WarInContext: News & Views Roundup: May 11. Today's news seems milder than yesterday's: Hizbollah is backing out of their West Beirut seizures cutting the government some slack; something of a truce in Sadr City; an evolving relationship between US Jews and Israel. Someone's still taunting the liberal interventionists to save Burma the hard way. Frank Rich sees a clear road to victory for Obama, and Bill McKibben offers civilization one more chance.

The sudden shifts of the Siniora and Maliki governments, one day lurching aggression against militias that are more independent than oppositional (to said governments, but more clearly anathema to the US), the next day backing into wary truces, just goes to show how spasmodically the US is pulling their strings. (Helena Cobban reports that the US response to the intra-Iraqi ceasefire was to bomb Sadr City.) The Bush regime may be the last holdout on earth in their steadfast belief that force settles things. (Even Israel, which happily indulges, doesn't seem to harbor any faith about the results -- as much as anything else they do it to keep the ball moving.)

Peter S. Goodman: The Dollar: Shrinkable but (So Far) Unsinkable. More of the usual about the shrinking dollar and its increasing detachment from the norms of financial integrity.

Come what may -- a financial crisis here, a military misadventure there -- Americans could count on money sloshing up thick on their shores. Virtually limitless demand for American government bonds has supported the dollar's value, and kept domestic interest rates down. Americans have been emboldened to spend in blissful disregard of their debts, secure that foreigners would always supply finance. And that devil-may-care spending has in turn fueled economic growth around the world.

Which is one of several reasons the world continues to indulge us. Another is that the US government (especially but not exclusively the Bush regime) serves generously as a flagship for the capitalist class worldwide, a class which retains substantial influence in many states, enough so they prefer not to embarrass their benefactor. Still, the rationalization can get out of hand:

But many economists say that chatter about the demise of the dollar is overblown. The United States, despite its problems, has been a remarkably solid place to put money, making it singularly able to attract savings, they point out. The dollar is likely to continue to shed value, and the American economy will grow far slower than India's and China's, they acknowledge. Yet the dollar, they argue, remains one of the few entities that seem to have fundamental staying power in an age of risk and obsolescence. The size of the United States military alone reinforces confidence that America will endure to honor its debts.

How do you make sense of the last line? The military is the largest single drain on the US economy. It has some Keynesian value in pumping money through the system, creating jobs and cash flow, but it doesn't actually produce anything of note, and it's largely financed on credit, which immediately weakens the dollar. One thing it does generate is a lot of risk -- unexpected costs, liabilities, and ill will. No other nation at present wastes so much resource. Few throughout history have come close, and decay and/or destruction have followed those that have. Why this should vouchsafe US credit is hard to imagine.

WarInContext: News & Views Roundup: May 10. This whole cluster of article links makes me exceptionally nervous. One thing the Bush administration has worked hard at has been to draw its nominal opponents into open armed conflict. Hamas, for instance, had established a longstanding unilateral truce with Israel, entering the legitimate political process in the Palestinian territories, but over a year of forced isolation and armed attacks, both by Israel and by the US-backed PLO, eventually succeeded in forcing Hamas's hand -- although Hamas's consequent seizure of Gaza may not have been exactly what Bush (or more specifically, Elliott Abrams) intended. The same thing has happened with Hizbollah in Lebanon, again backfiring with the seizure of West Beirut. In Iraq the US continues to prod the Sadr militia toward open rebellion, as happened in Basra and Kut, and may well happen in Baghdad (Sadr City). Hizbollah and the Sadrists carry the extra burden of association with Iran, so it is worrisome as ever that this is happening at the same time as rumors are floating that the US will attack "training camps" in Iran. The bit about Negroponte tightening the US grip in Pakistan shows the same aggressiveness and presumption. The piece on "The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics" is just icing on the cake. (The only piece I'm inclined to dismiss out of hand is the one about invading Burma.)

The Rami Khouri piece is especially notable. You should recall that Egypt had a recent round of food riots, exposing the frail legitimacy of a regime that we often take for granted. Maybe the petro-emirates of the Persian Gulf are making out like bandits given record petroleum prices, but much of the Middle East is very fragile, and US belligerence only stresses them worse.

Not included in this list is a piece I read in the New York Times which suggested that Olmert should invade Gaza to unite the Israelis and distract from his pending indictments. One thing this all goes to show is that even in its waning, lame duck months, the Bush regime is very dangerous.

Tony Karon: Israel is 60, Zionism is Dead, What Now?. Long piece, essential reading. Karon argues that the Zionist rationale behind Israel has collapsed with the waning of anti-semitism worldwide, the choice of two-thirds of the world's Jews not to live in Israel, including some 750,000 Israelis who have (re)joined the diaspora.

Israel may be an intractable historical fact, but the Zionist ideology that spurred its creation and shaped its identity and sense of national purpose has collapsed -- not under pressure from without, but having rotted from within. It is Jews, not Jihadists, that have consigned Zionism to the dustbin of history.

Make sure you read the long quote from Rami Khouri at the end.

I think this quote comes from Time, but I found it quoted at Talking Points Memo, referring to Mark Penn's inability to grasp the basic rules of Democratic Party primaries:

And yet the strategy remained the same, with the [Clinton] campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don't get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she'd be the nominee.

Guess she should have run as a Republican.

---

By the way, Matt Taibbi's latest piece on Clinton is pretty generous to her, although the Victor Juhasz illustration makes its point savagely. For whatever it's worth, I've been bashing elites and celebrating low-brow culture since I was in my mid-teens. But I find it disturbing when competency and common sense pragmatism get bundled up as elite traits -- not least because real elites these days have so little of either.

Andrew Leonard: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus. There's something perversely satisfying when any politician deigns to attack the economics profession, even when said politician is dead wrong. After all, it's not as if economists never screw up. But this does follow an already disturbing trend: even when Clinton manages to come up with a relatively sound policy on an issue, she backs it up with bad instincts and misunderstandings, leaving us with no confidence that she'll follow through or avoid numerous pitfalls. Leonard walks through the "gas tax holiday" issue carefully and tenaciously. Bottom line is that gas prices and especially gas taxes are already too low, even if they have been pumped up through speculation; that speculation is a distinct problem from the oil market and should be addressed on its own terms, in the more general case; and that even with reasonable fixes bigger problems are in store.

Perhaps you won't win a primary battle in Indiana by telling voters that "during my presidency, you can expect to pay more for gasoline than you do now, because that is the only way we can truly break free from our addiction to oil," just as you weren't going to win a primary battle in Ohio by lecturing voters on the benefits of free trade. But by blaming "elite opinion" for not being on the side of ordinary Americans, Clinton is dismissing everyone who says the current status quo can't be sustained, that sacrifices will have to be made, and that the era of cheap oil is over.

One thing that should be added here is that even Obama's commitment to "truth" comes up short here.

Josh Marshall: Clinton to put gravity under scrutiny. Report here is that Clinton intends to break up OPEC, using some combination of antitrust laws and the WTO. While I'd be as happy to see her turn into a new Ida Tarbell as I would to see her lead a revival of Jeanette Rankin's pacifism, her talk still reeks of opportunism. Marshall writes:

Hillary is certainly not the first candidate to bash the oil producing states or oil companies around election time. And the polls seem to show it's working for her. But I'm concerned about the widening gap between reality and her campaign trail statements. First with the pledge to obliterate Iran if they attack Israel, then the rebellion against economists and now this.

Andrew Leonard: Now, Paul Krugman throws economists off the bus. Thought I'd follow up Leonard's post yesterday with Paul Krugman's reaction, but there wasn't one yesterday, and Leonard sums up today's response nicely. Krugman doesn't support the gas tax holiday scam, but he also refuses to budge an inch toward Obama because of Clinton's gaffe. Krugman seems to favor Clinton over Obama because he'd rather see a Democrat push hard on populist themes than soft peddle them, even if the Democrat has no credibility and a busload of interests that promise to derail any possible change. For one thing, a clear rhetorical stance would make it easier to push legislation through in the wake of a Democratic landslide, as happened in the first 100 days of FDR and LBJ. On the other hand, I think the next administration is going to have its hands full well past 100 days, and will be judged more on how they react to new crises than what their opening play is.

Alex Koppelman: Quote of the Day. Speaking of Clinton, she's just picked up this ringing endorsement from Bill Kristol:

She's running a right-wing campaign. She's running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan -- "The Bear in the Forest" -- ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she's doing it with much the same symbols. [ . . . ] She is hated on all the right fronts. The snots and the snark-mongers now all despise her, along with the trendies, the glitzies; the food, drama, and lifestyle critics, the beautiful people (and those who would join them), the Style sections of all the big papers; the slick magazines; the above-it-all pundits, who have looked down for years on the Republicans and on the poor fools who elect them, and now sneer even harder at her.

So add Kristol to her growing list of admirers on the far right, starting with Richard Mellon Scaife and Bill O'Reilly. The basic problem with this demonology is that Kristol remains a moron. He also wrote:

It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny. Liberals love victims and want them to stay helpless, so they can help them, with government programs; while conservatives love those who refuse to be victims, and get up off the canvas and fight.

Just look at Kristol, who came from nowhere to make himself the leading intellect of the neocon right? Well, not exactly nowhere -- his father got there first, paved the way, and handed it to him on a silver platter. I don't know about liberals, but leftists recognize that external forces molded them -- it's almost a commonplace that books by leftists start with a personal introduction on how one came to view the world. Conservatives take the opposite tack, assuming they represent God given truth even when all they ever try to do is to represent the inherited interests of their class.

But their fawning recognition of Clinton does seem to be heartfelt. They recognize that her willingness to say and do anything to grasp hold of power is a worldview, not to mention conceit, that they share.

Spent the whole week in the Detroit metro area, away from the comforts of home. Able to function somewhat with a new notebook computer, but it's been hard to focus, especially on music -- brought three travel cases of CDs with me, but don't have the reference notes, and have just been playing them for impressions, not writing as I go. So no jazz prospecting this week. Probably none next week either, as this week looks like more of the same.

No Jazz Consumer Guide either. Just heard from music editor Rob Harvilla that the space crunch is getting even worse, so he's postponed my full page piece until next week, May 14 issue. This is pretty much out of my hands: when I promised the postponed piece would run this week I was just repeating what I had been told at the time. I doubt that it's Harvilla's fault either -- maybe you could say that he's the one making priority choices between bad options, but by its very nature Jazz CG is both big (making it awkward to fit) and untimely (few of the records are very recent releases and none have much in the way of buzz).

Harvilla raised another question which I would like to throw out for comment, particularly from publicists who have some feel for the importance of Jazz CG remaining in the Voice. Harvilla suggested running Jazz CG online-only, offering to pay me the same as I've been getting for the print column. The print paper has virtually no visibility outside of NYC, so I imagine that most people only see the online version. (I often never see the print version myself.) One advantage of going strictly online might be that it could come out more frequently, with a shorter lead time, and possibly longer (e.g., more Honorable Mentions). On the other hand, I wonder how long they'd pay me print rates. So I'm not sure what to say. Don't get much feedback from these posts, but I would appreciate comments on this. Thanks.

Didn't manage to see the New York Times today. No big loss for me, but I'm reminded that I've been packing parts of the April 20 issue, figuring I'd quote some and comment on others. The big article two weeks ago was "Behind Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand: Courting Ex-Officers Tied to Military Contractors." I didn't actually read the piece. I realized five years ago that the networks' parade of generals were team players, retired from active service but grateful recipients of lavish pensions and lucrative second careers in the Defense racket, and that their "inside sources" were mere propaganda ministries. Moreover, I was hardly alone in noticing this. Still, when Laura started reading me quotes, I asked her to mark a few for a blog post. Here goes.

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke's staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

"You could see that they were messaging," Mr. Krueger said. "You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over." Some days, he added, "We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You'd look at them and say, 'This is working.'"

[ . . . ]

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly "artificial" that he joked to another group member that they were on "the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq," a reference to Mr. Romney's infamous claim that American officials had "brainwashed" him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

[ . . . ]

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. "They can't shoot, but then again, they don't," one officer told them, according to one participant's notes.

"I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south," General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

"You can't believe the progress," General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be "down to a few numbers" within months.

"We could not be more excited, more pleased," Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces.

[ . . . ]

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that "mainstream" journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

[ . . . ]

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the "hit," the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon "sources," the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

"They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level," Mr. Krueger said. "This has been highly honed."

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. "That's not something that ever crossed my mind," he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. "We assume they know where the lines are," he said.

[ . . . ]

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that "some four-star could call up and say, 'Kill that contract.'" For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq's security forces. "I know a snow job when I see one," he said. He did not share this on TV.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq's purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had "smoking gun" proof.

"We don't have any hard evidence," Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. "We are looking at ourselves saying, 'What are we doing?'"

[ . . . ]

Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being "manipulated" to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

[ . . . ]

Some e-email messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

"Recall the stuff I did after my last visit," he wrote. "I will do the same this time."

[ . . . ]

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable "surrogates" in Pentagon documents.

[ . . . ]

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the "twisted version of reality" being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give "a heads-up" that some of his comments on Fox "may not all be friendly." Pentagon records show, Mr. Rumsfeld's senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O'Reilly that the United States was "not on a good glide path right now" in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was "precipitously fired from the analysts group" for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, "simply didn't like the fact that I wasn't carrying their water." The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines' deaths further erode support for the war.

"The strategic target remains our population," General Conway said. "We can lose people day in and day out, but they're never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen."

[ . . . ]

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the "Generals' Revolt" dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. [ . . . ]

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

"I'm an old intel guy," said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers' names.) "And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, 'Oh my God, they're trying to brainwash.'"

"What are you, some kind of a nut?" Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. "You don't believe in the Constitution?"

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld's former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration's overall war strategy, they counseled, was "brilliant" and "very successful."

"Frankly," one participant said, "from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative."

An analyst said at another point: "This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn't mean a tinker's damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that's not a threat to us."

[ . . . ]

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the "political tide." One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to "just crush these people," and assured him that "most of the gentlemen at the table" would enthusiastically support him if he did.

"You are the leader," the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. "You are our guy."

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: "In one of your speeches you ought to say, 'Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi,' And then you just go down the list and say, 'All right, we've got oil money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.' If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, 'Oh my God, I can't imagine a world like that."

[ . . . ]

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled. [ . . . ]

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined.

"Focus on the Global War on Terror -- not simply Iraq. The wider war -- the long war."

"Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran."

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

"I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions," he said.

[ . . . ]

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts' military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. "None of that ever happened," said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

"The worst conflict of interest was no interest."

Plenty of things to note here, but I was especially struck by the scapegoating of Iran -- a card the military, Bush, and everyone in between have replayed whenever the need for a scapegoat arose, which is to say repeatedly.

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Same issue has a Jad Mouawad piece on oil called "The Big Thirst." A couple of quotes here show big problems that could be recognized with only a tiny bit of intelligence.

"This is the market signaling there is a problem," said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, "that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies."

Today's tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet's population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years -- to more than two billion -- as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil -- enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United Statews and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that's only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades. [ . . . ]

The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from.

Let alone draw the obvious inference, which is that if the oil isn't forthcoming, the demand for it -- all those extra people, cars, and development -- is also thrown into question.

But the quote that first tripped my alarm was further down:

A small band of skeptics view today's record prices as evidence that oil supplies have peaked -- that half the globe's oil supply has already been used up. But most experts believe that there are still enough oil reserves, both discovered and undiscovered, to last at least through the middle of the century.

The problem is that in many corners of the world, geopolitics, more than geology, has removed much of those reserves from the reach of independent oil companies.

"There are plenty of resources in the globe," Rex Tillerson, the chairman of Exxon, recently told an investor conference. The difficulty, he said, was "just continuing to have access to all of the opportunities."

Over the past century, the world burned through a trillion barrels of oil. Another 1.2 trillion barrels of known conventional oil reserves wait to be tapped, according to BP, one of the world's biggest oil companies. It sounds like a lot. But given the current rate of growth in demand, a trillion of those barrels will be used up in less than 30 years.

First thing here is that even the concessions -- from BP at least, if not necessarily from diehard Exxon -- sound like rousing confirmation of the Peak Oil model. One trillion down, 1.2 trillion to go, that's pretty close to half pumped, especially given that it gets progressively harder -- more expensive, most critically in terms of energy -- to get at the last barrels in every oil field. Nor does it really matter if the time frame for getting down to this last 10% of unpumped oil is 30, 40, or 60 years. Within the natural lifetimes of people already born our world is going to change substantially.

In fairness, Mouawad adds the following escape clause:

What then? Many analysts estimate another trillion barrels of yet-to-be-found oil remains, but in remote places like the Arctic Ocean where it will be expensive to extract, or in countries that might restrict access.

Note that the analysts have dropped from "most" to "many," and the costs are hopping. There have been some deep sea finds recently, but they are paltry compared to the discoveries that were common in the 1960s-1970s, and they are expensive and risky. The political cases are hardly any cheaper, especially if Bush's efforts to open up Iraq to western oil exploration are any indication.

What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation' first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: "complacency or crsis."

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world's oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks. [ . . . ]

"The country has been living beyond its means," said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba. "The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don't realize how dire the situation is."

Of course they don't. Americans survived the scares of 1973 and 1979 and came out thinking they're immune. They bought into Reagan's "morning in America" flattery, and now they think it can never be otherwise. This is a nation built on cheap land and cheap oil, so happy go lucky even WWII was just a party. We're so conceited we still refer to ourselves as the world's sole superpower -- a hyperpower even. How can such a run of dumb luck ever run out?

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Then, same issue, there's an op-ed by Clinton economist Martin Neil Baily (currently at Brookings) called "Don't Blame the War for the Economy." Several people have said this recently, including Dean Baker, who argues that the numbers from the subprime mortgage crisis simply swamp out the nominal Iraq war expenses. That's true as far as it goes, but only if you assume there are no hidden connections. One of those connections is George W. Bush, whose 2004 election depended on putting up some plausible indication of economic growth to counter his fiasco in Iraq -- itself intimately connected to Bush's quest for power, and failed by the same ideological blinders and reckless disregard that drove the housing bubble through the subprime jungle.

Baily, on the other hand, doesn't even understand that the critical economic problem now is financial, not the relatively simple (albeit intractable) problem of oil prices. He writes:

I am no fan of the war in Iraq, but it simply has not been a major contributor to the financial crisis and the impending recession. The high price of oil is largely the result of strong demand, notably from China and India, pressing against a limited supply. The global oil supply is growing more slowly than it could because of politics and policies in many places -- Russia, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela as well as the Middle East. [ . . . ] Absent the war, Iraqi oil production under Saddam Hussein might have been somewhat higher, but not by enough to affect the American economy. Iraqi oil production has been very volatile and has experienced a downward trend since the late 1970s, despite its vast potential.

Get that? High oil prices are the result of politics, but not of American politics, even though the strapped suppliers have complex and mostly unsavory experience with US policies, and the voracious consumers are precisely the developing nations with the poorest record of following the dictates of the Washington Consensus on how developing nations should be governed -- nations which also benefit from US offshoring, and which in turn prop up US deficits. Before you let war off the hook for the economy, take a good look at how America's penchant for war and empire affects everything.

Here's another example of Baily's confusion:

Is government borrowing to blame? Chronic budget deficits are harmful because they increase interest rates, crowd out domestic investment, and increase the trade deficit. So, in principle, budget deficits should actually have curbed the housing boom, not fueled it.

In practice, budget deficits did not result in high interest rates because of the huge flows of foreign capital into the American economy. The lack of discipline in the federal budget in recent years is deplorable and we will pay for that,especially as we face the costs of an aging population. The failure to pay for the war is part of this policy mistake, but only a part and not a big cause of today's problems.

Economics is a science? Sounds like we're being scammed by the world, willingly so. Mostly because it makes Bush look less worse than he's actually been -- a delusion we'll pay dearly for.

---

One good op-ed for a change, Alexandra Fuller on "Recovering From Wyoming's Energy Bender":

For example, oil and gas companies are exempt from provisions of the Clean Water Act that require construction activities to reduce polluted runoff as well as from provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act that regulate underground injection of chemicals. The industry is also generously permitted to drill on critical wildlife winter range (close to 90 percent of all their requests to drill on winter range have been granted). Oil rigs are drilling for natural gas on the banks of the New Fork River (the headwaters of the Colorado) and in the foothills of the Wyoming Range. Well sites in many parts of the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are so closely spaced that, with roads, gas pipelines and compressor stations, the development is continuous.

Not clear whether Steve Fraser's TomDispatch essay The Great Silence is an excerpt from his new Wall Street book or an advance from a future book on "The Two Gilded Ages." But it's worth quoting at some length. The two gilded ages theme also has a prominent place in Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal. The most obvious connection is the similar degree of economic inequity, especially in contrast to the middle class-oriented period coming out of the New Deal.

---

Here's a set of quotes, highlights from the essay:

Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the New Rich and the New Right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a "bacchanalia of the haves." Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: "Everything is power and money and how to use them both . . . We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury."

That's when the division of wealth and income began polarizing so that, by every measure, the country has now exceeded the extremes of inequality achieved during the first Gilded Age; nor are our elites any more embarrassed by their Mammon-worship than were members of the "leisure class" excoriated a century ago by that take-no-prisoners social critic of American capitalism Thorstein Veblen.

Back then, it was about masquerading as European nobility at lavish balls in elegant hotels like New York's Waldorf-Astoria, locked down to forestall any unpleasantness from the street (where ordinary folk were in a surly mood trying to survive the savage depression of the 1890s). Today's "leisure class" is holed up in gated communities or houseoleums as gargantuan as the imported castles of their Gilded Age forerunners, ready to fly off -- should the natives grow restless -- to private islands aboard their private jets.

The Free Market as Melodrama

As in those days, there is today no end to ideological justifications for an inequality so pervasive that no one can really ignore it entirely. In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis published his book How the Other Half Lives. Some were moved by his vivid descriptions of destitution. In the late nineteenth century, however, the preferred way of dismissing that discomfiting reality was to put the blame on a culture of dependency supposedly prevalent among "the lower orders," particularly, of course, among those of certain complexions and ethnic origins; and the logical way to cure that dependency, so the claim went, was to eliminate publicly funded "outdoor relief."

How reminiscent of the "welfare to work" policies cooked up by the Clinton administration, an exchange of one form of dependency -- welfare -- for another -- low-wage labor. Poverty, once turned into the cultural and moral problem of the impoverished, exculpated Gilded Age economics in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries (and proved profitable besides).

Missing Utopias and Dystopias

What's left of mainstream populism exists on life-support in some attic of the Democratic Party. Even the language of our second Gilded Age is hollowed out. In a society saturated in Christian sanctimony, would anyone today describe "mankind crucified on a cross of gold" as William Jennings Bryan once did, or let loose against "Mammon worship," condemn aristocratic "parasites," or excommunicate "vampire speculators" and the "devilfish" of Wall Street? If nineteenth century evangelical preachers once pronounced anathema on capitalist greed, twenty-first century televangelists deify it. Tempers have cooled, leaving God, like many Americans, with only part-time employment.

The Great Silence

Perhaps the answer is simple and basic: The first Gilded Age rested on industrialization; the second on de-industrialization. In our time, a new system of dis-accumulation looted American industry, liquidating its assets to reward speculation in "fictitious capital." After all, the rate of investment in new plant, technology, and research and development all declined during the 1980s. For a quarter-century, the fastest growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector.

De-industrialization has set off an avalanche whose impact is still being felt in the economy, in the country's political culture, and in everyday life. It laid the industrial working class and the labor movement low, killing it twice over. This, more than anything else, may account for the great silence of the second Gilded Age, when measured, at least, against the raucous noise of the first. Labor was mortally wounded by direct assault, beginning with President Reagan's decision in 1981 to fire all the striking air traffic controllers. His draconian act licensed American business to launch its own all-out attack on the right to organize, which continues to this day.

[ . . . ]

Dis-accumulating capitalism also undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or marginalization. When we think about poverty, what comes to mind is welfare and race. The first gilded age visualized instead coal miners, child labor, tenement workshops, and the shantytowns that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa and Homestead.

Poverty arising out of exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion and a robust political assault on the power of the exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of exclusion of our own time have been trickier to identify. In his 1962 book The Other America, Michael Harrington noted the invisibility of poverty. That was half a century ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the second Gilded Age was politically neutered . . . or worse.

The Myth of Democratic Capitalism

Our corporate elite are much more adept than their Gilded Age predecessors were at playing the democracy game. The old "leisure class" was distinctly averse to politics. If they needed a tariff or tax break, they called up their kept Senator. When mortally challenged by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan in 1896, they did get involved; but, by and large, they didn't muck about in mass party politics which they saw as too full of uncontrollable ethnic machines, angry farmers, and the like. They relied instead on the Federal judiciary, business-friendly Presidents, constitutional lawyers, and public and private militias to protect their interests.

Beginning in the 1970s, our age's business elite became acutely politically-minded and impressively well-organized, penetrating deeply all the pores of party and electoral democracy. They've gone so far as to craft strategic alliances with elements of what their nineteenth century predecessors -- who might have blanched at the prospect -- would have termed the hoi polloi. Calls to dismantle the federal bureaucracy now carry a certain populist panache, while huffing and puffing about family values has -- so far -- proven a cheap date for a gilded elite that otherwise generally couldn't care less.

[ . . . ]

"Shareholder democracy" and the "ownership society" are admittedly more public relations slogans than anything tangible. Nonetheless, you can't ignore the fact that, during the second Gilded Age, half of all American families became investors in the stock market. Dentists and engineers, mid-level bureaucrats and college professors, storekeepers and medical technicians -- people, that is, from the broad spectrum of middle class life who once would have viewed the New York Stock Exchange with a mixture of awe, trepidation, and genuine distaste, and warily kept their distance -- now jumped head first into the marketplace carrying with them all their febrile hopes for social elevation.

As Wall Street suddenly seemed more welcoming, fears about strangulating monopolies died. Dwindling middle-class resistance to big business accounts for the withering away of the old anti-trust movement, a telling development in the evolution of our age's particular form of "big-box" capitalism. Once, that movement had not only expressed the frustrated ambitions of smaller businessmen, but of all those who felt victimized by monopoly power. It embodied not just the idea of breaking up the trusts, but of competing with or replacing them with public enterprises.

Long before the Reagan counter-revolution defanged the whole regulatory apparatus, however, the "anti-trust" movement was over and done with. Its absence from the political landscape during the second Gilded Age marks the demise of an older middle-class world of local producers, merchants, and their customers who were once bound together by the ties of commerce and the folk truths of small town Protestantism.

The End of the Age of Acquiescence?

However, the wheel turns. The capitalism of the Second Gilded Age now faces a systemic crisis and, under the pressure of impending disaster, may be headed back to the future. Old-fashioned poverty is making a comeback. Arguably, the global economy, including its American branch, is increasingly a sweatshop economy. There is no denying that brute fact in Thailand, China, Vietnam, Central America, Bangladesh, and dozens of other countries and regions that serve as platforms for primitive accumulation. Hundreds of millions of peasants have become proletarians virtually overnight.

Here at home, something analogous has been happening, but with an ironic difference and bearing within it a new historic opportunity. One might call it the unhorsing of the middle class.

[ . . . ]

Anger and resentment, however, do not by themselves comprise a visionary alternative. Nor is the Democratic Party, however restive, a likely vehicle of social democratic aspirations. Much more will have to happen outside the precincts of electoral politics by way of mass movement building to translate these smoke signals of resistance into something more muscular and enduring. Moreover, nasty competition over diminishing economic opportunities can just as easily inflame simmering racial and ethnic antagonisms.

Nonetheless, the current break-down of the financial system is portentous. It threatens a general economic implosion more serious than anyone has witnessed for many decades. Depression, if that is what it turns out to be, together with the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one believes in any longer, could undermine whatever is left of the threadbare credibility of our Gilded Age elite.

Legitimacy is a precious possession; once lost it's not easily retrieved. Today, the myth of the "ownership society" confronts the reality of the "foreclosure society." The great silence of the second Gilded Age may give way to the great noise of the first.

Donald T Critchlow: The Conservative Ascendency: How the GOP Right Made Political History (2007, Harvard University Press)

Another general history of the conservative political movement in the US, starting after WWII. One thing I found is that the history seems quaint until 1968, despite widespread anticommunist hysteria and plenty of hawkish saber rattling. That's really because the first political character who sounds like the modern right is George Wallace. Nixon and Agnew, especially through their speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to pick up Wallace's voice, and thereby his votes, and that was what finally gave the Republican right it's shot at mass support.

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(p. 13):

Right-wing opponents of the New Deal were overwhelmed by what they saw as the New Deal revolution, but they offered no programmatic alternative to modern liberalism. [Irving] Babbitt, [Albert J] Nock, [Ralph Adams] Cram, and the Southern Agrarians were reactionaries, eloquent in their criticisms of democratic culture, pristine in their condescension toward the masses, and confirmed in their elitism. They offered little alternative to the industrialism or mass democracy that they so vehemently derided. They held little faith in the future, the dynamic quality of capitalism, or the character of the American people. At heart, they remained pessimists. The success of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s deepened this sense of defeatism and confirmed their expectation that the advance of the collectivist state was inevitable. By the war's end, New Deal liberalism stood indomitable, a Gulliver untied, able to ignore its Lilliputian critics.

(pp. 14-15):

[Friedrich] Hayek, an Austrian-born economist, gained world-wide fame for his book The Road to Serfdom, which appeared in 1944 while he was a professor at the London School of Economics. First published in England by Routledge, The Road to Serfdom became a best seller. Believing that England was poised to nationalize its industries, Hayek intended the book to reach a large audience of educated men and women who would be warned about the dangers that centralized planning posed to liberty. The point of the book was that private ownership in a society was essential to freedom and democracy. Socialism, in any guise, would lead to a totalitarian state, even if it was brought about by democratic means. He believed that free-market capitalism was essential to the maintenance of democracy. In a socialist economy, he warned, the individual would become little more than the means for realizing the schemes of a planner. He argued that socialism was inimical to liberty because it devalued individual rights, personal freedom, and economic choice.

Hayek believed that individualism lay at the core of Western civilization, as demonstrated in the Hebrew conception that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God, the Christian conception of Christ's love for all, and the Roman belief in equality before the law. In his view, the government could play an essential role in maximizing individual liberty. Thus the belief that government should not interfere in society or set rules and regulations was misguided. Still, he maintained, a liberty-maximizing society should make "the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts . . . It is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is the better way of guiding individual efforts that any other." In making this argument, Hayek disclaimed any role as defender of the status quo. The fundamental principle of a society that preserves liberty should be to make best "use . . . possible of the spontaneous forces of society" and resort "as little as possible to coercion." This principle was capable of infinite variation, and Hayek stressed "the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are."

(p. 19):

In 1953 Russell Kirk, a young instructor in the history of civilization at Michigan State University, published The Conservative Mind. Kirk had taken a leave from Michigan State to complete his doctorate at St. Andrews University in Scotland. While in Scotland, Kirk wrote his doctoral dissertation, "The Conservatives' Rout." Acquired by Henry Regnery, a small conservative publishing house in Chicago, the dissertation renamed The Conservative Mind gained immediate national acclaim. In the book, Kirk defined a conservative as a person who is convinced that "civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite," and accepts that "tradition provides a check on man's anarchic impulse, and maintains a belief in a divine intent that rules society as well as conscience." Before the publication of the book, members of the American Right had rejected the label conservative because they saw themselves as vigorous defenders of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition of individual rights, property rights, and distrust of centralized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal had usurped this liberal tradition and redefined it to mean the regulation of capitalism by centralized government, state welfare, and social equality.

The Conservative Mind offered a sweeping account of the conservative tradition, which Kirk found rooted in the "moral imagination" of Edmund Burke and his defense of tradition, order, and "permanent things." He believed that conservatives had been routed by "a world that damns tradition, exalts equality, and welcomes changes" and a "world smudged by industrialism; standardized by the masses, consolidated by government." He refused to condense the conservative tradition into "a few pretentious phrases," but outlined the canons of conservatism as a belief in a transcendent order, affection for "the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence," a conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, a faith that "man's anarchic impulse" needs to be checked, and "recognition that change may not be salutary reform."

(pp. 48-49):

Meanwhile, a highly reluctant Goldwater gave the go-ahead for a book to be written in his name outlining the conservative philosophy, although he made it clear in a private meeting with Manion in early November 1959 that he had no wish to run for president. In fact, Goldwater continued to publicly promote Richard Nixon for the 1960 nomination. Nonetheless, Manion proceeded with the arrangement for Brent Bozell, Jr., to ghost-write under Goldwater's name. Unable to receive an advance contract for an unfinished manuscript, Manion decided to publish and distribute the book through his newly formed nonprofit company, Victor Publishing. Batches of the manuscript were sent to Manion and Goldwater's political operative Stephen Shadegg in Arizona for review as soon as pages rolled off Bozell's typewriter. As astounding as this sounds, it remains unclear whether Goldwater read any of the manuscript, but when the book appeared in March 1960 it became an instant best seller.

In what was many Americans' first introduction to the topic, The Conscience of a Conservative defined conservatism as a philosophy that upheld "the dignity of the individual human being" and was "at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race." The book gave much attention to the necessity of winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. It warned, contrary to the liberal perspective, that winning the Cold War was not simply a matter of domestic reform at home and foreign aid abroad. It called for an aggressive foreign policy that began with American military superiority. The Conscience of a Conservative declared that "the Communists' aim is to conquer the world," even though few in the West seemed willing to believe this "central political fact of our time."

(p. 85):

Sensing the first cracks in the liberal regime, George Wallace left the Democratic party to exploit working-class white resentment toward African Americans, rising crime rates, growing welfare rolls, inner-city riots, and the war dragging on in Southeast Asia. Running on the American Independent ticket, he appealed to less-educated white voters, who shouted with rollicking enthusiasm at his attacks on pointy-headed intellectuals, government bureaucrats, black militants, hippies, welfare mothers, and "bearded anarchists." Despite Wallace's popularity among poor and lower-middle class whites in the North and the South, few right-wing leaders rallied to his campaign, with the exception of John Schmitz, a southern California community college instructor and John Birch Society member. Most Republican conservatives refused to support Wallace, even though he called for law and order and expressed open disdain for welfare and opposed court-ordered busing. For all of his conservative rhetoric, the GOP Right did not see Wallace as a conservative at all. Rather, right-wingers viewed him as a typical New Deal southerner who welcomed federal monies for public works and welfare in his state, while demanding that the federal government recuse itself from enforcing civil rights laws concerning voting rights and integration of public places.

(p. 90):

In reality, however, Nixon was above all an opportunist. He was an anti-Communist and a cold warrior, but his outlook proved to be remarkably flexible. As an avid reader of English history, Nixon saw himself as a Disraeli, the nineteenth-century conservative prime minister who had undertaken liberal reforms as necessary steps for the survival of the Tory party. Nixon had entered the Republican party as a "Moderate Republican," eager to disassociate the party from the isolationism of Robert Taft. He wanted to transform the GOP into the party of internationalism. Nixon's views on domestic policy were determined by what he thought could garner political strength. As vice president under Eisenhower, he had played a pivotal role in pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the most important such legislation enacted since Reconstruction. Nixon believed that the GOP could regain the African-American vote that had been lost to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. But following the 1960 election, when blacks overwhelmingly voted for Nixon's rival, John F. Kennedy, Nixon retreated from a strong civil rights stance, and during the 1968 election he criticized forced busing to integrate schools.

(p. 105):

Just as neoconservatives were voicing their disaffection, conservative think tanks emerged to provide technical expertise to the GOP. The Goldwater campaign and the Nixon regime taught conservatives that they needed specific policy proposals to combat the hegemony of liberalism in the policy arena and to present a case to voters (and Republican party leaders) that there were real alternatives to the status quo. Policy entrepreneurs such as William Baroody, Edwin Feulner, and Paul Weyrich began to institutionalize conservatism through research institutes, fellowship and student-training programs, and new publications. They brought to these endeavors a single goal: to erect countervailing sources of power to undermine the liberal establishment. The Left had the prestigious Brookings Institution and the liberal academy to influence policy makers and public opinion, and conservatives wanted to create their own sources for what Washington insiders called "policy innovation." To this end, they expanded established moderate-conservative research institutes such as the American Enterprise Institute and launched the Heritage Foundation. Drawing support from philanthropies such as the Scaife Fund, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation, as well as from wealthy conservative benefactors such as Joseph Coors, these research institutes emerged as vital centers for conservative policy innovation.

The development of think tanks marked an important shift in the history of conservatism and would have important implications for the shaping of the GOP Right in subsequent years. A kind of "managerial conservatism" arose that reoriented conservative thinking on actual governance toward a more ready acceptance of the exertion of federal government power acting within the broad principles of conservatism. Neoconservativism was not welcomed in some right-wing circles, but it imparted energy and expertise to the conservative movement in the 1980s.

(pp. 113-114):

Many neoconservatives remained in the Democratic party, even though they supported Richard Nixon in 1972. [Norman] Podhoretz joined Democrats like Senator Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, journalists Max Kampelman, Ben Wattenberg, international relations professor Jeane Kirkpatrick and her husband, Evron Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Moynihan to form the Coalition for a Democratic Majority with the intention of taking back the Democratic party from the McGovernite wing. This group was openly critical of the "New Class" of radicals who held antibourgeois values and had captured the Democratic party in 1972. Jeane Kirkpatrick spoke for the coalition when she declared in Commentary in February 1973 that "an embattled revolutionary elite united under the banner of George McGovern" had transformed liberalism into an "ideology of the privileged." She maintained that McGovernites were upper-middle-class feminists, high-income homosexuals, and college-educated whites who despised blue-collar ethnic workers, white southerners, and traditional American values. As a consequence, she observed, conservatism had become the "position of the less privileged." Conservatives, she suggested, upheld traditional values of hard work, family, and patriotism. From this perspective it was a short step to Republicanism. [ . . . ]

The issue that caused the greatest divide between McGovernite liberals and neoconservatives was foreign policy and how to deal with Communist nations. Anti-Communism united Podhoretz and Kristol intellectually. Both men believed that many on the McGovern left misunderstood the imperial nature of Communism and overestimated the good intentions of Soviet Leadership. Both agreed on the need to fight for democracy in the world, and it was this belief that became a defining characteristic of what became known as "neoconservatism."

(p. 128):

[President Gerald] Ford's centrist policies created a political vacuum on the Right that was quickly filled by a groundswell of grassroots activism. From this activism emerged the New Right -- a term coined by the longtime activist Paul Weyrich. The media identified the leaders of the New Right as Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Terry Dolan, but these people were certainly not new conservatives. Phyllis Schlafly's involvement in conservative Republican politics and anti-Communism went back to the 1950s, before other leaders of the New Right had become politically active. Viguerie, Phillips, and Weyrich were children of the 1960s who became involved in right-wing politics through Young Americans for Freedom. By 1978 the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), founded by three young conservatives -- Charlie Black, Roger Stone, and Terry Dolan (the chairman) -- became the largest conservative political action committee in the country, distributing more than $1.2 million in cash and in-kind contributions to political campaigns in its first five years.

The New Right's ability to tap into grassroots discontent over social and moral issues such as abortion, prayer in school, and the ERA caught both liberals and the Republican establishment off-guard. These New Right activists challenged the status quo and the power structure in both parties. They saw themselves as radicals who wanted to overthrow entrenched elites and professional experts. Paul Weyrich later declared, "We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo." They believed that liberalism was a dying force in American politic sand that the political future belonged to conservatism. "The liberals have not only lost confidence in themselves but in their ideas," Viguerie declared. "We're convinced we have the ability to govern and will govern in the not-too-distant future."

(pp. 129-130):

Weyrich's principal talent was teaching conservatives how to form and make use of coalitions involving antitax groups, antiabortion groups, veterans' organizations, small business associations, and conservative pro-family advocates.

In his work, Weyrich was joined by Howard Phillips, the founder of the Conservative Caucus, in late 1974. The mission of the caucus was to recruit conservative leaders, organize the grassroots, and help set the conservative agenda. Phillips developed hsi political skills as a Harvard University undergraduate and as one of the founders of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. In 1964, he became Republican party chairman in Boston and then managed Richard Schweiker's successful race in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate in 1968. In 1970, he lost his own race for Congress in Massachusetts and accepted an appointment by Richard Nixon as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Nixon had talked about shutting down OEO, but a Democratic-controlled Congress prevented Phillips from doing so. By 1979 the Conservative Caucus had a base of 300,000 contributors. It also launched the Religious Roundtable, which reached out to evangelical Protestant leaders and brought them together for briefings on public policy issues.

Richard Viguerie brought new technical skills to the Right through his use of sophisticated computer technology to raise money and garner support among the grassroots. Viguerie had gained valuable experience in mass fundraising by working int he 1950s for Marvin Liebman, whose Committee of One Million had pioneered the use of fundraising on the Right through mass mailing. Viguerie took direct mailing to new levels of effectiveness through the use of the computer. In doing so, he advanced the conservative cause well beyond the technological capabilities of the Left.

(p. 162):

The ERA battle taught conservatives three important lessons that changed the course of American politics from its leftward drift to the right: First, the STOP ERA organization and the antiabortion movement showed the importance of social issues in mobilizing unheard numbers of average Americans. Second, the anti-ERA campaign provided a casebook example of how evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Mormons could be united into a single cause. In particular, the antifeminist crusade revealed that there was a huge reservoir of potential voters in the evangelical Protestant revival of the 1970s that could be tapped by the Republican party. Finally, the defeat of the ERA taught conservatives that they could win when they mobilized around the right causes. Ever since Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964, the conservative movement had lacked confidence that it could ever win nationally, but on the issue of the ERA it had triumphed.

(pp. 174-175):

The Reagan campaign realized that if Carter was successful in making the 1980 election into a replay of 1964, Republicans would lose. To prevent this outcome, Reagan needed to emphasize the poor economy while reassuring the public that he would not slash benefit programs indiscriminately. This was a tricky strategy because Reagan was on record as opposing many of the entitlement programs proposed to help workers hurt by economic dislocation. GOP strategists realized that the key to victory rested in winning traditional Democrats to their cause. As a result, when Senator Paul Laxalt nominated Reagan at the convention, he pointed to Reagan's record as governor of California in increasing aid to the truly needy, increasing funding to higher education, protecting the environment, and undertaking welfare reform.

(p. 177):

These were minor mistakes compared with the controversy that followed a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964. In his first speech following his nomination, Reagan declared, "I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states' rights . . . I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to the federal establishment." Reagan's use of the words "states' rights" in a town known for the murder of civil rights workers gave immediate offense to black leaders. Following these remarks, Carter's secretary of health and human services warned that black voters "will see the specter of a white sheet" behind Reagan. Carter's former ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, said that Reagan's remarks seemed like code-words implying "it's going to be all right to kill n---- when he's President." Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., told the press she was frightened that if Reagan won the election "we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party."

In 1976, Carter had swept the South. Reagan's campaign strategists assumed that if Reagan could take the South, he would win the election. Mississippi was a good place to start because Carter had won the state by less than two percentage points of the popular vote.

(p. 184):

In the early spring of 1985, a year after his landslide victory for reelection to the White House, President Ronald Reagan addressed his critics on the Right who complained that the Republican revolution had stalled. Reagan reassured them that the "tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction" because liberalism had become "virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital, such as it was, and it has done its deeds." He concluded, "We in this room are not simply profiting from their bankruptcy; we are where we are because we're winning the contest of ideas. In fact, in the past decade, all of a sudden, quietly, mysteriously, the Republican party has become the party of ideas. All of a sudden, Republicans [are] not defenders of the status quo but creators of the future."

(pp. 187-188):

Reagan's core beliefs led him to the worldview that the best government is that which governs least so individual citizens can reach their full potential. Reagan believed that centralized government weakened a free people's self-reliance and capacity for self-government. In his inaugural address, he declared, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

(p. 189):

Banking deregulation had begun under Carter with the enactment of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Further deregulation was continued into the Reagan administration in the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. Backed by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, these acts deregulated the savings and loan industry while tightening federal control over the banking industry. One of the unforseen consequences of this policy was the collapse int he late 1980s of many savings and loans owing to over-expansion and, in some cases, fraudulent loans.

(pp. 246-247):

The final weapon in the battle for control of Congress came in the form of a clever election proclamation signed by 337 Republican candidates for the House, the "Contract with America." The ten-point legislative program was promoted as a covenant with the voters -- a promise to introduce ten specific pieces of legislation if Republicans became a majority party in the House. The Contract with America had evolved out of extensive polling and focus-group interviews which revealed that voters wanted "accountability" in government. The contract called for welfare reform, anticrime measures, a line-item veto, regulatory reform, and tax reduction. In addition, hot-button issues such as abortion, pornography, and school prayer were not included in the plan in order to avoid the charge that Republicans represented only the Religious Right. Although the exclusion of social issues upset social conservatives like Paul Weyrich, this program gave Republicans the offensive. As the 1994 mid-term elections approached, Republicans were on the march, energized by their victory over the Clinton health-care plan.

(pp. 256-257):

In the process [the 2000 presidential campaing], [George W] Bush put his own stamp on conservatism. His proclamation of himself as a "compassionate conservative" during the 2000 election was more than campaign rhetoric. Through this identity Bush sought to combine traditional conservative principles of individual responsibility, free enterprise, low taxes, and resistance to government spending with an acceptance of the important role that government had come to play in American life. He sought to use activist government for conservative ends by allowing faith-based charitable organizations to provide social services to the poor; by making public schools more accountable by linking federal aid to national standards; and by expanding federal health insurance for prescription drugs to the elderly. He believed that the federal government could help promote moral values, regulate abortion, and encourage individual responsibility. At the same time, he called for reform of Social Security through limited privatization. Bush's compassionate conservatism reflected his religious faith as a born-again Christian who believed in the responsibility to be "thy brother's keeper." The Bush vision of government was far from what the first generation of postwar conservatives -- Hayek, Rand, or Buckley -- had called for when they sought to overturn the New Deal liberal order.

John W Dean: Conservatives Without Conscience (2006; paperback, 2007, Penguin Books)

Same John Dean who was White House legal counsel to Richard Nixon during Watergate. He acquitted himself relatively well (if somewhat belatedly) in that scandal, which left him in good position to write a book about the George W Bush administration called Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004). This is his follow up, and it has in turn been followed by a couple more books: another on Bush called Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judical Branches, and another on conservatism, cowritten with Barry Goldwater Jr., called Pure Goldwater. In his introduction here, Dean claims that this book was originally planned as a joint effort with Barry Goldwater Sr., who died before he could put his name down here. The title contrasts nicely with Goldwater's 1960 The Conscience of a Conservative. While it would be nice to think that Goldwater would have had some scruples over what Bush has wrought, I have my doubts, and those only start with the probability that had Goldwater lived he would have taken no more interest in this book than he did in his own ghost-written bestseller.

Dean does his best to preserve his sense of conservative identity against the scandal of conservative reality, mostly by characterizing his opponents as authoritarians. The more operative word that no one uses is "neofascists": the "neo" merely dispenses with the no longer palatable racism of the colonial/imperialist era that went out of fashion after 1945 and the subsequent exhaustion of the British and French empires.

Dean opens with three quotes, notably Bob Altemeyer: "If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state." Also, Jonathan Schell: "The administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form."

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Early US conservatism: a laundry list (pp. 6-7):

Conservatism is a movement with no Moses, although William F. Buckley is sometimes considered to be an analogous figure, as John B. Judis's biography of him, subtitled Patron Saint of the Conservatives, would attest. Buckley's support of conservatism's latter-day saints, like Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Friederich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham, through his National Review, have certainly invigorated modern conservatism. Kirk and Burnham have always been the most significant among these formatives voices, although by 1986, when Russell Kirk prepared his last edition of The Conservative Mind, young conservatives were already coming to consider his work as "Old Testament" conservatism, and his once well-known canons of conservatism now reside in the dustbin of history. In retrospect the only things that tie all these early [conservative] thinkers together are a dark view of human nature, their strong dislike of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and an outsized fear of communism. This is about as close to "classic" conservatism as it gets.

(p. 16):

Had conservative scholars of the 1950s conceded the nation's liberal legacy, and stated at the time that they were formulating a conservative philosophy based on a century and a half of history since the nation's founding, a legitimate conservative foundation could have been built on the American tradition. [George H.] Nash isolated the key question facing the conservatives: "How could a nation conceived in violence and dedicated to universal rights ever be called 'conservative'?" Political scientist Clinton Rossiter, considered one of the first neoconservatives, answered this question head-on, and unlike his peers, honestly, in his early study Conservatism in America, stating correctly that America's political roots were "progressive" and the United States was conceived out of "a Liberal tradition."

Dean presents a "glimpse of the modern conservative family tree" (pp. 20-22):

• Austriocons: after Ludwig von Mises.
• Buchanocons: after Patrick Buchanan.
• Neocons: centered around Weekly Standard.
• Aquinacons: after Reverend Richard John Neuhaus.
• Radiocons: talk radio cons like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Mike Reagan, Blanquita Cullum, Dr. Laura Schlesinger.
• Sociocons: like Cal Thomas.
• Theocons: "actually favor a more or less theocratic application of biblical law. Unlike Aquinacons, they reject natural law."
• Republicons: came up as GOP activists, like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
• Catocons: libertarians, after Cato Institute.
• Platocons: after Leo Strauss.

(pp. 23-24):

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. The adherents of early conservatism -- economic conservatives, traditional conservatives, and libertarians -- agreed that communism was the enemy, a fact that united them for decades -- and hid their differences. Today's conservatives -- especially social conservatives, as opposed to intellectuals and the more thoughtful politicians -- define themselves by what they oppose, which is anything and everything they perceive to be liberal. That category includes everyone from Democrats to anyone with whom they disagree, and can, therefore, automatically be labeled a liberal. Another group that has recently been designated as an enemy is "activist judges," regardless of their party or philosophical affiliation. Activist judges are best described as those whose rulings run contrary to the beliefs of a particular conservative faction.

Antipathy to liberalism has been present from the outset of the conservative movement but it only became a powerful unifying influence in the early 1980s. Sidney Blumenthal, when still a staff writer at the Washington Post, concluded that "conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning," for "without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle." Blumenthal's observation, made two decades ago, is even more valid today. Leading conservative Web sites, including well-funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, spend a lot of time and money criticizing or complaining with varying degrees of contempt about all matters perceived to be "liberal." Important conservative opinion journals, like the National Review and Human Events, see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal. Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. Take the "queen of mean," Ann Coulter, whose titles speak for themselves: Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right (2002); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003); and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004). Slander< for example, contains page after page of scorn, criticism, belittlement, and bemoaning of ideas she believes liberal. Her books have also generated a subsidiary cottage trade in fact-checking her work, which has amply demonstrated that Coulter apparently considers accuracy as something that needs only to be approximated.

Psychological Perspectives on Conservatism: starts with a report called "Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition" by NYU professor John T. Jost (pp. 29-30):

Their survey of the usage of the term "conservative" over roughly a half century revealed "a stable definitional core; and a set of more malleable , historically changing peripheral associations." While its core meanings were considered to include "a resistance to change" and "an acceptance of inequality," its peripheral meanings were more complex, because not only did they change with time, but in some cases they overlapped the core meanings. For example, the study found the peripheral focus of "conservatism in the United States during the 1960s entailed support for the Vietnam War and opposition to civil rights, whereas conservatism in the 1990s had more to do with being tough on crime and supporting traditional moral and religious values." In addition, the authors provide examples of people who became conservatives for reasons having nothing to do with the identified core meanings, yet who later accepted those aspects of conservatism "because of their association with likeminded others."

(pp. 34-35):

In 1992, as part of a lecture series at the Heritage Foundation, [David] Horowitz said that "conservatism [is] an attitude about the lessons of the actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives [is] directed toward an imagined future. Conservatism [is] an attitude of caution based on a sense of human limits and what politics [can] accomplish" (emphasis added). In his response to the question being addressed by this Heritage Foundation conference -- whether contemporary conservatism was truly conservative -- Horowitz candidly answered no, acknowledging that today's conservatives are "rebels against the dominant liberal culture." In later updating his Heritage lecture, Horowitz wrote that conservatism "begins as an attitude, and only later becomes a stance," and noted "that conservative attitudes derive from pragmatic consideration."

Dean then comes up with a chart (p. 37), a 2x2 matrix with the vertical axis "The Modern" Dilemma" opposing Freedom and Equality, and the horizontal axis "The Original Dilemma" opposing Freedom and Order. The matrix products are:

• Equality/Freedom: Liberals
• Equality/Order: Communitarians
• Freedom/Freedom: Libertarians
• Freedom/Order: Conservatives

This section is largely based on a series of books by Bob Altemeyer: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter (1996) (pp. 54-55):

Altemeyer's data provides additional information about the dispositions of right-wing authoritarians. Here are a few examples that provide further perspective. These have not been deliberately isolated as negative characteristics; rather, they are traits that authoritarians believe to be positive:

• They travel in tight circles of like-minded people.
• Their thinking is more likely based on what authorities have told them rather than on their own critical judgment, which results in their beliefs being filled with inconsistencies.
• They harbor numerous double standards and hypocrisies.They are hostile toward so many minorities they seem to be equal-opportunity bigots, yet they are generally unaware of their prejudices.
• They see the world as a dangerous place, with society teetering on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence, and when their fear conflates with their self-righteousness, they appoint themselves guardians of public morality, or God's Designated Hitters.
• They think of themselves as far more moral and upstanding than others -- a self-deception aided by their religiosity (many are "born again") and their ability to "evaporate guilt" (such as by going to confession).

It is authoritarian followers who filled churches across the United States on "Justice Sunday" to lobby for right-wing judges in federal courts; who can be seen on C-Span seated at dinner tables, after paying ten times the cost of their meals, to listen to Bill Frist or Karl Rove give a speech at the Federalist Society; who are the well-scrubbed young people who join college Republican clubs, whose parents or grandparents are delegates at GOP presidential conventions. By and large these Americans have never been troubled by the execution of a prisoner, and there has never been a war in which the United States engaged that they did not support.

Conservatives Without Conscience (pp. 61-62):

But stated beliefs and expressed behavior often reflect the workings of a conscience. For example, social dominators freely admit on tests that measure moral issues of right and wrong behavior that such matters are irrelevant to them. That suggests little conscience, a fact which is often corroborated by behavior. Altemeyer noted that "social dominators believe that a really good skill to develop is the ability to look someone straight in the face and lie convincingly. Obviously, that person has no conscience." Nothing shows lack of conscience better than bold-faced lying. Altemeyer pointed out that lying, however, is not a uniquely social dominator skill; it is also easy for right-wing authoritarians to do because of their remarkable self-righteousness.

(pp. 62-64):

How can this paradox be explained? Right-wing authoritarians employ "a number of psychological tricks and defenses that enable them to act fairly beastly," Altemeyer explained, all the while thinking they are "the good people." To begin with, they have relatively little self-understanding: "For instance, they do not realize any of the many undesirable things that research has discovered about them." Second, right-wing authoritarians have very compartmentalized minds, and "they can just pull off a Scarlett O'Hara ('I'm not going to think about it!') whenever they want." Altemeyer found the fact that so many others are able to detect their hypocrisies while they themselves are oblivious demonstrates how effective they are at ignoring their shortcomings. Third, he said, "right-wing authoritarians shed their guilt very efficiently when they do something wrong. Typically they turn to God for forgiveness, and as a result feel completely forgiven afterwards. Catholics, for example, use confession. Fundamentalist Protestants use a somewhat different mechanism. Many who are 'born-again' believe that if you confess your sins and accept Jesus as your personal savior you will go to heaven -- no matter what else you do afterwards. (This is called 'cheap grace' by those within fundamentalism who hold its members to higher standards.) [ . . . ]

This analysis can account for how someone like the born-again Chuck Colson can go about his hatchet work on people today without troubling his conscience just as he did at the Nixon White House. And how Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson can openly call for the assassination of foreign leaders, despite the Ten Commandments that he holds so dear. It is as if these individuals had worn down their consciences with cheap grace -- a remarkable and frightening process.

(pp. 66-67):

Altemeyer discovered that the aggression of right-wingers seems to be not merely instrumental -- that is, expressed for some political purpose -- but engaged in for the pure pleasure of it. Torture is an extreme example, yet apparently authoritarians can find even that enjoyable, as the Abu Ghraib photos tragically illustrated. But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. This heightened level of aggressiveness has a number of psychological roots. Right-wing authoritarians, as we have seen, are motivated by their fear of a dangerous world, whereas social dominators have an ever-present desire to dominate. The factor that make right-wingers faster than most people to attack others, and that seems to keep them living in an "attack mode," is their remarkable self-righteousness. They are so sure they are not only right, but holy and pure, that they are bursting with indignation and a desire to smite down their enemies, Altemeyer explained.

When one examines authoritarians closely, their propensity to attack others by any means fair and foul is not surprising, for they are fundamentally fierce people. Yet Altemeyer's studies indicate that if they could see themselves as others do, which they are seldom able to, they might gain perspective on their conduct. Their blinders, however, help make them who they are.

(pp. 77-78):

One of the more colorful (and accurate) descriptions of the typical neoconservative comes from Philip Gold, who justifiably described himself as having "impeccable conservative credentials and long experience in the national-security field," as well as being "a grumpy old Marine (a former intelligence officer), who has grown infuriated with and appalled by the conservative embrace of disaster" served up by neoconservatives. Gold, a former Georgetown University professor, described neoconservative foreign policy wonks as "a new aristocracy of aggression that combines 19th-century Prussian pigheadedness with a most un-Prussian inability to read a man or a ledger book, and a near total lack of military -- let alone combat -- experience. Ask these people to show you their wounds and they'll probably wave a Washington Post editorial at you."

The list of notable US authoritarians starts with FBI czar J. Edgar Hoover (pp. 86-87):

Presidents, who came and went, protected the nation from foreign invasion; Hoover, who held his post for almost a half century, protected the nation's "internal security" from mobsters, Nazis, communists, hippies, and antiwar protesters. He intimidated (and blackmailed) members of Congress and presidents (about whom he gathered information); and he helped foster McCarthyism by feeding often dubious information to the maniacal red-hunting senator. Hoover influenced the Supreme Court by using background investigations to disparage potential nominees he did not like and to promote those he did. He also aided Nixon's efforts to remove Abe Fortas from the Court, and hoped to do the same (but failed) with Justice William O. Douglas. Hoover trained his FBI agents in the black arts of burglary and other surrepetitious skills, and had them employed at his whim. He was a racist who sought to disable the civil rights movement; he refused to hire black FBI agents; and he tried to get Martin Luther King, Jr., to commit suicide. He rigged the Warren Commission investigation in a manner that still colors the nation's understanding of President Kennedy's assassination. How many innocent people were framed by Hoover's FBI -- a prototype of authoritarian government -- will never be known.

The peak of Hoover's career -- the period when conservatives almost genuflected at the mention of his name -- was during his crusade against communism. Conservative historian Paul Johnson describes McCarthyism, in which Hoover was deeply involved, as a time "when the hysterical pressure on the American people to conform came from the right of the political spectrum, and when the witch hunt was organized by conservative elements." It was a time when Hoover preached a terrifying gospel about communism. His FBI hacks cranked out endless articles (regularly placed in national as well as local publications) and speeches (for FBI agents, members of Congress, Justice Department lawyers, and other government officials) explaining how communists, if they managed to infiltrate, would destroy the American family -- its lifestyle, its homes, its ability to provide food for the table, and even the time parents had to dote on their children. And because the godless communists sought to destroy America's religions, Hoover warned that no American dare lose faith in God, for should they do so, communism would fill the void, and this would place them in hands worse than those of the devil.

Second example is Spiro T. Agnew. (pp. 88-89):

At the Nixon White House Agnew had the job of currying conservative favor. Employing the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Nixon dispatched Agnew to fight the cultural war, and the vice president delighted in unloading depth charges and assorted munitions assembled by Buchanan and others. In the fall of 1969, the war was escalated, and Agnew became the first high-profile conservative to go after the mainstream news media. For a half hour the vice president tore into the unaccountable power of the unelected newspeople, who decided what forty to fifty million Americans would learn of the day's events. Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, with some delight, that "at the networks there was pandemonium; all three decided to carry the speech live."

Agnew loved his work. "My mission is to awaken Americans to the need for sensible authority, to jolt good minds out of the lethargy of habitual acquiescence, to mobilize a silent majority that cherishes the right values but has been bulldozed for years into thinking those values are embarrassingly out of style." His recurring themes and targets were "avowed anarchists and communists," "elitists," the "garbage of society," "thieves, traitors, and perverts," "radical liberals," and, of course, the news media, whom he called "an effete corps of impudent snobs, a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government. They are nattering nabobs of negativism." (They were also, for Agnew, the "hopeless, hysterical hypochrondriacs of history.") Agnew's avowed aim was "dividing the American people," which he called "positive polarization." He was delighted when he caused a ruckus. "I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it." Conservative media loved Agnew's authoritarian aggression as well. A Wall Street Journal editorial approvingly noted that "Mr. Agnew's targets -- the media, war protesters, and rebellious youth -- are representative of a class that has enjoyed unusual moral and cultural authority through the 1960s."

Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich also get sections, followed by the religious right's authoritarian followers.

(pp. 159-160):

Josh Marshall, writing in the Washington Monthly, was the first journalist to observe this fact about Cheney; the piece was titled "Vice Grip: Dick Cheney is a man of principles. Disastrous principles." Marshall had discovered that Cheney has made one serious mistake after another as vice president, although "in the Washington collective mind," he has the reputation of a "sober, reliable, skilled inside player." Marshall found that the facts belie Cheney's reputation, and he has made a consistent, and he has made a consistent string of "mistakes -- on energy policy, homeland security, corporate reform." Since Marshall wrote his piece this list of serious errors has only grown. Marshall attributed Cheney's ineptness to a career that has largely isolated him from the real world. As Marshall described it, Cheney is part of the "hierarchical, old economy style of management [that] couldn't be more different from the loose, nonhierarchical style of, say, high-tech corporations or the Clinton White House, with all their open debate, concern with the interests of 'stake-holders,' manic focus on pleasing customers (or voters), and constant reassessment of plans and principles. The latter style, while often sloppy and seemingly juvenile, tends to produce pretty smart policy. The former style, while appearing so adult and competent, often produces stupid policy." Marshall is also describing the distinction between a nonauthoritarian White House and an authoritarian operation.

An examination of Cheney's career reveals that it is marked by upward mobility and downward performance. For example, the best thing that Cheney did for Halliburton as chairman and CEO was to step down and help them get no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq and federal help with their asbestos claims liability; Cheney's attempt to run for president failed at the conception stage; he was undistinguished as secretary of defense, and many believe he was actually disappointed when the cold war ended on his watch, and not by his doing; his years in Congress have left a voting record that any fair-minded person would be ashamed of; and he was way over his head as Ford's chief of staff, which resulted in the remaining Nixon staff's appreciating how good Haldeman had been in the job; and, of course, he helped Ford lose his bid to become an elected president in the race against Jimmy Carter.

Bad judgment is Dick Cheney's trademark. It was not George Bush who came up with the idea of imposing blanket secrecy on the executive branch when he and Cheney took over. It was not George Bush who conceived of the horrible -- and in some cases actually evil -- policies that typify this authoritarian presidency, such as detaining "enemy combatants" with no due process and contary to international law. It was not George Bush who had the idea of using torture during interrogations and removing restraints on the National Security Agency from collecting intelligence on Americans. These were policies developed by Cheney and his staff, and sold to the president, and then imposed on many who subsequently objected to this authoritarian lawlessness. It was Cheney and his mentor, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq, which is proving to be a protracted cala