PMC Commentary

Back from the holiday

Back from the Ozarks, as well as too much food, way too many college football games and a rather poor Internet connection, which saved me from the temptation to post instead of to overeat and watch Missouri beat Arkansas. Next Saturday, the Tigers go up against Alabama. That could be grim.

Also from the home front, the NYT quoted yours truly on Friday in an opinion-page piece on Jim Webb's possibly quixotic race. I don't see it that way, and I further think that Ed Kilgore, whom the Times also quotes, perfectly encapsulates punditry's utter misapprehension of Webb's potential appeal. But, much more on that in the coming months.

For now, good to be back, and I hope you also had a pleasant Thanksgiving.

 

An Ozarkian respite

Tomorrow my daughter and I are heading for Southwest Missouri, where, I can assure you, I'll keep both my arms to my sides and never go for my waistband, which could give the appearance of an attempted felony and thus instigate a rain of highway patrol bullets. I shall advise my daughter--a most ferocious-looking 15-year-old in deceptively feminine garb--to do the same.

I'll return Sunday. In the interim, I'll post as national events dictate. I don't expect an eventful Thanksgiving break--therefore you can expect radio silence here--but circumstances have a way of intruding, and I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. Writing is a severe addiction, and I've always found that holidays from it are pure torture. With exceptionally little variation, I rise daily at 6 a.m. and sit down to read the online papers about 6:05; by 6:15 my opinionated and mildly caffeinated blood is stirring, and by 6:30 I'm ready to pop off about something--or other.

The effort required to not pop off about everything under the sun is enormous, however (usually) I find restraint in the knowledge that no one is likely to give a damn about my uninformed opinions on modern art or European fashion or Tex-Mex cooking. So I restrict myself mostly to what I've studied for some years: politics and all things political, which, in my informed opinion, are remarkably expansive enough. There's no greater sport than politics, and for sure there's no other sport that carries such weighty, real-life consequences.

What horrifies me most in this age, and particularly in this country, is that we're losing our interest in that supreme practice of republicanism, loosely defined as a dedication to public affairs. I care less that my fellow man or woman may be an upper-case R or a lower-case d than I care that they're simply engaged, for the greater the pluralistic battle the better. The founders knew that, and they counted on mass dedication to see us through. I'll give thanks if we can soon remind ourselves of that obligation.

Oh dear, I'm sermonizing. I best stop. See you Sunday, or something like that.

***

Arrived safely, except for my swerving the car in laughter at Rush Limbaugh's discovery that the Pilgrims were ... religious! They weren't thanking the Indians; no, they were thanking God. That's what the first Thanksgiving was all about. This seems to have come as news to Rush.

Evidently he didn't know that the earliest New Englanders attributed everything to God--good crops, bad crops, good weather, bad weather, births, slaughters, whatever--hence all thanks, whenever something turned out in less than disaster, traveled upward.

But of course Rush's fundamental point was racist--that Native Americans didn't really count. For three hours this morning there was that, plus lots of nonsensical prattle about Obama as "head of the black, urban wing of the Democrat Party." Three hours of racism.

 

Some more thoughts on Ferguson

I was just watching the Brown family's attorney in a news conference and he went right at "the process." That's where he's winning, and that's where the prosecutor lost.

"What scenario can we offer where they finally indict police officers for killing us?" asked Benjamin Crump. A powerful question, the answer to which the prosecutor obliviously short-circuited through the grand jury process. The more I think about it, the more staggering prosecutor Bob McCulloch's decision becomes: To have deprived the Brown family and the citizens of Ferguson a full and public hearing, meaning a jury trial; to have deliberately ignited such raw emotions in a racial tinderbox; and then, just to top it all off, to have staged a whimpering, bellyaching press conference whose self-defensiveness was an embarrassment to watch--a more mishandled "process" would be hard to conjure.

The evidence provided by the prosecutor via grand jury testimony has been characterized by some as "conclusive," which, in legal terms, is essentially meaningless. That is to say, rare is the evidence that can't be credibly disputed by an accomplished attorney, and just as rare is the testimony that can't be cut to pieces by an equally accomplished cross-examiner. But of course grand jury settings don't allow for that kind of adversarial perusal. The process is instead in the controlling hands of the prosecutor, and its results can fairly be deemed to be the prosecutor's wish.

And that's where the Brown family's attorney is winning: In attacking the process, from the dictatorial calling of a grand jury to the prosecutor's inane press conference. Benjamin Crump understands the politics, the emotions, and the seeming unfairness of this case--and he's brilliantly exploiting them all. Bob McCulloch? In the long run he has lost, I'd wager. Crump will get his jury trial, in a federal court of law.

 

No, this won't do

Which four words below--hint: they're nestled between commas--veritably leap from the page and throttle the others?

House Republican leaders are beginning to coalesce around a strategy to avoid a government shutdown in less than a month.

The likely proposal would fund nearly the entire government through September 2015, but immigration enforcement related funding would be renewed on a short-term basis, according to several high-ranking GOP lawmakers and aides who described the plan as it stands now.

The strategy is designed to keep the government open, while satisfying the base, which is livid with President Back Obama for issuing an executive order that ends deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants.

I see the strategy, but for the base, where's the satisfaction?

 

11 out of 162,000

FiveThirtyEight:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable.... Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.

Which of course means that prosecutors go before grand juries with their minds made up, which arbitrarily bars other minds from the decision-making process. That's why so many residents of Ferguson will interpret the grand jury's decision as nakedly illegitimate, which, further, is why a jury trial in the Brown case was essential. The shooting required a full, public and transparent hearing. Only that would have kept the peace.

 

In Ferguson, a botched, boneheaded non-prosecution

From my reading of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's coverage of grand jury testimony, I gather that in Missouri a police officer is justified in shooting you dead if the officer so much as suspects you of merely attempting to commit a felony while armed--which, furthermore, is a condition that requires no actual weapon, as one might think of a weapon, since your hands, under Missouri law, are considered weapons themselves.

Is a broader standard for the use of deadly force even possible?

But not to worry, since prosecutors in the Brown case didn't fuss much about Missouri's deadly-force law, which is clearly at odds with a relevant Supreme Court decision, which, quoting the Post-Dispatch, "says that an officer using deadly force against a fleeing felon must have probable cause that the felon poses a significant risk of harm to the officer or the community." Ponder this absolutely astonishing portion of the Post-Dispatch's coverage:

[An assistant prosecuting attorney] told [grand jurors] to take the copy of Missouri law that was provided to them at the start of the grand jury process and to fold it in half. "What we have discovered ... is that the statute in Missouri does not comply with the case law" [said the asst. p.a.]. Of the portion that does not conform, she said, "Ignore it totally." When jurors started asking more technical questions, [she] told them just to disregard the statute.

That would be the guiding statute on the use of deadly force, which was the central issue in the Brown shooting. If it's to be "disregarded," then quite literally lawlessness within the law--a rough kind of the-law-is-what-it-is-as-we-make-it-up-on-the-fly--became the grand jury's legal standard. Which is to say, there was no standard under which the grand jury could have indicted, hence the law, or rather the instructed lack of it, was bound to pre-absolve Officer Wilson.

Perhaps he should be absolved. I don't know. But the sort of sloppy, carefree legal amorphousness reported by the Post-Dispatch--Folks, just disregard the statute under which you're to decide on indictment--would not, I should think, have been tolerated by a conscientious judge or competent prosecutor in an adversarial jury trial. In that instance a fuller presentation of the law itself would have been afforded the jury. And that's the point.

As it stands, the Brown family is left to seek justice under federal civil-rights law, since they've been denied a state jury trial. Meanwhile, that denial will rip Ferguson and perhaps other communities apart--which was another consideration the prosecutors seemed not to weigh with much care. That was a huge and exceptionally unpragmatic mistake, since the socio-politics of this case could not be responsibly dismissed. And that, it seems to me, is the supreme point.

 

In Ferguson, a bad beginning

I quite agree with the chorus of disparate voices on CNN expressing dismay at the postponed, 8 p.m. announcement in Ferguson. The "drama" surrounding the grand jury's decision has been far "overdone," said a former FBI agent appearing with Wolf Blitzer, whose opinion completed a trifecta of harmonious bafflement: law enforcement, legal analysts and journalists are all together in a kind of WTF? perplexity.

What possible benefit is there in delaying the release of such a delicate grand jury decision? Even Missouri's governor didn't know, couldn't say. What the delay has done, at least for me, is heighten suspicion that the decision is: No indictment. Yes the schools are closed and most businesses will be closed by 8 p.m., but the dramatic suspense imposed by the prosecutor's office has only sharpened community tensions.

This was just dumb.

***

8:32 p.m. It seems to me that a trial by jury, on, at minimum, a lesser manslaughter charge, would have been a wiser political choice for the prosecutor (and let's face it, there's no evading the essential politics of this case), certainly a more satisfactory choice for the family, and a more peaceable choice for the community. The grand jury's decision not to indict undoubtedly will be interpreted by many as the prosecutor's exclusive pre-judgment, given the discretionary power that prosecutors hold before a grand jury. 

It also seems the prosecutor's 24-minute explanation of his actions was excessively self-defensive, which was telling in itself.    

 

Maybe crates of air freshener?

Obama on campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee:

I think the American people, you know, they’re gonna want--you know, that new-car smell. You know, their own ... they wanna drive somethin’ off the lot that ... doesn’t have ... as much mileage as me.

I imagine Hillary, tooting around in her battered Tin Lizzie of endless campaigns and a dreadfully familiar history, hopes Obama comes up with another metaphor.

 

Dionne is right: Obama's unilateralism was inevitable

Recent polling (from Latino Decisions) shows "basically every Democratic Latino voter supports [Obama's executive] actions, which is not unexpected, but the support holds up across independent and Republican Latino voters.... 85% of independents and 76% of Latinos who identify as Republicans support Obama’s move."

Despite the heaps of justified anguish over Obama's unilateralism, one can't help but relish the political splendor of it all. Republicans have not only foolishly lost a generation of Latino support, they'll wreck themselves in overreaction to the president's move. It's what they do, and Obama should have done it to them even earlier.

As E.J. Dionne observed this morning: "This is a historic moment when all of the divisions, misunderstandings and hatreds of President Obama’s time in office have come to a head. We are in a different place than we were. We are also in a place we were bound to get to eventually." Again, despite the anguish, it wasn't Obama who put us in this place. It was congressional Republicans. They own this.

It's unrealistic of commentators to engage in detached, scholarly debates about proper constitutional procedures when two thirds of our governing branches have held our traditional constitutional system in such unprecedented contempt. I'd be far more worried about Obama's actions if I believed they presaged some permanency. I don't. If Obama's political gambit works, then our constitutional system of balances and negotiations and compromises will someday (soon) return, because the electorate will have unseated the unprecedented problem children. In a way, Obama is rescuing the system by abusing it.

If I've any issue with the president's handling of the fallout, it's in his explanation of consistency. It rings false. Clearly he changed his mind from a year and two years ago, and it makes me cringe to hear him say otherwise. No one is buying his explanation, which has now cheapened his action. Why couldn't the president have simply said that he indeed changed his mind, and that his changed mind came about from fresh legal thinking and empirical research on the matter?

 

Lindsey Graham, what a guy

I have in my mind one unshakable image of Sen. Lindsey Graham--an image of screaming insincerity contained in a transparent vessel of aw-shucksiness. The image comes not from his days in the U.S. Senate, though; rather, it comes from his time spent as a House agitator of the Clinton impeachment fiasco. I recall him sitting in a judiciary committee hearing announcing that he had just received news of some personal attack having been launched by the White House--against whom I forget--and Lindsey was in despair. Why can't we have civility? he wailed at some length. These politics of personal destruction were getting out of hand, he added. The poor man was inconsolable.

This from one of the chief instigators of the early Republican politics of personal destruction.

What a fraud, I thought at the time. And he hasn't disappointed me since. In the intervening years we've been treated to Lindsey's aw-shucks military revisionism, his aw-shucks yearning for bipartisanship, and of course his aw-shucks clarity about President Obama's abomination of ... Benghazi. He's as folksy as ever. Thus yesterday, on CNN's "State of the Union," he expertly dissected the House Intelligence Committee's clearing (the eighth such clearing) of the administration on any Benghazi wrongdoing as "crap."

Which, I'm sure, the homefolk ate up. Lindsey's, that is.

 

He did what?

Ashton Carter, a former deputy defense secretary who is said to be in the running for Chuck Hagel's job, "built upon academic specialties in medieval history and theoretical physics to become the Pentagon’s top expert on budgets and weapons," says the Times.

Well, at least that's easier to follow than the plot of Interstellar.

 

The firing of Chuck Hagel is worrisome

Chuck Hagel's sacking is a disturbing signal, though I can't say the act itself is very surprising.

As the NY Times comments, "Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts--or administration policy--in an effective manner." This is no recent phenomenon. His time in the Senate was most notably marked by high praise from anti-Iraq war activists, but that praise arose more from Hagel's simple opposition to an unmistakably dumb war than from his eloquence in framing that opposition. He was often halting in his expressions, and at times his disordered thoughts bordered on incoherence. Hagel's recent appearances with Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey have served only to highlight his deficiencies in extemporaneity. Frankly, I found his selection as defense secretary more surprising than his dismissal.

What's disturbing, as noted, is the signal sent by Hagel's dismissal. The Times reports that his firing comes from criticism leveled at "the government’s early response to several national security issues, including the Ebola crisis and the threat posed by the Islamic State." This, however, seems arrestingly weak compared to another explanation offered: "[administration] officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ." Said one of those officials: "The next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus."

As in, hawkish? Consider Hagel's past non-interventionist sentiments, and then consider President Obama's recent decision to reengage American troops in Afghanistan combat, as well, of course, as our creeping reinvolvement in the selfsame sectarian hellhole from which Hagel previously advocated retreat. One can almost hear Hagel, privately, in the Oval Office: Don't do this.

That kind of foresight doesn't require eloquence; indeed the bluntness called for tends to really annoy chief executives. Off with its head.

 

Iraq: another class act in corruption

It's compare-and-contrast time.

Despite roughly $25 billion worth of American training and equipment over the past 10 years and far more from the Iraqi treasury ... the pattern of corruption and patronage in the Iraqi government forces threatens to undermine a new American-led effort to drive out the extremists, even as President Obama is doubling to 3,000 the number of American troops in Iraq.

***

Corruption played a significant role in thwarting American objectives in Vietnam by contributing to the South Vietnam government's lack of legitimacy. The heavy handed and corrupt government of South Vietnam actually made the countryside fertile for the insurgency of the Viet Cong and the communists. Successive governments left much to be desired and too readily turned a blind eye to corruption and incompetence.

The comparisons are easy. But the contrasts? Aside from Iraq's majority Shiite population being ideologically immunized from the ISIS insurgency through violent sectarianism--unlike the South Vietnamese peasantry's embrace of invading and indigenous antigovernment forces--the contrasts are damn near invisible. What we have is just another client state more interested in personal enrichment than national defense; and another round of American treasure and, potentially, American blood being poured into it.

GlobalSecurity.org remarks that "Corruption was (and is) endemic throughout the developing world and ... to have expected South Vietnam to be an exception was perhaps unrealistic." The next round will always be different, won't it.

 

Kasich is wrong, but Webb would be right

Dan Balz observes somewhat admiringly that John Kasich is running fast and on the outside lane. In this presidential season's first unofficial debate last week, at the annual Republican Governors Conference, Kasich confronted fellow governors Bobby Jindal, Mike Pence, Rick Perry and Scott Walker on stage. In terms of positioning--the art of "distinguishing" oneself from others--"the first round went to Kasich," says Balz.

The Ohio governor zagged when the others zigged, warning against an overreaction to President Obama’s immigration action, defending expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare and imploring his party to find ways to solve big problems despite differences with the president.

Of course it's not difficult to distinguish oneself in a Republican primary race: Just take rational positions on any given topics and you'll stand out like a throbbing thumb. Let's see, as I recall, 2012's frontrunner in the field of sanity-positioning was Jon Huntsman. Enough said? While the former ambassador and governor was trying, for instance, to remind the base that science has advanced beyond sorcery and alchemy, the other candidates were shrewdly investing in efforts to sound as crazy as Herman Cain. The sprint to ultimate lunacy was dicey for a while, what with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in heat, and turning it up, but Mitt finally pieced together a winning incoherence.

Thus I'm puzzled as to why Gov. Kasich would take the Huntsman route, but not too puzzled. His idiosyncratic approach is characteristic; he figures, I suppose, that his folksy, vaguely pragmatic, tell-it-like-it-is style has got him this far, so naturally it will take him even farther. What he's not figuring is that Ohio Republicans aren't Iowa and South Carolina primary voters.

Similarly, he's crafting a campaign that puts the general election before the primaries. This is a mistake.

It's a mistake that Hillary is making as well--assuming someone credibly challenges her from the left. Enter Jim Webb, who, as you know, has already entered. That he'll stake out a less interventionist, more intelligible foreign policy than that intimated so far by Mrs. Clinton is clear enough. This will win him early converts, especially in antiwar states like Iowa. In my opinion, to better accentuate his positioning on foreign policy he'll need to be bolder in confronting Clinton by name, although that's more a matter of style than substance.

But also from the left, he will--during the primaries--need to sharpen his stance on domestic policy. And by that I mean he'll need to transcend all the pedestrian, Clintonesque Third Way talk about "bipartisanship," "working across the aisle," "finding common ground," and related gibberish of the emptiest sort. It worked in 2008, before the right's Great Partisan Desolation; but today it'll inspire no one on the left, because (correctly) no one on the left believes it.

Such platitudes are fodder for the general election's centrists who still believe in the mythology of potential political harmony, and in the general election they likely will work for the Democrat, given that he or she will have a blue Electoral map to lean on. But for now, Webb--as well as any other possible challenger--must distinguish himself from Hillary in striking and more definably center-left ways. It's either that, or Hillary will bury him in undifferentiated platitudes.

 

On Benghazi, if they'd just say "Sorry"

From the House Intelligence Committee, what a paradoxical bundle of cynicism: yet another tranche of refreshing albeit superfluous honesty revealed in the disingenuous shadows of a Friday night trash dump. Two years of the loudest of hyperpartisan scandalmongering--Benghazi, Benghazi, yes they'd expose the truth about Benghazi, surely the greatest betrayal of America since Arnold--only to scurry off in a whimper.

Well, it's mostly out the door. Rep. Trey Gowdy's select committee will use the Intelligence Committee's findings "to determine," says a spokesman, "the full facts of what happened in Benghazi ... and contribute toward our final, definitive accounting of the attack." Gowdy's will be the eighth definitive accounting--all seven predecessors found what the six preceding the House Intel Committee found: nothing. No CIA or U.S. military impropriety, no intelligence failure, no nefarious "stand down" order, no evidence of secret arms transfers, and, above all, no wickedness by Obama administration officials.

And you know what I found this morning? Not a single story about the Intel Committee's findings on Drudge. Not a fucking word.

Glancing at Web aggregators, with the exception of HotAir.com (which launches a weak semantic assault on the non-differentiation between an intelligence "failure" and an intelligence "wrong call"), there are also no reactive stories from Fox News, National Review Online, Weekly Standard, Power Line, The Blaze, Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, the Daily Caller, Red State or Right Wing News.

As always, it's less the partisan crime than the spineless cover-up and subterranean silence that truly insult, and show great contempt for the body politic. Few who understand politics ever particularly begrudged the GOP its manic obsession with Benghazi. It riled the base, provided a platform from which to attack the likely Democratic nominee in 2016, raised oodles of cash for the party and its affiliated henchmen--all rather standard-issue political gamesmanship. But now the jig is up, laid bare, incontrovertibly dead. Rather than contemptuous silence, at least a Perryesque "Oops" would be nice. But of course it won't come, for there is no honor on the right.