Can We Please Start Letting Crises Go To Waste Again?

Will Wilkerson longs for the good old days when a crisis was just something to solve, not an excuse for another trillion dollar government enterprise.  He's really down on Former President Bush, but I agree with his larger point, which could simply be put as "Enough Already!"

The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation's alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden.  (The Week - Will Wilkerson)

He accuses Obama of the same crime:

Bush's botched attempts to capitalize on crisis—the ugly aftermath to which Obama is heir—might have made an alert leader wary. But instead, Obama set up shop in the Oval Office and proceeded immediately to use crisis as (Emanuel's words again) "an opportunity to do things you'd think you could not do."  

Similarly, the Obama administration could have focused narrowly on getting the economy back on its feet, on getting the unemployed back to work, but it didn’t. Instead, it has followed Bush’s lead, pushing its most ardently desired policies through the window of crisis. A prolonged economic quagmire may be our reward.

A "Marriage of Incompetence and Craven Opportunism"

This marriage of incompetence and craven opportunism is so much in the familiar spirit of the age that one must conclude that the age itself remains unchanged.

The News Media is Torturing Us

The "Torture Memos" have the unhinged Bush haters ululating with excitement.

Here's a simple question for those screaming "torture!" What is the definition of torture? Not your definition, but the only one that counts in this discussion, the legal One. Here is one definition from the US Code:

Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code, prohibits torture committed by public officials under color of law against persons within the public official's custody or control. Torture is defined to include acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. (It does not include such pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions.) The statute applies only to acts of torture committed outside the United States. There is Federal extraterritorial jurisdiction over such acts whenever the perpetrator is a national of the United States or the alleged offender is found within the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or the alleged offender.

You can read the International Committee of the Red Cross's broader definition here .

The screaming hordes spilling ink and infesting our radios and TV sets have so misused and sensationalized this word, but no one has started by defining it. Such blather is unproductive and unworthy of your attention. These sensationalists also risk falling prey to the logical fallacy of equivocation, where the meaning of a word, especially an emotional one like torture, is shifted to fit the arguer's agenda.

This tower of babble has various agendas: The lefties use it to further castigate and discredit the Bush "regime," and the good folks at FOX, CNN, et al are milking it to rake in the advertising dollars by keeping you agitated and tuned in. Getting at the truth has nothing to do with it.

How can the critics be so sure we tortured when they can't even honestly define it?

DOJ Manual
ICRC
HuffPo
Wikipedia - Equivocation

3000 Words

Truth Commission

I initially recoiled at the idea of establishing a "truth commission" to investigate supposed crimes of the Bush administration. It lumps this president and his team in the same category as dictators and military regimes. This categorization is only at home in the fevered imaginings of Bush Derangement Syndrome patients.

This article by Stuart Taylor has made me reconsider. We know that Abu Graib style abuses have happened. Were these rogue operations, or were they authorized, tacitly or otherwise, by government officials? Did torture happen? To what extent? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? As a society that upholds high democratic ideals, we have a responsibility to ourselves and the world to get to the bottom of whatever happened, document it, and report the results for all the world to see.

We need to get the facts out in the open, if for no other reason than to knock down the nuttiest speculations and to exonerate anyone who may have been unfairly smeared.

...the U.S. needs to take serious steps to show reasonable critics at home and abroad that we are not going to sweep the evidence of Bush administration torture under the rug. This is not necessarily to suggest that Bush, his appointees, or other U.S. officials should be prosecuted. Most or all would have a valid defense of good-faith reliance on then-authoritative -- although erroneous and now-repudiated -- legal advice from the Justice Department.

Who could conduct such an investigation and prevent it from becoming a political circus? Only a respected Republican of "unquestioned stature" who is...

"known for courage and for independence from both Bush and Obama -- and for personal knowledge of the horrors of torture. His name John McCain."

I still hate the idea of all this, but the Bush administration's failure to construct a coherent legal framework to deal with jihadis scooped up from GWOT battlefields has led us here. Iron clad proof would not pacify the Bush haters, but a thorough review would at least establish a record of findings that reasonable people could analyze, debate, and learn from.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20090404_6094.php

Cowardly Exercises In Freedom

The shoe throwing incident could not have happened under the previous Iraqi regime. A reporter exercises his new found freedom by attacking the man responsible for bringing him that freedom. Yes, the Middle East is a complicated place.

This was not a brave act; it was a cowardly act. It's like the religion haters in the US who harass anti-gay marriage churchgoers or dunk a crucifix in a jar of urine and call it art. Try that in Europe with a Koran and see how far you get. These are not brave acts of free speech. Christians are easy targets because they don't cut heads off and burn down cities in a fervid rampage, foaming at the mouth and screaming all the while like a flaming pack of hemorrhoids.

No, Christians just shake their heads and move on. The Judeo-Christian God is too big to be insulted. As Cecil B. DeMille once said, "Man cannot break God's law, he can only break himself against God's law."

So throwing a shoe at President Bush was too easy. The president displayed some lightning quick reflexes, shook his head, and moved on. That Saddamite reporter will not suffer the fate of Iraqi reporters before him. He will not find himself chained to a lamppost in his neighborhood, bleeding out from the mouth because the government cut his offending tongue out. No, he will live to throw shoes another day. And that makes me happy. I am proud that we have carved out a place in a cauldron of hatred where people can express themselves without being killed for it.

Now, if that reporter, or any liberty lover, really wants to speak truth to power he could do it in lands uncontaminated by President Bush's hand. Let's see him throw a shoe at Egypt's Pharaoh Hosni Mubarak, Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad, or any member of the Iranian theocracy. That would be a brave statement.

President Bush Leaves Us a Cooler Planet

The planet has cooled since President Bush took office eight years ago. Go to http://www.globalwarming.org/node/2756 for details.

Ocean Ice is back to 1980's levels and October wasn't such a hot month after all.

As you enjoy the thought of this, go read this article about the fallacy of green jobs. Every dollar our government directs to something is a dollar taken from something else.

Bush as Batman: A Summary

Powerful protector or Ominous oppressor?
 

Victim of his own success...

What price victory?
 

Good -vs- Evil

I find the whole Bush as Batman phenomenon quite interesting. I agree that Bush is Batman: He believes in good and evil and has earned nothing but opprobrium for relentlessly fighting the latter. Here are links to what I think are the two best articles on the subject.

Father Raymond J. de Souza doesn't compare the President to Batman in his National Post article, but he does set the stage for the debate. He places the movie's central theme in stark philosophical terms of not just a struggle between good and evil, but a struggle against the nihilism that says there is no such thing as good or evil:

This Batman comes with the bonus of some of the more combustible questions in philosophy. What is evil? Is there a moral order built into our world, or is to speak of such a moral design delusional?

Andrew Klavan makes the best case of Bush as Batman over at WSJ On-Line:

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

Despite the protestations of modern-day relativists, it is a good -vs- evil world.  Even the Hollywood fantasists stumble upon that truth every once in awhile.

Rock On, President Batman!