too many issues at once in the book, and opened himself up to criticisms on the weaker parts that are used to dismiss the stronger parts. I agree.

Most of the discussion takes up a weakness in theology, and it parallels the weakness in Dawkins' book: the confusion between different concepts of this god-thingie. Theologians play that one like a harp, though, turning it into a useful strategem. Toss the attractive, personal, loving or vengeful anthropomorphic tribal god to the hoi-polloi to keep them happy, no matter how ridiculous the idea is and how quickly it fails on casual inspection, while holding the abstract, useless, lofty god in reserve to lob at the uppity atheists when they dare to raise questions.

When we complain that the god literally described in the Old Testament is awfully petty and hey, doesn't this business of a trinity and an immortal god being born as a human and dying (sorta) sound silly, they can just retort that our theology is so unsophisticated--Christians don't really believe in that stuff.

It gets annoying. We need two names for these two concepts, I think. How about just plain "God" for the personal, loving, being that most Christians believe in, and "Oom" for the bloodless, fuzzy, impersonal abstraction of the theologians? Not that the theologians will ever go along with it--the last thing they want made obvious is the fact that they're studying a completely different god from the creature most of the culture is worshipping.

You Think Dick Cheney's Going to Slip Up?

Spencer Ackerman:

toohotfortnr: a liar loves to lie: Exhibit A: Dick Cheney to a conservative radio host.

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Exhibit B: Tony Snow at the White House:

"You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will," Snow said, according to the Reuters news agency. "You think Dick Cheney's going to slip up on something like this? No, come on."

So: will it be me or your lying eyes? And "as a matter of common sense" Cheney wouldn't be endorsing torture. Oh, no, wait, that's a matter of common decency.

You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to shoot somebody in the face while three sheets to the wind either.

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by This Idiot?

Matthew Yglesias bangs his head against the wall:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: When the going gets tough, George W. Bush digs deeper into the cocoon of ignoramous conservative journalism, hunkering down for a lengthy chat with die-hard administration loyalists from inside the print media universe. As Mike Crowley notes, you can't get this much raw transcript of Bush without a good dose of hilarity. You also can't get this much Bush without noticing that, like Rick Santorum, the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly frightening ignorance and dangerous analytic errors.

Here's Bush on the Israel-Lebanon War:

Iran empowered Hezbollah, Hezbollah takes the attack, and -- which creates an interesting dynamic, and it gives us an opportunity to fashion kind of -- an alliance of reasonable people headed toward a clash -- all kinds of different ways, by the way -- with extremists and radicals.

It's easy to get distracted by the fact that Bush doesn't seem familiar with the English language and miss the fact that beneath the garbled syntax Bush is making a clear -- and utterly incorrect -- factual claim here that the upshot of the war was to cement an alliance between the United States, Israel, and moderate forces in the Arab world.

He calls John Abizaid "one of the great thinkers" and attributes to him

this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here . . . As a matter of fact, they'll be more emboldened to come after us. They will be able to find more recruits to come after us.

He seems unaware that his National Intelligence Council has concluded the reverse (IISS in London, too, along with, I think, just about everyone). In a hilarious reprise of his earlier Lebanon remarks he enjoins the government of Syria:

Do not destabilize Siniora . . . helping the Siniora government is in this country's interests and it's a priority.

We, um, had our local proxy ally strangle the Lebanese economy and launch airstrikes against its basic infrastructure and military facilities, but stabilizing the government there is a priority?

It goes on and on like this. The President, it seems to me, entered office in January 2000 utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and has spent the past six years filling in the blanks with pleasant illusions and straight-up misinformation.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach himnow.

Why Is Apple Still Alive?

With 5% of the operating system market share, Apple should be dead--overwhelmed by Microsoft's resources. But it isn't:

Technology News: Commentary: Under IBM's Hood, Oracle's Linux Move, Apple's Vista Surprise: [B]ased on the chatter I'm seeing it appears very likely that Apple is preparing a little surprise for Microsoft at MacWorld which happens at the same time as the Consumer Electronics Show in January. While Microsoft and partners will be talking about Vista in advance of the launch of that product at CES, Apple, along with Intel, will be launching Apple's version of the Media Center with iTV and Leopard. That's right -- Leopard. It looks like this puppy is nearly ready if I'm reading the signs right -- and Apple is clearly setting up for something big.

Now Intel's part goes beyond the chip and appears to contain elements of Viiv, if not all of that platform. Viiv is actually kind of cool, it's just that Intel has not been able to explain effectively what it is and, as a result, the market hasn't been particularly excited about it on Windows. However, Apple knows how to sell and with a problem where the technology is good but the marketing's not, Apple has the skills to make a huge contribution.

Recall how Apple took the MP3 player market by storm by simply looking at what was out there and figuring out how to do it right. Microsoft's Media Center isn't fully cooked, even with Vista, something that Intel actually created Viiv to fix. Now, it appears, the two of them are collaborating to do the Media Center right, and if they hit the target as well as they did with the iPod, which is likely, they could actually have a second massive success on their hands.

So, if you are into technology, particularly if you are into Apple, you'll want to hang around MacWorld in January for the Apple pre-Vista surprise party! Oops. You didn't hear that here...

William Arkin Is Shrill!

William Arkin on the stupidity that is Bush defense budget planning:

A Tale of Two Budgets - Early Warning: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security: A Tale of Two Budgets: I rarely have written about the defense budget, seeing it almost as a political side show to policy, with twists and turns requiring constant attention and special expertise to decipher.

The budget, moreover, seems secondary to war itself, the domain solely of battling bureaucrats who have little impact on -- and hardly care about -- what happens in the real world.

Somehow, while we weren't looking, the annual defense budget bloated to a half a trillion.

Congress just administers the madness, adding line items in a behind the scenes ritual: pork mongers and Cunningham's on the take, Democrats trying to prove their martial spirit by arguing for even more, junior secretaries of both parties offering brilliant amendments to show that they care about the troops more still.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has hit upon a perfect device for both public control and executive autonomy. He has turned crisis into a permanent state of excess. "Emergency" funding has now become the regular state of affairs. We have, in fact, two defense budgets, a regular budget that receives some scrutiny and is somewhat limited, and an emergency supplemental that grows ever larger without much outside oversight.

The budget situation doesn't threaten to bankrupt America. And people seem only too happy to pay to keep the military over there, cowed in an endless post-September 11, 2001, offering.... Since September 11, the defense department and the national security bureaucracy has been submitting two budgets to Congress: a normal authorization and appropriations request and a supplemental or "additional" request for "emergency" funding of the war on terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan.... For five years now, the Pentagon has been declaring a budget emergency, operating with an annual supplemental... in a Pentagon version of pork barrel spending, it also hides favorite and controversial research, development and procurement programs from regular scrutiny.... The supplemental budget and a set of supplemental budget amendments are submitted to Congress without the detailed written justifications that accompany the regular budget.

It is the absence of a paper trail, a kind of bureaucratic offering to the Congressional purse holders, which has resulted in a growing sense of disquiet on Capitol Hill.... In June, the Senate approved by 98-0 an amendment by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to require the president to request funding for Iraq in its regular, annual budget submission. The Senate-passed fiscal year 2007 budget resolution put a cap of $90 billion on total emergency funding.

Last week, according to reporting in Inside the Pentagon and by Reuters, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England directed the military services to base their requests for funding of the "longer war against terror" on supplemental budgets. England told the services that such requests should not be limited to Iraq, Afghanistan or other direct operations, but should include as well general modernization programs. England's avoidance of the regular budget is because regular annual defense spending (to the tune of $500 billion) is both under the control of Office of Management and Budget caps and Congressional oversight...