McCain and sick veterans

Do you oppose the candidacy of John McCain? Do you subscribe to The Nation? If the answer to both questions is "yes", then check out my article in the current issue. If the answer to the first question is "yes", but the second question is "no", then either buy a subscription, or enjoy the first several paragraphs of said article. If the answer to both questions is "no", then I'm genuinely curious how you ended up at this blog.

The thrust of the piece, as you might imagine, is that, though John McCain says nice things about veterans, his record on their issues is, in true maverick fashion, fairly abominable. Teaser:

The way John McCain tells it, the injuries he suffered at the hands of his captors in Vietnam would have ended his career as a Navy pilot were it not for the help of physical therapist Diane Rauch. And that's basically true: after months of painful treatment, he was well enough to pass his medical screening. But that leaves out an interesting part of the story. In his biography of McCain, Robert Timberg details the treatment McCain received at two naval hospitals. Navy doctors in Maryland were, in fact, McCain's first physical therapists, but they offered a bleak prognosis. Fortunately for McCain, the story of his imprisonment and torture was so widely known that strangers from across the country offered assistance. One of those strangers was Rauch, who provided her services at no charge.

As a vignette, it's charming--a POW, just released from a long and brutal stretch in captivity, finally stumbling upon some good fortune. But it's hardly a working model for veterans' health services. Most vets, after all, need government-provided treatment for the rest of their lives--first, like McCain, at military hospitals and then, unlike McCain, at VA facilities.

Hillary wins?

But by how much? Does she win the delegate fight tonight? Nobody knows yet. Which means I have to keep watching. Um... hooray.

Meanwhile, Terry McAuliffe wants me to believe that Obama's inability to carry California and New York in the primaries means that he'll lose them in the general election as well. That's some tired bullshit-logic by now, but I suppose it's not all that germane anyhow since McCain lost Nevada, Wyoming, Maine, Montana, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, Alaska, Alabama, Arkansa, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, and so presumably Obama will be able to make up CA/NY ground in those traditionally red states.

Self-centered election blogging

First election blogging night in a very long time. Been in front of the teevee for approximately five minutes. Already extremely annoyed.

Why John Yoo should be fired

Because he's a criminal. One who will likely never face criminal proceedings. But a criminal nonetheless.

By now I've seen and heard a few arguments--all similar--that though Yoo might well be a criminal (and that, in fact, he should be tried for war crimes), he should remain a tenured professor until such time (never) as he gets frog-marched off to prison. The thrust is always this: decent people (but particularly liberals) can't possibly consider Yoo's work writing ex post facto justifications for torture in a Republican Justice Department with any objectivity. It's too politically fraught. And the idea that he should be fired is no doubt be colored by those politics, no matter how soberly reasoned the arguments.

The implication, then, is that Yoo is just one or two ticks closer to "reprehensible" on the continuous egregious-academics scale than is, say, Madeline Albright (of Iraq sanctions fame) or Viet Dinh (of PATRIOT Act fame) or Ward Churchil (of Little Eichmann fame)--and that if UC Berkeley were to target Yoo because of his work at DOJ, they'd be setting a precedent that could be easily salami-sliced back to any professor taking any politically unpopular position of any kind.

But there are, I think, categorical difference between Yoo and just about every other controversial academic in this country. On the one hand there's the legal issue--admittedly a difficult one to settle. Yoo looks more and more like a criminal every day, even though he'll almost certainly never really be a criminal, because he'll almost certainly never be tried criminally for his work at DOJ. But the evidence is there: Unlike Albright (who enforced an internationally-recognized sanctions regime) or Dinh (who crafted a bill that was enacted by the American legislative system) or Churchill (who said some very mean things about dead people), Yoo, it seems, was a link in the chain between the idea that enemy combatants should be illegally tortured, and the illegal torturing of enemy combatants. His work was so dubious that the president classified it, to keep it secret, and then ditched it to prevent it from being torn to shreds before the courts. Imagine if Madeline Albright had spent her nights writing legal justifications for the embezzlement of oil-for-food money because she knew that Bill Clinton was padding his personal accounts with U.N. funds... and then imagine anybody arguing that she should be a professor of anything anywhere. And then imagine the Boalt Hall faculty finding, through a process--analogous perhaps to a civil trial--that John Yoo is in fact liable for the publicly disclosed torture tactics at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and stripping him of his tenure as a consequence.

Then on the other hand, there's the less satisfying--though perhaps more germane--professionalism question: Yoo is a lawyer teaching future lawyers how to practice law. This, of course, is despite the fact that his own views on the practice of law--now widely known--are deeply at odds with the discipline's accepted academic and ethical norms. One doesn't find many physicians guilty of extreme malpractice teaching at the nation's finest medical schools. One doesn't find many creationists teaching creationism in their roles as tenured biology professors. And this is no different. He abandoned the norms of his trade, so why shouldn't his trade abandon him?

And, yet, despite all this, it's pretty clear that he won't be losing his job any time soon.

Lost in translation

From anonymous. La Spezzia, Italy

BP, meet BB

Now that TNR's new energy and environment blog is being powered by this BP instead of that BP, I've begun contributing. Check me out there when you have a chance.

POWs

Today, by order of the president, we honor our prisoners of war who, "[t]hrough unspeakable conditions [] upheld their oath to defend America with honor and dignity."

And, indeed, it is fitting to take a day to honor American POWs, because they did and do not deserve to suffer the "unspeakable conditions" we would never dream of inflicting on the prisoners of war we capture.

Yoohoo?!

John Conyers sends John Yoo a gentle invitation to testify before his House Judiciary committee in early May (with a quiet threat at the bottom to "compel"--read: subpoena--his appearance if Yoo refuses).

I'm not quite sure why he's convinced Yoo will demur. It's not like former and current Bush administration officials have a tendency to blow off congressional oversight! More seriously, Yoo, who penned the famed (and discredited) DOJ legal justifications for torture (and, apparently, another memo suspending the fourth amendment for domestic military operations) hasn't been all that averse to discussing his time in Washington and his role in the torture fiasco. Just last week, he spoke to Esquire magazine and The Washington Post about the release of the March 2003 memo (which the ACLU recently acquired after a lengthy battle with the administration). And, as Glenn Greenwald notes, John Yoo will be appearing live and unplugged on April 14 at the Bancroft Hotel (just across the street from his offices at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall school of law) as part of a conversation about "the intersection between privacy and national security law."

If Yoo declines Conyers' invitation before that date, Congressional staffers know where to find him.

Bets?

Given all the talk today about diminishing Iranian influence in Iraq, how long before somebody in the administration unironically floats the idea of erecting a border fence?

Has Iraq made us safer?

John Warner just repeated the same question to David Petraeus that he asked last year.

Paraphrase: "Well, I've thought a lot about this question over the last year. Obviously Iraq has meant a tremendous cost, but ultimately history will answer that question."

Crocker's answer was a bit more on point--that Iraq is a "work in progress" and that even if Iraq hasn't made us safer, pulling out now may make us less safe. But lacking a scenario in which we stay in Iraq just long enough to cut the ribbon on a prosperous and stable new country, that's still fairly deceptive. We're going to have to withdraw from Iraq at some point. In the absence of some sort of strategic miracle, Iraq will still be a mess and withdrawal will entail some unknown set of negative (and positive) consequences. Whether that happens now, soon, or far into the future--whether the aftermath is dire or more dire--this endeavor has made America less secure.

A desurging surge

I suppose it's fitting that, as the surge is desurging, and as the insurgents are resurging, and as the gains are being lost, and the shrinking death tolls are growing and so on and so on, that today's Petraeus/Crocker testimony would be ripe with the sorts of equivocal pronouncements about progress in Iraq (both tactical and strategic) that a). wink at the idea that the war should continue indefinitely, but b). don't actually constitute an argument for anything.

So we hear a lot about "uneven gains", "steady, but incomplete" progress, etc. Things are solid, yet fragile. Robust, but also frail. Pacified, though still agitated. Encouraging, but needing yet more encouragement. It's a topsy-turvy world out there!

Update: He seemed to struggle badly, rambling a bit about nebulous "elements" or "factions" in "Iraq" but at least John McCain got the connection between Iran and Shiism correct. Of course, he did so as part of a prelude to future questions, which will no doubt mischaracterize of the threat Iran poses to the region and beyond--and, surely, the need to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb them. But baby steps.

Update 2: Via Spencer, via Faiz, McCain might have the Iran/Shiite connection committed to memory, but he's still a bit confused about Al Qaeda.

Tertiary effects?

Apparently a NAFTA-style trade agreement with Colombia will improve America's national security.

Lost in translation

From anonymous. Thun, Switzerland.

Straight talk

"At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Casualties

On a bus the other day, I spoke to the father of this young man. Maybe it's because Chris and I are the same age--I have no other personal connection to him or his family, and obviously, tragically, there are thousands of other people in similar situations who need help too--but something about this particular story stuck with me. So if you have a moment soon, click over to his page and give it a read.

8 x 8

Gratitude to Kevin for debunking (again) the notion that the average adult ought to drink eight eight ounce glasses of water a day. There's, of course, absolutely no evidence for this and until such time as scientists find a positive correlation between urinating and longevity I recommend you all drink only as much water as you crave. As a caveat, though, you ought not do as I've done and habituate yourself to drinking much less water than you crave. I'm not sure if it's laziness or a subconscious rebellion against the various 8 x 8ers I know who've wasted god knows how many hours of my life with unnecessary bathroom breaks, etc., but I definitely don't drink enough water and it definitely triggers headaches and who knows what other preventable discomforts.

Heads in the Sand

If you have spent the last several weeks perusing the blogosphere and asking yourself, "Self, do I really want to order a copy of prominent American political blogger Matthew Yglesias' new book Heads in the Sand when I could just as easily pay no money to keep reading 200-word posts on the Internets?", then keep in mind that Heads in the Sand just won the Jamie Kirchick primary.

When your copy of the book arrives, you'll find that one of its many key insights is that the process of international institution building is long and slow and requires plenty of refinement over time, but is ultimately the stable and liberal way forward. The fact that one can point to moments in the last half century when international institutions weren't up to the tasks at hand or failed to engage certain problems isn't evidence of their obsolescence--it's to be expected. The problems are hard! One ought to look at those failures aside the the myriad successes of those same institutions and conclude that the system should be allowed to mature, not left to crumble. I don't really have any interest in fisking Kirchick's whole review, but if you want to get a sense for the bad-faith manner in which conservatives conclude the opposite--argue, in essence, against the basis of liberal international order--you should give it a read. If, however, you're familiar with Kirchick and that line of thinking, then you might as well just go enjoy your Friday.

Obama drives the right insane

I wisely just sent Human Events my work email address in order to get my very own copy of this 30-plus page Obama... expose. It contains much of what you'd expect from that crowd, but the quote below (from the Obama is a Muslim section) struck me as particularly loony:

[T]wo people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

If this is true, Obama could possibly be charged with being an apostate from Islam. This could give him a unique chance to speak out about the freedom of conscience and the human rights of those who leave Islam — for Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, ordered that apostates from Islam be put to death. Although this is frequently denied, his statement “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” appears in numerous authoritative Islamic sources.

So is Barack Obama under a death sentence? Probably not — particularly if he left Islam while still a child. This is a crucial point, for according to Islamic law an apostate male is not to be put to death if he has not reached puberty (cf. ‘Umdat al- Saliko8.2; Hidayahvol. II p. 246). Some, however, hold that he should be imprisoned until he is of age and then “invited” to accept Islam, but officially the death penalty for youthful apostates is ruled out.

Uh. Yeah.

Lost in translation

From Nancy Metcalf. Florence, Italy.

Nancy's also responsible for the title of this post. People, please send me your funny photos from abroad. They do make me laugh so!

Aww nuts!

Funspoiler Matthew Yglesias throws a wrench into my plan to move to Miami.

More FISA lies?

Read Glenn Greenwald (again) on Michael Mukasey's claim that the administration knew about a call in the days before September 11th, from an Al Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan to terrorists in the United States (and his false assertion that FISA--as it existed in 2001--made wiretapping that call illegal).

If the story's true, then not only would intercepting that call have been legally permissible, it would have been the administration's obligation. My suspicion: Mukasey just invented this shit wholesale to sell stricter FISA provisions, knowing, of course, that the press wouldn't really look into it.

Update: GG posts a letter from the 9/11 commission executive director saying:

Not sure of course what the AG had in mind, although the most important signals intelligence leads related to our report -- that related to the Hazmi-Mihdhar issues of January 2000 or to al Qaeda activities or transits connected to Iran -- was not of this character. If, as he says, the USG didn't know where the call went in the US, neither did we. So unless we had some reason to link this information to the 9/11 story ....

In general, as with several covert action issues for instance, the Commission sought (and succeeded) in publishing details about sensitive intelligence matters where the details were material to the investigative mandate in our law.

In other words, the Attorney General just outright lied.

How to spend political capital

I'm not sure it's wise to assume that a significant number of Republican senators will hop aboard a universal health care bill without actually making it a bad bill. It's not just that Republicans don't want Democrats to benefit alone from the legacy of the policy but that they actively dislike the policy. I'm also not sure advising that the next president make health reform his or her number one issue speaks to anything more than the advisers personal interest in that particular area of policy.

That said, young health wonk Ezra Klein is exactly right here.

[I]n 1994, Bill Clinton... convened a massive task force that eventually grew into 30 separate working groups that boasted 500 separate participants. The point of this task force? Er, to write a bill.

Predictably, those arms of government actually tasked with writing bills felt a bit left out. Sara Rosenbaum, now the chair of health policy at George Washington University, was eventually charged with drafting the Clinton plan. Looking back, she says, "I was the biggest mistake of the Clinton health care bill. It was a terrible error to have the president doing what Congress was supposed to do. It was a misuse of the relationship between the legislative branch and the executive branch. The executive branch is supposed to generate action, and the committees are supposed to actually take the action. By sending a 1,300-page bill, you're writing a detailed blueprint for the policy rather than using the congressional process to create a consensus."

A very important bit of history, this. Whatever issue the next president tackles first, he or she would be foolish to become wedded to the passage of a particular bill (with a particular title) before that bill has been larded up and swiss-cheesed by the very people on the Hill who will gladly exploit the president's ambition. That's a fantastic recipe for blowing a bunch of political capital by paying for the quiescence of the worst politicians in the country, and (if everything goes well) signing a bill at the end of the process that nobody likes. Much better for the president to take a position of authority and demand that Congress submit a bill with X and Y mandatory provisions (and without X and Y poison pills) for consideration by date Z. The president, in other words, should goad Congress into giving more and more, rather than allow Congress to goad him into accepting less and less.

Fourth Amendment, Shmourth Amendment

Smarter people have already commented on the release of the Yoo memos, and frankly I don't have much to add. What I can say is that I'd been tracking Congress' movement on those memos for some time. A long while back, at an event at the Georgetown Law Center, I asked Patrick Leahy whether, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he'd use his subpoena power to make them public and he said it might come to that. What followed, of course, was a series of very angry-sounding letters and public statements from various corners of Capitol Hill, until finally the ACLU had to step in where public servants had either failed, middled, or ignored the issue entirely.

Now we learn of the existence of yet another memo, still unreleased, which, for the 16-or-more months the administration honored it, effectively "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." The Fourth Amendment, you'll recall, is that annoying little cockroach in the bill of rights which protects people like you from things such as warrantless wiretapping and other means of internal espionage.

So, by my count, the White House has, at various times, determined that the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are unacceptable impediments to its violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, and, as such, chosen to wish them out of existence as if they were minor headaches like congressional subpoenas or the national debt. Half of the bill of rights. Pretty neat trick, no?

Obama wins Texas?

MSNBC says:

NBC News has allocated the remaining nine Texas caucus delegates, 7-2, in favor of Obama. That means the Illinois senator has won the most delegates, 99-94, as a result of both the Texas primary and caucuses.

Obama now leads by 129 in the overall delegate count, 1637-1508. Obama leads by 162 pledged delegates, 1415-1253. (There remains just one delegate unallocated from Democrats Abroad.) Clinton leads among superdelegates, 255-222, per the NBC News Political Unit count.

Reliable Replacement Warheads

This bright idea has been kicking around for a few years now. The administration just won't let it go. Here's my report:

The Bush administration has made a point of condemning countries like North Korea and Iran for their nuclear weapons (or alleged nuclear weapons) programs. As recently as last Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney charged Iran with being "heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade levels"—comments that were at odds with last fall's National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

But amid the flame throwing, the administration has also quietly tried to launch its own new nuclear weapons production system—one that has been roundly criticized by nonproliferation experts and diplomats and has been rejected by Congress.

Give it a read.