Matt Yglesias

Bush 36,000

I, for one, cannot think of a better man to serve as custodian of the Bush legacy:

Former President George W. Bush took a step closer Thursday to establishing an “action-oriented think tank” alongside his future presidential library by naming James K. Glassman, the longtime journalist and former administration official, as its founding executive director.

Mr. Glassman, who served in the Bush administration as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and later undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, will be charged with building a public policy institute intended to advance some of the issues that Mr. Bush embraced as president.

Glassman is, of course, better known to bloggers who like to make fun of know-nothing conservatives as the author of the late nineties bestseller Dow 36,000. I think that’s the kind of detachment from reality you need to dedicate your life to bolstering the reputation of the Bush administration.

Peru Experiencing the Benefits of Sound Public Policy While We Suffer for Bush’s Mistakes

Palacio Legislativo in Lima, Peru (wikimedia)

Daniel Gross offers an interesting look at Peru, a country that’s weathering the recession fairly well thanks to sound policy:

In the latter half of 2008, being a poor, export-dependent, commodity-producing country set you up for a vicious downturn. But Peru has weathered the storm, in large part because President Alan García, an old leftist turned center-leftist, and the Peruvian central bank have proved adept at a set of capabilities notably lacking in the United States in recent years: sound fiscal and financial management. Fearful of a return of hyperinflation amid rapid growth, Peru’s central bank raised interest rates throughout 2008. Instead of spending the foreign currency that piled up on its books ($32 billion at the end of 2008), the government saved it. In 2008, Peru ran a $3.3 billion budget surplus.

And so, when troubles came, it was able to respond in textbook fashion. In December 2008, García announced a stimulus program, promising to boost government spending by $3.2 billion, and to take up to $10 billion in further measures. The total of $13 billion in promised stimulus doesn’t sound like much, but that’s equal to about 10 percent of Peru’s GDP. (By contrast, the big stimulus package Congress passed in February was about 5 percent of U.S. GDP.) The central bank’s 2008 vigilance against inflation left it with plenty of room to cut rates. So far this year, it has reduced the benchmark lending rate from 6.5 percent to 2 percent.

Peru’s economy took a hit in the first half of 2009 but never stopped growing. This even though commodity-exporters tend to get hammered by recessions even when they d>o everything right, and even though stimulus efforts tend to be less effective in small countries (more “leakage” of funds outside your borders) than in large ones. Recall that the United States could have been in a position to do this were it not for the fact that George W. Bush was a very bad president and a shockingly large number of bad members of congress from both parties chose to embrace his terrible ideas about public policy.

Had we left taxes where they were when Bush was inaugurated and refrained from invading Iraq, we would have been running substantial budget surpluses and done a good deal to pay down the national debt. Thus, when a big recession hit we would have been in a position to do a stimulus program that was much larger than the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (meeting liberal objections to ARRA) while also keeping our debt-to-GDP ratio lower than it is (meeting conservative objections to ARRA). Millions of currently unemployed people could, instead, be employed.

Tuesday Screeching Weasel Blogging

The Punk President

I was looking at the archives of Ben Weasel’s blog earlier today for no particularly good reason and came across this September 2006 post about his desire to write a song called “The Surrender Hymn of the Republic” that would be about “giving up on a relationship” and take “the form of a series of sarcastic little barbs designed to mock the standard Leftist line on 9/11, the Iraq War and pretty much anything Bush says or does.” He also explains that he’s “actually written several songs on the theme of modern Leftist idiocy since 9/11 but they were all pretty straightforward attacks on dumb-bell ideology” and he’s very interested in “the notion that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism wouldn’t be a problem if we’d simply sit down and talk with the terrorists.”

At any rate, this struck me as an interesting sign of political change in the United States. Back in 1995’s “I Wanna Be a Homosexual”, being gay was posited as a way to “shock the middle class.” But eleven years later, it was probably the case that espousing a pro-Bush ideology and support for the Iraq War would be a much better way to épater le bourgeois than coming out of the closet.

Except for the Unpopularity of Conservatism, Conservatives are in Good Shape

I’ll grant Matt Continetti that this is clever:

The administration would like the voting public to believe that the GOP is outside the mainstream. Co-opting centrist Republicans like Huntsman reinforces that notion. But the problem with this argument is that what is “mainstream” changes over time. As unpopular as the Republican party is at the moment, it is actually winning a lot of the debates in Washington. Cap-and-trade has little chance of passing, health care is just as dicey, Americans are concerned about Obama’s reckless accumulation of national debt, Nancy Pelosi is playing defense for the first time in her speakership, and the president has reversed himself on military commissions, abuse photos, and preventive detention. Victory or near-victory in these policy battles hasn’t redounded to the GOP’s benefit because the public still associates the Republican party with George W. Bush’s failed second term, specifically the years 2005-2006 and the recession that began in December 2007.

It takes a while for the public to catch up. When they do – and it may not happen until 2016 – they’ll go looking for someone who, in all likelihood, opposed the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and ObamaCare.

Jon Chait has a more detailed response to this than I can muster, but note that what Continetti is saying here is basically that right-wing policies aren’t unpopular, it’s just that the catastrophic consequences of right-wing policies are unpopular. I’m not really sure what the big political moral of the story is here, but the fact of the matter is that we’re left with the conclusion that conservative ideas about governance are basically unworkable. And I think that is the real problem with the right’s unwillingness to engage in a constructive way on the climate, health care, and tax debates.

We Have Ways of Making You Bolster Our Erroneous Preconceptions

Now here’s a good reason to torture someone. As explained by Jonathan Landay one important use of torture to the Bush administration was to force detainees to cough up “evidence” of the Iraq/al-Qaeda ties that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. already “knew” existed:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

There’s much more in the article. And note that when people say that “torture doesn’t work” as an intelligence-gathering method, the point isn’t that it never produces an accurate piece of information. The point is that its application doesn’t systematically enhance the quality of your intelligence. In this case, for example, not only does torture appear to have vastly eroded key elements of America’s strategy of self-presentation in the world, it contributed to our undertaking a massive policy blunder that led to much more loss of innocent life than occurred on 9/11.