Alberto Gonzales: A victim in the War on Terror

God help me, I wasn’t going to blog today. But then Alberto Gonzales pops up in the Wall Street Journal, saying stuff like this:

“For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

A little advice on form, Al: If you want to be taken seriously — and not seen as a sniveling whiner — you should never equate your old job as a top-ranking government official with the lot of anybody who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Didn’t you see The Dark Knight? Be a little more stoic, man.

On to the substance. I don’t think Alberto Gonzales is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. It’s much more banal than that. I think Gonzales was a mediocre man who acquiesced — first in his job as the president’s lawyer, then as attorney general — to people who formulated evil policies.

The best reporting I’ve seen — including Jane Mayer’s indispensible The Dark Side — suggests that Gonzales (yes, a Harvard-trained lawyer) was utterly unprepared for the post-9/11 demands of his job, with scant-to-nonexistent knowledge of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war. So he deferred to the contemptible opinions of people like David Addington (Dick Cheney’s lawyer) and John Yoo, among others, who more or less tried to define restrictions against torture right out of existence. Those folks wrote the memos; Gonzales accepted them or even signed his name to them.

And Gonzales seems to confirm this in his interview with the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Gonzales said his role as White House counsel at the time was one among several administration lawyers who debated the opinions, but that in the end it was the Justice Department’s call. John Yoo, the then-Justice official who had been assigned to draft the memos, had strong feelings and no one could have pressured him to write the memos a certain way, Mr. Gonzales said.

Of course, no one actually pressured Yoo to write the memos any other way than what he did. Certainly, Gonzales didn’t. But one presumes that if he felt differently, he could have told the president so. And, again presumably, that opinion might’ve carried some weight — he was the White House counsel after all.

In the end, though, Gonzales doesn’t have the courage — or maybe even the knowledge — to justify the policies that went forward with his acquiescence. His mediocre passivity is, in fact, his only defense. And that’s no defense at all.

Goodbye, 2008

OK, I’m checking out for this year and flying back to Kansas to see my parents for a belated Christmas. I’ll be back Sunday or so. Thanks to all of you who read me here, both old friends who followed me from distant, far-flung other blogs and new readers who I hope will mix it up with me here in 2009. Happy new year!

A wife’s duty is to sexually service her husband

Over at National Review’s The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez announces that Dennis Prager is writing about marital bliss. Being married, I follow the link.

And I gasp. Prager’s secret to marital bliss: The primary duty of wives, it appears, is to get their husbands off.

Sorry to be so blunt, but really, what can you say about advice like this:

Yet another outgrowth of ’60s thinking is the notion that it is “hypocritical” or wrong in some other way to act contrary to one’s feelings. One should always act, post-’60s theory teaches, consistent with one’s feelings. Therefore, many women believe that it would simply be wrong to have sex with their husband when they are not in the mood to. Of course, most women never regard it as hypocritical and rightly regard it as admirable when they meet their child’s or parent’s or friend’s needs when they are not in the mood to do so. They do what is right in those cases, rather than what their mood dictates. Why not apply this attitude to sex with one’s husband? Given how important it is to most husbands, isn’t the payoff — a happier, more communicative, and loving husband and a happier home — worth it?

What I find interesting here is that there’s no discussion on Prager’s part about the potential responsibility of men to act contrary to their feelings for the sake of their wives.

And there’s this:

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can — indeed, ought to — refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

Er … because going to work is necessary to pay for the immediate needs of survival? Whereas having sex today is merely something you want to do? Yeah, I know, sex is necessary for the survival of the species. But sex today isn’t.

Praeger frames this in the context of how wives should love their husbands. But don’t husbands have a loving duty to their wives not to be horny narcissists? And isn’t it convenient that in Prager’s universe, the demands of his id constitute an obligation on the part of his spouse, but no reciprocal obligations? What kind of man is he?

Anyway, this is all worth noting because Prager is a widely listened-to radio host, writing on a popular (and populist) conservative website and approvingly linked from National Review, the house organ of intellectual conservatism. You don’t have to be pro-choice to conclude from this that many conservatives don’t really have the best interests of women at heart.

Republicans love being kinda racist!

A couple of days ago, as the “Barack The Magic Negro” flap began to unfold, I suggested it was not really surprising that a man who wanted to lead the GOP thought that it was OK to risk appearing racist:

Of course, the song originally appeared on the Rush Limbaugh show. So it’s hard not to conclude that the willingness to appear kinda racist is a mainstream attitude for Republicans. And it’s hard to fault the GOP candidate for thinking that’d be the case.

Today, Politico reports that Chip Saltsman — the guy who sent out the song to Republican voters who will choose the party’s next chairman — may actually benefit from the controversy because those voters think there’s just too much politically correct fussiness about the whole thing.

I have white conservative friends who really hate racism, but who also bristle when Republicans are tarred with the broad brush of racism. But honestly, guys, your party makes it so damned easy. Stop it. Please.

The price of gasoline is low again. It’s time to raise taxes on gasoline.

I have in the last couple of months suggested that the “Big Three” automakers have only themselves to blame for their troubles: They’ve spent years fighting fuel efficiency standards that would’ve made their vehicles more palatable to American consumers once the price of gasoline topped $3 a gallon. My conservative friends have always had the same response: Imposing those standards would’ve forced the carmakers to build vehicles that consumers didn’t want at the time.*

But it appears that there’s a solution to oil consumption that’s gaining conservative support: Raising taxes on gasoline. Charles Krauthammer makes the case in (gasp!) a cover essay for the very conservative Weekly Standard this week. The recent $4 spike in gasoline prices killed SUV sales, he notes, and sent consumers scurrying for fuel-efficient cars. Now that gasoline has fallen under $2 a gallon, he says, raising gasoline taxes can make sure there’s not an accidental revival in the sales of Hummers.

And, Krauthammer says, there are conservative reasons for wanting to take this action:

A tax that suppresses U.S. gas consumption can have a major effect on reducing world oil prices. And the benefits of low world oil prices are obvious: They put tremendous pressure on OPEC, as evidenced by its disarray during the current collapse; they deal serious economic damage to energy-exporting geopolitical adversaries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran; and they reduce the enormous U.S. imbalance of oil trade which last year alone diverted a quarter of $1 trillion abroad. Furthermore, a reduction in U.S. demand alters the balance of power between producer and consumer, making us less dependent on oil exporters. It begins weaning us off foreign oil, and, if combined with nuclear power and renewed U.S. oil and gas drilling, puts us on the road to energy independence.

Krauthammer’s a climate-change skeptic, but he acknowledges that such concerns might motivate liberals to sign onto the gas tax plan.

It’s always weird to hear conservatives talk about raising taxes as a way to positively harness market forces. But there’s some cautious openness to the proposal among the pillars of the right. This may be an opportunity for President Obama to take strong, bipartisan action that would serve our economic, security and climate interests.

*(I always thought this was pre-9/11 thinking myself. Since we knew that our oil consumption was affecting our national security, wouldn’t most Americans have been willing to make a sacrifice or two to lower the odds of another attack?)

Did President Bush really read 95 books in one year? It doesn’t matter

Like a lot of people, I’m somewhat stunned by and dubious about Karl Rove’s announcement that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006 — and regularly reads four dozen or more books a year. Really? Really really? I think I’m a pretty dedicated reader, but even in my best years I manage to make it through about two dozen books or so.

Rove is trying to burst the aura of — let’s not mince words here — stupidity that has clung to Bush ever since he emerged onto the national scene. “He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader,” Rove writes. Of course, Bush was rather a famously a C student at an institution famous for helping create the notion of a “Gentleman’s C,” so that might not prove what Rove says it does.

Here, though, I might be falling into the trap that Richard Cohen grumbles about this morning:

Still, the fact remains that Bush is a prodigious, industrial reader, and this does not conform at all to his critics’ idea of who he is. They would prefer seeing him as a dolt, since that, as opposed to policy or ideological differences, is a briefer, more bloggish explanation of what went wrong.

Let’s unpack this just a bit. And, for the sake of this argument, let’s concede that Bush does indeed do a lot of reading. There are a couple of ways to read a book: One is to find out something you didn’t know. The other is to confirm what you think you know.

Hey, we all do it. I’d rather read Jane Mayer’s book on torture than anything Ann Coulter has written. But everything we know about Bush suggests the latter approach. He’s apparently not a man given to doubt, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that maybe he should be. He’s never been concerned with details, preferring his briefing papers and important meetings both be kept short. Maybe he just wanted to get back to reading Camus.

None of this makes him dumb, actually; I actually think he’s got a quick (if frattish) wit that belies an underlying intelligence. I’ve often said, instead, that he’s incurious. But I’m not sure that’s exactly right, either. Maybe he’s just intractable.

Still, there’s no escaping Bush’s record. It is one dominated by failure. As Cohen points out, those failures were caused by Bush’s policy choices, and it’s a distraction to spend time pondering the president’s relative stupidity. But if the mantle of dumbness clings to Bush, it’s because he has often governed dumbly. All the books in the world won’t change that.

Not Politics: You know what’s awesome? Star Trek is awesome.

My geeky anticipation for the Star Trek reboot has been growing for some months now — I’m not a GalaxyQuest-style convention-goer, but I do check TrekWeb.com every couple of days — but I admit I was only mildly interested last week when my wife discovered that the original series’ first season is available at Netflix streaming.

Then I watched an episode. And it was awesome.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. I was hooked on Star Trek from the very first episode I saw, where the crew of the Enterprise takes on Mel (from Mel’s Diner) on the Chicago Gangster Planet. This would’ve been around 1980, I would’ve been about 7, and this was when old shows still showed up during the afternoons on local broadcast stations instead of being relegated to niche cable channels and DVDs. I was already a budding space enthusiast, and Star Trek tapped into my wildest dreams.

I was a big Next Generation fan when that show was on. It took me awhile to warm up to Deep Space Nine. I got bored with Voyager and finally gave up entirely with Enterprise. About a year ago, I caught an episode of Next Generation on TV and was surprised: It was painfully dated and cheesy, but not in a good way. Bland (the bridge was beige!) and self-serious. And I wondered: Had I just suffered through a couple of decades of having really bad taste?

Maybe. Maybe not.

The original series was, in the last year or so, given what I’ll call the Lucas Treatment: Original shots of the balsa wood Enterprise were removed and replaced with new CGI effects. The other shots were digitally remastered to make the picture sharper and the colors more vibrant. And watching the “new” old episodes in recent days, I remembered something I’d forgotten: Star Trek is kind of awesome.

Oh yeah, it’s cheesy. But in a good way, poking fun at its own foibles. Yes, too many problems are solved by William Shatner’s cosmic sexiness. Yes, that was really creepy in the episode where Shatner’s love interest was a pubescent girl. Yes, Doctor McCoy’s character seems to have been designed to ensure 1960s segregationists that they’d still be fighting for the South to rise again in the 23rd century. Yes, there are (as Spock might point out) problems of logic in many of the episodes. And yes, the show is shamefully — gleefully — sexist. But you know what? The show is just flat-out entertaining.

A lot has been made of Trek’s allegories about the Vietnam War, racism and the rest. And those episodes are OK. But it’s the episodes with prancing rogues like the Squire of Gothos and Harry Mudd that make the series a real treat. Unfortunately, when Gene Rodenberry got around to creating Next Generation, he’d bought too much into the fan hype about offering a utopian vision of the future and smoothed out all the wrinkles that made the original series fun.

It is fun. I hope the new movie captures that old spirit.

Time for the TV networks to get out of the journalism game

The New York Times reports that the networks can’t be bothered to keep full-time reporters in Iraq anymore. No point in watching the newscasts anymore, is there?

What caused Bush Derangement Syndrome?

I’m not going to deny there’s such a thing as Bush Derangement Syndrome. I’ve seen it in action, and I’ve occasionally fallen victim to it myself. But what’s funny about conservatives is that they seem to think that President Bush himself in no way contributed to the rise of BDS. Take Pete Wehner today:

George W. Bush came to Washington hoping to do the same thing, and he had reason to be hopeful. As governor of Texas he worked well with Democrats and had no real stake in the bitter partisan battles of the 1990s. As president, Bush himself, if not perfect, was consistently civil and did not engage in personal attacks against his critics. That is in part because Bush is himself a man of admirable grace. Yet the president became a polarizing figure, hated by the Left, and gave rise to a politico-psychological phenomenon: Bush Derangement Syndrome. It turned out President Bush could control what he said, but he couldn’t control what others said about him.

In this scenario, George W. Bush is the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington — a simple, well-meaning man who accidentally stumbles afoul of dark forces. But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?

For one thing, there’s the matter of how Bush came to the White House in the first place. He didn’t win the popular vote, after all. And once the Florida vote went into extra innings, it’s likely that half the country was going to be disenchanted anyway — no matter the outcome. I’m not one of those people who said “Bush isn’t my president,” because, well, he was the president. But when a man who most voters didn’t want to become president becomes president, that’s going to make a few people more than ordinarily cranky.

(And yeah, those cranky people might also have been primed by eight years of watching a Democratic president fall victim to Clinton Derangement Syndrome. What’s good for the goose, etc. The point is: President Bush didn’t exactly start his administration in a vacuum.)

Bush talked a good game about changing the tone in Washington. He even partnered with Ted Kennedy on important legislation. And it’s true he didn’t personally say nasty things about his opponents in public. Here’s the thing, though: Presidents don’t do that. It’s un-presidential. They leave the dirty work to underlings. Like a vice president who would deliver a crisp “fuck you” to a Democratic senator (and still be proud of it some years later). Or a political strategist who helped orchestrate racist rumors against John McCain in South Carolina and generally perfected the art of negative political campaigning.

That those two men were also the two most influential people in the Bush Administration for much of the last eight years is telling; the president may have been “personally gracious,” but Washington’s dark tone was set — in large part — by Bush’s own choices. The president is no mere victim; he’s also the Typhoid Mary of BDS.

This is a sentence I will probably never write again

So here goes: Michelle Malkin might be right about something.

Forgive me. I usually don’t even read Malkin, who often seems more interested in being a second-tier Ann Coulter than in doing anything productive with her media platform. But today she points out that media coverage of Barack Obama’s exercise routine has been a touch adulatory, while coverage of President Bush’s similarly devoted regimen tended to make him look dim and out-of-touch with the needs of real Americans.

Granted, Malkin puts her thumb on the scales a bit. The anti-Bush evidence she marshals mostly consists of quotes from Jonathan Chait — who is a frankly liberal opinion writer. That’s hardly “the media.” Still, I really didn’t need to read the following sentence in the Washington Post about the next leader of the free world:

“The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

Sounds almost like a line from a bad romance novel.