There’s absolutely no good reason for Obama not to close Guantanamo immediately and simply try the detainees in our already-extant courts of law.  That’s how we’ve convicted all sorts of accused terrorists in the past.

Let’s take as assumed all of Greenwald’s key factual premises, add a few points that Greenwald omits, and note what Greenwald, in his ideological extremism, refuses to talk about:First, let’s highlight Greenwald’s factual premises and take them as assumed to be true:

1.  That treatment in violation of Geneva Conventions and certainly in violation of criminal procedure governing interrogations has occured.

2. That the alternative to Guantanemo Bay is trial in standard U.S. courts under standard criminal laws and procedures.

And now let’s add some important and relevant points that Greenwald consistently omits from his posts in spite of their length and purported thoroughness:

1. In addition to rules about treatment during interrogation, standard criminal trials have complex and detailed standards governing chain of evidence and territorial jurisdiction.  Since soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not trained or equipped to ensure proper chain of evidence, use of criminal trials would ensure that most detainees would be acquitted even in cases where torture is not an issue.

2. The response to acquittal in a criminal trial is outright release of the defendant.

3. Many of those already released from Guantanemo have returned to the field in the service of al-Qaeda with the explicit intention of killing people in large numbers.

What these points add up to is what Glenn Greenwald apparently doesn’t want to talk about.  Specifically, that his purist approach limiting the U.S. response to global terrorist networks to the use of criminal trials would result in the outright release of many, if not most of the defendants.  Many of those defendants would then dedicate themselves to killing as many Americans as possible, with nuclear or biological weapons, if possible.

Why does Greenwald refuse to discuss the implications of the plan of action that he angrily at at length insists is the only way forward that is even worth of discussion?

Let’s be clear: Torture is a travesty against American values that is wrong regardless of whether it is effective or not and regardless of whether our refusal to use torture is reciprocated when American servicemen are captured.  I am not endorsing torture.  But Obama’s recent moderation of his plan to close Gitmo seems to me a responsible acknowledgment that there are potentially dangerous implications to simply opening the doors and letting Gitmo prisoners to go free because the Bush administration grievously mishandled their interrogation.  Obama’s call for the creation of some alternative process that would balance the deeply conflicting interests that we have in the current situation is laudable.  Greenwald’s demagoguery and extremism is contemptible.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Social conservatives who have dominated the Republican Party for the last decade define those core issues in harshly didactic terms deriving from religious roots.  Abortion, gay marriage, and a more nebulous but passionately held commitment to “family values” are what they see as the heart of the Republican Party.  They tend to resent calls by “moderates” to compromise as they see such calls as nothing less than an effort to read God Himself out of the party.  More pragmatically, social conservative leaders note the longstanding success of such principles in successfully building and maintaining a movement with strong double roots in both rural and suburban regions.

In recent years, social conservatives have been reinforced by an alliance of convenience with some rather questionable characters arising from the migration of Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. With strong roots in the South, these cultural conservatives have supplemented social conservatism with disdain for immigration as a threat to American cultural identity.  Stopping “amnesty” and demonizing any cultural or educational institution not encapsulated by a NASCAR race is the core issue for cultural conservatives.

Cultural conservatives also linked together with national security conservatives left over from the Cold War.  These national security conservatives were reinvigorated by 9/11 and place the strong pursuit of the global war against Islamic extremism as the core cause of the party.

In the aftermath of electoral meltdowns in both 2006 and 2008, however, this tripartite hegemony has come to be identified as pathological by old-style fiscal conservatives, usually dubbed as “moderates” due to their dissent from social and cultural conservatives.  The argument from the fiscal conservatives is that both events and demographic trends have intervened to destroy the viability of the tripartite coalition.  The myriad failures in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have served to undermine Republicans’ claim to be the safest stewards of national security.  This whittled down the numbers and enthusiasm of the national security conservatives.  Meanwhile, shifts in the cultural and moral ethos of younger generations have eroded the numbers that could be marshalled by social conservatives even while intensifying their self-perceptions as a beseiged minority.  And the undertones of racism and intolerance that too often infest the anti-immigration movement served to make cultural conservatives toxic, further driving away younger voters and centrists.  Fiscal conservatives thus argue that to renew the commitment to any of the tripartite groups’ preferred core is a suicide pact for the party, condemning it to permanent minority status regardless of the particular virtues of their moral claims.

The only option left, say the fiscal conservatives, is therefore to return to the party’s generational roots in pro-business, low-tax, pro-growth economics.

The trouble is how to craft that into a workable message during times of economic meltdown, necessary-evil government bailouts running into the trillions of dollars, and spiraling deficits in the midst of two continuing wars.  No horror movie hack writer could top this monster of a political problem.  But it is exactly the monster that the Republican Party will have to find a way to slay if it is to be able to function as an effective opposition, let alone a credible challenger in future elections.

The fundamental truth here is that Steele and the fiscal conservatives are right — the key issues of the day are economic and demographics make cultural and social conservatism secondary bases for the party anyway.  Any new Republican coalition will have to be built around responses to economic issues, not attempts to reconstitute the crumbling social or cultural bases.  In selecting which issues are “mandatory” for Republicans versus those with which the party needs to accept compromise and dissent, Republicans will need to take lessons from Democrats’ successes in dealing with their peacenik elements — accommodating and including, but not allowing them to control and purify everything.

And time is short.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

This event serves also to highlight Illinois’ famously corrupt Democratic Party political machine, where personal favors are traded for political action in scenes reminiscent Tamany Hall.  During the 2006 and 2008 elections, Democrats reveled in pointing fingers at Republican corruption from Mississippi to California to Alaska.  But with Blagojevich coming after the William Jefferson bibery scandal in Louisiana, Democrats may nee to tend to their own garden.

Naturally, the old “the Republicans are corrupt too!” subject-shifting dodge is already prominent among Democrat-leaning bloggers.  Don’t expect a sudden outbreak of self-criticism from the left.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Donklephant has cobbled together a fairly definitive list of all the ways in which these theories have been debunked and even Obama’s strongest critics at Hot Air don’t want any part of this nonsense.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: All comments which spew “Obama is a Muslim” nonsense are automatically deleted.  Don’t even bother.)

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Jamie’s also shrewd in noting that the 1950s nuclear family has special theological salience for Mormons:

According to Mormon dogma, marriage extends into the afterlife and couples continue to have “spirit children” who populate extraterrestrial worlds.

A secular amendment to a secular constitution was passed partly in order to protect the integrity of “spirit children.”

This mocking representation of LDS teaching is a “red flag” to those familiar with anti-Mormon literature.  In point of fact, Mormons do believe in eternal heterosexual marriage and family, but the bits about “spirit children” and “extraterrestrial worlds” are speculative extensions on the official LDS teaching at best.  Their inclusion here serves no purpose except to make Mormons look bizarre and strange in a theological sense irrelevant to Sullivan’s core concern with the church.  Sullivan is indirectly and, I am quite certain, without his knowledge drawing on a long history of anti-Mormon and self-styled “anti-cult” hatred and misrepresentation championed by fringe groups of Christianist evangelicals that are far more Sullivan’s natural enemies than the Mormons are.  In his anger over the outcome of Prop 8, Sullivan is spraying fire indiscriminately, undermining his own cause in the process.

Also, the very distorted version of the LDS teaching that Sullivan and his underlying source are mocking is far from the reason that many Mormons (tragically, I believe) supported Proposition 8.  His insertion of it in his post has no apparent relationship to the actual political issues.  Sullivan offers no evidence that such considerations were actually the motivations for any of the Mormons who gave money or time in support of Prop 8.  It is just bald religious stereotyping and bigotry against a group that Sullivan believes deserves it because of their opposition to gay rights.

I used to really enjoy Andrew Sullivan as an incisive and unusually nuanced thinker in the political blogosphere.  But his succumbing to Palin Derangement Syndrome during the campaign (Sullivan led the charge to target Palin’s daughter, among other outrages) seems to have been exacerbated by a Mormon Derangement Syndrome now.  And I think if he would take time to look around at his allies in the anti-Mormon cause of twisting and mocking Mormon theological beliefs, he wouldn’t like the company he is now in.  And his hypocritical embrace of flagrant religious bigotry here serves only to undermine his cause of promoting tolerance.  For example, where I am personally on Sullivan’s side in regards to Prop 8, I find myself unwilling to become a very active supporter of the gay rights movement as long as it continues to tarnish itself with a turn towards its own version of vile hate speech.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

The measure, which progressives claim to be “pro-labor” is more aptly described as pro-unionization, with all the unexamined flaws that attend thereto.  What the law would do is actually remove from employees their only opportunity to express their real feelings about potential union representation in a secret ballot and force employees instead to express their will solely through a card filled out and signed under the direct supervision of a union organizer.  Make the “wrong” choice on the “card check” and the employee could be vulnerable to job loss if the union is formed anyway or other forms of social or even physical intimidation.  Rather than the boogyman of intervening coercion by business, such fears are precisely the reason that “card check” drives tend to show the appearance of more support for unionization than secret ballots do.  After all, which is more likely: That employers have found a way to monitor and influence employees in the secret ballot, or that union organizers have found a way to monitor and influence employees filling out a card check right in front of them?

The commitment from Obama is bald political payback.  Union leaders were strong supporters of Obama and they lavishly contributed to Obama’s campaign from the coffers of union dues extracted and spent without workers’ consent under the pretense of funding collective bargaining.  And union officials clearly hope to use the new coercive powers granted to them by a compliant Congress and President to reverse decades of workers choosing to not have union representation and its associated fees and added bureaucratic supervision by union representatives.

If there was ever a good candidate for the first Republican filibuster, this is it.

UPDATE: The probable pro-union tilt in the Obama administration has been reinforced by the appointment of a union activist for Labor Secretary.  This might be an appointment for Republicans in the Senate to resist.  The Labor Secretary is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of labor laws that protect workers from both employers and unions, not a cheerleader for unionization.  While Obama’s other cabinet picks thus far have been generally excellent, the appointment of a union organizer as Labor Secretary is the kind of low-profile, high-impact appointment that can cause an incredible amount of damage to worker’s rights during a time when jobs might already be hard to come by.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

This raises again a question of what people who seem to have structured their entire emotional lives around their hatred of George W. Bush are going to do with themselves when he leaves office.  Their problem is exacerbated by the lack of any politically viable Republican power in the new government.  Congress is a Democratic bastion that, with luck in Georgia and a little theft in Minnesota or an election override in the Democrat-led Senate, might even be filibuster-proof.  Even after eight years of a Republican White House, the courts remain at most a 50/50 liberal/conservative split and likely to turn further leftward.

This creates a problem for the BDS brigades — they need to have people to hate in order to feed their image of themselves as “telling truth to power” or “fighting for social justice” or any of the other variations on their Manichean worldview.  Who are they going to hate now that they’ve totally won?  Railing against the excesses of some small-town school board president that has managed to evade the edicts of the courts doesn’t seem likely to fulfill their appetites, and they can keep recycling the Sarah Palin boogeywoman over and over and over only for so long.

The psychological frustration that comes from needing to hate but lacking a suitable target might produce some entertaining stuff over the upcoming months and years.

Then again, they can always repackage President Obama as the new evil liar.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

First, the report’s calculation of 2013 as a point by which WMD use is probable is strange.  The four-year period seems calculated for political effect (the next four years coincides with the next presidential term) and thus does not appear to be a sober and neutral assessment.  The purpose of the report seems to be to build up a threat sufficient to warrant actions which would be funded and staffed through particular government agencies, with corresponding benefits in their intercene budget battles.  Every area of the government periodically produces reports that amount to “give us more money or the world will end” and this report seems to possibly be the same thing.  The invocation of WMD is an impressive rhetorical tool.  At times like this, it is difficult to tell whether the threat is as grave as they say or whether it may be exaggerated a bit to gain ground in the D.C. budget wars.

The recommendations in the report are, for the most part, common-sense recyclings of similar recommendations made in earlier reports: improve security for nuclear materials in Pakistan and the former Soviet Union, increase surveillence and interdiction against smuggling networks, and counter moves by Iran and North Korea towards nuclear weapons.  These goals are relatively uncontroversial and have been so for a long time.  What is missing is the “how” part of the answer.

For example, while the task force recommends diplomatic engagement to constrain North Korean behavior, they do not explain how diplomacy alone can reliably counteract North Korea’s longstanding record of breaking agreements, splitting hairs to evade and obstruct agreements, and bizarre and apparently random changes of course.  Also, what if a regime in North Korea or Iran feels fundamentally threatened by the unchecked potential of the United States to take unilateral military action against them without effective consequences and seeks a nuclear capability as a way of deterring America?  A diplomatic approach that fails to take into account the real incentives for proliferation is doomed to failure.

A similar problem constrains the effectiveness of projects to secure nuclear materials in Pakistan and the former Soviet Union.  To the extent that such projects are led and staffed by the United States, the Pakistani and former Soviet states that cooperate risk being seen as U.S. puppets for doing so.  Th efforts of the United States to strengthen those governments’ control over their nuclear materials might perversely wind up politically undermining the governments themselves.  Alternatively — and especially in Putin’s increasingly nationalist Russia — state leaders may want to reject cooperation with the United States for their own reasons.

The bottom line is that while we will be hearing a lot about this report due to its invocation of the dreaded “WMD” category, it does not on its face appear to be a serious contribution to policy-making.  Instead, it is a long-standing ritual — telling the new President that the sky in falling and that the only way to prop it up is to give someone more money to do exactly the same things they were doing anyway.  Meanwhile, we hope and pray that a more fundamental strategic reassessment isn’t required.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Chambliss’ re-election prevents Democrats from building a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate, even if Democrat Al Franken manages to scrape together enough newly-discovered ballots to win a recount in Minnesota or get the Democratic Senate leadership to overturn the Minnesota election day results.  But more importantly than reaching the magic number of 41, Chambliss’ feat provides a pointer on how Republicans can begin to rebuild their party. 

Chambliss’ election campaign for the last month focused on two major themes: preserving some modicum of check against Democratic Party hegemony in government, and restoring a focus on foundational Republican principles of fiscal conservatism.  While a strong social conservative, Chambliss did not appear to highlight social issues during his election campaign.  The result was a departure from the Republican playbook of the last eight years and a return to Reagan-era emphasis on economic issues that are more salient during these times of potential financial crisis.  Chambliss thus offers Republicans a chance to position themselves as a genuine “loyal opposition” that can probe and question assumptions while the Obama administration moves to restructure the economy.

This is a very positive development that Republicans would do well to stick with for a while.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Ford’s proposal said it hopes to avoid using the credit and doesn’t anticipate a 2009 “liquidity crisis,” barring a competitor’s bankruptcy or more severe economic slump. Ford plans to sell five jets and would pay Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally a $1 annual salary if the loan is used.

This bailout is substantively different from the bailout of the financial sector in that the groups affected have different economic impacts and political connections.  Economically, the financial bailout was a necessary evil because it was the only way to affect the entire banking system from the fallout of the effects of collapse in the elite national banking sectors resulting from ill-advised innovations like “default credit swaps” and “mortgage-backed securities”.  It was necessary to socialize (yes, it is not always a political heresy) the consequences of bad financial decisions in order to avoid the devastating alternative of frozen credit markets and a tumble into an economic depression.  Potential bankruptcies in the U.S. auto industry do not threaten anything near the same second-order cascade effects, and thus are less necessary.

Politically, the financial bailout ultimately had bipartisan support, as both Democrats and Republicans with contacts in the business sector were able to testify as to the truth of the disastrous potential for inaction.  Even the feckless and counterproductive uncertainty telegraphed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in carrying out his mandate to react to the financial crisis was insufficient to override the bipartisan consensus that shoveling money out of the Federal Reserve was and is the only plausible option.  With regards to the auto industry, however, support for bailout is much more concentrated in the Democratic Party, as their constituencies among union leaders are the most directly threatened.

As a practical matter, Democrats’ overwhelming control of Congress makes this point moot.  Even without Republican support, the auto industry bailout is unlikely to be impeded.  But Democrats will much more directly own the consequences if it should turn out that union concessions accompanying the bailout request are insufficient to redress the structural competitiveness problems that U.S. auto companies face in comparison to foreign competitors.  If the auto industry succeeds in getting its bailout and comes crawling back again and again for more and more, Democrats will have a hard time explaining to the taxpayers why this industry should receive such special treatment.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Aside from the political side of the story — which is likely overblown in that the Obama administration’s backing away appears more a matter of changed timing than a shift in its supportive position — the text of the story itself gives an unusually clear window into how bias in the media works. 

Note first the text of the story in using inflammatory and sweeping language to describe President Reagan’s tenure:

The new law could be the most consequential social and economic policy shift since President Reagan reshaped the country by slashing taxes and regulation and crushing unions.

Would the Las Vegas Sun characterize an Obama administration economic policy as “raising taxes and regulation and crushing business”?  I seriously doubt it.

But more seriously biased is how the story treats the substantive issue itself.  The case in favor of the union position is presented in glowing and charitable terms:

The law would allow workers to form a union by signing cards instead of voting in a secret-ballot election, stiffen penalties for employers who commit unfair labor practices during organizing drives and impose binding arbitration in bargaining cases in which the sides cannot agree. Unions argue that those changes will level a playing field that has tilted toward business at the expense of labor for decades.

Well who could possibly oppose that?  We should certainly stop those abusive employers and seek arbitration, right?  And it is especially important to “level a playing field that has tilted towards business”?

Unfortunately, of course, they don’t answer the question of who could oppose it or why.  They cast opponents in purely procedural terms, without ever presenting the actual basis for their opposition:

The chamber deployed a network of operatives in a number of key Senate races this year and campaigned aggressively — on the air and on the ground — against the card-check legislation. It will be maintaining those operations, hoping to win over some senators and peel back others, in addition to running TV ads. Last week it released the first in a series of reports refuting what it calls union rhetoric.

In truth, the basis for opposing card check is that it is potentially even more abusive to workers than the mostly mythical claims of employer abusiveness now.  The cards that are signed are offered to workers directly by union organizers.  Workers feel compelled to sign in order to comply with the in-your-face demand of the organizer, especially when they know that they may find themselves out of a job if the union organizes without their profession of support on the card.  If they resist signing the card, they may also face threats of violence or property damage for their “betrayal”.

Traditionally, the best check on this potential for abuse is the secret ballot, where workers who may not want to pay union dues (much of which can be diverted to political causes as determined by the union leaders, not the individual members) and to have their jobs dependant upon the continued goodwill of potentially corrupt union leaders can evade the ability of union organizers to use social pressure, threats, or intimidation.  Because the secret ballot has so often allowed workers to break free from union organizers’ coercion is precisely why the union organizers want to revoke it.  Contrary to their narrative, Reagan didn’t “crush unions” in most cases of the two-decade decline in union membership, the workers themselves declined to join.  Union leaders want to strengthen their hand against the workers more than against the companies or the government.

Of course, to read the Las Vegas Sun, you would be made aware of exactly none of that.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

I would first call attention to the rhetorical trick Joyner is playing here. He insists that conservatives (and everyone else, for that matter) must accept the premise of his issues as assumed or else stand convicted of being intellectually bankrupt. Apparently, arguing that global warming is exaggerated (and there is growing evidence of exaggeration and even outright fabrication by global warming activists) or that perfect income equality is not economically or socially desirable is just out-of-bounds. In a sense, Joyner’s argument reduces to the trivial truism that conservatives are failing to proactively make intrinsically liberal arguments. Well, duh.

Second, I would note that conservatives are not totally silent on the broader issues within which global warming and income inequality are embedded as liberal foci. Contrary to breezy and self-righteous liberal stereotypes about conservatives, conservatives are not in fact reflexively hostile to the environment. While they resist government and international mandates as ineffective and even counter-productive, conservatives often promote private conservation and stewardship as moral issues and encourage market-based mechanisms for additional environmental protections, such as purchasing Brazilian rain forest tracts to protect these essential carbon sinks and biodiversity reservoirs from slash-and-burn agricultural use. If — IF — global warming advocates would stop exaggerating their “consensus” and holding witch-hunts against skeptics long to actually do the work of building a persuasive (rather than coercive) case that global warming was both real and man-made, many if not most conservatives would probably be willing to explore ways to create market incentives for reducing CO2 outputs and speeding transitions to cleaner energy forms. Because Al Gore’s disingenuous demagoguery on the issue has made many conservatives leery of the potential for government action on global warming to take away with one hand while giving corrupt handouts to certain friends of the activists themselves (e.g. the companies who claim, often deceptively, to counteract a “carbon footprint” by using contributions to plant trees), advocates of government-based global action still have a lot of persuading to do, but conservatives hardly bear sole blame for their credibility deficit.

A similar problem holds with regards to income inequality. Aside from their highly questionable premise that income equality is either economically efficient or socially desirable, liberals who hold conservatives responsible for inaction in this area presume too much moral and intellectual authority on their own side. Leftist philosopher Peter Singer wrote over 30 years ago arguing for a moral obligation to spend oneself into near poverty in order to alleviate others’ suffering, but many of the liberals who want to use the government to force others to give seem to be living quite well themselves. In fact, when it comes to actually taking personal action instead of just advocating for government action, studies have shown that conservatives are more giving than liberals, even controlling for income levels. Joyner seems to be just trying to conservatives responsible for not joining liberals’ hypocrisy on helping the poor.

Even in regards to government policy towards the poor, Joyner gives short shrift to conservative thinking on the issue. He characterizes conservative responses as being limited to “education”, but that is just not true. Conservatives argue that private-sector employment is a better solution to low income than dependency on government handouts or government make-work jobs. And the proven conservative method for creating such jobs is to reduce whenever possible the tax load that the government places on those who do the investing and the hiring. The fact that Joyner or other liberals don’t like this solution for emotional reasons (it is often characterized deceptively as a “handout to the rich”) doesn’t mean conservatives are avoiding the issue. If anyone is avoiding substantive discussion in favor of easy pejorative labels and changes of subject, it is liberals, not conservatives.

Now, is there room for conservatives to refresh and improve their commitment to serious policy ideas? Of course there is. The fixation among many conservatives for social issues like abortion, religious purity, and cultural objections to immigration is poorly suited to the critically important economic issues that confront the country today. Conservatives need to step back from their sweeping electoral defeats and their Pyrrhic gay marriage victories and reassess which issues are important and, more to the point, amenable to practical action.

But Joyner’s attempt to skew the ground for that debate by smuggling in assumed conclusions and misrepresenting conservative contributions is, quite frankly, just self-serving and petty.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

The problem is that their case is much weaker.  Few dispute that the U.S. auto industry is in serious trouble.  As consumers retrench after a summer of unprecedented gas prices and an autumn of credit crunch, the market for new cars has declined precipitously.  Moreover, U.S. automakers must bear the “legacy costs” of pension and health care programs that their foreign competitors do not have.  The result of this confluence is that all three U.S. automakers may be on the verge of bankruptcy.

What is different from the financial industry, however, are the consequences of collapse.  In the financial sector, collapse would lead to a chain reaction, as the bad debt cascaded from the instutitions responsible for bad decisions in the housing and derivatives markets to those that may have invested much more conservatively.  The end result might have been a generalized collapse of the U.S. banking system, culminating in a reprise of the Great Depression.  The medicine of “socialism” in the form of a bailout was a necessary evil to prevent devastating consequences throughout American society.

Bankruptcy of the auto industry would be unlikely to produce similar second-order effects.  While it is true that tens and even hundreds of thousands of workers in assembly and automotive parts plants might suffer job losses, the real effect of bankruptcy would be to force auto companies into restructuring and consolidation efforts that would shed their unsustainable “legacy” contracts and result in a more efficient automobile industry.  The idea that the U.S. auto industry would cease to exist is simply not realistic.  Already, one of the largest automobile manufacterers in the United States is Toyota — that alone proves that there does exist a market in the U.S. for automobiles and that market can be filled by U.S. workers.

The real motivator for an auto industry bailout is not rich executives, but union bosses who are reluctant to sacrifice the fruits of decades of hard bargaining.  Now that the bill has come due for fat life-long  pension and health care programs and is producing crippling sticker shock, they hope to prevent the cancellation of those benefits under bankruptcy by simply transferring the costs to the taxpayers and calling it a bailout.  This is why we are being treated to the unusual spectable of leading Congressional Democrats appearing to support the auto executives while most Republicans are unsympathetic.

The need for bailouts is real, but not unlimited.  A line in the sand has to be drawn somewhere, or else every business facing hard times might seek to salve their pain from the public trough.  The auto industry is a good place to draw that line.  The restructuring that will result from auto industry bankruptcies will surely be painful, but it is necessary.  Pushing it down the road with a bailout won’t solve the problem nor even limit the damage — it will only stretch out the days of reckoning.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Promoters of these mirrored derangements nearly always blame the victim, arguing that the target of their rage has reneged on their promise to be a “uniter” rather than a “divider”.  It is a convenient case to make, since the people who hate the target can themselves create the conditions under which they blame the target for failing to follow through.  They can themselves escalate the hateful rhetoric, then point to that hateful rhetoric as itself being the evidence of “divisiveness”.  This was the trick that many on the left played with the Bush presidency and that equal numbers on the right appear to be modelling in 2008.

The truth is, of course, less blameworthy and more intrinsic to broader patterns in American political culture that are independent of the specific promises or personalities of the politicians.  Writing at RCP, Jay Cost documents the growing polarization of the American electorate.  Since their goal is, naturally and appropriately, to get elected, politicians have no choice but to pander to the “with us or against us” divisions that the American voters have built amongst themselves.  “Divisiveness”, it seems, is more effect than cause.

Alot of those who complain about the divisiveness of politicians need to look in a frickin’ mirror.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Even critics of “socialized” health care systems should be able to detect the trick here — the health care industry is seeking to maintain the ability to set prices and is hoping that the government will step in to pay the potentially high rates that would be charged to those with pre-existing health problems or high risk behaviors.  On the other hand, the proposal would provide coverage for those who cannot receive it now as well as providing flexibility for those caught in “job lock” where they dare not change jobs lest they lose their existing health coverage and are unable to obtain new coverage.

Of course, the alternative of maintaining a health care system where costs are elevated by uninsured people who delay seeking health care until the problem is so severe as to require emergency room treatment is not viable either.  A government limitations on the cost threaten to stifle equipment and research investments much as similar mandates have done in countries like Canada.

There are no easy solutions to the health care dilemma.  Demogogues on the left will continue to decry the obscene costs of modern health care and lament the plight of the uninsured while ignoring the problems of research and equipment costs.  Demogogues on the right will continue to cry “socialism” to object to any national system while ignoring the elevation of costs charged to the government after the uninsured seek emergency treatment.  The countervailing demogogury results in stasis where both sides receive political benefits from the issue, but don’t actually do much to address it.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.