Ezra Levant Update

Back in January, I urged readers to check out the blog of Canadian journalist Ezra Levant. Levant was subjected to a year-long investigation by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission following a complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities over his publication in the Western Standard of the Danish Muhammad cartoons that had so many other publishers cringing in fear. I'm happy to report that the complaint has finally been dismissed and, as a friend at a forum site I frequent said, Canadians are at least tentatively embracing free speech.

As can never be noted too often, speech about which we already approve doesn't need legal protection.

More to the point, I would refer readers again to Mr. Levant's web site and specifically to his taping of the complaint hearing interview available here. I will repeat what I said originally: Levant’s responses to the bureaucrat seated across the table from him during the taped hearing is precisely how free people should deal with government officials under such circumstances.

Congratulations, Mr. Levant.

"Ron Paul? Wasn't He Famous Once?"

NEWSWEEK's Daniel Stone recently interviewed Ron Paul, who has dropped off the event horizon lately. Well, it's understandable, what with all the worldwide hoopla over the Libertarian Party's nomination of Bob Barr and, let's face it, the far more entertaining mini-series of the Democratic Party's determination to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. (Speaking of which, let me take this opportunity to say there's no truth whatsoever to the rumor Hillary Clinton will soon argue that, for the sake of constitutional historicity, Barack Obama's African American delegates' should only count 3/5ths each.)

Meanwhile, the "presumptive nominee," John Barking Mad McCain is busying himself interviewing prospective lackeys, taking advice on how best to avoid mentioning either President Bush or the fact that they belong to the same party during the actual campaign and tending to various coronation nomination details. Not much of a story there. Oh sure, he got in a bit of trouble with an former minister, too, but it couldn't really hurt him because no one seriously thinks John McCain believes in any power greater than himself.

My guess is that, viewing the Republican National Convention in purely entertainment terms -- and how could you not? -- Paul and his zany minions will provide most of the interesting sidebar stories. Aside from implicitly denying that unspent campaign money will be used on hookers and blow, other news from the interview includes the fact that Paul plans a major rally at some point during the convention to "present views and try to … get in on the committees to vote on platforms" and that he won't endorse another candidate.

Paul has always been a mixed bag as far as being libertarianism's poster boy goes, but that would necessarily be true of any flesh-and-blood national candidate. On balance, he's been a positive force in what has otherwise been and continues to be an abysmally depressing election cycle. Better still, we haven't heard the last of him yet.

Far From The Madding Crowd: A Libertarian Convention Non-Report

My preferred on-the-spot reporter would have been Triumph the Insult Comic or, failing that, Yakov Smirnoff (“In former Soviet Union, people actually give rat’s ass about Libertarian Party!”) Still, Reason’s David Weigel is doing a workmanlike job covering the 2008 Libertarian Convention, and you might want to check out Reason’s coverage if you, unlike me, care.

Picking the next Libertarian Party candidate is like being a battered wife fresh from the shelter walking into a pool room and flirting with the guy with the most prison tats and the fewest teeth. Forgive me if I don’t swoon at the prospect of Bob Barr, Mike Gravel or any of the other candidates carrying the tattered banner of libertarianism into the certain obscurity that yet again awaits it.

I will say, however, that if the ideological zealots who make up actual LP activists hand the nomination to a political careerist and opportunist like Barr because they think it will give the party added exposure, both sides to that bargain will have gotten exactly what they deserve. Barr will never again be taken as seriously as he once was (a good thing) and the LP will (correctly) be perceived as the political equivalent of a Star Trek convention. Not a good thing but not so bad, either. Hey, is that Penn Jillette over there? Oh, never mind, it's just Drew Carey again.

Kristol Finds Whole Herd of Ponies!

NeoCon extraordinaire and Editor-über-alles of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol whirls like a dervish in today's Washington Post to gin up support for his claim that "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one."

Those who neither debated in high school or college nor suffered the subsequent tortures of a legal education may be left agog at the brazen audacity of Kristol's argument, falling as it does into the category of destroying the village to save it or begging the court's mercy for the fellow who, having murdered his parents, is now an orphan.

His opening gambit here is breathtaking in its audacity. Let's simply pay no attention, he asserts, to that man behind the curtain, er, Bush's "unnecessary mistakes and ... self-inflicted wounds." And you have to admit it, if we willfully ignore his unnecessary mistakes, that is, the overwhelming majority of them, Bush doesn't end up looking nearly so bad after all. Also, focusing on Bush's self-inflicted wounds distracts attention from the more numerous and serious wounds he has inflicted elsewhere; so that's a nice piece of misdirection on Kristol's part, too.

So, what accomplishments do Kristol tout to support his claimed successful Bush presidency? Why, (1) the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, (2) the strong economy and -- wait for it -- (3) the war in Iraq! Oh, and a couple of conservatives on the Supreme Court, an almost throw-away point for Kristol but probably the only thing I might agree was both Bush's doing and, on balance, a good thing.

Not that the absence of terrorist attacks here or a strong U.S. economy are bad things. Only there's precious little reason to believe that Bush can take much responsibility for the latter and little tangible evidence that he is responsible for the former. Tax cuts are presumptively good, though not nearly as good as tax cuts combined with cuts in government spending, and we all know the administration's record on that point. In any case, Kristol's blithe causal connection between tax cuts alone and the state of the economy over the past five years is tenuous at best. Then again, Kristol's claim that Bush's prescription drug benefit Medicare expansion has "gone ... smoothly ... under projected costs" studiously ignores the elephant in the living room that is the looming, long-term cost of my Baby Boomer generation as we only now start to reach Medicare eligibility age. I guess economics wasn't Leo Strauss's strong point.

Shrouded in greater paranoia secrecy than any other administration in my lifetime, the Bush Administration has consistently refused to offer any serious or credible evidence of its purported success in staving off post-9/11 attacks. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't. Without such evidence, what neither Bush nor his fawning supporters can claim is that we should simply take the mere absence of such attacks as proof. The time has long since passed where Bush is entitled to even a presumption of honesty with the American people. While I do personally believe that the war in Iraq has drawn the attention of would-be U.S. attackers to more easily reached Middle Eastern and European targets, most of the plots discovered world-wide since 9/11 have shown far less grandiose ambition than 9/11. Meanwhile, America and Americans have lived as though under a constant state of siege with, if Bush and Kristol have their way, no end in sight.

Finally, amazingly, Kristol touts the war and hangs his hopes on General Petraeus, this year's -- let's be candid -- Great White Hope for the remaining supporters of this absurd and tragic misadventure. Of course, had we not attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, doing, um, well, we really don't know what. Neither does Kristol, but he assumes the worst because at this point it is only such counter-factual speculation that could possibly support the claim that America, never mind Iraq, is better off for having ousted Hussein in 2003.

Kristol concludes with a bit more wishful thinking about how the prospect of Democratic control of both the White House and Congress is so frightening that one of the lackluster or worse Republican presidential candidates may actually win next year, thus somehow vindicating Bush. Yeah, sure. His bottom line?

"If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president."

And if we had some bacon, we could have bacon and eggs for breakfast.

If we had some eggs.

Ellen Goodman's Race Problem

Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize winner and current resident of Brookline, Massachusetts (Estimated 2005 median house / condo value: $1,115,200. Estimated black population: 2.7%), has a race problem. Try as she might to understand Clarence Thomas as a man (and, truth be told, she doesn't try very hard), all she can see is a black man.

Goodman opens her column gladdened "that [the Supreme Court] won't do any more damage until the first week in October" and closes it by dredging up Anita Hill (remember her?) and implying that Thomas is a "rigid ideologue." In between, we find her serving up a few buckets of psycho-babble about how Thomas's Court opinions are really little more than rebellion against the sort of "black stereotypes" one suspects nicely characterize the majority of Goodman's (no doubt numerous) black friends.

It's all about race for Goodman, you see. Thomas can't really be independently conservative; that is, he can't possibly be the Court's "most predictable member of the conservative camp" because he honestly and rationally believes that nonsense. He can't possibly have rationally come to view racial discrimination of any sort as wrong despite having personally benefited from it. Could he? No, of course not. It's all about his resentments, the ingrate!

Poor Ellen, you see, didn't get a black liberal "successor to Thurgood Marshall." In Goodman's ideal world there should be a black liberal on the Court and a Jewish liberal and a female liberal, etc. That's diversity! She is outraged that Justice Thomas might seriously doubt whether forced racial integration has been the unqualified success she believes it to be.

What nonsense. And racist nonsense, at that.

I often don't agree with Thomas's opinions. But I have listened to liberals denigrate his intelligence and competence and -- Gasp! -- his blackness ever since he was appointed and I have yet to find any evidence at all of the first two claims. As to the last, I'm not a black man and do not, therefore, know what his experiences as a black man in America have been. Neither, it should be obvious, does Goodman. Then again, we will never understand Clarence Thomas or anyone else in this world if we can't ever get past the color of his skin.

Review: A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald

A Tragic Legacy: How A Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald. Crown, 320 pp.

There is an oratorical tone to Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy, the rhythms and word choices of a trial lawyer making his case to the jury from opening statement to presentation of the evidence to closing statement. The defendant here, George W. Bush, is charged with a failed administration both proximately and primarily caused by his unbending Manichean world view, more about which in a moment.

Greenwald was an appellate attorney before turning author by way of political blogger, and appellate briefs do not admit the rhetorical flourishes of a trial; but it is the rare lawyer of any sort who does not at least fanaticize himself in command of the courtroom, mesmerizing the rapt jury. (The real aim of law school, after all, is to turn natural born anal retentives into oral aggressives and vice versa. Learning the law comes later.) In any case, A Tragic Legacy reads neither like the quiet work of a scholar nor the brisk, adjective starved prose of a professional journalist but, well, like the work of a lawyer who writes more clearly and interestingly than the average lawyer.

Okay, so there is a bit of damning with faint praise in that last, but for those who enjoy current events / political analysis books Greenwald's contribution is at least as worthy as the vast majority of the rest and better than more than a few I've suffered through in recent years. It needs to be said, however, that such books are not my cup of tea, lest the reader here take my somewhat tepid endorsement as more negative than intended. Disclaimer done, back to the book.

Manichaeism is the belief that the world is a battleground between roughly equal forces of Good and Evil, between the two of which there is no ground for compromise. A third century Persian religion, Manichaeism’s influences on Christianity were quickly deemed heretical (Satan may indeed exist but is surely no equal to God in orthodox Christian theology), but it is not the doctrinal Manichaeism that Greenwald accuses Bush of so much as the Manichaeism mind-set. As far as it goes, it strikes me as a fair charge. The question occurs, however, whether Greenwald required over three hundred pages to make his case or whether, more to the point, the reader requires plowing through same to be convinced that Bush’s simplistic moral absolutism has led to disastrous effect.

Here, striped of its quasi-theological trappings and with a few liberties of my own taken along the way, is a far shorter version of Greenwald’s thesis: Moral ambiguity and nuance are not George W. Bush’s strong suits. Raised in privilege, Bush has never had to suffer the consequences of his bad decisions nor even to abide, let alone compromise with those who were disloyal or who even merely disagreed with him. His conversion at age 40 to evangelical Christianity fitted him out not so much with a moral as with a moralistic lens processing the world in black and white, good and evil terms that were and still are largely indifferent to such trivialities as political theory or the rule of law. The enormity of 9/11 gave Bush both tremendous political popularity and thus political power but, more importantly, it became his blindingly bright focal point in the battle between good and evil with, of course, the Islamist terrorists on the side of evil and America and himself on the side of good. Public opinion, now that it has turned against him, be damned – Bush sees himself on God’s side and will not waiver in fighting the good fight.

Greenwald’s secondary agenda is a critique and criticism of contemporary conservatism and especially of what, I think over-broadly, he includes under the rubric of neoconservatism. Such conservatives (neo- or not) both cheered on and, among Bush’s inner circle of advisors, manipulated his policy and decision making at first. Now, however, the pundits, at least, have increasingly abandoned Bush rather like, to keep the religious metaphor going, Peter repeatedly denied Christ once things got ugly.

There is some truth to this, too, though I think rather less than Greenwald would have us believe. To cite, say, National Review’s Rich Lowery endorsing Bush for a second term as evidence of conservatives' belief in Bush’s conservative bona fides is a bit of a stretch. Political rhetoric is political rhetoric, and Bush was the better choice for conservatives in 2004, notwithstanding his manifold sins and transgressions against conservativism in his first term. The lesser of two evils is still the better choice and it would simply be naïve to expect advocacy journalists not to engage in, well, advocacy, especially in the midst of an election.

I don't recall there ever being a time when Bush wasn't the target of serious and often scathing criticism especially from economic / small government conservatives, nor will it do to conflate all conservatives of any sort who ever supported the war in Iraq as members in good standing of the neoconservative movement of the past few decades. Moreover, people do, after all, change their minds, the occasional disingenuousness in that fact which Greenwald accurately notes among some right-wing writers aside.

Indeed, one of the weaker points of the book is Greenwald’s heavy reliance on block quotes from various conservative pundits, both those who have continued to support Bush publicly (whatever they may believe in private) and those who have changed their public views, to make his case. There is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality about Greenwald’s take here, not to mention the very short shrift paid to the genuine differences and ongoing arguments inside what might broadly be called the American Right for far longer than the Bush years.

Though he takes some trouble at the onset to distinguish general conservative theory and principles from the actual policies of self-identified conservative office holders, Greenwald takes too little account of the differences between, say, Burkean or social conservatives and Hayekian or economic conservatives, nor do his occasional and arguably gratuitous swipes at Ronald Reagan’s administration take adequate account of the political realities precluding Reagan from dismantling more of the Great Society he inherited.

Speaking of which, Greenwald’s concluding comparison of Bush to Lyndon Johnson is insightful and, up to a point, quite apt. Johnson’s administration will forever be judged through the prism of the Viet Nam war which, unlike Bush, Johnson did not instigate but did significantly escalate. On the domestic front, his economic policies were doomed to failure because they were bad economics, but Johnson also did what no Kennedy could or Nixon would ever have done. This unlikeliest of civil rights champions pushed passage of civil rights legislation through force of will and a political ruthlessness and singlemindedness that would have made Richard Nixon, let alone George W. Bush, blush. That is Johnson’s real and lasting legacy. So what, then, is Bush's?

Greenwald concludes that Bush’s legacy will forever be not only his failed war in Iraq (and perhaps, worse yet, in Iran) with all the damage to constitutional law and America’s standing in the world it has wrought but also his failure, because of his Manichean obsession with terrorism, to accomplish anything on the domestic front beyond the unintended and tattered remains of the conservative movement in America.

Perhaps. Surely, much damage has been done to the American republic in these past six and a half years. As for Bush’s legacy in terms of his historical standing among other presidents, however, who cares?

For the Judeo-Christian theists among us, there is also a recurring theme in the Old Testament of God’s wrath being visited upon his errant people over and over again, nevertheless always sparing a righteous remnant for a new beginning. Theology aside and using that metaphor in purely political terms, especially for those of us who have always opposed the prospect of American Empire, it is at least worth suggesting that America is far better off now than it would have been had Bush’s holy war met with greater success. The Lord or, if you will, the Zeitgeist works in mysterious ways, after all.

Where's Balko's Pulitzer?

I'm pretty sure there isn't a Pulitzer Prize category for investigative blogging and, for that matter, that real journalist Radley Balko (and I say "real journalist" in the nicest possible way here) probably hasn't hit the radar yet of whoever decides those things. But if Balko's continued coverage at The Agitator and Reason of the Cory Maye travesty and the many other now almost weekly occurrences of some jackbooted police SWAT thugs busting in the wrong address and maiming, killing or otherwise brutalizing entirely innocent people isn't worthy of a Pulitzer, I'll be damned if I can think of what is.