Andy McCarthy has an opinion that does not make me livid

I think I’ve established the bona fides of my dislike for Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor turned National Review writer who never met a torture technique or subversion of liberty that he didn’t absolutely love. So it’s only fair that I note that I don’t entirely disagree with his take on a military judge’s refusal of an Obama Administration request to suspend tribunals at Gitmo:

As regards whether to continue with the military commissions of the 21 detainees currently charged with war crimes, Obama may make a terrible decision, he may make a good one, or he may do something in between.  But in any event, it was entirely reasonable for him to ask for a four-month time-out — which was done in a very respectful manner that did not in any way denigrate the dignity of the military tribunals.  He is still getting his national security team in place and getting them the clearances they need to get up to speed on all the relevant facts, many of which are no doubt highly classified.  He is, moreover, the President of the United States and the commander-in-chief of our military forces in a time of war.  These considerations, by themselves, should have been enough for the judge to indulge his request — I can’t think of a single civilian court judge I ever appeared before who would not have respectfully deferred to a reasonable request for delay by the president in similar circumstances.

Now I say I don’t entirely disagree because, at the end of McCarthy’s posting, we see some of what’s motivating his call for deference to the president:

However inadvertently, Col. Pohl is just giving President Obama more reason to think there are better ways to deal with detainees than a system that denies abundantly sensible motions — and in which Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard, arrested in possession of missiles intended for shooting at U.S. troops, gets sentenced to a grand total of six months on a war crimes conviction (which is what happened in the first commission trial).

Right. Since the military tribunals have ended up not being entirely the kangaroo courts everybody — including McCarthy — expected them to be, McCarthy is taking a “the hell with ‘em all” approach to matters. It’s not that McCarthy wants the judge to be fair to the new president; he was the judge to simply defer to the president’s judgement in this (and, based on his record of commentary) in all other matters. In that context, a little defiance doesn’t bug me at all.

Just a speech

Looks like President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law yesterday. Good. Looks like the Senate voted to approve an expansion of the S-CHIP program — which covers health insurance for children — which the president will certainly sign. Good. Wonder if the president’s critics will keep saying that he’s only giving speeches?

More Limbaugh

Sorry for light posting today. (I know it disappoints you, badly.) In the meantime, Ben and I decided to expand our tussle over Rush Limbaugh this week in our Scripps Howard column. My more considered take:

Rush Limbaugh might indeed be the apotheosis of modern conservatism: Mean-spirited, sexist and bigoted. Liberals could hardly invent a better bogeyman if they tried.

But perhaps that’s giving Limbaugh too much credit. His job, after all, isn’t politics. It’s entertainment. He gets paid $50 million a year — a sum closer to the earnings of, say, Barbra Streisand than any politician or mainstream commentator — to sell advertising for the radio stations that carry his show. To do that, he has to deliver a huge audience.

That he does deliver that audience is proof that conservatism still has appeal in this country, even after eight disastrous years of the Bush administration. It’s also a testament to the enduring power of Limbaugh’s shtick: Outrage. Perpetual, nonstop, bleeding-ulcer outrage. He was angry during the first Bush administration. He was angry during the Clinton years. And he was angry during the second Bush administration. Now President Obama is in town and — surprise! — Rush Limbaugh is still angry. That may be entertaining, but it’s not really a political philosophy. It’s a marketing decision.

That’s not to say Limbaugh doesn’t wield some power; GOP congressmen clearly fear his influence over their constituents. President Obama, though, is wise to caution those congressmen about paying too much deference to Limbaugh; their job is to help run the country, not sell advertising. Let’s hope they understand the difference.

Ben makes the case that Limbaugh is right to oppose the $850 billion stimulus package, which isn’t unreasonable. But where Ben says that Limbaugh “deploys humor to powerful effect,” I’d say that Limbaugh is a “jerk.” Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

Torture prosecutions off the table

Washington Times:

President Obama’s choice to run the Justice Department has assured senior Republican senators that he won’t prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the Bush administration’s policy of “enhanced interrogations.”

Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

Mr. Holder’s promise apparently was key to moving his nomination forward. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 17-2 to favorably recommend Holder for the post. He is likely to be confirmed by the Senate soon.

I’m on record saying that torture prosecutions are a bad idea, politically, but still. The last two Republican attorneys general were able to hem and haw around the topic of what constituted torture based, in part, on “I can’t pre-judge that until I’ve seen the case files” kind of reasoning. And everybody was cool with it. But the new A.G. can’t get into office until he promises to pre-judge something?

Maybe the Democrats really are weaker willed than the Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh: Not helping

My friend and conservative colleague Ben Boychuk overnight Tweeted his (brief) thoughts about the role of Rush Limbaugh in our public life;

If liberals didn’t have Rush, they would need to invent him.

There’s something to that, I suppose. Every political movement loves to have a bogeyman — somebody who represents all the stereotypically worst impulses of your political opponents. But here’s the thing: Liberals don’t have to invent this bogeyman: Rush Limbaugh actually exists and — along with Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly — does everything he can to make our political discourse dumber and cruder by the moment.

Sometimes people forget this, but Rush Limbaugh exists primarily to sell commercials for radio stations. That he does so successfully, of course, speaks to A) his broadcasting talent and B) the fact that a lot of people buy (more broadly speaking) what he’s selling. But part of his shtick is that he’s always outraged — no matter who is in power or what’s being done, he’s always angry. It’s no accident that Limbaugh’s opposition to the McCain nomination became most intense once that nomination was virtually assured. Limbaugh guaranteed himself four more years of outrage no matter who became president.

I don’t mean to suggest that Limbaugh isn’t, at heart, a conservative. I’ve no reason to doubt it. But he’s got a pretty clear financial motive for being so pugnaciously conservative; there’s just no percentage in being nice, even when the times might call for it. The problem here is that Limbaugh is thus forever whipping up the passions of his listeners, who in turn make governing more difficult for no other reason than to make it difficult. I’m not going to try to silence Limbaugh, but it makes sense for liberals to point out when he’s not helping. And he’s usually not.

Pissing off the right people

There’s a phenomenon in politics known as “pissing off the right people.” It’s when a politician takes a controversial stance and his usual allies — having little else to say about that stance — note that critics are getting lathered up about it and figure the stance must be OK.

You see a corollary of this phenomenon in this Weekly Standard blog posting today, noting that the Taliban are praising President Obama’s decision to close down Gitmo. There’s no commentary, but the implication is clear: Obama did something that made the Taliban happy, so it must be wrong.

All I can say is that Gen. David Petraeus — hero to conservatives everywhere — might disagree with that.

Is the GOP getting played on the stimulus vote?

Brendan at Brendan Calling has an interesting take on the hubub over the stimulus:

I am wondering if Obama has led the Republicans into a trap.

We have seen the family planning funds get ejected, and still the GOP plans to vote en masse against the bill.

We’ve seen mortgage modifictaion get cut and still the GOP plans to vote en masse against the bill.

The bill is filled with tax cuts the GOP insisted on, and still the GOP plans to vote no en masse.

It’s beginning to look to me like the GOP opposes ANY STIMULUS AT ALL NO MATTER WHAT OBAMA GIVES THEM. And yet there is no denying that Obama went out of his way for the GOP, certainly farther than most Democrats like me would like.

I am no Obama fanboy. I’m not one of those people that comes up with excuses for politicians behaving badly. I’m not easily persuaded.

But I think this time, Obama may have led the GOP into a trap. The public overwhelmingly supports some kind of stimulus. Obama has very publicly tried to get the GOP on board, and just as publicly, the GOP has said no. It’s the standard “Lucy-pulled-the-football” play… but this time I think Obama pulled the football, because (despite my strong objections to pulling family plannign funding etc.) the Democrats can say “look at everything we did to get the GOP on board! We are trying to “change” our politics, and the GOP simply doesn’t want to cooperate! Blame them if the economy fails!”

Obama Administration lawyers will defend John Yoo?

It appears so. John Yoo, of course, wrote the memos suggesting that President Bush could disregard centuries of precedent, domestic and international law and torture suspected terrorists. He’s being sued by Jose Padilla — who was accused of a “dirty bomb” plot, but convicted on unrelated charges — who says his treatment by American interrogators was torture that wouldn’t have happened without Yoo’s say so.

I’m not entirely thrilled about this, even though I understand why: The Obama Administration, now that it’s in power, has an interest in making sure its officials don’t have to look over their shoulders at potential lawsuits every time they give advice — even bad, awful, immoral advice — to the president.

However…

I don’t particularly mind if officials have to look over their shoulders at potential lawsuits every time they give advice — particularly bad, awful, immoral advice — to the president. If that advice is that it’s ok to ignore (and thus violate) the law, then I want officials thinking very long and very hard about whether they want to do that.

Kindle 2.0 comes out next month?

Want.

John Updike and the varieties of religious experience

I was never a huge fan of John Updike. I made a go of reading one of the Rabbit novels when I was much younger, but I’ve never quite found the whole genre of suburban white guy angst to be all that compelling — yes, I’m grossly oversimplifying — even in the hands of a master. So my exposure to Updike was limited mainly to his reviews of books and art in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and I found that if I wasn’t a fan of Updike’s novels, I was certainly a fan of the idea of John Updike: A lifetime spent in ravenous pursuit of the life of the mind.

I remain touched, though, by one of Updike’s short stories that appeared in The Atlantic in November 2002. Varieties of Religious Experience was about 9/11 — seen through the eyes of Dan, a WASPy Ohioan who is in New York on the day of the attacks; “Mohammed,” one of the attackers; Jim, a worker in one of the towers; and Caroline, a passenger on Flight 93. It was the first fictional treatment of 9/11 that I had seen, and re-reading it now I find I’m getting a lump in my throat. The opening sentence, though, is what initially caught me:

There is no God: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.

At the end of the story, Dan Kellogg has turned his back on this atheistic declaration, resettling comfortably into the confines of his Episcopalian congregation. But reading those words and the entire story in 2002 somehow dislodged the growing doubts about my own faith that I’d tried to ignore since 9/11. By the end of 2002, I was out of the church — not because the story moved me to agnosticism, but because it forced me to confront what I could no longer ignore.

This, no doubt, is not a result that would’ve pleased Updike, who was a churchgoing man his entire adult life. But such is the power of literature: Authors do not control how it is received, and sometimes readers cannot control how they receive it — not, at least, if they’re approaching with an open mind.

So no, John Updike was not my favorite author. But his writing in some small way changed my life. I am thus grateful for his career and his gifts; may he rest in peace.