"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative  Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only)  Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.


Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.

Thoughts on Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes, and the Lonesome Death of Political Journalism

Just over two years ago, I wrote about What it Takes: The Way to the White House and what it meant to political writing, especially campaign books. I was of the opinion then that it was the high water mark of such books and with its commercial failure, it marked the death of proper political journalism.

If anything, I feel even more strongly than I did on New Year's Day of 2011. Moreover, I think the consequences of it are infinitely worse than I did then. For a democracy to be worthwhile, it has to be informed. Otherwise we're a land of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king.

That's more or less where we already are. Imagine just about any modern politician running fifty years ago, armed with little more than their silly platitudes and absurd talking points. Do you seriously think that any of them would last more than five minutes before they were shamed into committing suicide?

We have access to more information more affordably than at any other time in human history. Virtually anything you want to know is at your fingertips. Yet people manage to know even less than they did just a generation ago. It's remarkable when you think about it. Our grandparents knew more about the basic functioning of their democracy from reading a daily newspaper than we do with literal encyclopedias on our telephones. As literacy rates skyrocket, actual knowledge is declining.

Politics used to be about persuasion; convincing people that disagree with you that your platform is best for society. That hasn't been true in some time. politicians now pander to our predetermined beliefs, which are often breathtakingly ignorant. Political consultants and lobbyists (who are, with shocking regularity, the same people with different titles depending on whether it's an even or odd numbered year) will tell you that this is democracy in its purest form, which is a lie.

Modern communications and microtargeting don't persuade anybody of anything as much as they tend to reinforce existing positions and drive turnout. It's all very scientific, to be sure, but it exists only to play to stupidity. It doesn't educate or elucidate and it isn't supposed to.

The same is increasingly true of journalism, which is now thoroughly targeted to existing biases and only barely pretends otherwise. Why else do Fox News and MSNBC even exist?

Virtually every political campaign book in the last twenty-five years have been little more than opportunities for insiders to badmouth one another and deflect blame from themselves. Expand the tabloid format by 300 pages and that's your book.

What it Takes was very different. It was almost a series of mini-biographies of the major candidates that went into great detail about what shaped them and why. In some cases, Cramer interviewed the candidate's grade school teachers. Yes, the book was a thousand pages long, but you learned more than that consultants are human garbage, which everybody already knew.

I believe that the commercial failure of What It Takes sent a powerful message just as the information revolution was beginning. Detail and depth are the surest way to the remainder bin. Nobody wants to read something that they don't already know or doesn't confirm to what they already believe. Nothing succeeds quite like intellectual laziness and underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Nobody wants to be challenged about anything, especially their system of government.

What It Takes is considered by political journalists to be the most influential book ever written, but that doesn't change the market and it sure as hell doesn't change the attitudes of editors and publishers. And in the end, it doesn't change us.

Prior to 1992, people were complaining that no one was writing books like What It Takes. But Richard Ben Cramer did, and no one bought it. As I noted two years ago, Cramer still owed his publisher $200,000 back from his initial advance and he never wrote about American politics again.

Cramer died Monday evening of complications of lung cancer. He was 62 years old. Of course, every political writer in America has published tributes to his ability and the majesty of What It Takes. But none of them are doing what would be the most fitting tribute to Richard Ben Cramer of all: Doing their jobs the way he did his.

If you want to know how much poorer we are for his loss, you should buy a copy of What It Takes, read it, and imagine how much different things might be if more people wrote and read books like it.

Book Review - "How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot: The Inside Story Behind the Coalition" by Brian Topp

The fall of 2008 was magical time, if by "magical" you mean "the world was ending."

Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15 and the year-old recession metastasized into a full-bore, balls-out financial panic. More than anything else, this was responsible for electing Barack Obama president of the United States. From that moment on, John McCain made to many stupid unforced errors for him to ever be taken seriously again.

Oh, and Canada was enjoying it's 42nd federal election in 20 minutes. Nobody does democracy like Canadians have over the last decade. I vote almost as often as I masturbate, and I masturbate plenty! It's actually pretty annoying.

Because of spectacularly bad political decisions on his part, Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government was reelected, but didn't yet win his long lusted-after majority.

How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is what happened in the aftermath of the 2008, during what Canadians call "The Winter of Our Discontent." The author, Brian Topp, was the New Democratic Party's campaign director and a key player in what subsequently happened.

After a campaign riddled with incredibly dumb mistakes, Harper consciously chose to begin his second mandate with even dumber ones. When the House of Commons resumed sitting in late November, Harper's jerk-off finance minister, Jim Flaherty, introduced an economic statement that basically said "Everything's fine" just as the ruins of the world economy were smouldering around him.

But then it got worse. Harper and Flaherty decided that they were going to be Scott Walker, two years before Scott Walker was invented by the Koch brothers. Among other things, the Conservatives announced that federal workers would lose their right to strike and pay equity for women would be rolled back. Then they set off a political hydrogen bomb: the public subsidy to the parties would be immediately ended.

This requires some explaining for my foreign readers. In 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided that he very much wanted to cripple his successor as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Paul Martin. He did this by banning corporate and union donations to the parties, replacing them with a per-vote public subsidy. The Liberals, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks, took the biggest hit of all in this scheme and it had the effect of electing Harper, who had mastered grassroots fund-raising.

Under the public subsidy, the parties that weren't the Conservatives took out loans to pay for election campaigns and repaid them with the public subsidy. The immediate end of the subsidy would have bankrupted. And there was no way that the opposition parties were going to tolerate that.

As much as he now likes to pretend otherwise, Harper is no stranger to the idea of a coalition replacing a "democratically elected" government. During the dark days of Paul Martin's short-lived minority, he had proposed doing just that with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Now the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc proposed doing it to Harper.

The whole idea was apparently Topp's and Jack Layton appointed him as one of the negotiators to approach the Grits.

Small problem, Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals, ran an even more disastrous campaign than the Tories did and had already announced his resignation. Everyone believed (as later happened) that Michael Ignatieff was going to replace him. Ignatieff was far more conservative, arrogant, opportunistic and unprincipled than was Dion and a coalition would likely have been a dead letter under him. Time was of the essence.

Even while Dion was still leader, the Liberals couldn't stop being the Liberals and nearly sank the deal. As they have been for most of my life, they were in the midst of a vicious civil war and, all available evidence to the contrary, still believed that they could win an election on their own. Those assholes honestly suggested that the NDP just give them power with nothing in return. Breaking the Grits of that illusion took days.

The greater problem was the NDP and the Liberals did not by themselves have enough votes to defeat the Conservatives on a confidence vote in the House or pass anything as a coalition. For that they would need the Bloc.

One of the great lies of the "Coalition Crisis of Ought-Eight" was that the treasonous Bloc would actually be partners in it. They weren't. They wouldn't be part of the government or hold any Cabinet seats. All the Bloc would do was pledge to support the NDP-Liberal coalition on confidence measures for roughly 18 months.

But Layton and Dion made a magnificently stupidly optical error: They publicly had the Bloc's leader, Gilles Ducceppe, join them in signing the coalition document and for the press conference announcing it. More than anything else, as Brian Topp himself concedes, killed the very idea of a coalition in the minds of English Canada.

The Harper Tories engaged in almost Herculean levels in lying in response to the coalition proposal. It was an unconstitutional power-grab against the wishes of the people, we were told, despite the fact the Westminster parliamentary system specifically allows for it.

The presence of Ducceppe and the Bloc only made matters worse. This, Harper screamed from the rooftops, was Stephane Dion "getting into bed with separatists," which was a shot well below the belt. As Mr. Topp points out in his book, the only person that Quebec separatists despise as fulsomely as Pierre Trudeau is Dion. More importantly, Harper wanted to do exactly the same thing only three years earlier.

Because Canadians aren't very bright, the whole thing was public relations clusterfuck of immense proportions. And it was going to get worse. Oh, it would get so much worse.

On the evening of December 3, both Harper and Dion delivered pre-taped addresses to the country. The Prime Minister surrounded himself with flags and lied his ass off. The Leader of the Opposition, who on top of being only barely functional in English, looked as though he was starring in a Hezbollah hostage video. And Dion could barely even get his hostage tape to the networks on time.



It was nothing less than the single greatest political disaster I had ever seen. Dion, who in many ways was a stronger champion of federalism than Harper, was so thoroughly discredited and humiliated that he immediately resigned the next day.

Ignatieff was named interim Liberal leader and the Grits' already formidable arrogance and stupidity went into hyperdrive. He fucked around, using the coalition as a meaningless threat before ultimately supporting Harper in Parliament for nine months.

In a way, it's actually too bad that How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot ends in the fall of 2009 because that's where the real fun started. What followed in the two years after the book was the complete disintegration of the Liberals, the almost forced deportation of Michael Ignatieff and the rise of the NDP as a genuine political force in Canada. Brian Topp's analysis of everything that happened after September of 2009 would have been fascinating to read.

Whether you agree with the NDP on policy (and I don't,) How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is a much better than average contemporary political history. You see, in real time through Blackberry messages, how the negotiations built and how everything ultimately fell apart.

If you like your political books to grab you by the crotch before head-butting you, I can't recommend Brian Topp's book enough. How We almost Gave the Tories the Boot is instructive in the fine art of what Richard Nixon called nut-cutting and shows you not only where the bodies are buried, but almost lets you hold the shovel.

If you can, I suggest you pick it up.

Too Late, Dumb and Dead: More Thoughts on the NDP-Liberal "Merger"

I've been saying for years that the Liberal Party of Canada is on a rapid slide into obsolescence. However, even I didn't think it would happen as rapidly as it did. I thought it would take the Grits a decade to wind up where they are, although I did say that their ending up as the third party in Parliament was well within the realm of possibility during last year's campaign. I was still kind of shocked when it actually happened.

To understand how the Liberals got to the depths they're in now, one should understand how they reached the heights they enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, I've found Peter C. Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada a remarkable resource in this regard. Newman is also the author of one of my all-time favorite hate-screeds, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: The Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. I'm seriously considering having all of my future lovers read The Secret Mulroney Tapes before I embed myself within them, so beautifully angry is that book. It's almost as balls-out pissed off as Mulroney's own memoirs, but only a quarter the length!

Anyhow, without actually coming right and saying so, Newman makes the case that the Liberals became the "Natural Government Party" through good timing and breath-taking corruption. Fantastically, I was unaware of this theorem before reading When the Gods Changed because no Liberal actually contested it. There was no shortage of material in Newman's book that various and sundry Grits protested, but that wasn't among them.

The LPoC had the good fortune of governing during the Second World War, when Canada finally became a fully industrialized society. As was true in the United States later, Ottawa was besieged with "dollar a year men," business leaders who worked for the government to further the war effort. In Canada, they answered to Prime Minister King's "Minister of Everything," C.D Howe.

Besides being mostly responsible for the war effort, Howe was also the Liberal party's chief fundraiser. However, he never bothered building any kind of a wall being his two functions. When a business wanted a lucrative "cost-plus" war contract, Howe's functionaries reminded them that a political donation would grease the wheels somewhat. That this also essentially froze money from going to the Conservatives or the CCF (which is now the NDP) was likely something that didn't escape ol' C.D's notice.

Often times, a company would overbid for a contract and then kick back as much as 10% of it to the party. Most modern observers believe that Jean Chretien's sponsorship scandal came out of nowhere, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Peter Newman spends the better part of three chapters describing how corruption is part of the Liberal DNA, again, without actually saying so. But it is impossible to read the history in When the Gods Changed without coming to that conclusion.

The Grits also mightily relied on the federal civil service to build it's infrastructure and as a training ground for their candidates, particularly during the King, St. Laurent and Pearson years. What was created was an unstoppable marriage between politics, business and the public service that was unparalleled in most of the democratic world. Indeed, it was a phenomenon more more common to totalitarian societies.

But the Liberals were often brought down by their own unparalleled arrogance. At various points(specifically, 1957, '84 and 2006) the public would grow disgusted with their hubris and throw them out, giving the Conservatives the odd chance at government, which they would promptly fuck up.

But after '57 - with the very notable exception of Pierre Trudeau's win in 1968 - the Liberals only won because the Conservatives were so bad at politics. Trudeau never won back-to-back majority governments and Jean Chretien only won at all because the Conservative party fractured three ways during the latter Mulroney years.

When the Tories reunified in 2003, the Grits were first reduced to a bare minority, then thrown out of government altogether, probably never to return. In the 2006, '08 and '11 elections, the Liberal seats from Paul Martn's last government have been cut by more than two-thirds.  Only three Liberal leaders since 1867 have never been prime minister. Two of them were leader in the last six years.

Of course the Liberals should have reached some accommodation with the NDP. In fact, even Jean Chretien now recognizes that he should have done it years ago, when he was prime minister. The Dippers were almost as thoroughly wiped out as the Conservatives were in 1993. Had Chretien absorbed the New Democratic Party under the most generous terms possible back then, I believe that they'd still be in power today. There would have been an almost unstoppable left-wing party in a centre-left-leaning country, which even the unified Conservatives probably wouldn't have defeated.

But the Liberals couldn't stop being Liberals for 20 minutes and think about their electoral future. They had their strength in Quebec cut in half after 1984 and spent the better part of the 70s guaranteeing that they'd never again win significant numbers of seats in Western Canada. They thought that the Tory fracture was forever and that they could continue to win majorities with all of the seats in Ontario, slightly less than half of Quebec's and a plurality in Atlantic Canada until they end of time.

The only problem was that they didn't see the end of time coming until it was too late to stop it, which was in 2010, if you believe some commentators. It was only then that some Grit functionaries - very probably without telling their leader, Micheal Ignatieff - started "negotiating" a merger with the NDP under Jack Layton.

Even at that incredibly late date, the overwhelming hubris of the Liberals was on full display. The "deal" was essentially this: "Stop being the NDP and we'll let you become Liberals. But before you get too excited, we're not going to give you commie assholes any Cabinet seats that have anything to do with money. How's that grab you?"

Within a year, the Grits would have fewer seats than the Dippers did when those "negotiations" were ongoing.

Now comes the new book by  Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Power Trap: How fear and loathing between New Democrats and Liberals keep Stephen Harper in power--and what can be done about it.

I haven't yet read Power Trap, but Professor Adams' thesis is, to put it lightly, silly.

A new book that advocates a Liberal-NDP merger blames partisan pettiness and personal rivalries for the two parties’ refusal to play footsie.

“New Democrats and Liberals are caught in a power trap in which they seek to reach government, not by defeating the Conservatives, but by destroying their progressive rival,” writes Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

In Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between the Liberals and NDP Keep Harper in Power, he predicts the two parties will keep duelling for at least another three elections before one or the other establishes supremacy.

In other words, opposition stubbornness will enable Stephen Harper to join the five-member club of Canadian prime ministers who’ve each ruled for a decade or more.

This, argues the veteran journalist, will be disastrous for Canada.

(...)

He believes a victory by co-operating progressives would be fairly certain, noting the three parties won 53 per cent of the vote in 2011.

And that was with a no-show from a large chunk of a voting constituency — youth — that the progressive parties potentially are best positioned to win over. If the three parties were to undertake a campaign of outreach, using social media as Barack Obama did in his 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign, young people who previously haven’t voted could help put a merged Opposition force over the top in a vote expected in 2015.

While it’s true some right-leaning Liberals likely go over to the Conservatives in such a scenario, “blue Liberals” probably already have left the party, Adams writes.

At the moment, however, so-called progressives have “no agreed-upon platform or unifying vision, no leader who can claim undisputed primacy in the fight to dislodge the Conservatives.”

There's absolutely no evidence to support Adams' assertions.

The Liberals have already spent the better part of four decades narrowing their geographic and political appeal to the point that it barely exists at all. If the Conservatives were even halfway smart, John Turner would have been the Last Liberal Prime Minister instead of Paul Martin.

The NDP has already established "supremacy" over the Liberals, as any fair reading of the last twenty years of elections results amply demonstrates.

In 1993, the Dippers were reduced to 9 seats from 44, losing party status along with the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals went from 88 to 177, and Chretien likely wouldn't have won half that many were it not for vote-splitting in Ontario and Quebec, where over half of Parliament's seats are.

But in four of the five subsequent elections, 1997, 2004, '06 and '08, the New Democrats slowly gained seats as the Liberals lost them. The Grits started the 2004 election with 168 seats and ended it with 135. In 2008, they dropped to 77. Between '93 and '08, the Dippers more than quadrupled their seat count to 37.

2011 was the terminal point. The Liberals were reduced to an all-time low of 34 seats, while the NDP exploded to 103, over half of which was in Quebec.

Simply put, the Liberals have had the floor drop out of their vote in the last two elections, losing 50% of their seats in each of them. Meanwhile, the Dippers have been increasingly expanding the scope and reach of their vote in ways that no one could have anticipated.

Unless the Grits can magically start doubling and tripling their seats counts overnight, reversing a trend two decades in the making, they're done. And given the narrowing of the geographic reach of the vote that started under Trudeau, that ain't at all likely. At this point, they barely hold the majority of seats in their former stronghold of Toronto.

Liberal fortunes are further complicated by their continued reliance on fucking gimmicks. Their coming leadership race seems to be a contest for who their next "guru" is going to be; Teenage Jesus, who hasn't done anything in government, or a retired astronaut who hasn't done anything in government. Both are about as notable for their governing vision of Canada as the former goalie who previously ran for the leadership was. The Liberals haven't thought of having a serious parliamentarian as their leader since Martin.

Say what you will about Jack Layton and Thomas Muclair, but they had spent decades in municipal and provincial government between them. They both knew how the game of politics is played and how the machinery worked, as well as having a vision as to how broaden the chessboard of the electorate. The Liberals are still relying on stunts that they think will make the country fall to their knees before them. I could be very wrong about this, but I think they're insulting the public with that nonsense. I haven't hidden the fact that I think that the voting public is stupid, but I don't think we're that stupid.

Professor Adams also makes much too much about how "right-wing" the Harper Conservatives are. They responded to the 2008 financial panic by spending even more in stimulus money than Barack Obama did. Every single proposal they've ever made since 2004 has been poll-tested to the tits and is utterly bereft of anything that is recognizable as "conservative principle." let alone being "right-wing." In his six years in power, Harper has come close to surpassing even Trudeau's insane spending.

When a left-wing party finally beats the Tories, it won't be because that party is so made of awesome. It'll be because conservatives have abandoned the Conservatives.

Can we also quit comparing anything in Canadian politics to President Obama's 2008 victory? More than anything else, doing that demonstrates that people like Paul Adams don't know anything about Canadian or American politics.

There are two reasons that Barack Obama is president today, their names are George W. Bush and John McCain.

Bush had poisoned the well on all the issues that Republicans had previously been strong on, most importantly, national security and the economy. It's important to remember that the financial panic began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 but the recession started in the spring of 2007. Iraq was a huge mess and Afghanistan was even worse without anyone noticing. Also, McCain ran a spectacularly bad campaign and thought that a semi-literate piece of ass would save him. He thought wrong.

I probably shouldn't overlook the fact that Obama wasn't even the favourite to win the Democratic nomination: Hillary Clinton was, but her campaign was  overwhelmed by stupidity, hubris and infighting, making her the ideal frontrunner to run the Liberal Party of Canada.

You can actually look at the Obama presidency and adorably say that "He didn't build that!" The GOP did it for him, and are continuing to. But there is, as yet, no evidence at all that Stephen Harper is creating similar conditions for a future

Finally, I have seen no indication at all that the Liberals have gotten over themselves enough to even think about reconsidering their previously stated terms of a merger, specifically that the NDP stop being the NDP. Even though they have well under half of the seats that the Dippers do, the Grits are still delusional enough to think that they can dictate the terms of a merger.

The Liberal Party of Canada is basically the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They've had a limb cut off in each of the last four elections, but they insist that "it's just a flesh wound" and that they remain strong enough to dictate the terms under which the New Democrats cross the bridge.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. Okay, that's not true, It's still hilarious.

I'll probably still read  Power Trap, but that's only because I like feeling smarter than my supposed intellectual betters. Whether you buy it or not, I'll leave to you, but I can't imagine that Tories or Dippers will find a single useful thing in it.



I could go into some depth about Quebec and how the dynamics there are likely to play into the coming power shift, but I'm bored and this post is already long enough. If you want to argue, let's go to the comments. In all probability, somebody's going to bring up the Clarity Act and that'll necessitate a part two to this post.

Let's get it on.

Senor Citizen: Dan's Unlikely Journey

Blaming the debacle in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority is far from fair. Because Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and President Bush all decided that the State Department was going to be frozen out of the post-war occupation and because there never was any planning for the occupation at the Department of Defense, the whole adventure was doomed from the very start.

The history now pretty clearly shows that the White House and DoD didn't seem to think that a long-term occupation was necessary. Rumsfeld and Cheney seemed to think that they could hand the entire country over to Ahmed Chalibi and everything would be fine, despite a decade's worth of warnings from State and the CIA that Chalabi was as dishonest and corrupt as an Iraqi could be without being a blood relative of Saddam's.

Granted, that didn't stop everyone in the Bush Administration from blaming their proconsul, L. Paul Bremmer for everything that went wrong. Read any of their memoirs. The one recurring theme is "Our ridiculous lack of any planning whatsoever had nothing to do with it. It was all Bremmer's fault!"

If you've read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's magnificent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - and if you haven't, you really should - you know that the CPA was its own, completely separate disaster. It was staffed from top to bottom with Republican political hacks that were determined to engage in weird social experiments directly out of the American Enterprise Institute. For example, Bremmer saw to it that the Iraqi people had a flat tax before they had reliable electricity. It was the single most unserious occupation operation in American history.

Of course, that's not why some 4,500 American soldiers and innumerable Iraqi civilians died after Saddam was driven from power. That was directly caused by CPA Orders Number 1 and 2, which de-Baathified the Iraqi civil service and disbanded both the military and police. As a consequence an insurgency that was estimated to be about 3,000 immediately ballooned to 300,000, or roughly twice as large as the U.S military presence in Iraq. Because the Americans were devoting their resources to finding weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist instead of providing security until it was too late, anarchy prevailed for the next four years.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's spokesman was Dan Senor. During his time in Iraq, he gave Rajiv Chandrasekaran one of the greatest quotes I've ever read.  "Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."

With a record like that, how could he not become a senior foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney? If you've been following Governor Romney's international travels this past week, you'll see that it's going swimmingly.

Mr. Senor, 41, is an unusual hybrid: He is a policy wonk, media maven, successful author and financier. He made headlines last weekend when he told reporters that if Israel launched a pre-emptive unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Romney “would respect” that decision, a claim Mr. Senor softened somewhat in a later statement.

For his part, Mr. Romney said in an address on Sunday that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons “must be our highest national-security priority,” but made no mention of an Israeli attack.

If in fact Mr. Senor used the word "pre-emptive" strike in regards to Iran, that's a cause for concern because it indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating. An attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would not, as a matter of both international law and common sense, be pre-emptive. Pre-emption rests entirely on the imminence of a threat. Since there wouldn't be a deployable weapon, let alone a stated threat that one would be used forthwith, the Iranian program does not pose an imminent threat.

Such a strike by Israel, the United States, or anyone else would meet the definition of a preventative war, and those are illegal under any reading of international law and tradition. President Eisenhower spoke eloquently when he said "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

The point is that pre-emption and prevention, despite what most Americans currently choose to believe, are not interchangeable. They are separate and distinct from one another. One is legal and righteous, the other is criminal. Someone who can reasonably be expected to hold a senior national security post in a potential Romney Administration should know the difference.

Then it got worse.

The trip has attracted its share of controversy. Mr. Romney departed from official U.S. policy and described Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel,” “culture.” Such a comment is “racist” and “shows a lack of knowledge,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

From time to time,  conservative politicians will ward-heel their way over to Israel and promise that they'll move their embassies to Jerusalem when they get themselves elected. Canada's Joe Clark did this in 1979.

But, like Clark, they never actually do it, mostly because they get a good look at reality as soon as they take office. There isn't a Muslim country in the world that will accept foreign embassies in Jerusalem so long as that city's status remains unresolved. And we still have to deal with Muslim countries, mostly because there are so many of them and they have so much oil. You might not like that, but it remains a fact.

The Israelis never really expect said politicians to follow through on this stupid promise, but those politicians have their credibility damaged in Israel's eyes for having made it in the first place, as I'm sure the aforementioned Joe Clark will tell you. In making such a colossally stupid promise, you manage to pull off the impressive feat of enraging Muslims and Jews. And for what?

As for the "Palestinian culture" remark, not only was that an enormous foreign policy gaffe, it was incredibly idiotic as a domestic political matter. Romney's home state of Michigan is much closer than it has any business being. Because it has more Arabs per square foot than anywhere else in America, I'm pretty sure it won't be for much longer.

Not only was Romney himself born and raised in Michigan, Dan Senor himself was the communications director for the first and only Arab-American United States senator, Spencer Abraham ... of Michigan. If Mitt were to win the Wolverine State, his path to the White House become immeasurably easier, since he'd also probably pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota with it.

The Governor then went on to praise Israel's health care system, citing all kinds of spending to GDP numbers and health outcomes, while ignoring that a central facet of it is, you guessed it, an individual mandate. As I said at the great and good Velociman's place this morning "If one created an individual mandate in the state one governed, suggested that his party campaign on Wyden-Bennett (which contained an individual mandate,) and then went on to praise a foreign health care system with an individual mandate without being asked ... Well, reasonable people might begin to suspect that one doesn't have a huge problem with individual mandates."

Everyone is still focusing on Romney's Olympic disaster in England, which was more funny than anything else. But what he did in Israel was worse by several degrees. They were not only entirely self-inflicted wounds, they were wounds of some consequence.

Look, I don't know if either of those gaffes were Senor's idea, but I do know that it's his job to stop Romney from making them. When his candidate is overseas (which I think is a brutally stupid thing to do in a modern campaign, anyway. The deepest wound John McCain inflicted on Obama four years ago was the "Celebrity" ad that used footage from the The One's Berlin visit.) Dan Senor's single biggest responsibility is to keep his fucking mouth shut! The single easiest way for a candidate to get himself in trouble is to make with the goddamned talkee-talk, especially when he's anyplace more foreign than Wayne County.

I don't take any pleasure in writing this. Whenever I've seen him on TV, Senor has struck me as a decent breed of cat. We're roughly the same age, we grew up in the same hometown (although I only learned that this morning,) we both have a deep interest in foreign policy, and we both have bad hair. The only difference between Dan Senor and I is that he has a great education, a cool job, a ton of money and a hot wife. Oh, and I never took part in destroying the Middle East.

Other than that, it's like we're connected at the soul.

But if you were still wondering why I think Mitt Romney's going to lose this election, the Israel trip is instructive.

A Two-Legged Cancer: Another Post About Lobbyists and Why Conservatives Should Want Them Destroyed

In his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig posits that money is the root of all political evil and that money must be strictly controlled and regulated. Professor Lessig also makes the interesting point that conservatives will never get their fondest wish, tax reform in a "flat" or "fair" system, without systematic campaign finance reform.

Lessig's basic theory is that you cannot have serious tax reform with Washington lobbyists throwing money around wildly at the relevent congressional committess, specifically Ways and Means in the House and the Senate Finance Committee.

As Ronald Regan's first budget director, David Stockman, pointed out on Moyers & Company a couple of weeks ago, that would require a constitutional amendment given repeated Supreme Court rulings equating money and speech. Obviously, that isn't going to happen anytime soon, if ever. The triumph and continued celebration of institutional ignorance makes it a virtual impossibility. Even if that weren't the case, ratification would be a challenge that probably couldn't be overcome.

John McCain said on Meet the Press this past Sunday that Citizens United would lead to a scandal so catastrophic that serious reform was inevitible. As he is on any number of issues lately, McCain is terribly, terribly wrong and displays a pathetic understanding of history.

The first significant revisions to campaign finance were made in the wake of Watergate and President Nixon's resignation on 9 August 1974. It should be remembered (if anyone understands it in the first place) that there would have been no Watergate witout Nixon's campaign "slush fund" that consisted of several million dollars. The White House Plumbers Unit was financed through that fund, which is how Congress was unaware of it. And the hush money that constituted the main (and by far most important )obstruction of justice article of impeachment came from there as well.

During a recorded conversation on 20 March 1973, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that the silence of the Watergate burglers would "cost a million dollars." Nixon replied, "You can get a million dollars. I know where it can be gotten", by which he almost certainly meant his campaign slush fund.

And Watergate did lead to comprehensive campaign finance reform. Unfortunately, it didn't take. Beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, the Supreme Court knocked laws down on First Amendment grounds just as quickly as they could be written. If Watergate and the forced resignation of a president that had won 49 states less than two years earlier didn't make reform stick, what scandal does McCain forsee that will? In the decade after Watergate alone, the money spent in House and Senate races exlploded by some 400%.

Money will always (and, in my opinion, properly) be equated with speech. Scandal will only change things temporarily, if it doesn't actually accelerate the cascade of money. And a constitutional amendment is a hill far too high for anyone to be reasonably  expected to climb.

Nor do I think campaign money is even the problem. President Theodore Roosevelt financed his 1904 campaign with giant wads of cash from a very exclusive combine of industralist millionaires. That money in no way stopped TR from screwing his contributors with the hot poker of anti-Trust laws when the mood struck him. That suggests that money isn't as much of a problem as the character of our current politicians is. And no law is ever going to change that.

I just started reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform by Allan Murray and Jeffery Birnbaum. Showdown chronicles the passage of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the signature legislative accomplishment of President Ronald Reagan's second term, which was passed over the strenous efforts of Washington's army of lobbyists with fairly impressive bi-partisan support.

The '86 law is the foundational basis of most current Republican tax plans. It lowered rates fairly dramatically and closed corporate loopholes. Sound familiar? What modern Republicans don't like, but liberals loved, is that it also took some four million low-income earners out from under the federal tax burden entirely. In any event, it was widely considered a triumph over the lobbying class.

One of the great things about reading history is that you usually know how the story ends. While Showdown at Gucci Gulch had a happy ending - tax reform passed and the lobbyist scumbags were vanquished - things became decidedly unhappy after the book's 1987 publication.

By 1990, or thereabouts, the lobbyists had most (if not all) of their client's loopholes restored, which essentially meant that you had fewer people paying taxes at a lower rate. That threw the budget even more out of balance, necessitating the 1990 and '93 tax increases under George H.W Bush and Bill Clinton. Since then, tax rates have been even more drastically cut as loopholes have broadened.

Forget something as dramatic as serious tax reform, you won't even be able to balance the budget as long as this persists. So long as the political system stays as it is, tax rates will continue to remain static (or head further downward) as loopholes expland, meaning that government will have less and less revenue to do more and more. Iran, as you might have figured, has a very poor history of bombing itself.  

Nor willl spending cuts accomplish much, at least not by themselves. You can only cut so much in a democracy before people start to realize that they're losing services only to preserve the goodies in the tax code for their social betters. This almost never ends well, as you might well imagine.

No amount of campaign finance reform - outside of full public financing - is ever going to change this. Moreover, there's no guarantee that public financing would be upheld by the courts because of free speech considerations.

But it can be handled nicely through lobbying reform. Specifically, the revolving door of politics, government and lobbying.

Let's be real. Political types are practically unemployable, which is how they got into politics in the first place and why so many of them go into lobbying when they finally get booted out of politics forever. And lobbying firms know that.

On the other hand, those firms also know that those layabouts, both at the elective and staff levels (both campaign and governmental), have built relationships and know how to work the system to their ends. Why else would they be hired, if not to exploit that? It's not as if these people were especially good lawyers. If they were, they'd be making more money in white-shoe law firms and investment banks, and never would have darkened democracy's door in the first place.

Worse, these people, while still registered as lobbyists, are allowed to still "volunteer" on campaigns and "advise" members of the government. Those people exist to play the government - and by extension, us - to the fullest extent that they can. If you want to know why the 1986 Tax Reform Act didn't solve all of the world's ills, and may have actually made the budgetary situation worse, now you do.

The best part is that you don't even need a law to fix this! Under the constitutions of the United States and most of the Commonwealth, legislatures are given the freedom to pass and enforce their own rules. Better still, the courts rarely, if ever, interfere with that right, if only because they want to preserve their own independence to maximum possible extent.

The way I see it, you needn't restrict the right of former politicians or their staffs from registering as lobbyists. Congress or Parliament could simply pass a rule prohibiting current members (and their current staffs) from interacting with them if they do. This also wouldn't violate anyone's association rights because the member always has the option of resignation. Being a member of a legislative body isn't a right. It is something that comes at the pleasure of the people.

How long do you figure lobbying firms would continue to hire these people if their ability to trade influence was retricted? Sure, some of them would survive as "consultants" or "legislative strategists" but you would see their numbers decimated simply because the market couldn't bear that much dead weight for very long. 

One of the reasons that I don't write about liberals very often is that I know that they're impractial idealists, and that there's very little reasoning with them. Until very recently, conservatives were different. 

Besides, the most important legislative goals - like fundamental tax reform - are directly tied to minimizing the power of lobbyists, and that's simply not true of the left. Moreover, it would probably be far better politically for conservatives if liberals were left to be the exclusive domain of animals like the folks at Goldman Sachs. More importantly still, there haven't been very many liberals over the last fifteen years that have been ensnared in (or imprisoned because of) lobbying-related scandals. But the list of conservatives who have been is virtually endless.  

There are any number of reasons that conservatives should do this, but I hardly think that they will.

First, as we've seen in recent years, conservatives benefit as much from the revolving door as liberals ever did, and the criminal dockets show that they've benefitted from it even more. Second, it would require conservatives to actually do something, instead of  merely opposing stuff, which has become our legislative default position.

Long story short, conservatives are never going to get the things that their hearts desire most. And it's going to be their own fault.

Hitch 62: 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night and we're all a little worse off for his loss. He was 62 years old.

When I started writing regularly nearly a decade ago, I knew that the exercise would be an exploration of my own outrage and contempt toward virtually everything. That being the case, I chose as models the two writers who best expressed those feelings, Hunter Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom were very much alive in the spring of 2003.

Of the two, Hitchens was a better writer for longer. Though legendary, Thompson was only truly incandescent between 1970 and 1979. Afterward, he became a truly erratic writer. The genius would pop up from time to time - the best example of which is his 1994 eulogy of Richard Nixon -  but, more often than not, he wrote like a Hunter Thompson impersonator. You could see him trying to top his own past and failing. It was almost tragic to watch, and most likely the reason he ultimately killed himself. Not only was football season over, as his suicide note said, it had been for a good long time.

Hitch was consistently brilliant for decades. If anything, he got better as he got older in ways that Hunter never could. While he never produced anything as immediately classic as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", Christopher Hitchens was a better writer than almost anyone else for thirty years.

Where Thompson's written expressions of indignation were rhetorically violent, Hitchens' were outstandingly elegant without being foppish, a curse of most British writers. Thompson's outrage was energizing while Hitchens' was almost narcotic. His turn of phrase was so beautiful that you almost didn't notice the anger that drove it. And that, my friends, is art. Like Hunter Thompson, Christopher Hitchens turned something as terribly pedestrian and dreary as journalism into something literary and beautiful to read for it's own sake. The only other political journalist I can think of that turns cynicism into something akin to poetry the way Hitchens did is George Will.



I've made the proud ignorance of the Republican Party something of a religious text here for nearly four years. I've referenced it over and over again in this space, without knowing that Hitchens said it first on Hardball with Chris Matthews 11 years ago before yesterday. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."

Here's the full quote;

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

As was true of Bobby Kennedy, when Christopher Hitchens hated you, you stayed hated. His best books, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were all moral condemnations of their subjects and all far more eloquent by several degrees than anything else written on the subjects of his scorn.

Even God His own Self wasn't spared the wrath of Hitchen's typewriter. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything posited that most of mankind's evil is sanctioned in our holy books, in one way or another. And the truth of that is almost inescapable. You can argue whether the good religion produces outweighs the evil it condones, but you cannot reasonably argue that said evil isn't textually sanctioned and, in some cases, actually demanded.

I was raised Catholic, so there are few things that I love more than precious (mostly, but not always, liberal) Catholics who feel that feel that the One True Church is "misguided" in believing that things like divorce, homosexuality and abortion are abominations and mortal sins, while maintaining that they are "good Catholics."

If you're one of those folks, you're a hypocritical asshole and should probably suffer any number of biblical fates for several deadly sins, not the least of which being pride.

The Church isn't a grassroots organization like ACORN, for Christsakes. Moreover, it never pretended to be a "bottom-up" democracy. Foundational beliefs like papal infallibility tend to undercut silly notions like that quite nicely.

The Church is their club, not yours, and their rules are law. To suggest that you can "reform" what even you believe is the Word of God - and is actually written in the text of the book - is more than a little presumptuous and definitive proof that you're simply bad at your religion. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that your religion disagrees with you, rather than you with it.

When I was twelve years old, I determined that the beliefs of the Church were dangerous and silly, so I refused confirmation and stopped considering myself a Catholic. As a matter of theological fact, liberal Catholics aren't Catholics, either, I'm just honest enough to say so. The Church was there long before I was born and will continue long after I'm dead. I merely choose not to prticipate in it's extraordinary silliness.

Under no circumstances would I associate myself with anyone running around Africa and telling the locals that AIDS was bad, but condoms were worse, so I quit. But I would never presume to say that Church's position wasn't biblically sanctioned because it is. I just happen to believe that the sanction is moronic and demonstrably lethal to the most vulnerable people on earth. If you believe that "God hates fags", you sure as shit better not have a tattoo while doing so because that just happens to be the next verse in Leviticus.

Essentially, that's what God is Not Great is about. If you wrap yourself in some supernatural, superstitious ceremony, you should also be called to account for the true - and sometimes breathtakingly so  - evil that's done in it's name. If the world was populated with rational adults, rather than overly tall children, that book would not have been as controversial as it was.

The facts are the facts. And the facts are that the Catholic Church didn't renounce the biblical interpretation that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ - the basis of 1,000 years of Christian-propagated pogroms - until Vatican II, seventeen years after the Holocaust ended. And, to my way of thinking, that's more than enough reason to renounce Christianity.

Of course, Hitchens wasn't without his own messianic impulses. He was fervent supporter of the idea of regime change, particularly in Iraq. While I was - mistakenly - at the time, as well, Hitchens and I differed on the entire  point of the war. He strongly advocated Bush's disastrously wrong "democracy agenda", which argued that you can maintain Iraq as a cohesive country while enhancing regional stability under the will of the people. It should be pretty clear by now that you can't.

His position was eminently justifiable as an ethical matter. He morally identified with the plight of the Kurds., who are the world's largest minority without their own country. For Hitchens, it was a matter of loyalty to leftist comrades against what he rightly called "a pornographic regime." But he never, to my knowledge, shared their aspirations for a national homeland.

And that's where his case falls apart. There is no reason to believe that the Kurds will ever abandon their desire for a state, but any declaration of independence will result in a catastrophic war with Arab Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, some of whose territory would be a part of such a state. And unlike Kosovo, there is no international guarantor that can protect such a fledgling nation from immediate destruction.

Having said that, you can't help but admire the passion that Hitchens brought to the issue, particularly when you consider the personal and professional friendships his stance cost him on the political left. He was unwavering in what he believed was right, and that couldn't have been easy.

On the other hand, he did popularize the term "Islamofascism", which I've had a number of things to say about. It is the one instance I can think of where Hitchens carelessly throws words together, contrary to their diametrically opposing meanings. Like "progressive conservative" or "revolutionary conservative", "Islamofascism" is an oxymoron and well beneath the linguistic standards of a titan of the language that Christopher Hitchens was.  Being an Islamofascist is not unlike being a "pro-abortion Catholic", a ridiculous contruct on it's face and not something to be taken seriously.

One can't truly appreciate Christopher Hitchens without exploring the way he conducted the last 18 months of his life. Instead of engaging on a maudlin celebration of his own mortality, Hitchens instead used his esophageal cancer as a point of intellectual exploration, especially in his Vanity Fair column. If you read anything today, it should be "Topic of Cancer" and  his most recent essay "Trial of the Will."

It was on the topic of his own mortal illness that he truly broke through a journalist, and produced some of his most beautiful writing.  There was no sentimentality or self-pity in those columns, particularly "Trial of the Will", published just a week before his death. It was an intellectual and philosophical exploration on what it is to die, written by someone who was in the process of doing just that. "Tuesdays With Morrie" it wasn't.

Christopher Hitchens explored his own death with the same courage and valour that he lived his life. It didn't matter if you agreed with him or not because he was smarter than you are and would argue circles around you. Even when he was wrong, he could make a persuasive case that he right. That isn't normally the job of a journalist, but it is the raison d'etre of a writer.

Hitchens on Bill Clinton



Hitchens on Mother Teresa



Hitchens on the Tea Party



Hitchens on Jesus and the Exodus



Hitchens on 60 Minutes

"Where Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul": Countering Conrad Black

Like Conrad Black, I consider myself something of an aficionado of Richard Nixon and his presidency. He was certainly among the most fascinating men to occupy the office; an introvert in the most extroverted of professions, an accomplished intellect who wore what he considered to be an inferior education on his sleeve, and a truly angry person who prevailed in politics - which is almost entirely dependent on personal relationships and accommodation.

It is a truism these days to suggest that Nixon was the author of his own downfall, becoming the most Shakespearean figure in White House history. The most nominated major party politician in history (five times for president or vice-president, a distinction he shares with Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Nixon mastered both policy and politics in a way that was unequaled by anyone, except perhaps Bill Clinton. As Lord Black reports in yesterday's editorial in The National Post, Nixon's accomplishments were many and legendary, particularly the 1972 "China opening", which I believe was more responsible for the end of the Cold War than any other single event.

It is a truism these days to suggest that Nixon was the author of his own downfall, becoming the most Shakespearean figure in White House history. As he himself conceded in his interview with David Frost, "I gave them a sword and they twisted it with relish." Later in the same interview, he opines "I brought myself down."

Just as a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a civil libertarian is not infrequently a conservative that has been jailed. Conrad Black has rather famously endured some rather storied legal difficulties over the last decade, and it was in that context that he wrote his most recent biography, The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon (which was published in the United States as Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.) The book, as well as yesterday's Post editorial, serve as interesting legal apologia for Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal that eventually removed him from office.

In the Post column, Lord Black doesn't address whether President Nixon committed impeachable offenses. He simply contends that no violations of a criminal statute were committed by the 37th president of the United States, saying that Nixon engaged in "Unworthy actions … but not criminal ones." However, the issue of impeachment is important and should be looked at before addressing Nixon's criminal culpability in Watergate.

My position on impeachment is that it doesn't happen enough. Most modern presidents have been guilty of impeachable offences, and the fact that they haven't been pursued by Congress only makes it more difficult to keep subsequent presidents in check. The Democratic left, for example, is upset that President Obama commenced bombing of Libya this week absent any congressional authorization. Unfortunately, the modern precedent for that rests in Harry Truman's Korean War, with only the authorization of the U.N Security Council, a clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The then-Republican majority in Congress was right to impeach President Clinton in 1998, but they proudly ignored the multiple - and far more serious - offenses against the Constitution and several sections of the federal code committed by President Reagan in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Those that submit that regular impeachments would create anarchy in the Executive Branch overlook the fact that failing to use that tool has incentivized presidents to regularly act outside both the law and the constitutional restraints of their office, creating what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. rightly named The Imperial Presidency.

The constitutional language requiring conviction of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" aside, impeachment has historically been a political tool rather than a legal one. It is for that reason that Congress is prohibited from issuing a "bill of attainder", leaving that to the judiciary in the event of a criminal convention. Nixon's future vice-president, then House minority leader Gerald Ford put it best when he said that "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history" during the hearings to remove Justice William O. Douglas, which we now know was engineered by the Nixon White House.

If impeachment were considered a singular legal tool, requiring criminal actions, any further legal proceeding would also be prohibited by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. That clearly isn't the case, and it why President Clinton sought and reached an agreement with the Office of Independent Counsel in his last days in office to avoid indictment.

Of the three Articles of Impeachment passed by House Judiciary Committee against President Nixon, only one (obstruction of justice in Article 1) was a clear violation of federal criminal law. As Senator Barry Goldwater advised Nixon on August 7, 1974, there were fewer than a dozen votes to acquit in the Senate. Nixon certainly would have been removed from office, and Lord Black was wise not to make this part of his argument.

However, in making his case, Black frequently mixes impeachable acts with criminal liability, and the Constitution makes clear that the two are very different.

After the Watergate affair came to light, Nixon’s attorney-general appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who had a mandate to investigate anything he thought might be an offence “arising out of the 1972 election.” Nixon’s public contention was that he had known nothing of the June, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex (in which nothing was stolen or damaged), which was true; had no knowledge of any attempt to cover it up (tenuous); knew nothing of any offers of clemency for the accused intruders (probably true), or of any offers to provide them with funds (not true); knew nothing of the break-in at the office of the psychotherapist of the man who stole and gave to the media the Pentagon Papers (which discredited the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), which was true; and had not authorized subordinates to engage in improper campaign tactics (tenuous). In all these matters, he had a national-security argument that was sometimes a stretch, but precedented and arguable. His opponents sought to incriminate him with, in effect, involuntarily obtained taped testimony of his; and with perjured evidence, which should not have been admissible, of his turncoat counsel, John Dean.

Legally speaking, the cover-up is what matters and that's where the criminal liability on Nixon's part would almost certainly have been found by a Washington jury, had he not been pardoned by Ford a month after his resignation. This is compounded by the June 17, 1972 conversation that directly forced Nixon's resignation.

The so-called “smoking gun” at the end of the process consisted of revelations that a trio of Nixon’s aides — Robert Haldeman, John Ehrlichmann and John Dean — suggested to Nixon that the director and deputy director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms and General Vernon Walters respectively, be asked to invite the FBI to desist from investigating the Watergate affair on the grounds that the intruders were Cuban and the whole matter could back into national-security areas, including anti-Castro clandestine activities. Nixon agreed with the plan, and the request was made. But Helms and Walters said they would follow a direct presidential order but not otherwise, and Nixon declined to make any such request. This was a pathetically feeble case for obstruction of justice. (Both Helms and Walters told me that they did not think Nixon had committed a crime in the matter.)

(...)

The only area of legal vulnerability Nixon had was on the matter of paying a million dollars to Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate break-in organizers. It is not clear in this case, and certainly not clear elsewhere, that Nixon approved payments in exchange for altered testimony. In a fair trial in a dispassionate atmosphere, Nixon would not have been convicted on the Hunt matter, and certainly not on any of the rest. But no such trial was available to him. He followed, in the circumstances, the best course, and resigned voluntarily. Nixon maintained to his grave (in 1994), and beyond, that he had “committed errors unworthy of a president” but no illegalities.

Since neither Helms or Walters were practicing criminal lawyers - and Helms himself was later convicted of lying to Congress - their opinions are legally irrelevant.

From my understanding of U.S law, it could be successfully argued that the "smoking gun" conversation marked the beginning of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is separate and apart from obstruction itself. It doesn't necessarily follow that the conspiracy be successful for overall guilt to be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under America's (overly broad) conspiracy laws, what is called "an act in furtherance" is required and those acts themselves need not be crimes in and of themselves. For example, if you conspire to rob a bank with someone else, renting or borrowing a getaway car is considered an act in furtherance. Nor is it necessary for your co-conspirators to even know the details of the conspiracy.

If you accept that a conspiracy began on June 17 with the direction to have the CIA interfere with the FBI's investigation, which it did, an act in furtherance can be established in the March 20 conversation when Nixon told Dean that he knew where a million dollars for Hunt could be found - without having to prove a corrupt motive (likely witness tampering or subornation of perjury) in doing so.

More important, every act of the cover-up following June 17 would constitute an act in furtherance of the overall conspiracy. And there were several dozen of those, almost all of which were captured on tape. A prosecutor could also potentially argue that Nixon's exercise of his constitutional prerogatives in denying the tapes to the Senate and Cox were part if an underlying conspiracy, even if the president felt that he was constitutionally obligated to do it.

Of course, none of that is particularly relevant. When President Ford was considering the Nixon pardon, he was told by the second special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, that a fair trial couldn't be held in the District of Columbia for at least two years. Even then, there would be no guarantee that a fair trial could ever be conducted in the aftermath of the first presidential resignation in American history. Finding twelve jurors that had no opinion on Nixon's guilt or innocence would probably be impossible well into the 1980s, thereby denying the former president his right to a speedy trial.

Then there's the matter of what a federal prosecution of Nixon would have done to the country. The previous decade had seen the King and two Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam and the multiple government lies that arose from it, the downfall of Lyndon Johnson and, finally, Watergate. Even as he resigned, more Americans approved of Nixon than they later would of George W. Bush when he left office. A trial would have only served to further tear the country apart, making the pardon not only the right thing to do, but the only thing.

I agree with Conrad Black that Richard Milhous Nixon was a much better than average president and that history will eventually reevaluate his many great accomplishments. But I would argue that continuing to debate whether he was "treated fairly" only retards and further delays that from happening. Irrespective of his other achievements, no matter how fine and admirable they might be, Richard Milhous Nixon also committed multiple impeachable offenses and engaged in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. The only reason that we're even still having this debate is Nixon went to his grave without admitting it.

Nixon's resignation was the right thing to do, both for the country and for himself. If he had been allowed to escape without consequence after his actions became public knowledge, it would have sent a clear message that future presidents would be a law unto themselves and that nothing would constitute an impeachable act.