So much to talk about:
Category Archives: Politics
Tuesday Linkorama
Trouble Ahead; Trouble Behind: Predicting 2010
Every year, I like to run an article looking ahead and behind, making fearless predictions for the year to come. I’ve written a long piece for the other site on the last year in politics called a Year in Fantasyland. 2009 was the year everyone in politics was delusional — from Democrats who though the nation turned liberal to Republicans who think they’ll ride the tea parties back into power.
I didn’t comment on it there, but my predictions from last year held up pretty well:
Anyway, 2010 is already two weeks old, so I’d better make my predictions so I can be as wrong as ever.
As much as 2009 was the year of fantasy, 2010 will be, I think and hope, the year of reality. And about time too.
Weekend Linkorama
Why I Left The Right; Exhibit 87a
Right Wing blogs are aflame because Obama is devoting CIA resources to examining global warming.
Bzzzt.
What’s happening is that the CIA is sharing data they already have with climate scientists, reversing Bush’s cancellation of the previous agreement.
The monitoring program has little or no impact on regular intelligence gathering, federal officials said, but instead releases secret information already collected or takes advantage of opportunities to record environmental data when classified sensors are otherwise idle or passing over wilderness.
There could be some concerns about classification barriers breaking. But, no, CIA agents are not monitoring glaciers.
Guys? Do your fucking homework before you scream blue murder.
We’re At War
The “conservative” part of this country is busy demonstrating, once again, that the War on Terror is not something they take seriously. It’s just a big partisan game to them.
Every since Richard Reid, we have used the criminal justice system to prosecute terrorists caught on American soil. This has been very uncontroversial. Yet, suddenly, it’s travesty that Obama wants to put the panty bomber on trial.
It’s very difficult to define partisanship better than hating someone for doing what you praised your guy for.
But what’s bother me more is the constant repeating of the “We’re at War!” meme. It’s the unceasing rallying cry of the Right — that Obama doesn’t realize we’re at war. This bullshit has continued in the face of a massive troop buildup in Afghanistan and the continuing of Bush’s Iraq policy.
“We’re at war” is not a policy statement anymore; it’s the political equivalent of a fashion statement. It’s the conservative answer to “No Blood For Oil!”. Here’s Sully, describing Giuliani’s TV appearance earlier today:
But what I really take from Rudy’s remarks is that he believes that merely saying “war on Islamist terrorism” again and again somehow helps us win. What most sentient beings have learned these past several years is that taking this war to a constant and grand rhetorical level empowers Jihadists more than it weakens them. There is a sick syndrome in which “conservatives” get into some dysfunctional relationship with Islamists with each faction elevating the other in global consciousness.
Obama is trying to wind down this drama and focus on actually finding and killing terrorists, removing their recruitments tools (like torture and Gitmo), and defusing their appeal to the Muslim middle. I will further note that Giuliani, in his criticism that Obama has not treated this like a war, has failed to mention the huge build-up of forces in Afghanistan. I remain deeply ambivalent about this strategy, but surely Giuliani would approve. It’s many more troops and many more resources than Bush ever devoted to Afghanistan. And yet all Giuliani believed showed Obama’s concern with terrorism was his use of the word “war” yesterday.
This is not a serious policy. It is not a serious politics.
During the 1980’s, Leftists used the constantly criticize Reagan over his Israel policy. The constant refrain was that he wasn’t “taking the problem seriously”. When you asked them what it meant to take the problem seriously, they wouldn’t have an answer. They didn’t have an alternative. All they knew was that they hated Reagan and that he wasn’t taking the problem seriously.
The Right does have some actual differences with Obama: mostly that he’s had back-channel talks with Iran and stopped torture — both of which are steps toward victory in my book. Both, of course, also demonstrate the spectacular incompetence of the last Administration, which is a prime motivation for the angry response.
But in the end, the vituperative rhetoric is way way out of proportion to these policy changes. In the end, it gets down the partisan bullshit. In the end, it’s a mantra.
Compare and Contrast
Barack Obama’s response to the intelligence failure of the Christmas attack to George W. “I have no regrets” Bush.
Which one represents the party of personal responsibility again?
The Trial
It’s amazing how fast the “we can’t do trials for AQ guys arrested on the battlefield” has morphed into “we can’t do trials for AQ arrested in this country”. What the panty bomber did was a criminal act, no? Since when do we turn criminals into un-persons? It’s equally amazing how fast “we need to torture in ticking time bomb scenarios” has morphed into “we need to torture full stop”.
This is why, for all Obama’s faults, I’m glad the GOP is no longer in power. They are still willing to burn the Constitution and the rule of law if they think it can make them marginally safer from scary terrorists. Even if it doesn’t.
New Year’s Linkorama
It’s been nothing but Linkoramas lately. But I’ve been posting some article at the other blog. Hopefully, now that the holidays are over, I can get back to being my usual cantankerous self.
Christmas Linkorama
Tuesday Linkorama
Wednesday Linkorama
The Other Climategate
New Scientist has a summary of Climate-gate-esque deceptions that have been found in the anti-AGW movement. One that was very important to me was #4.
In 2008, the Forum on Physics and Society (FPS), a newsletter produced by the American Physics Society, published an article entitled “Climate sensitivity reconsidered”. The article claimed that “the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe” and that attempts to cut CO2 emissions “are pointless, may be ill-conceived and could even be harmful”.
The article was written by Christopher Monckton, a British journalist and consultant. Although apparently highly technical, the piece has been strongly criticised by professional climate scientists, including Gavin Schmidt, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York.
The piece was reported by the US Science and Public Policy Institute as having been “peer-reviewed”.
The editors of FPS pointed out that, as was standard practice at the journal, they had merely edited the piece without sending it out to specialist climate scientists for peer review. A disclaimer was subsequently added to the piece, clarifying that nothing in FPS was peer-reviewed.
I remember this one very clearly. Several conservative blogs linked to his article with the statement that the head of the American Physics Society had published an article disproving climate change. I clicked through and was markedly unimpressed. Much of it was out of date or wrong. The article was not a peer-reviewed article so much as it was a letter they’d commissioned from Monckton, a journalist not a scientist, because they couldn’t find a scientist who would dispute their articles.
What shocked me was that when I pointed this out on several conservative blogs, I was pilloried. I was told I was a secret communist and Algore disciple and was being bamboozled and was consumed by my “religion” of environmentalism. Read the comments to the New Scientist article and you’ll see pretty much the same thing.
This is why I have moved from flat out disbelief in AGW to skeptical belief. It’s been a series of incidents like that — of finding out that I was being lied to. I found out that global cooling was not the consensus science in the 1970’s. I found out that the temperatures did not track the solar cycle. I found out that 1934 wasn’t the warmest year in history. I found out that the last decade hasn’t cooled. I found out that whatever faults the models have — and they have many — the underlying theory was sound.
I’m not totally on board with everything the climate idiots want to do. And any movement that takes Chavez, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad seriously has some big problems. But in the end, my thinking is very similar to the Minimax Principle outlined in this old video. The downside risk of doing nothing and regretting it crosses me as greater than the downside risk of doing something and regretting it — especially as fossil fuels will run out one day anyway.
My question for the climate refusers is always this: what do you think are the odds that global warming is real? Dick Cheney justified a trillion dollar invasion of Iraq by saying it was worth it if there was even a 1% chance that Iraq would set off a nuke in American city. If there even a 1% chance that global warming is real — and I personally would put the odds more like 65% — should we not do something?
More From Me
Sullivan’s first letter is from me.
The provocation of my note is the discussion of a “war tax” to pay for our ongoing conflicts. I think we should pay for our wars — maybe a tax hike would make us more circumspect about military engagement. My problem with a war tax is more technical — they tend to stick around after the war is over. The phone tax to pay for the Spanish American War lasted for 108 years.
Yesterday, I tried out Limbaugh again — I turn him on about once a quarter to see if he has regained his sanity. He hadn’t. He was responding to the claim that no President has started a war and cut taxes at the same time. His first line of defense was to attack the source of the claim. Only after bashing them did he come up with the weak defense that Reagan cut taxes while ramping the Cold War. Which is fine except that Reagan raised taxes. Twice.