An Impossible Dilemma

Ryan Grim, author of the informative and entertaining book "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America," writes about the recent WikiLeaks cables about the corruption of Afghanistan:

President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly released well-connected officials convicted of or charged with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, frustrating efforts to combat corruption and providing additional evidence that the United States' top ally in the country is himself corrupt. (emphasis mine)

This is a tad too simplistic, I think, given the situation in which we have placed Mr. Karzai. This is not to apologize for Karzai, or even excuse the actions and pardons detailed in the cables, but comments like this are misleading outside the context in which they take place.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's illicit heroin and opium. It is less of a country than it is federalism ad absurdum and its meager economy is dependent on that illicit trade. Poppy farmers are, for the most part, backward, illiterate tribesmen who care nothing for national politics. (No, really, Afghans are the most dangerously ignorant people this side of Glenn Beck.) There is no viable economic alternative to what they do.

So, at the same time the U.S. armed forces are trying to establish rapport with the locals--i.e., opium farmers--our DEA is doing everything in its power to stop them from making a living.

Enter Hamid Karzai. He has to run this pitiful, fractious, not-quite-a-state. Every domestic political interest of note is tied to opium one way or another. In addition, he is expected to balance this with American demands for accountability, open democracy, functional government, and, um, drug prohibition. Oh, and the Karzai administration doesn't exist without explicit support from Washington.

Good luck with that. Maybe when Karzai is done doing the impossible in Afghanistan, we can put him to work on cold fusion.

I don't doubt that Karzai is corrupt. I don't doubt that his administration is corrupt. But the United States government's policy in Afghanistan is impossible to reconcile with itself. That we expect a man to run a establish a functional country made up of tribal drug peddlers, with no hope of legitimizing the drugs for licit medical use, is criminally absurd.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

The Pair on These Two!

Ok, so I'm scanning through my reader today and come upon this about the recent Congressional ethics investigations and exonerations over at DiA:

"Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member's actions are being influenced by campaign contributions," the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said in a unanimous statement.

In 2008, the seven lawmakers the committee cleared of any wrongdoing had steered $112m in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying organisation. In that same year, they accepted a total of $350,000 in campaign contributions from those clients. The contributions, they maintained, had nothing to do with the earmarks. And a committee of their peers backed them up. To paraphrase Jon Stewart in another context: I don't think they're stupid. I think they think we're stupid.

By the tone of the people harping on the Citizens United decision which freed domestic corporations and groups from onerous and arbitrary limits in independent expenditures (read: their own political ads without direction from, permission of, and wholly separate from political candidates), you'd think the floodgates guarding our fragile democracy had finally been opened to corporate America. It turns out, however, corporate America just needed to go to the right Congressional offices:

The representatives in question are Democrats Norm Dicks, Marcy Kaptur, James Moran, and the late John Murtha, and Republicans Todd Tiahrt, Peter Visclosky, and Bill Young.

Not surprisingly, and as far as I can tell, the Republicans were all silent on Citizens United. (Indeed, my superficial search shows that two of them may have taken from the case's namesake organization.) And, to their credit, neither the late Jack "Corrupt for his Constituency" Murtha nor Norm Dicks had the cojones to openly criticize the Citizens United ruling. (And yes, Murtha was still alive when the decision came down.) The same restraint could not be shown by Reps. Marcy Kaptur and James Moran.

From Moran's Citizens United press release:

Today’s Supreme Court decision represents a monumental step backwards for American democracy and will allow corporations to drown out the voices of average Americans. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn precedent and allow corporations to spend unrestricted resources on political activities will undermine the public’s confidence that the government is acting in their best interest on issues such as the economy, health care and energy policy.

Not to be outdone in testicular grandiosity, the gentlewoman from Ohio's Ninth district introduced legislation to curb express displeasure with independent expenditures (Official Summary):

1/8/2009--Introduced.Expresses the sense of Congress that the Supreme Court misinterpreted the First Amendment to the Constitution in the case of Buckley v. Valeo because the decision failed to recognize:
(1) that the unlimited spending of large amounts of money on elections has a corrosive effect on the electoral process not simply because of direct transactions between those who give large amounts of money and candidates and elected officials but because the presence of unlimited amounts of money corrupts the process on a more fundamental level; and
(2) other legitimate state interests which justify limiting money in campaigns, including the need to preserve the integrity of our republican form of government, restore public confidence in government, and ensure all citizens a more equal opportunity to participate in the political process.

We need more outrageous hypocrites like Jim Moran and Marcy Kaptur as the standard bearers for restoring "public confidence in government" because we should have exactly much confidence in our government as we have in them. Clearly, direct quid pro quo bribery is much better for democracy than the warping influence and appearance of independent spending.

'Only 1.5%-5%...'

Today is apparently 'International WTF Day':

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was "busy cleaning its own house" and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that "available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

Oh, only 1.5%-5%? Substitute "my friends" or "my colleagues" or "my employees" for "Catholic clergy" and one starts to get the idea of how repugnant to all moral decency this release is.

The statement said that rather than paedophilia, it would "be more correct" to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

"Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17."

Oh, well. Once you put it that way...

Politically correct terms cannot and should not be used to obfuscate the plain and simple truth that the Catholic Church aided, abetted, transferred and gave shelter to hundreds (or perhaps thousands, given their own numbers) of known child molesters...for decades. That they still have the nerve to publish garbage such as this is a testament to the wicked obstinacy of its hierarchy and is further proof that so many who have suffered by their hands will not receive justice in this life.


It's people like this that make me hope there is a Hell.

H/T: Democracy in America

Nota Bene: This condemnation has nothing to do with God or individual Catholics' relationship with their God: this is about a specific organized religious order. The Catholic Church is a globally recognized political entity that is so morally bankrupt that it passes itself off as the collective voice of God on Earth while issuing press releases that rationalize child molestation.

How to Treat Kennedy's Death

My friend Elizabeth Nolan Brown had this to say about the way the American chattering and political classes are handling Ted Kennedy's death:

Maybe I’m just being falsely nostalgic, like when I wish ladies still wore hats and pretty stockings even though I can hardly be bothered to comb my hair and apply mascara on a daily basis; maybe it’s just, as the[LA Times] article goes on to point out, the “more elemental … difference between knowing someone as an individual rather than a political caricature” … but maybe it really is a sad, sad [indictment] of our current political culture and the kind of respect and diplomacy that’s been lost …

I found myself vacillating on how to treat Teddy in death because of my contempt for him while he was alive. Save one rather nasty tweet I wrote while somewhat intoxicated--that I subsequently deleted--I have been quite reserved in my public criticisms. The respect and diplomacy of which ENB writes I think is--like nearly any 'good ol' days'--indeed a 'false nostalgia' for things that never really were. But, nevertheless, I decided to hold my contempt for Teddy at bay, for the most part.

Most of my venom, instead, has been directed at the glowing obituaries that mention his most tragic act as nothing more than a political misstep for him--likening the death of a young woman to Gary Hart's pictures that cost him the nomination in 1984. That, I think, has been the most reckless part of this Kennedy media overdose.

But as this two-decade old profile in GQ illustrates, the man of the people wasn't really one of the people. Like the aristocratic politicians that counted plebes as their patrons in ancient Rome, the Kennedys' modern day Julio-Claudian mythology belies their personal, decadent, self-involved natures. The legendary personal "foibles"--as many are wont to use so-milquetoast of term--of the lot of the Kennedy men were stunts of such depraved indifference to other people that only those immune to laws of government and the judgment of society could survive politically. Yet, they are widely held to be "America's Royal Family," known for their empathy toward the downtrodden and helpless that could never approach them in their personal lives, lest they be molested on a restaurant table or hit in the face with a flying drink.

Obits like this one, penned by another friend of mine, J.P. Freire (who is, by the way, an unapologetic conservative), project a fragile humanity onto the man that,--while J.P.'s article was moving to read--I don't think was really there. Matt Yglesias, a proud "progressive", responding to some "right-of-center" rebukes this week for being confounded by modern politicians' motivations, wrote:

The formal model of the self-interested legislator is very easy to understand. What I’m saying is hard to understand is the actual psychology of this kind of behavior. I think I now have a much better grasp than I once did of what’s going on inside the heads of people who have ideological beliefs I disagree with. But I find it very difficult to extend my powers of moral imagination to the kind of people who hold high political office in the United States.

...

Instead, we’re fated to be ruled by the sort of people who are really desperate to cling to power. But it still strikes me as a very odd mentality.

If prostitution is the oldest profession, then man maneuvering to rule/control his fellow man is a close second. (Of course, the line between the two is hardly clear.) Governing politics embodies ideas so old and basic they've made it into the religious canon, and suffice it to say one doesn't need a degree in psychology to figure them out. What I want to know is how, after we have known how corrupting power is for--quite literally--thousands of years, intelligent people, especially those of us who live and work near the locus of political power, could ever be so naive as to happily grant the governing authority more power over our money and individual liberty, whatever the politicians use for their stated motivation.

Some may state that comparing today's politicians to Rome is not fair, given the great societal changes of the past two millenia. But I ask, has human nature changed in that time? Have the Seven Deadly Sins been erased from the human heart? And more concretely, have these things changed since the days of Mark Twain?H.L. Mencken? Sinclair Lewis? Will Rogers? Woodward & Bernstein? How politicians grab and cling to power is far less mystifying to me than someone as intelligent as Yglesias looking at the bloated bureaucracy of government, the dog-eat-dog fights that we call "election cycles," the cloakroom logrolling deals "to get things done"and then attempt to rationalize and assign any moral commitment to the people whose ability to lie to your face is a career necessity. (And while a perhaps noble gesture on J.P.'s part, I also have a hard time imagining the quiet torture of life as Ted Kennedy, especially after reading and hearing this).

I'd like to think that Yglesias's overall point is what he said it was in the follow-up post: that he just can't get into the mind of a politician. However, it still seems to me that there is a dramatic cognitive dissonance between what he--and, extending it further to most well-meaning "progressives"-- feels politically and what he painfully admits to knowing about politicians when he writes sentences like this about the departed senior senator from Massachusetts (who indeed was excellent on trucking and airline deregulation in the 1970s):

The moral of the story isn’t that “regulation is bad” but that progressive politics at its best isn’t about bigger government but about attacking privilege and power.

Thus, to his way of thinking, one must give more privilege and power to the privileged and powerful to take away privilege and power from others, who happened to be the government who you gave the privilege and power to in the first place. Like the man it praises, this aim of Matt's sentence is undercut by the means to achieve its stated goal.

In the end, Ted Kennedy was a deeply flawed man, of flawed moral and political character. He was bred for power, he attained it through legacy, and he used it to ends that suited him, for good and ill. With more Bushes, Clintons, and Kennedys still on the political horizon, I don't think we've seen the last of the political dynasties. But I sincerely hope that we have seen the end of the likes of Ted Kennedy.

Edward M. Kennedy, R.I.P.

One of the Most Disturbing Stories I've Read, Ever.

It is rather difficult to surprise me when it comes to corruption in the criminal justice system. I grew up acutely aware of its power over people, particularly poor people/people of color, and while I'm no Hobbesian, I'm not one to always assume the best in people. And specifically given how long Radley has been chronicling (and thus I have been following) the Stephen Hayne debacle in Mississippi, I didn't think it could get much worse.

I was wrong.

As Radley stated when reason published the story today, a description of it doesn't really fit well into a soundbite. Suffice it to say, the article describes a tragic miscarriage of justice, gross incompetence by nearly everyone involved, and a criminal act by charlatans that should throw into question every word of testimony ever given in court by the perpetrators--and that includes potentially thousands of cases. I can't recommend strongly enough that you read it.