Matt Yglesias

Banquo’s Ghosts

Reader F.W. writes to draw my attention to Rich Lowry’s spy thriller Banquo’s Ghosts commenting “apparently he managed to pack every imaginable vapid right-wing cliché into his “forthcoming literary masterpiece”:

Lowry: Here’s the basic plot: Peter Johnson is a left-wing journalist who writes for a New York-based publication called The Crusader. He’s a lush, a cynic, and a little corrupt. But watching the 9/11 attacks from his Brooklyn Heights apartment changes something in him. He begins to have doubts about the “hate America” pieces his editrix, Josephine von Hildebrand, constantly assigns him. Meanwhile, an old forgotten CIA spymaster, Stewart Bancroft (he works under cover of the name Banquo), has an eye on him. Banquo is old school. He’s been marginalized in the new overly bureaucratic, politically correct CIA, as an anachronism who believes in aggressively and imaginatively taking the fight to the enemy. He concludes that the best possible man to send to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist is the one no one would suspect–the unreliable, famously America-hating Peter Johnson. And then, as they say, mayhem ensues.

In Lowry’s defense, the idea of Christopher Hitchens reacting to 9/11 not by abandoning his Nation column in favor of a Slate column, but instead by becoming an assassin is pretty amusing.

Also there are tons and tons of vapid right-wing clichés that aren’t involved in this plot sketch. My recollection of the Tom Clancy book in which Jack Ryan becomes President is that not only does he do a bunch of right-wing national security stuff, but he also implements common sense domestic policy solutions like a flat tax.

Andy McCarthy’s Tax “Knowledge”

Andy McCarthy writes, in what I understand is not an April Fool’s Day post, that:

We know that lowering marginal tax rates can increase federal revenue, but it’s clear that the President won’t cut taxes (not even for “95 percent of Americans”). So we need a Plan B.

Every time I read this kind of thing I wonder: Why on earth does McCarthy think that Obama is stubbornly refusing to cut taxes when doing so would raise revenues? Tax cuts are broadly popular, and with the increased revenue Obama could reward his supporters in the public employees’ unions. Shouldn’t AFSCME, NEA, and AFT be constantly clamoring for lower taxes and higher revenues? I mean, how stupid are we supposed to believe Democrats to be? They’re just all in the pocket of big accountant, I guess.

Larry Kudlow’s Worrying About Inflation While Rome Burns

David Frum’s essay on Rush Limbaugh winds up making the excellent point that there’s an issue these days in which the conservative movement is hard-wired to offer solutions to the problems of the 1970s when, whatever you think about the solutions they offered at that time, today’s problems are totally different. Exhibit A for that trend could be this Larry Kudlow post at the Corner warning that current policy is going to produce inflation. This is like worrying that Barack Obama’s defense budget is showing weakness and likely to leave us open to aggression from Martians.

We have actual statistics about inflation, which show the core CPI increasing by just 0.2 percent in February. Inflation is very low. Very recently there was a very real threat of deflation, and expansionary policy has been aimed at preventing that from happening. Meanwhile, we have very good policy tools at our disposal for curbing inflation should it start to reach problematic levels.

At the moment, however, not only is deflation a bigger worry than inflation, but a modest (albeit non-accelerating) amount of inflation would probably be beneficial as it would help firms and households get out from under the load of debts they’re currently dealing with.

Do Lawyers Work Harder Than Movers?

I’m just now getting to read Lisa Schiffren’s contribution on the Corner to the growing overclass revolt taking the American right by storm:

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

First off, as Schiffren notes Barack and Michelle Obama are both high-achieving meritocrats in their own right. Indeed, his entire administration is staffed with such people. She should, perhaps, consider the hypothesis that nobody is being “demonized.” Rather, a judgment is being made that a return to Clinton-era income tax policies in order to finance comprehensive health care reform would serve the national interest.

But beyond that, there’s the obscene implication that if people are poor, it’s because they don’t work hard and certainly not as hard as those long-toiling business executive. As I wrote back in October 2008:

I’m a veteran of several moves of a “let’s get a bunch of friends together and all move a bunch of stuff” variety. Today, I hired a moving company. It was a good choice. It’s also the kind of thing that, on a more political note, really dramatizes how bizarre it is that people often characterize current levels of inequality in the United States as reflecting a desire to reward hard work or say that in the United States you can get ahead by working hard. I’m sure the partners at Jones Day and the wizards at Goldman Sachs work hard, but I don’t think you can seriously deny that moving furniture for a living is hard work.

Indeed, one of the main advantages that professional career offer is precisely that, money aside, they don’t involve the sort of taxing physical labor associated with many low-skill jobs. Guys who move furniture are, of course, working extremely hard. And even your basic retail employee needs to be on her feet for hours and hours at a time while “executives” comfy chairs. And, again, I don’t think the Salvadoran guys who moved my bed found themselves in that line of work because they were too busy partying in college.

Conservative Magazines Not For Liberty

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

Jerry Taylor, National Review, and Executive Power

I did a post this morning noting with amazement that the inauguration of Barack Obama was swiftly followed by a Corner post bemoaning excessive executive power, something that doesn’t seem to have been a big concern during the Bush years. I should, however, have been clear on the point that the author of the post, Jerry Taylor from the Cato Institute, hasn’t been engaged in any hypocrisy here. Cato and Cato personnel were always, and appropriately, very critical of the Bush administration’s actions in this regard. Taylor just wasn’t blogging at the Corner until very recently.

But therein lies the rub. Conservatives are suddenly rediscovering this topic and reaching out to the Taylors of the world. It’s funny.

National Review’s Best Conservative Movies

When you learn that National Review is going to list the 25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years, you know you’re in for a good time:

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

The End in Somalia

The disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia seems to have reached its ultimate conclusion today as the Ethiopian-backed nominal government totally collapses and Islamist insurgents capture Baidoa. Now we’ll have to reach some kind of accommodation with the Islamists, which is what we should have done back in late 2006, but we’re now going to be dealing with a more radicalized and anti-American crew than otherwise would have been there.

At the time of the invasion back around Christmas 2006, right-wing commentators were busy offering unusually stupid opinions. Robert Farley reminds me of a classic Corner post in which Deborah Glick and Cliff May teamed up to explain the “real” (i.e., fake) roots of European skepticism about the operation:

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance “in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.” Also, the people who write for The Corner are idiots.

Obama’s Permanent Revolution

Ever since Barack Obama’s election, the very same conservative movement that had been castigating him for months as a harbinger of sharia socialism has spent an awful lot of time crowing about weird nonsense concepts like Obama’s cabinet coming from the “center-right” of the Democratic Party. It’s a bit annoying, I miss the classics. Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson is willing to kick it old-school and explain that in 2008 “50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized.”

Trotsky! I like it. I wonder which kind of Friedman-style, free market thinking Hanson thinks was prevalent back in 1958. As I recall it, the 50s were a time of high taxes, high levels of unionization, and strict regulation in the economic sphere with conservatism generally prevailing on matters related to sex and gender relations.

Times Change

Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.

And what about the years 2004-2007 in Iraq? Here’s Hanson’s “Sizing Up Iraq” from December 2004:

First, is the United States winning its engagements on the ground? The answer is an overwhelming yes—whether we look, most recently, at Samarra or at the thrashing of the Mahdists in Najaf. The combination of armor incursions, constant sniper attack, and GPS bombing in each case has led to decisive tactical defeat of the insurgents. Our only setback—the unfortunate pullback from Fallujah—was entirely attributable to our wrongheaded constraint, as if we somehow felt that releasing the terrorists from our death grip would either placate the opposition, empower the Iraqi government, or win accolades from the international community.

And in his 2006 “Winning the Iraq Wars” he not only claimed we weren’t making mistakes, but that no alternative strategy was possible at all:

Note also that after the hysteria over body armor and unarmored humvees, the Democratic opposition offers no real concrete alternatives to the present policy .

Why not? Because there are none.

Oh well.

The Party of Denial

One respect in which I thought it might be healthy for the conservative movement to go into opposition for a while is that it might kick them out of the habit of knee-jerk denialism about problems. With Bush in office, there was a tendency to dismiss any concern about any aspect of the nation’s economic well-being as a politically motivated attack on the Bush administration. So for no real reason, the conservative movement became an ideological tendency devoted to the proposition that rising household debt was a good thing.

With the right on the way out, maybe that can change and conservatives can start seeing problems and trying to devise distinctly conservative solutions to them. So far, though, Andy McCarthy seems determined to stay in denial mode, deriding talk of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression as a bit of “Obamanomics” spin.

On the DL

Via Spencer Ackerman, Jay Nordlinger reveals his unfamiliarity with modern slang:

A lot of us had this suspicion about Derbyshire.

The Ingrate Problem

It’s nice to see that Andy McCarthy is putting aside his crazy anti-Obama conspiracy theories and getting back down to his core competency of incredibly stupid commentary on national security policy. Thus, via Dave Noon, I give you this paragraph:

Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam’s terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.

Because, of course, historically people have welcomed being invaded and occupied by a foreign power whose actions lead to years of chaos, a huge civilian death toll, and millions of displaced people.

Frum Leaving National Review

It seems that David Frum, one of National Review’s very best writers, is going to be leaving the magazine and he suggests that NR’s burgeoning penchant for cocooning and purges is part of the issue:

In October came the resignation of Mr. Buckley’s son, the writer and satirist Christopher Buckley, after he endorsed Barack Obama for president. He did so on Tina Brown’s blog, The Daily Beast, to avoid any backlash on The Corner.

Now David Frum, a prominent conservative writer who enmeshed himself in a minor dustup during the campaign by turning negative on Governor Palin, is leaving, too. In an interview, he said he planned to leave the magazine, where he writes a popular blog, to strike out on his own on the Web.

“The answers to the Republican dilemma are not obvious and we need a vibrant discussion,” he said. “I think a little more distance can help everybody do a better job of keeping their temper.”

An interesting development. An End to Evil is a preposterous book, but Frum’s Comeback and Dead Right are both very interesting and, frankly, more worthy of your time than a lot of political books written by people I have more substantive agreements with.

Income and Voting in Vermont

For a bit more on National Review’s Jay Nordlinger’s assertion that contrary to the image of the Republican Party as “the party of the rich” in Vermont “modestly off people” are Republicans, whereas “comfortably off people, such as those that own ski chalets” are Democrats. In fact, Vermont is one of the states with a relatively weak relationship between income and voting behavior. But the relationship is that the more money a Vermonter makes, the more likely a Vermonter is to vote Republican. Razib offers these graphs. First, here’s the shape of a statewide race the GOP won:

And here’s the shape of a statewide race the GOP lost:

Clearly, when Republicans win they’re more than “the party of the rich” just as when Democrats win they’re more than “the party of the poor.” But richer people are friendly to Republicans than are poorer people, presumably because Republican policies are friendlier to richer people than they are to poorer people. It’s rather astounding that you see professional political commentators getting this wrong so frequently. The correlation between income and proclivity to vote for the more conservative political party exists in all U.S. states, has existed for a long time, is in line with traditional stereotypes, is replicated in almost every country around the world (Israel and Ireland are, I think, the main exceptions), and follows straightforwardly from the parties’ competing policy priorities. It shouldn’t be difficult to remember.

Myths and Realities

Jay Nordlinger writes at The Corner:

Dept. of Enduring Myths [Jay Nordlinger]

I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.

That may what “the evidence of [Nordlinger's] lived experience” says, but it would be strongly at odds with the historical pattern. Here’s Andrew Gelman’s map of voting patterns among the top third of the income distribution in 2004:

As you can see, John Kerry did win the votes of most rich people in California, New York, and Maryland. These states happen to be where most influential media people live, and this often gives influential media personalities a misleading impression of the voting behavior of rich people overall. But rich Vermonters, like rich Alabamans and rich Oregonians and rich Texans voted for George W. Bush. Which, if you know what you’re talking about, isn’t surprising — rich people vote Republican.

By contrast, this is the equivalent map for people in the bottom third of the income distribution:

Here you see overwhelming support for Democrats, including in Vermont. Those are the facts. Presumably the McCain-Obama map will look somewhat different, but it would be bizarre for the pattern to reverse itself as Nordlinger seems to be anticipating.

Silencing Bill Ayers

Paul Kengor for National Review continues to keep the focus on the important issues:

I continue to be quite perplexed by a few things that are surely related: Where is Bill Ayers? Where is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? They seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth. Why? How?

No two figures relating to Barack Obama have been talked about as much as Ayers and Wright. That being the case, why aren’t these two figures talking? Why is no one talking to them, or demanding to talk to them?

Have Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright been silenced? If so, who has silenced them, and how?

I see two plausible options here. One is that Barack Obama, as the first step in his campaign to perpetrate a second holocaust or turn us into the U.S.S.A. has sent Wright and Ayers into some kind of gulag. The other is that Wright and Ayers, like the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, don’t want to see four more years of conservative rule in the United States of America and have therefore decided not to act as useful idiots for the Republican Party. You be the judge.

The 99 Percent Solution

Barack Obama says that frequently differences in judicial philosophy aren’t going to matter because in “ninety-nine percent of cases [because] the Constitution is actually going to be clear. Ninety-nine percent of the cases, a statute or congressional intent is going to be clear. But there are going to be one percent, less than one percent, of real hard cases” where differences in judicial philosophy do matter. See this:

Ed Whelan deems this absurd:

What an idiotic statement. If Sarah Palin said something so stupid, she’d be pilloried from coast to coast. As I explained months ago (when Obama used a figure of 95% for the same general proposition):

As Obama ought to know, the unanimity rate on the Supreme Court is nowhere near 95%. According to the Harvard Law Review’s statistics for the past three terms, cases with dissents accounted for 64.4% (2006 term), 45.7% (2005 term), and 62.0% (2004 term) of all cases. Indeed, last term, cases dividing 5-4 accounted for over a third of all cases, and the three justices that Obama cited as justices he likes—Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter—agreed in the disposition of non-unanimous cases only 61%, 60%, and 63% of the time, respectively.

Obama, far from being an idiot, is very intelligent. And, “as somebody who taught constitutional law for ten years” (as he tells us in the interview), he surely knows that what he is saying is false.

This seems to totally miss the point. The reason Supreme Court decisions are rarely unanimous isn’t that cut-and-dry legal issues are rare. The reason is that the Supreme Court has absolute discretion over which cases to hear, and they disproportionately choose the “hard” cases. There are lots of cases where the Supremes could choose to offer a 9-0 affirmation of a Circuit Court decision, but that would be a waste of time. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to call Obama a liar, Whelan is completely misrepresenting what Obama is saying — he’s not, at all, denying that judicial philosophy is important. He’s just making the point that the cases where it comes into play are a minority of the total docket that sits before the federal judicial system.

UPDATE: Ed Whelan has a response here that I do agree makes his point of view on this look a bit less ridiculous, but I would still stand by the contention that he’s completely misrepresenting Obama’s fairly clear and basic point here.

Tinfoil Time

The Corner hits a new low of absurdity:

Now here’s a subversive little thought about that Khalidi tape that the Los Angeles Times is guarding like a cargo of plutonium.

* Item: The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Co.
* Item: The Tribune Co. is based in Chicago.
* Item: “In 2008, Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers.” (Wikipedia. A business friend tells me the current figure is actually $14.7 billion.)
* Item: Tribune Chairman and CEO Sam Zell is a major Republican donor. Why would he not want his paper to release the Khalidi tape?
* Item: The federal government is sitting on a bailout fund of $700 billion.
* Item: It’s not likely the Treasury can disburse more than one or two hundred billion of that before the next administration comes in.
* Item: The next administration will therefore have at least half a trillion greenies to hand out to anyone it deems worthy of being bailed out. Anyone — there are no hard and fast rules.
* Item: 14.7 billion is a very small proportion — less than three percent — of half a trillion.

Again, the tape is not being released because the LA Times was given the tape under the condition that they not release it. The only reason anyone knows of the tape’s existence is that the LA Times wrote a story revealing its existence and describing its content. If the LA Times were conspiring to keep the tape covered up, all they would have had to do would have been to not run the story. But they did run the story. Because they’re not perpetuating a cover-up.

By “Yes” I Mean “No”

We’ve grown accustomed in recent years to thinking of the Supreme Court as having a “left” bloc, a “right” bloc, and a “center” block. In truth, relative to the state of the judiciary in the 1970s and 80s we’ve seen an entire wing — judges who took the kind of positions that Justice Thurgood Marshall and others espoused — to the left of the current liberals essentially vanish. Someone like Justice Kennedy should be seen as representing a center-right viewpoint and the current liberals are a center-left viewpoint. The more robust liberal jurists of yesteryear believed in affirmative economic rights. Barack Obama was on Chicago public radio back in 2001 and said he disavowed those views:

“Maybe i am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know, I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” he said. “You know the institution just isn’t structured that way. Just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order … changes that cost money to local school district[s], and the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage, it was hard to figure out, you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court is not very good at it, and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts, I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.”

This should all be clear enough, but a lot of the right-wing, led by the McCain campaign and the Drudge Report, have decided that it would be good to pretend that Obama said the opposite of what he said. So we get a series of posts by Mark Levin dedicated to that idea. But the text is clear — Obama thinks you could come up with a rationale for affirmative economic rights if you wanted to, but that it would be a bad idea to do so. On this topic, the right would do well to take “yes” for an answer.

The Epistemology of Connections

Barack Obama has a stated Middle East policy. He also has a set of foreign policy advisers. And beyond the relatively narrow group of people who’ve been Obama’s national security team from the beginning he, as the Democratic nominee, now draws on the advice of the wider circle of Democrat-aligned foreign policy hands. This is a group of more-or-less known quantities whose views are by no means uniform, but which fall in a fairly predictable range. One might think the best way to ascertain Obama’s likely approach to national security policy would be to think about these people and their views. The institutions where Obama’s advisers will be coming from — CAP, CNAS, NSN, CSIS — have all kinds of written documents about foreign policy issues that could be perused.

Or you could follow Stanley Kurtz and focus on the views of Rashid Khalidi a scholar and left-wing Arab nationalist who, according to Kurtz, was a supporter of Obama’s when Obama was a local politician in Khalidi’s neighborhood.

It seems tedious to even point this out, but the standard of proof being applied here couldn’t possibly be applied consistently. Consider, by contrast, Obama’s ties to Joe Biden. They’re both Senators and, indeed, if Obama becomes President then Joe Biden will become Vice President. Or Obama’s ties to General Colin Powell — Obama specifically sought and received his support for a presidential bid and has repeatedly suggested that he would be interested in getting input from General Powell on national security issues. Or Obama’s ties to New Republic editor Marty Peretz who has written positive things about Obama. But then again, so has Jeffrey Goldberg. And so has Spencer Ackerman. But those guys think different things about American policy to the Middle East.

Or consider John McCain. He’s been in politics a long time. And his views have changed over the years. And he’s had a lot of different kinds of political allies. Back when he was leading the charge for the McCain-Feingold bill, he worked closely with the heads of a lot of liberal good-government groups. Should we take that to mean that he agrees with the heads of those groups about abortion rights or foreign policy? His “ties” to them are much more substantial than anything between Obama and Khalidi.

The procedure just doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile, National Review doesn’t agree with the foreign policy views of the sort of mainstream Democrats who, unlike Khalidi, will actually wind up staffing an Obama administration and making policy in it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to expend time and energy attacking those people and their views? Conservatives aren’t going to like the real Obama, so they’d do well to focus a little bit on him instead of obsessively hounding this mythical figure they’ve created.

A Question

Here’s an issue I would like the Corner to clear up for me. Is their idea about Barack Obama’s crypto-radicalism that he’s wildly different from other Democrats, such that, say, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and Patty Murray are immune to these kind of accusations? Or is the idea that Obama, in secretly being a radical left-winger, is just typical of mainstream progressive politicians? I mean, given that Jonah Goldberg believes that contemporary American liberalism is a form of fascism, accusing particular liberals of having tenuous ties to obscure radicals seems a bit odd. It’s like harping on Hitler’s ties to Franco (except, of course, that in National Review-land Franco is a great hero). I mean, isn’t the real story here that Bill Ayers is a fascist?

Yglesias’ Ties to Radicalism

With the ACORN conspiracy about to seize control of the government and force plumbers to make loans to uncreditworthy black people before spreading the wealth around to terrorists, I thought I might see what I could learn from National Review. Well, Stanley Kurtz observes that in the mid-nineties, Barack Obama’s State Senate campaign was endorsed by the New Party. The idea of the New Party was to serve as a pragmatic alternative to Naderism — it would cross-endorse progressive Democrats in select races and maybe now and again try to beat a conservative Democrat. Kurtz explains. Very little ever came of it because ballot access laws in the United States are generally hostile to this strategy, but New York State features a fusion-friendly election law and three fusion-oriented parties. There’s the Conservative Party on the right, the Liberal Party in the center, and the Working Families Party on the left with the WFP being the main institutional legacy of the New Party. Anyway, Kurtz says:

To get a sense of where the New Party stood politically, consider some of its early supporters: Barbara Dudley of Greenpeace; Steve Cobble, political director of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coaltion; prominent academics like Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of the “Cloward-Piven strategy” and a leader of the drive for the “motor-voter” legislation Obama later defended in court on behalf of ACORN; economist Juliet Schor; black historian Manning Marable; historian Howard Zinn; linguist Noam Chomsky; Todd Gitlin; and writers like Gloria Steinem and Barbara Ehrenreich. Socialist? Readers can draw their own conclusions. At one point, Sifry does describe the party’s goals as “social democratic.” In any case, the New Party clearly stands substantially to the left of the mainstream Democratic party.

This reminds me of my own extensive ties to radicalism. For one thing, when I was registered to vote in New York, I voted Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2000 on the Working Families Party line. Also I once went to hear a Howard Zinn talk, after which I asked a moderately hostile question and he gave a non-responsive answer. But I have read the People’s History of the United States. For that matter, I was assigned Nickle and Dimed in college and though I never took a class with Juliet Schor, I’m pretty sure I met her at one point through the Progressive Student Labor Movement. And I have extensive ties to Todd Gitlin. Beyond TPM Cafe we both traveled to the Netherlands about a year ago as guests of the Wiardi Beckman Stiftung which is affiliated with the Dutch Labor Party which is a member of the Socialist International (making things even more confusing, shortly after this we both found ourselves at a Liberty Fund even in Arizona).

Long story short — there are radicals everywhere!

Antacid

National Review’s Peter Kirsanow says EFCA’s arbitration provisions are no good:

As nervous as employers are about card check, it’s EFCA’s first contract mandatory arbitration provisions that have businesses ordering antacids by the truckload. Under EFCA, if the company and union fail to reach agreement on a contract within 120 days after the union requests bargaining, the matter will be referred to an arbitration panel that will actually write the contract. That contract is binding for two years. I’ve negotiated more collective bargaining agreements than I can remember, but I can’t remember too many times when an agreement was reached on an initial contract in four months. It sometimes takes that long just to agree upon the shape of the table.

What if an arbitrator mandates a wage scale that makes the employer uncompetitive? What if the arbitrator puts the company into a pension plan that renders the company unmarketable? Can the arbitrator require interest arbitration in exchange for a no-strike clause? The questions are interminable.

This seems like a somewhat silly worry. A national union that just invested a lot of time and energy in organizing a new workplace has no interest in acquiring a contract that simply drives the company out of business. Nor do the newly organized workers have any interest in acquiring such a contract. And, of course, corporate management won’t want such a contract. So why would an arbitrator come up with one?

As to the point that it’s rare for an agreement to be reached within four months, that’s kind of the point of the arbitration clause — to motivate both parties to try to reach a rapid agreement in order to avoid the arbitration process.

Ayers Video

Some wingnuts put together this ad which they deem “the McCain ad you’ll never see.” Presumably they think you’ll never see it because McCain is too weak-kneed to air it. In fact, you’ll never see it because it’s way too long and also incredibly unpersuasive:

The collective meltdown over at the Corner over the past few weeks makes me tempted to say that a lot of folks have oozed down to Mark Steyn’s level, but actually Steyn’s getting dumber, too, as witnessed by his huzzahs for the ad and puzzlement that no wealthy 527 donors want to pick it up. But here’s a clue — the ad, while a damning indictment of Bill Ayers, has nothing on Obama. There’s not even a proper insinuation of wrongdoing here.