InstaMcCarthy: Yet Another Smear

Well, that didn't take long. As predictably as the tides, via Greenwald I see that Glenn Reynolds has flat-out compared Mearsheimer and Walt to David Duke. Obviously, comparing scholars to a Grand Wizard of the Klan solely for publishing a paper whose conclusions you disagree with--with absolutely no evidence that either of them remotely share Duke's fascist worldview--is beneath contempt, but par for the course where Reynolds is concerned. I can't put it better than Dan Drezner, although I admittedly in this case I would put it in nastier form: I didn't say this explicitly in my last post, but let me do so here: Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.* To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that : A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability; B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and C) They omit consideration of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies. The paper is in many respects shoddy and tendentious, and should be criticized on its merits as vigorously one pleases. But to compare two distinguished scholars to a vicious racist and anti-Semite with no supporting evidence whatsoever is utterly reprehensible. To further underscore Reynolds' mendacity, let's compare his reaction when Harvard's President made, if anything, more ill-informed and tautological assertions about female inferiority to justify his awful record in the hiring and retention of female faculty. If you can put someone in the Klan for disagreeing with you about American foreign policy toward Israel, surely vigorous (but far less severe) criticism of Summers' views by people who know far more about the subject than he does is acceptable, right? Nope: his reaction, of course, was to "indeed" a post whining about how unfairly poor Larry was being treated. So to summarize Glenn Reynolds' views on academic inquiry: if you agree with Glenn Reynolds, you should be insulated from any but the mildest criticism. If you disagree with Glenn Reynolds, you can be baselessly compared to David Duke. The usefulness of this standard I leave to your judgment.

I'm Not Sure We've Ever Pitched a Perfect Post, But...

L, G & M has made it to the finals the Koufax awards! Please consider voting for us for Best Series for my Supreme Court coverage. Voting instructions can be found here. Also consider voting for some friends of the blog! A not-close-to-exhaustive list would include Firedoglake, Majikthise and Pandagon for best blog, TPM Cafe for best blog community, Orcinus and James Wolcott for best professional blog, Sadly, No! and Shakes Sis for best group blog, Michael Berube, ReddHedd and Lindsay Beyerstein for best writing, Mad Melancholic Feminista and Unclaimed Territory for best new blog, Rox Populi for most humorous post, Feministe for best single-issue blog, Bitch Ph.D. for best expert blog, Michael Berube, P.Z. Myers and Glenn Greenwald for best post, several of the aforementioned and Norbizness for must humorous blog, and Mahablog for most deserving of wider recognition. Please take the time to vote!

Dream Sequences Suck: A Follow-Up

Thanks to James Wolcott, my cranky complaints about dream sequences on TV are stated in considerably better prose: Dream sequences are a curse on series TV, equal in their artsy-kitschy intrusiveness to ghostly visitations from deleted characters, and perhaps even worse than dream sequences are dream-sequence interpretations, which compels talented critics to smack at every symbol that pops up from the watery unconscious with wooden paddles. The implication that L&O;: CI is superior is, on the other hand, quite spectacularly wrong, but at least he's right to attract The Sopranos at its weakest point...

It's the Media, Damnit!!!

From Fox News' Soldier's Diary correspondant Capt. Dan Sukman: Most of the coverage seems to focus on the bad things that happen here — car bombs, murders, etc. — but that’s what news is. Footage of a car blowing up will always make for more readers or viewers than all the cars that do not explode. The analogy I will use here is this: If a triple homicide occurs in your hometown, everyone is tuned in to see what happened, but you will never see a news report about some guy going to work like he does every day. My question is this: How is a reporter supposed to make an event like this look good? Insurgents stormed a jail around dawn Tuesday in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad, killing 19 police and a courthouse guard in a prison break that freed dozens of prisoners and left 10 attackers dead, authorities said. As many as 100 insurgents armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the judicial compound in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles northeast of the capital. The assault began after the attackers fired a mortar round into the police and court complex, said police Brig. Ali al-Jabouri. Is the media supposed to focus on all the days that the jail wasn't the scene of a massacre of police officers and a mass freeing of prisoners? No attack on the jail happened yesterday, after all, or the day before that, or even the day before that. Postive news!!!! Is it supposed to point out that many other jails in the country haven't suffered from an attack by 100 armed men? The media concentrates on cars that explode, bridges that get blown up, and jails that get attacked because, in the normal course of business, cars aren't supposed to explode, bridges aren't supposed to be blown up, and hundreds of armed men aren't supposed to attack jails. If these events take place with some regularity, it's evidence that something is wrong. That they happen so often in Iraq actually works to reduce the cumulative effect of the violence rather than enhance it; we actually don't hear about, and don't pay attention to, most of the massacres, explosion, and suicide bombings in Iraq because they're so common.

Apologist

I'm neither surprised nor disappointed that Hitchens refuses to budge from his initial position on the Iraq War. It should probably be noted that he has now become a self-contrarian; he has apparently forgotten that he demanded the firings of Rumsfeld et al over the feeding on information to certain reporters in Iraq, a sin I still find to be the least consequential yet committed by the Bush administration in Iraq. I am surprised, though, by how relentless his apology is. He is desperately reluctant even to criticize the Bush administration on the merest of tactical questions. In his latest, he says that he wouldn't have opposed the deployment of an extra hundred thousand troops, then blames the entire failure of the operation on the international community. That's it. Not a bit of blame attaches to George W. Bush or his administration. Compare Fred Kaplan's assessment of the war with Hitch's. Kaplan is a knowledgeable, sensible analyst of military affairs, and carefully lays out a series of critiques of the Bush administration's performance. This isn't the only place you'll find such an analysis, because the failings of the administration are painfully obvious. Given that many who supported and continue to support the war have admitted these mistakes, you'd think that Hitch might at least allow that things could have been better executed. You'd be wrong. Instead, we have a recounting of how Saddam probably did have WMDs, or would have in the future, and even if he didn't, there's no way we could have known about it at the time. This has been so thoroughly destroyed by so many people that I don't think we need to spend much more time on it, and admits of a refusal on Hitch's part to grapple with ANY aspect of the post-war situation, including the failure to find any substantial amount of WMD or the capacity to construct a future program. Then Hitch points to a series of Steven Hayes articles that have "laid out a tranche of suggestive and incriminating connections, based on a mere fraction of the declassified documents, showing Iraqi Baathist involvement with jihadist and Bin Ladenist groups from Sudan to Afghanistan to Western Asia." Laid out a tranche of suggestive connections? That's the best he can come up with? No effort to compare this set of connections to say, the same kind that you might find in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria or Egypt. No effort to grapple with the fact that the central contention of Cheney, that Iraq and Al Qaeda had an operational connection, remains utterly unsupported by any meaningful evidence. I can see two possibilities with Hitch. First, he's so bitter at the Left, and so unwilling to admit that he made a critical and stupid mistake on the single most important political judgement of his life, that he's taken a position to the right of Jeff Goldstein. Goldstein, at least, allows for friendly tactical criticism of the Bush administration. It would seem that Hitchens won't stand even for this. The notion that Hitch sees solidarity with the troops as a postive value is wholly implausible given his previous work. Second, perhaps Hitch has simply decided to accept his lot in the life as that of an uncritical apologist for an inept and corrupt President. The benefits are good, there's plenty of scotch, the pay is solid, and you get to meet lots of nice people at AEI and the National Review.

Oh

Congratulations to Japan, Ichiro, and Sadaharu Oh on winning the WBC. Kudos to Cuba for a fine run.

Protesting

Kingdaddy attended a protest commemorating the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, and wasn't pleased: The speakers displayed their tin ear for American politics in other ways. A Middle East expert blew several minutes dissecting the Bush Administration's public statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A folk singer belted out a tune about how Americans like to blame "welfare immigrant mothers on drugs" for all their problems. After the mother of an army lieutenant killed in Iraq gave the rally touched the nerve that a majority of Americans are feeling about Iraq, a local public radio personality stopped the political and emotional momentum with a rambling discussion about the Bush Administration. The organizers had an opportunity, and lost it. You don't need a manifesto to explain why you should be against the current US strategy in Iraq. Instead, you need only listen to someone like the mother of Lt. Ken Ballard, who said what a growing number of Americans are feeling: we did not need to fight this war; we were lied to about the reasons for the invasion, which then kept changing; we were ill equipped for the insurgency; too many Americans and Iraqis are now dying, without the substantive progress that might justify their sacrifices; and in the end, we are not safer than we were the day before the 9/11 attacks. I can't say whether Kingdaddy's experience at the protest was representative of other protests, although I can say that it resonates with MY experience at such events. Nevertheless, even though I agree with a lot of Kingdaddy's account, my agreement leaves me feeling vaguely uncomfortable. I suppose that my first problem is that these events usually attract committed, anti-war leftists, and I am far from a committed anti-war leftist. This is neither my fault nor theirs, but it still produces a disconnect. I'm not anti-war in a politically meaningful sense; I've supported every other major military intervention that the US has conducted in my lifetime, although I really haven't taken the time to rethink Lebanon or Grenada since I was eight. Of course I'm going to be uncomfortable with a genuine condemnation of US "militarism", US foreign policy, and (although rarely seen these days) the US military. I could never condone a withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, and I still haven't fully politically forgiven a friend of mine for superimposing a swastika over a NATO star at an anti-Kosovo War rally. To the extent that protests about the Iraq War almost always seem to extend beyond the Iraq War to a more general critique of US foreign policy, I'm left cold. My second problem is that I've never understood the web of connections between a particular war and the other issues that animate the Left. I hate the word "moderate" when it's applied to political beliefs, and I especially detest self-declared "moderates" and "centrists", but I am, after all, kind of moderate. There are some issues, like trade, on which I'm much more likely to agree with those on the right than with those on the left. I think that recognizing Israel's right to exist is a good thing, and I'm deeply suspicious of the motives of any number of foreign countries. Like Kingdaddy, I think that universal health care, the Iraq War, and vegetarianism really are separate and distinct issues, although this seems a minority of opinion at these kinds of rallies. But I'm also uncomfortable, because I know that any political movement must bring together a whole set of different interest groups, and that those who feel most strongly are likely to make up the vanguard in any struggle. There are some incredibly bad arguments for NOT staying in Iraq, and for NOT invading Iraq in the first place, but it's important not to pay so much attention to those that I forget that there are good arguments, as well. No demonstration for any cause, really, is going to look like middle America, even if it has the tacit support of the majority, and the energy that people spend on these things has to be honored in some way. Then again, I can't help feeling that some people are just idiots, and are wholly detrimental to the causes they support. I feel that way a lot about Gore Vidal, for example. I've been sitting on this Vidal interview in the Nation for a while because I just haven't been sure how to approach it. This exchange here particularly grabbed me: Q: If, indeed, this Administration is collapsing for lack of weight, what comes after it? A: Martial law, that's next. Bush is like a plane of glass. You can see all the worms turning around in his head at any moment. The first giveaway of what's on his mind--or the junta's mind. Q: The junta being...? A: Cheney, who runs everything, I suspect. And a few other serious operators. Anyway, I first noticed this was on their mind when Bush finally woke up to the fact that the hurricanes were not going to be good PR for him. And he starts to think friends of his are going to be running in '08. So what's the first thing he does? The first thing on the mind of a dictator? He gets the National Guard away from the governors. The Guard is under the governors, but Bush is always saying, Let's turn it over to the military. This is what's on their mind. Under military control. Q: Are you predicting a coming military dictatorship? And that the American people would stand for that? A: They'll stand for anything. And they will stand for nothing. Just what in the hell has to be wrong with you to think that George Bush is about to order a military junta? Anyone who has been awake over the past four years might have noticed that the uniformed military and the Republican Party are not the same entity, and indeed stand at odds on a number of important questions, not least the conduct of the Iraq War. For Vidal, though, there is no difference; Cheney is evil, the military is evil, and therefore their ends and means must be identical. As far as I'm concerned, this kind of analysis is worse than useless; it makes us look like idiots. So my not terribly insightful conclusion to this overly long post is that moderate dissenters of the war need to express tolerance for the truly committed, but that this tolerance can't be unlimited. There can be enemies on the left, but that the Reynolds/Hitchens trap of emphasizing only the worst arguments against the war or in favor of withdrawal is very dangerous.

OC Rape Case Update

I've discussed before the horrifying case of a young Orange County woman who was repeatedly gang-raped while she was unconscious. What made the case particularly appalling was the conduct of the defense. Lacking any credible case that they consented, they used the well-worn strategy of attacking the victim with irrelevant sexist details, egregious violations of privacy and outright intimidation: Since the moment the tape was recovered by police, there's been an effort to destroy Doe. An army of Haidl lawyers and private detectives have continually hounded her and her family; posted inflammatory fliers in her neighborhood; called her a "slut" who tricked "an innocent boy" into making a "sex film" because she wanted to be a "porn star"; spread defamatory rumors about each member of her family; persuaded her high school friends to betray her in court; tailed her to her new high school and informed her new, unsuspecting friends about the rape case; and released her private medical and psychological records to the media. While no ending to such a case can be "happy," the primary assailants have been convicted. In addition, Jane Doe is suing for civil damages. Ikoi Hiroe emails me to say that she's collecting letters of support for Jane Doe--you can send letters addressed to the latter at ihiroe@yahoo.com and Ikoi will pass them along. (This has been vetted by Sheelzebub, who in addition to her other terrific work on this case contacted Doe's attorney and confirmed that the letters of support will be passed on.) Please consider doing so.

Lexblogging: Fun with Governor Fletcher

In 1986, Judge Lewis Paisley declared Kentucky's anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. In 1991, a group called Pro-Family Kentucky distributed a flier claiming that "Lexington is becoming a Hot-Bed for growing Sodomy, Pornography and Violence against women and families," in part because of Judge Paisley. The treasurer of Pro-Family Kentucky at the time was a man named Ernie Fletcher, who is now the governor of our fair state. As one of the commenters at Bluegrass Report puts it, "I didn't know you could grow Sodomy in a Hot-Bed. And to think for all these years I've been using potting soil and Miracle Gro." Given that it's had fifteen years to grow, you'd think I'd notice all the sodomy here in Lexington. Eh, not so much, as far as I can tell. I'm also uncertain how sodomy laws prevent violence against women and families, but I'm sure that Governor Fletcher has a good explanation.

V

V for Vendetta was fair enough for a big studio production. Natalie Portman rarely impresses me as an actress, and this was no exception. Hugo Weaving was a perfect choice for the title role, however, and pulled it off both verbally and physically. The plot was rather predictable, and its foray into the political was unsurprisingly hamfisted and clumsy. As a final note, please don't rely on this film for its historical interpretation of the original Guy Fawkes. Just because you want to blow up Parliament and decapitate the English elite does not, in fact, mean that you're an anarchist.

The Wingnutosphere: A Test Case

David Duke has endorsed the Mearsheimer/Walt paper about the alleged "unmatched power" of the "Israel lobby," something that I'm guessing will be picked up around the right-wing blogosphere. Most of the lessons will be obvious: it's a bad paper, but I don't think there's any reason to believe that anti-Semitism played a role in writing it even if anti-Semites trumpet it, but I'm sure some clueless hacks will run with the New York Sun's angle and play the guilt-by-association game--turning this work of two scholars into something about "Harvard" (and even more amusingly into something about "liberal academics.") What will be particularly instructive is to compare the reaction of the purveyors of reactionary academic identity politics to this with their defenses of their allegedly martyred idol Larry Summers. We have two cases in which somebody used poorly supported, largely circular arguments to reach "anti-p.c." conclusions. Except that it's worse in Summers' case, because he was speaking as a representative of the university, and his comments were consistent with a terrible record of hiring and retaining women in science faculties. Somehow, though, I don't think we're going to see Mearsheimer and Walt similarly portrayed as victims of a political witch hunt when the media and other faculty start attacking them. Because, of course, "acadmic freedom" as they define it (which, if we can derive its conservative usage in the Summers case, seems to mean "the right to say stupid things without being criticized by people who know far more about the subject than you do and without any consequences") somehow becomes less important when the "anti p.c." comments are less congenial with the conservative line of the day... ...Pithlord has more.

Reproductive Freedom: It's Positively Unxenophobic!

According to Georgia state senator, "Big employers may get the benefit of cheap labor, but the U.S. taxpayer will pay for their healthcare, food stamps, schooling for children, and income tax credits. I am convinced it is a consequence to the almost 50 million children we have put to death in their mother's womb through abortion. The large unfilled job market in Georgia would not be a problem if the almost 50 million Americans were here filling many of those jobs." But why stop there? Why, if we were to outlaw birth control, maybe we could prevent anyone from immigrating at all! Hmm, that argument ads a nice racist element to perhaps the worst genre of anti-abortion arguments, the "would you have wanted to be aborted in the womb" argument. The problem with this argument, of course, is that to any non-crackpot it proves rather too much. In retrospect, I am indeed happy not to have been aborted; I'm also happy my parents were not using birth control the night I was conceived, that my mother didn't get a tubal ligation, etc. etc.--I guess we really have no choice but to ban those things too! Always nice to get the Christian consevrative agenda out in the open...

A Brief Note About Dream Sequences

I saw Transamerica last month. Not a bad picture, actually--not only the expert lead performance, but a genuinely interesting lead character. The biggest problem with the film--what makes is a halfway decent movie with a great acting performance rather than a really good movie--is that the road movie just isn't as robust a genre as indie directors seem to think it is. The picture slowly runs out of gas as the arbitrary incidents and local color pile up; it's almost impossible to do anything with it at this point, and it saves screenwriters from thinking up more dramatically interesting ways of advancing the narrative. I'm not sure what's more exhausted, though: the road movie, or the dream sequence. By dream sequence, I hasten to add, I don't mean a Lynch-like aesthetic where everything teeters on the edge of dreaminess, but dreams within an otherwise straightforward narrative, especially on TV. I suppose it's not literally true that if they're more than 30 seconds, they suck, but I'm tempted to say it anyway. This was made particularly evident in the regrettable 3rd season of Six Feet Under--the dream sequences undermined what the show did really well (first-rate soap opera in the non-pejorative sense with some terrific characters) and emphasize what it did badly (Alan Ball's conviction that his well-worn cliches about suburban life are Profound Insights), but with 1000% more wankery. And then we have The Sopranos. It's used short dream sequences well sometimes, especially in the Season 2 finale. I suppose "The Test Dream" was better than I feared, but while it was pretty good for an interminable dream sequence it was also exceptionally subpar for a Sopranos episode. And tonight...I guess I could be perverse enough to point out that it did replicate a real dream more than these things usually do: some but not total resemblance to real life, with anxious failures and things you just can't grasp. But, really, to be candid it was dull and pretentious, no takeoff and no payoff. (I'm embarrassed that I didn't see this as an inevitable downside to Tony getting shot last week.) I don't mean to sound like Television Without Pity reviewing the last season of Buffy, but the prospect of this stillborn concept continuing for more episodes is dampening my enthusiasm for Season 6 considerably...

More On Tough Choices in Foreign Policy

As one might expect Dan Drezner has some interesting comments about the earlier-discussed Mearsheimer/Walt article. Drezner makes 3 important points. First, he explains in more detail that the explanation seems a strained, ad hoc, excessively simplistic explanation to explain away a problematic anomaly for the realist framework. Second, he points out that "[i]f "The Lobby" is as powerful as Walt and Mearsheimer claim, why hasn't there been a bigger push in the United States for more fuel-efficient cars, alternative energy sources, and the like?" I would go further: if the swing-state Jewish vote is so critical in presidential elections, why have the Republicans adopted approximately none of the other policy preferences of the median swing state Jewish voter? (In a way, I wish M/W were right: I can't wait for the next Republican platform to enthusiastically endorse Roe v. Wade and the strict separation of church and state!) The third point, which provides the frame of Drezner's analysis, is a comparison of M/W to Sam Huntington. That strikes me as a quite apt description, especially insofar as Mearsheimer is concerned. Both have written very important scholarly works whose gift for parsimonious explanations can sometimes cross the line into crude overgeneralization, and the latter tends to overwhelm the good parts of their work when they're writing for a popular audience. (Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies, which emphasized that the most crucial difference between states is those that have effective governments and those that don't, is certainly highly relevant today.) I'm not sure about the "full Huntington" either way. On one hand, while it's not my field I doubt that any of Mearsheimer's work will prove as important or influential as Huntington's powerful early work, but on the other hand while I strongly disagree with it I don't think the new M/W piece is anywhere near as normatively objectionable as most Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations-era work (the worst of which Drezner has a good piece about here.) Speaking of overly simplistic thinking about foreign policy, Andrew Sullivan uses a familiar routine, ending a discussion of Juan Cole's analysis of Sistani's horrific anti-gay statements by claiming that "Cole tries a third option: he blames all this on what he regards as the misguided attempt to get rid of Saddam. Ah: Saddam. The pomo-left's last great hope for Arabia. I assume he's referring to (and distorting) this part of Cole's argument: I personally condemn Sistani's stance here, of course. He is a conservative Shiite cleric, however, so I don't know what people were expecting to happen if the secular Baath was overthrown and replaced by primordial ethnic identities. In other words, Sullivan is using the classic warblogger technique of avoiding difficult questions by accusing anyone who raises arguments about the war of being Saddam-lovers. Cole's point, is of course, unassailably correct: the increased power of radicals like Sistani was the nearly inevitable consequence of disposing Hussein. This doesn't make any statement about the comparative merits of Hussein's regime. To subject anyone who points this out to the smear that Hussein is their "hope" is disgraceful. And, of course, evaluating what the actual alternative regime is, rather than assuming that deposing a dictatorship means liberal democracy is crucial to assessing the war. With the security justifications evaporated, the only possible defense of this war is on humanitarian grounds. It may be at least possible to defend the war if deposing Hussein would lead to liberal democracy. But if one compares it to the quasi-theocracy that was always vastly more likely, the argument is impossible to make. A somewhat democratic illiberal Islamic state may be a better outcome than the preceding government (although if I were a woman or gay person in Iraq, I'm not so sure that I would agree), but hardly enough to justify the invasion. And, in addition, it exposes the self-evident folly of folding the deposing of Hussein's brutal but secular dictatorship with a war on "radical Islam." If anything, the invasion benefits it, and pointing this out this blindingly obvious fact doesn't make you an apologist for Hussein.

Half A Million Served

Thanks to our loyal and new readers!

For Glenn Reynolds, is there a difference?

Verbatim Glenn: They're not so much "antiwar" as just on the other side.

Israel and Neorealism

Jeff Goldstein has found another purported example of the perfidy of the "Democratic party and liberals" at Harvard. The political scientists in the audience will be amused by the punchline: it's the work of the conservative University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer. Whether someone who voted for Bush in 2000 counts as a liberal or a Democrat is, I would submit, contestable. (I don't know about the politics of his co-author Stephen Walt--my IR scholar co-blogger says he has voted for candidates of both parties. He's certainly not a public man of the left.) Almost as remarkable as the fact that he quite clearly knows nothing about the scholars in question but is willing to link uncritically to marginally literate screeds by Randite crackpots accusing them of "Jewhatred" is the way he refers to their working paper as a "Harvard paper," as if the institution sort of produces ideas that scholars receive like radio transmitters. Hmm, let's apply this logic further--I'm appalled about this "Harvard book": clearly the campus is overrun with Straussian male chauvinists! No wonder Larry Summers found poorly-supported just-so tautologies about female inferiority so convincing! And...no, really, this is too stupid. Having said that, though, once you strip away the silly right-wing identity politics frame, Goldstein has a point: the Mearsheimer/Walt claim (the full version is in PDF form here) that American policy toward Israel is the result of an exceptionally powerful "Israeli lobby" is, in fact, not very persuasive. The bulk of the paper, indeed, is not about supplying evidence for their central argument. W/M establish what is, from a neorealist perspective, an anomaly: American policy toward Israel is more supportive than would expect based on neorealist conceptions of national self-interest. This is probably right, although the extent of the gap is debatable. They then go on to dismiss the moral case for supporting Israel; I find this less persuasive, you may find it more, but at any rate it's neither here not there as far as the empirical case is concerned; what matters is not whether I or they find the case convincing, but whether people with decision-making authority in the American state find it convincing and whether it's at least arguable. (I don't disagree that Israeli policy is currently contrary to some liberal "American values"; it is also true that the US would have failed the "American values" test rather more resoundingly less than 50 years ago, and the relevant metric is to compare with other countries rather than against an ideal liberal democracy.) And then they conclude with a summary of the effects of what they see as excessive American support for Israel. But the key middle section--where they actually try to establish the key proposition--is skimpy and unconvincing, filled with dubious inferences and slippery causal relationships. To take an example of the at times almost comically tendentious nature of their empirical analysis, consider this paragraph: Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money'. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them. First of all, of course, for several cycles CA, NY and IL have hardly been "key states"; they haven't been remotely in play, and it would be pretty odd to for Republicans craft messages with a disproportinate eye toward small minorities in states they have no chance of winning. Pennsylvania's population of religious Jews is a whopping 2%. And then you have to remember that neorealist foreign policy would not predict hostility toward Israel, but less marginal support, narrowing the policy terrain. And, of course, Jews have far from monolithic positions towards Israel. So basically we're left with an enormous amount of leverage over the executive branch derived from the effects of differences within a narrow policy range within a segment of a small minority within a single swing state. Er, let's just say I consider the question open. And there's an even bigger problem when it comes to the Iraq War. Iraq is an even clearer empirical anomaly from a neorealist perspective, but it is (to put it mildly) far from clear that installing a Shiite state with very tenuous coercive capacity in Iraq is in the interests of the Israeli state. The M/W attempts to explain the alleged "Israel Lobby" influence on the Iraq war come down to little more that inferences drawn from the fact many administration proponents of the war are also supporters of Israel. But when it comes to evidence that Israeli interests were a key factor in the decision, that's awfully watery broth, and one I would think a neorealist would be particularly skeptical of. Since I'm not committed to neorealist explanations, I think a lot more explanatory leverage can be derived from noting that many important American state actors conceive of American interests differently than neorealists do and that they also believe the moral case for supporting Israel is more tenable than M/W do. Admittedly, measuring interest group power is a nettlesome problem, and assertions of interest group influence are almost impossible to prove or disprove, but I just don't find the case at all persuasive. While I think it's a disgraceful smear to imply that these serious scholars are anti-Semites, I do think they're straining to provide a simple explanation for some outcomes that their theoretical framework can't really account for. The well-organized and funded Israeli lobby may explain some policy choices at the margin, but there's little evidence that it's a central variable. As a final note, another reason I don't think that creating an "Israeli lobby" bogeyman is particularly helpful is that is obscures what neorealism can help us think about: the difficult choices that we face in the middle east. Unlike the ice-cream-castles-in-the-air vision of too many neocons, the realists grasp the obvious point that the democratization of despotic regimes whose populations are even more hostile to Israel than the current governing elites will produce very difficult dilemmas in which American interests, Israeli interests, and democratization are in serious tension with one another. Pretending that all of these interests are inherently aligned is useless, but weakly-supported intimations about a nearly-omnipotent "Israeli lobby" are also diversions from the real issues involved.

Sunday Battleship Blogging: HMS Invincible

Lord Fisher was not content with the invention of Dreadnought, the all big gun battleship which would render the fleets of the world obsolete. The mission of the Royal Navy was not limited to the destruction of the enemy battlefleet. Fisher was worried that smaller, less capable navies might attack British trade through the use of commerce raiding armored cruisers. These cruisers could typically outpace even Dreadnought, and could make the defense of Britain's trade lifeline difficult. Accordingly, before Dreadnought had even left the slip, Fisher commissioned a design for a new kind of ship, the battlecruiser. HMS Invincible was the first of this kind. HMS Invincible displaced 18000 tons, carried 8 12" guns in four twin turrets (one fore, one aft, and two wing), and could make 27 knots. Although roughly the same size as Dreadnought, Invincible sacrificed one turret and a lot of armour for six extra knots of speed. Invincible could either outgun or outrun any ship in the world. Against armoured cruisers, she was, well, invincible. Facing battleships, she had the speed to withdraw. The Royal Navy would build eleven more battlecruisers, culminating in HMS Hood. The German Navy, feeling the need to match the British, built seven, and the Japanese four. HMS Invincible began the war with the First Battlecruiser Squadron, based in Britain. Her first action was the Battle of Heligoland Bight, in which a group of British battlecruisers intercepted a destroyed a few patrolling German light cruisers. Developments in the Far East, however, drew HMS Invincible away. At the beginning of World War I, Germany controlled a naval base at Tsingtao. A crack German squadron including Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Germany's best two armored cruisers, had been transferred to China before the war. The German position in Asia was untenable, however. British and Russian forces could easily occupy the German territory, and the Japanese were making ominous anti-German noises. Admiral Graf Maximilian Von Spee decided to take his squadron into the Pacific in an effort to do as much damage as possible before being caught. There was a small chance, if the German ships were lucky, that they might make it back to Germany. Spee's squadron wreaked havoc in the Southeast Pacific for a couple of months before the British were finally available to collect the ships necessary to track it down. The first British effort ended in disaster, however; the British cruisers became detached from a pre-dreadnought battleship, and were destroyed at the Battle of Coronel. This defeat outraged British public opinion, and the Admiralty decided to deal with Spee by sending HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible to the South Atlantic. Admiral Graf von Spee's squadron attacked Stanley on the morning of December 8, 1914. The Admiral had no idea that Inflexible and Invincible were in port. Had the Germans launched an immediate and all out attack, they might have had a chance of seriously damaging or even crippling the British ships. On the other hand, Admiral Graf von Spee can hardly be blamed for retreating before an overwhelimingly superior force. The British Admiral, Frederick Sturdee, was unfazed by the initial German attack, and ordered the crew to take in breakfast while the battlecruisers raised steam. When Inflexible and Invincible were ready, they proceeded to leave Stanley, track down the German cruisers (they had an advantage of 3-4 knots) and destroy them at range. The ensuing battle was deeply unsporting, but Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did manage to score a number of hits on their poor shooting Royal Navy opponents before sinking. HMS Invincible returned to Great Britain, but missed the Battle of Dogger Bank. In May 1916, Invincible was flagship of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, temporarily operating with the Grand Fleet out of Scapa Flow rather than with the rest of the battlecruiser squadrons. Her commander was Read Admiral Horace Hood, part of a family with a long history in the Royal Navy. Invincible did not arrive at Jutland early enough to participate in the "Run to the South" where five German battlecruisers managed to destroy two of six British battlecruisers. When the Grand Fleet appeared on the horizon, the German fleet began to turn to the south. Hood joined his ships to Beatty's surviving battlecruisers, and Invincible began to hammer SMS Lutzow, the flagship of Admiral Hipper's German battlecruiser squadron. Unfortunately, the Germans noticed Invincible's excellent gunnery, an unusual characteristic in a British ship. Lutzow and Derfflinger poured fire onto Invincible, and a salvo from Lutzow hit the British ship on its middle turret. Invincible was not designed to take heavy fire from battleships, but the admirals of neither the Grand Fleet nor the High Seas Fleet could resist pressing their battlecruisers into front line combat. Invincible exploded and sank, taking all but six of her crew of 1021 with her, including Admiral Hood. That was twice the number of survivors of the battlecruiser Hood, destroyed almost twenty-five years later. A much larger number of sailors probably survived the initial explosion, but it was not the policy of the Royal Navy to pick up survivors during battle. Invincible came to rest in two pieces, with her stern protruding just above the water. As the rest of the Grand Fleet passed by, the name Invincible was clearly visible on the stern of the wreck. Trivia: What battleship devoted the highest percentage of its displacement to armour?

Feingold and the Censure Resolution: 2006 and 2008

[This was posted as a cameo guest slot at FireDogLake: but at least 50% new maetrial!] As a follow up to ReddHedd's post below, yesterday I wrote a post about Ryan Lizza's baffling claim, in response to Russ Feingold's proposed censure of the President, that "[c]hanging the FISA law is the way to address Bush's overreach." Ann Althouse objects, arguing that I am not "the best person to be deciding who's 'vacuous.'" The merits of the ad hominem I will leave to the reader, but I think that Althouse is missing the fundamental point here, and I don't think that what's at stake can be emphasized often enough. There are two issues here: the politics, and the merits. The former issue I see little point in discussing, because whether it's a net positive or negative the political impact of a censure resolution on mid-term elections in November will be negligible in any case. I will only point out another contradiction in Lizza's argument. His argument that the resolution will be politically damaging rests on his assertion that "providing a check on Bush and the Republican dominance of Washington is a key Democratic talking point, but it's being advanced subtly by candidates who still often must distance themselves from national Democrats." But, if a Democratic victory rests on red-state Democrats being able to distance themselves from the Senate leadership--a plausible enough claim--then how can the fact that Feingold's resolution has not produced a unified Democratic caucus be damaging? Lizza's argument gets more puzzling the more you think about it. But the more important point, which I think Althouse also misses, is that Lizza's claim that supporters of the resolution have the policy wrong is just a transparent non-sequitur. Changing the FISA law is hardly an adequate response to presidential overreaching, given that the administration has asserted the authority to ignore any statutory restrictions placed on its authority to conduct domestic searches. The value of Feingold's resolution is that it draws attention to the point that pundits like Lizza seem unable to grasp: this dispute is not only about the best policy to gather information about terrorists, but is about central questions of the President's constitutional powers and the rule of law. The key issue here is that the President acted--and continues to act years after 9/11, and therefore with plenty of time to request changes in the statute if it was inadequate--against a law passed by Congress. And, as ReddHedd says, claims that FISA is unconstitutional because the President has unconstrained authority over foreign policy are exceptionally weak. It's worth repeating my quote from Cass Sunstein about how contrary to our Constitutional framework such claims of plenary presidential power are: Yoo emphasizes Blackstone and British practice, arguing that the United States closely followed the British model, in which the executive--the king!--was able to make war on his own. But not so fast. There is specific evidence that the British model was rejected. Just three years after ratification Wilson wrote, with unambiguous disapproval, that "in England, the king has the sole prerogative of making war." Wilson contrasted the United States, where the power "of making war and peace" is in the legislature. Early presidents spoke in similar terms. Facing attacks from Indian tribes along the western frontier, George Washington, whose views on presidential power over war deserve special respect, observed: "The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated on the subject, and authorized such a measure." As president, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams expressed similar views. In his influential Commentaries, written in 1826, James Kent wrote that "war cannot lawfully be commenced on the part of the United States, without an act of Congress." That's the issue. The administration is claiming powers to act unilaterally with respect to a conflict with no logical end, powers far beyond what Lincoln claimed at the height of the Civil War. Changing the FISA statute not only doesn't address this crucial issue--which the censure resolution, at least, foregrounds--it compounds it by legitimating the President's lawbreaking and contempt for constitutional restraints retroactively. Feingold, unlike Lizza, actually understands the crucial issue at stake. As long as Congressional Republicans refuse to assert congressional prerogatives there's nothing Democrats can do policy-wise, but at least they should be making this point as often as possible. One area where I agree with Lizza, however, is that this is more about 2008 than 2006, and that's where I'll throw open to the discussion to our readers. This probably won't make me a very popular in these parts, but as much as I admire Feingold I think that, ideally, the Democrats would be better served by running a red-state governor than a blue-state Senator. On the other hand, if Matt is right that this strengthens Feingold's odds against Clinton, that can only be good news. If it comes down to Clinton/Feingold, then I think there shouldn't be any contest: Clinton--who ran well behind Gore in New Work, while Feingold ran well ahead of Kerry in Wisconsin--has electability issues that are just as or more serious, and Feingold is much better on the merits. To the extent that it weakens Clinton by highlighting her unswerving commitment to a disastrous and increasingly unpopular war, this is a good thing for the Dems in '08.

Challenge Results, Round 1

The Bearded Ducks are ready to make their move. Ordinarily, I've already been eliminated by this point, what with my special ability to identify high seeded first round upset victims and pick them to win the tournament. If Albany had pulled it out against UConn, I'd be sitting pretty; I have unwisely selected Kentucky to upset the Huskies, and an Albany victory would have let me off the hook.

Please Show Your Work

Ryan Lizza claims: So the partisans on the left cheering Feingold appear to have both the policy and the politics wrong. Censure is meaningless. Changing the FISA law is the way to address Bush's overreach. And the only way for Democrats to change FISA is for them to take back the Senate. This week, Feingold's censure petition has made that goal just a little bit more difficult to achieve. What an ass. On the second point, the main question is what exactly the evidence is that Feingold's censure resolution will make it more difficult to take back the Senate in '08. Is the censure proposal unpopular? Does it draw attention away "from providing a check on Bush and the Republican dominance of Washington"? There's some rather glaring gaps here. It may be true that it's bad politics, but bare assertions that it makes Ryan Lizza mythical swing voters uncomfortable do not constitute evidence. But even more problematic is Lizza's suggestion for a more effectual solution. How, exactly, does "changing the FISA law" address the problem? Bush, remember, is claiming an unreguable arbitrary authority to violate the law. Changing the law really couldn't be more beside the point, and certainly doesn't represent the slightest check on the President's power. And, of course, the changes to the law actually being proposed--which would essentially constitute a retrospective endorsement of the President's illegal behavior--would not merely not address the problem, but would actually compound it. If Lizza means a very different set of reforms, then his argument is self-evidently illogical: it's political poison for the Democrats to censure the President's illegal wiretapping, but it would be politically viable for the Democrats to endorse strong checks on President's warrantless wiretapping? Why? And if the Democrats believe that he was breaking the law, why on earth shouldn't he be censured? This is TNR center-right contrarianism at its most vacuous.

Friday Cat Blogging... Starbuck and Nelson

Dear CBS

Seriously, what the hell is up with taking us from interesting, competitive games to the tipoff of 1-16 stiffs? Isn't Villanova a pretty expansive definition of "local"? If we're going to go that far, why don't we count D.C. so we can actually watch a game that would be of interest to non-alumni? Love, Scott ...or, if you must show a 1-16 game, what about Ned Flanders' relatively well-regarded alma mater?

WBC Semis

Well, that was surprising. I don't think that anyone could have predicted that the US would simply fail to hit in the WBC. In five games against teams other than South Africa, the US scored 16 runs. That's with an exceptional offensive lineup against pitching which doesn't compare favorably with that of an average Major League team. I'm glad that the umpiring travesty in the US-Japan game didn't end up mattering. I'll go out on a limb and predict that Japan will win its third game of the tourney against Korea, then will defeat the Dominican Republic in the finals. But really, with four teams as evenly matched as these in a single-elimination tournament, anything could happen.

And Just When You Thought Judy Miller Couldn't Get More Pathetic

Who knew bloggers had such power? Judith Miller has a new alibi—the blogs done her in! Writer Marie Brenner presents Miller's latest defense in an April Vanity Fair feature story about the fallout from the Valerie Plame investigation. Brenner, acknowledging she's a friend of the former New York Times reporter, writes that while still in Iraq in May 2003, Miller became a "major target in the intense public anger directed at Bush's war, owing to her reports that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction." The ones tossing the fire were those dastardly—but unnamed—bloggers, according to Miller. Upon returning to New York later in May, Miller met with the Times' two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, who were then battling a staff revolt triggered by the Jayson Blair scandal. They acknowledged the "flak" her stories had gotten and told her foreign editor Roger Cohen did not want her to go back to Iraq. Cohen opposed her return because, as he tells Brenner, "There were concerns about her sources and her sourcing." Still, Miller managed a quick trip to Iraq. Wow. And I thought that it was her extraordinarily bad reporting. Certainly the blogosphere has provided a venue in which hackish work like Miller's can be exposed. But, it's not as if this is some small potatoes event that some enterprising blogger stumbled upon and then publicized. Judy repeatedly relied on sources who claimed that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Iraq did not, in fact, possess even small stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. I think somebody was going to notice this problem even if Josh Marshall and Bob Somerby hadn't pointed it out...

An Appeal To Self-Interest

If ethical and pragmatic arguments don't sway you from your belief that granting males an unlimited right to withhold child support is a good idea, via Ezra note this crucial question from Tyler Cowen: "This change would be a tax on male nerd sex. It would boost male nerd autonomy, but which of these do nerds need more?" Game, set, match.

Why The Saletan Smug Moralism Stratagem Will Fail

Via Atrios (who explains exactly what the results of the Saletan approach will be here), I see that Missouri Republicans voted to kill an amendment to start providing state funding for birth control. I guess Missouri pro-choicers didn't talk enough about how evil women who get abortions are: An attempt to resume state spending on birth control got shot down Wednesday by House members who argued it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles. Missouri stopped providing money for family planning and certain women's health services when Republicans gained control of both chambers of the Legislature in 2003. [...] The House voted 96-59 to delete the funding for contraception and infertility treatments after Rep. Susan Phillips told lawmakers that anti-abortion groups such as Missouri Right to Life were opposed to the spending. "If you hand out contraception to single women, we're saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that," Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview. Others, including some lawmakers who described themselves as "pro-life," said it was illogical for anti-abortion lawmakers to deny money for contraception to low-income people who use public health clinics. "It's going to have the opposite effect of what the intention is, which will be more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions," said Rep. Kate Meiners, D-Kansas City. What--you mean many American pro-lifers oppose contraception for reasons independent of the abortion issue? My illusions are shattered. And, of course, this is the central problem with Saletan's preserve-abortion-through-presumptuous-moralizing strategy. It's not just that he basically ignores the way in which American pro-life politics are not just about "fetal life" but are inextricably bound up in reactionary conceptions of gender and sexuality. It's also that his strategy is missing a plausible causal link. To work it basically assumes that many anti-choicers will admit that they're arguing in bad faith, and that their policy preferences aren't really about protecting fetal life. How likely is that? And how likely is it that talking about how immoral abortion is will increase support for reproductive rights? Trying to infer political strategies from snapshots of majoritarian public opinion is very unlikely to work. ...as a useful alternative, I think that this is an excellent point: What pro-choice advocates need to make clear in conversations with moderate pro-lifers is that advocating free access to abortion is not contingent on a belief that every woman who decides to have an abortion is doing a good thing, or is making her decision on a moral basis. It depends on the belief that, if you are willing to agree that there are good and sufficient reasons for a woman to seek an abortion in some circumstances, that there is no one in a better position to decide whether those circumstances apply than the woman involved. She may not always be right, but there is no preferable decision-maker available. Discussions of what constitute good and bad reasons for abortion can still be interesting and important moral discussions, but they can’t reasonably form a basis for restrictions on abortion that depend on the woman’s justification, unless one is prepared to propose an alternative decision-maker who decides whose reasons for abortion are sufficient and whose are insufficient on a case-by-case basis. [my emphasis] Exactly right. The problem with centrist moral ambivalence is that it can't be written into law (unless you assume that committees of doctors or whatever can make better complex ethical judgments than the woman whose life is actually involved, which runs into the obvious problem that it's silly.) So, instead, this ambivalence becomes manifested in regulations that make it harder for certain classes of women to get abortions, but do nothing to ensure that women will make choices Will Saletan will agree with.

Tourney Challenge

Last reminder; we already have 19 entrants. ESPN NCAA Tournament Challenge League Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money Password: zevon

Children and the Vote

When I teach American Political Thought, I close with what always turns out to be a vigorous class discussion on Michael S. Cummings essay "On Children's Right to Vote"* which is a brief, uncompromising case for extending the franchise to those under 18. My pedagogical reason is clear--they've all had the luxury of being casually correct and shaking their heads in dismay at the various arguments and justifications for *not* extending the franchise and full citizenship to various oppressed groups. Reading this essay, rightly or wrongly, tends to put most of them on the side of tradition and exclusion. Even those who are 100% convinced the proposal is insane tend to find this new position they find themselves in rather uncomfortable. But I want to talk briefly about Cummings argument (sorry, it's not available online) because it's surprisingly seductive. I'll summarize it in a series of premises: 1) The exclusion of any group from the franchise requires positive justification, as exclusion based on tradition has a poor track record. 2) The argument that children would take the responsibility of voting less seriously than other groups is an argument we'd reject out of hand if applied to other groups, even if it were empirically demonstrable. 3) The argument that children generally aren't full economic citizens with jobs and taxes is a) often untrue and more often partially true, and b) is also true of many adults, but we'd never tolerate arguments to disenfranchise the chronically unemployed or dependent adults, and c) is perhaps the point. Those without economic power are more likely to need other means to protect themselves. 4) Children's interests are represented by their parents and guardians. True in theory, but often false in practice. Children have a pretty clear stake in the boundaries and limits of parental discretion, which is determined as a matter of public policy. Moreover, the same argument was made--and widely accepted--on behalf of married women. Cummings, citing his own public opinion data on children, notes that children's views on corporal punishment are quite different from that of adults, and more in line with the current consensus amongst psychologists on the issue. Step back and look at this situation--the law authorizes violence against a particular group of people for their good. The best scientific data we've got suggests this is incorrect. The group against whom the violence is authorized agrees with the science. However you feel about this issue, this state of affairs should be enough to shed some doubt on the work that can be done by this premise. Moreover (and as with women in the past) the weight placed on this premise can't account for the fact that for children as a group this arrangement has serious limitations. Compare for a moment the spending and care society provides for the two groups who are vulnerable due to their age: children and the elderly. Anyone who thinks the disparity in security and resources devoted to these two groups has nothing to do with their relative electoral power? Between 1975 and 1990, 7.5% of GNP was spent on the elderly, and only 2% on children.** This despite the fact that most adults agree more or less with the view that justice demands we provide all children with subsistence support and a fairly costly education. Moreover, as Shrag notes, why should the children of parents who don't vote be left unrepresented, through no choice of their own? 5) The objection that children will support policies that are selfish and illogical is undoubtedly true. Their opposition to corporal punish may be on solid ground, they might plausibly support the elimination of wise and necessary parental powers. This, again, fails to mark of children as a group different from the rest of us. The very wealthy support utterly irresponsible and economically disastrous tax cuts, but we still let them vote. 6) The status of children as a group is different than other groups denied the franchise in one obvious way--childhood is temporary, whereas being a woman or an African-American in permanent. This is, of course, true, and it certainly seems significant. Still, there's a missing premise or three for this fact to justify disenfranchisement. I'm not saying they don't exist, I just haven't heard them clearly articulated. 7) Children will simply vote as their parents do. a)this isn't always true, and b)to the extent that it is true, it generally continues on into adulthood. This was assumed to true of women and their husbands as well. Next. A host of other arguments come up in class discussion, but I've yet to hear the argument that I find satisfactory. This doesn't mean I'm going quite prepared to endorse the proposal. So I'm curious: excluding practical concerns and Burkean conservatism (and the latter is probably the reason I can't quite endorse the proposal, but I really don't like relying on Burkean caution alone to support my policy preferences), what's the best reason to exclude children from the franchise? What are my students and I missing? *Pages 558-562 in Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Michael S. Cummings, eds, American Political Thought 5th ed. Washington D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press. **Data from Paul Peterson, cited in Francis Shrag, "Children and Democracy: Theory and Policy," Politics, Philosophy, Economics 3:3 (2004), pp. 365-379, at pg. 375.

"Destructive Trends In Mental Health"

So who's the bigger crank, Dr. Sanity or Dr. Helen? Lacking the wisdom of Solomon, I can't adjudicate this particular death-is-not-an-option game...

Early Steroid Use?

This is genius. With the DVD release of "Looney Tunes Golden Collection" it is at last possible for us to examine one of the most famous baseball games ever in detail, and see what lessons the contest holds for the analytical community.

Big Love and Polyamory: Aesthetics, Policy, Law, Wingnuttery

An emailer asked if I stuck around after The Sopranos to watch Big Love this week. I did, and while I liked it maybe a little less than Ezra I thought it was pretty good. I thought the scenes with their daughter and her Mormon friend at the fast-food restaurant were particularly strong, and there are a lot of good actors. Whether it will be worth sticking with, I dunno. Cold aesthete that I am, my first reaction to Jessica's claim that it's "glamorizing" alpha-male misogyny because it's relatively sympathetic to Paxton's character is to say that she must really hate the sympathetic portrayal of the psychopathic, racist mob boss that precedes it (and, of course, I suppose some people do, but for reasons I've discussed many times I just can't fathom that way of looking at art.) But, in fairness, one difference between the great and the merely good is that one generally worries more about that kind of stuff. I wouldn't say that the show is good enough to watch even if it you think you'll find it intolerably creepy. About the politics, I've written about this before, but even if I thought the show would lead to the legalization of polyamorous relationships it wouldn't bother me very much. The strongest argument against it is that bigamous relationships have indeed been sites of serious patriarchal repression. The obvious problem with the argument is that the same has been historically true of ordinary two-partner marriages as well. (Are two-partner heterosexual marriages in the Mormon communities that practice bigamy considerably better for women?) I don't see why polyamorous marriages would be inherently more patriarchal than two-person ones. On the legal argument, I think this is pretty much right. Existing privacy doctrine doesn't require the state to call any relationship "marriage," but I agree that it quite clearly does (and correctly) make laws like Utah's, which ban even informal polyamorous relationships, unconstitutional. Current equal protection doctrine, however, doesn't compel the state to confer privileges polyamorous marriages (although had O'Connor's equal protection rationale--which some people, like Jeffrey Rosen, erroneously consider to be "narrower" because it would have had slightly narrower implications in the low-stakes field of sodomy laws--been accepted in Lawrence, things might be different.) If sexual orientation is considered a suspect class, that would of course change things, but... I also agree with both points made by Matt here. I agree that the politic "gay marriage doesn't require us to go any further down the slippery slope" argument is true as a matter of formal logic, although myself I wouldn't consider it much of an argument even if I thought it was true. But what really puzzles me is the claims of people like Stanley Kurtz that if polyamorous relationships were legally recognized, they would become the social norm. As with wingnut obsession with discussing homosexuality in schools--which seems predicated on projected (and, of course, misogynist) assumptions that no man would ever consent to have sex with a woman if he was aware that there was any alternative--it's odd how little value they see to individuals in the social institutions they believe the state should use a great deal of coercive authority to preserve. In most states, after all, nothing stops people from engaging in informal polyamorous relationships, but it's not terribly common. Do you really think that it's just the stigma of legal recognition that keeps people from desperately wanting to be in long-term familial relationships with multiple erotic partners? Might people actually see value in monogamous relationships? Cultural reactionaries have such a strange view of the world.

No, Really, Data *Is* The Plural of Anecdote!

Shorter "Dr. Sanity" (sic): "Whenever you discuss socialized medicine, make sure you only talk about Britain and Canada, with a dirt-poor non-democracy thrown in for a particularly silly comparison. Make sure to ignore the huge differences in funding and systematic comparisons with the American system as opposed to random anecdotes. You can even simply flagrantly lie and call them " the cream of the crop"--this may cause your particularly dim-witted readers to forget that France, which gets far better and fairer results than the American system for considerably less money, even exists. You're a reactionary blogger, after all--none of your readers cares that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about." UPDATE: Barbara has more.