In Stark Contrast
Martin McPhillips

Conservative Hand-Wringing
Monday, Feb. 9, '04

It is a humdrum matter of daily life, the endless adolescent caterwauling of liberals and assorted Leftist types.

But when conservatives have putrefactive fits of the kind that are merely a lifestyle on the Left, it's like catching your wise and prudent uncle down at the corner bar sloshed out of his mind with a hooker on his lap. In a word, disgusting.

The high mighty pundits at National Review Online, one of the two or three most important conservative opinion sites on the web, were found (scroll up from there) in just such a condition yesterday as they reacted with instantaneous horror on their self-involved blog The Corner to President Bush's appearance on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Worst of the lot was a nasty John Derbyshire who disregarded Russert's repetitive loaded questions to the President so that he could focus on his apparent sudden finding that George Bush is not a glib, fast-talking salesman, as if that had not been obvious from the President's first appearance on the national scene a good five years ago early in his first campaign for the White House.

Peggy Noonan wrung her hands over the hand-wringing at the Wall Street Journal's site later in the afternoon. And this morning Jed Babbin had several cows at the American Spectator's site.

It is the Everest of disingenuousness for anyone to pretend that the George Bush who appeared on Meet the Press yesterday is any different than the George Bush who has been fumbling along the years with his own extemporaneous comments. That is Bush in a tight Q&A - sometimes charming, sometimes glazed over, sometimes incisive, routinely infuriating, always guarded, and always a barrel ride over the falls. Get over it. He did just fine yesterday.

Noonan at least had the sense to point out that Bush is reminiscent of Eisenhower in this respect. As for Derbyshire, he's the guy who weekly doubted that Bush would follow through in Iraq after the Taliban was ousted from Afghanistan, so his hysteria over a Meet the Press interview is unaccountably stupid. Babbin is just a hot head having an attack of the vapors.

The lot of them should jump ship if they've developed a sudden intolerance for the captain's transient rhetorical incapacities. George Bush is superficially tongue tied. Within he is as solid as a rock.  


A 'What If?' Iraq Parallel
Monday, Feb. 2, '04

Imagine a World War II in Europe that ended with a brokered peace in 1945 instead of unconditional surrender, where the Nazis were allowed to remain in power and the territorial integrity of Germany was left intact, but German arms would be required to be reduced to defensive levels (paging World War I).

Ten years later Europe is besieged with terrorism (as it had been most recently at the end of the 19th Century). The terrorists turn out to be generic fascists, whose purpose is to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy and foster new waves of social violence and anti-Semitism.

The generic fascist terrorists hold forth at bases in the Pyrenees, and take common cause with Basques in that region and with IRA cells in the UK and other groups with whom they may or may not share fascist aims but do share common enemies.

Back in Germany things have grown predictably bleak. Hitler is still alive -- remember this is only 1955 -- and has hidden the results of the Holocaust even as he employs secret mass executions to maintain power. The European peace accord has broken down insofar as arms inspectors are no longer given access to German facilities. 

Likewise, everyone understands that Hitler is on the side of the generic fascist terrorists operating throughout Europe, but overt support from him cannot be proved. Meanwhile, there is much speculation as to the status of his scientists' progress on a nuclear weapon.

An aging Churchill and a resigned Eisenhower agree that Hitler and Germany must be dealt with anew and with finality. The usual peace movements start up again, as they did in the 1930s. The time for a decision comes.

Whose side do you want to be on?


Weapons of Mass Destruction
Tuesday, Jan. 27, '04

There is a breakout of some sort coming down the road regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). David Kay, who has just quit as chief of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, is giving interviews all over the place (Reuters, The London Telegraph, NPR, New York Times) that produce headlines essentially saying "Iraq Had No WMDs."

The odd part here is that Kay's mission was and is supposedly classified, at least until he reports back to the President and Congress. Parts of his interim report a few months back were declassified and released, but much remained classified. By immediately talking to the press as he leaves his job is he trying to blindside the White House or the CIA or both? What gives?

The White House first responded to Kay's statements with no comment other than that it believes that there are WMD's or significant WMD programs in Iraq and that they will be found. Just last week  President Bush referred with confidence to Kay's interim report in the State of the Union Address. Later the White House said that it would review pre-war intelligence in the context of what has actually been found so far.

Kay says that he doesn't blame the White House for what he now sees as an intelligence failure, and that the intelligence community, in fact, owes the White House an apology for a bad reading of the tea leaves.

Kay, who before the war had no serious doubts that Saddam Hussein possessed serious WMD stockpiles, now says that there are none. But, he says, something was probably moved to Syria -- he doesn't say what -- and that Saddam was also increasingly detached from reality and was being deceived by Iraqi scientists, who were getting approval from him for WMD programs, received money for the programs, but never produced anything. Kay also says that CIA analysts have come to him to apologize for misjudging the situation so badly.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair is still saying he believes that there are WMDs and Colin Powell is saying that the matter is still undecided. Kay himself, in fact, says that something might still be uncovered, and the CIA says that just before Kay left the job he authorized its public affairs office to release a statement saying that it's too early to come to a conclusion about WMDs in Iraq.

There's an awful lot of fog lying in WMD valley, is there not?

My view, based on no more than a gut instinct, is that there are plenty of WMDs in Iraq, hidden in "spider holes" very much like the one Saddam was pulled out of. This view does not necessarily contradict what Kay has said, but it doesn't line up with it either. 

So why would I put my gut instinct ahead of what the guy who has been on the ground in Iraq looking for the things is saying? I'd do that because the way that Kay is behaving and the things he is saying don't add up to my satisfaction. I don't think that Saddam was living in any more of a fantasy world in 2003 than he was in 1991. I don't think that he would send anything important to Syria. I don't think that he would throw anything, other than human beings, away.

So, briefly, I think that something else is going to come along on the WMD front that will be sharply at odds with what David Kay has been saying over the past few days. We shall see.


Economy, Jobs
Monday, Jan. 5, '04

George Will has an interesting column on how some long held economic assumptions -- such as low unemployment causing inflation -- no longer appear to apply in the era of global free trade. The column is not quite half-there, and Will unfortunately couches it in an apparent grudging recognition of former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin's wisdom. But it is its half-thereness that gives the column its odd glow.

For instance, if Will wants to give Rubin some credit for the long economic boom of the 1990s, then he ought to give him some as well for the illusory bubble that it became, along with the crash that followed it. By the end of the column all that Will is ready to say is that neither he nor Rubin know what the hell is going on now.

He does take a fashionable swipe at the Republicans for their big spending over the last two years, without any attempt to understand the economic purpose of that spending. In that respect Will is consistent with Republicans, Democrats, and those in between, none of whom wants to have a clue about the purpose.

I'll happily take on the modest challenge of explaining the economic purpose of the deficit spending, and even stipulate up front that the Republicans are also certainly aware of the "all politics is local" advantages of filling the trough. 

Briefly, when the stock market bubble burst, when manufacturing seemed determined to stay in recession, when the September 11 attacks delivered a concussive blow to confidence, and when the Fed's serial reductions of interest rates to their lowest point in decades together with the fiscal stimulus of George Bush's tax cuts produced no more than a static economic recovery, Bush resorted to classical Keynesian deficit spending, and that was a responsible if embarrassing thing to do.

That doesn't mean that Bush has embraced Keynes and is now a closet Keynesian, or that Keynes will become again the new economic rage. But the fact is that macroeconomic signals cannot be ignored and that when the fiscal stimulus of tax cuts and the monetary stimulus of low interest rates don't get the engine going, letting the rascals in Congress spend money in their states and Congressional Districts is neither a bad thing nor a bad idea in the context in which it's been done. The bottom line is that it seems to have helped, and the economy, including the battered manufacturing sector, is now expanding much more vigorously.

Republicans won't admit to the Keynesian nature of their deficit-spending stimulus because they are ideologically opposed to Keynesian methods. Democrats won't admit that the Republicans are using Keynesian methods, because those are the Democrats' own historical methods, and they don't want to credit Republicans with using them. Republicans are basically right about Keynes -- economies should not be further coached to rely on government spending. But under certain conditions such methods are worth a try, even if they risk encouraging more bad habits in the long run. As Keynes himself said, "in the long run we're all dead."

At the heart of the economic problem that Bush faced were three things that could have resulted in far worse economic conditions than what we've seen. First, a twenty-year boom in the computer and information technology sector, reinvigorated by the internet revolution in the 1990s, came to an end with the dot-com implosion. Second, the competitive pressures to outsource both manufacturing and service jobs to foreign labor markets have become irresistible. Third, businesses were not investing or hiring, but relying instead on productivity increases from trimmed payrolls to squeak out thin profits.

There was no "next big thing" coming down the road -- there still isn't -- but there was a $10 trillion economy with enough internal energy to muddle forward with slow growth. Low mortgage rates kept the housing sector buzzing, but the dot-com ghost town and the outsourcing of jobs to <ahem> other neighborhoods in the global village, and the increasing productivity from existing payrolls, left the two-year-old recovery essentially devoid of job growth. That might be acceptable to free-market ideologists, but it's not acceptable to the American people, who don't like being boxed out of their own economy, have bills and mortgages and, worst of all, kids in college who they would like to think will find jobs when they graduate.

So in that context George Bush responsibly and wisely let the Congress spend. When the economy is roaring along nicely, producing jobs again, let angst and hand-wringing about deficits have its moment, again. 


The Most Important Writer in America
Thursday, Dec. 18, '03

The most important writer in America for the past two years has been Victor Davis Hanson. Author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, which appeared a month before the September 11 attacks, Hanson has since written extensively about the war on Islamist terrorism in general and the war in Iraq specifically. He has relentlessly clarified wartime events, placing them in a context that is in stark contrast to the hysteria being fostered in such backwaters as the European press, the United Nations, and the Democratic Party. His November 17, 2003 essay on The Paradoxes of American Military Power is as good a place as any to begin, as is his September 26, 2003 essay On the Right Side of History.


Howard Dean
Tuesday, Dec. 16, '03

Heretofore I have refused to believe that the Democratic Party would nominate Howard Dean as its candidate for President, but the time has come for me to follow the crowd and accept the fact that Dean probably will be the nominee. Dean will handily surpass Bob Dole as a thoroughly rotten presidential candidate (if Dole rates an easy '6' on the bad candidate scale, Dean's an easy '9'). 

Thankfully, Dean will be the end of the Democratic Party, as we know it. Whereas Dole's problem was simply that he was too worn out and cranky to inspire confidence, Dean's problem is that he appears, in the words of my artist pal Ken Gallup, to be slap happy.

The Wall Street Journal thinks that the capture of Saddam Hussein offers a final opportunity for the Democrats to snap out of it and choose someone other than Dr. Anger. But Dean is also stark testimony as to the desolation of the rest of the "serious" Democratic contenders, a sad collection of sad sacks and buffoons. When Joe Lieberman is the best man in the room, you should know that you're facing a catastrophe.


Civil Society
Tuesday, Dec. 16, '03

In the last entry (also notably the first, see right below) to this blog, I wrote that the plan in Iraq was to make it into a functioning civil society and that said civil society would eventually devour the murderers who now seek to prevent it from coming into existence. So, what exactly is a civil society? Well, it's a society where the rights of individuals are fundamental but are mediated by a common public authority (otherwise known as a government) that operates under the rule of law. This is not a perfect thing and never can be, but it is reasonably consensual and produces better results than, say, one guy and his sons and their henchmen cutting out tongues when they don't like what people are saying about them.

The most famous work on the question of civil society can be found in John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, most notably in Chapter Seven, coincidentally titled Of Political or Civil Society. A less famous exposition of civil society can be found in Adam Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society.


"Where's the Plan?"
Wednesday, Dec. 10, '03

Most recently repeated by Hillary Clinton (she's always ready to give lack of originality a bad name), the complaint that "the Bush administration has no plan for Iraq" is a line that only a fool could utter. There is a single and clear plan for Iraq: make it a functioning civil society that is reasonably free and democratic. To achieve that plan all of the logically required initiatives have been in place for months.

Iraq's schools and universities are open, its police force up and running, its military being formed, its courts open, its hospitals functioning, its oil industry pumping away, its cities and towns governing themselves through local councils, the national governing council deliberating about elections, a new currency is in circulation, and there are no famines or epidemics raging. What exactly does someone mean when they ask "where's the plan?"

If all that Senator Clinton or Wesley Clark or John Kerry want to know is what the plan is for dealing with the handfuls of thugs who are blowing up cars outside the Red Cross and UN headquarters in Baghdad and killing American soldiers and Iraqi cops, they must have missed that news too. The plan for those people is to kill them as soon as possible.

Eventually, as Iraq's new civil society more thoroughly establishes rule of law and provides Iraqis with the everyday environment for leading safer and more prosperous lives, that same civil society will devour the murderers who now seek to thwart its very existence. In the meantime, the U.S. military serves as the insurance policy against a backslide into thugocracy.

Perhaps the most irksome thing about the "where's the plan?" foolishness is that just one layer down it amounts to no more than a cynical exploitation of the killings of American soldiers. "If our soldiers are still dying, there must not be a plan!" There has always been one unalterable plan and many plans in action to achieve it. To suggest otherwise is to be wantonly out of touch with the truth.

© Martin McPhillips 2003, 2004