Mad Social Scientist

This is too much (from Kevin Drum):

I don't really care about immigration policy all that much, but Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo does. So he tried to get his views adopted in the Republican party platform.

When that failed, he decided to see if he could gin up a floor fight at the convention. This was more political theater than anything else, but even so he ran into an unusual problem:

There are two ways to bring a matter to the floor: One is to convince six state delegations to support the motion for a floor debate—a virtual impossibility, Tancredo realized; the other is to get 19 members of the platform committee to support bringing a matter to the floor. This latter route seemed doable to Tancredo, save for one problem: The congressman couldn't find out who, exactly, was on the platform committee. Running the platform process with all the discipline and secrecy that's come to be expected from the Bush White House, the RNC, citing security concerns, refused to divulge the identities of the handpicked delegates who served on the platform committee—even, in some cases, to other members of the platform committee.

The names of the platform committee members are a secret? For "security reasons"? Has the party leadership gone completely insane? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. No need to answer.)

Like the last post, very Heller, very Orwell. We have a party that claims to fight for freedom and democracy, but really offers only fear demands blind loyalty to our "resolute" brave leader.

From ABCNEWS:

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

Declassified documents supporting these accusations are here. They could have been ripped from Orwell or Heller.

A frightening "might have been", and a reminder that we cannot ever blindly trust our leaders to do what is right when it comes to war and national security.

It's rare indeed that I quote a George Will column, but this one has a noteworthy quote:

Kerry insists he is not a 'redistribution Democrat.' But of course he is. And Bush is a redistribution Republican. There is no 'natural' distribution of social wealth. Distribution is influenced by many social arrangements, from property laws to tax laws to educational arrangements, all of them political choices. Both parties have redistributionist agendas.

This is of course true, and I am not surprised George Will think this (I would be surprised if he didn't). But geez, aren't Republican talking heads supposed to keep these sorts of ideas under their hats? I mean, the whole anti-tax platform is sold with the sickening slogan "It's your money", which presumes that there is a "natural distribution of wealth" that the government has simply violated.

To recognize that without property laws or educational systems, it would never have been your money in the first place is to up-end the entire moral justification for Republican domestic policy. And without that justification, we'd only be able to judge Republican tax policy on its effects, which few consider stellar.

But I guess this quick burst of sanity will soon be forgotten, and the drum beat for tax cuts will continue without a backwards glance.

Paul Krugman wonders whether we should give al-Sistani everything he wants. I was there back in March. Of course, how to do so without turning him in to another Shah, and without leading to a Kurdish rebellion... God, what a mess.

Brad De Long catches this interesting comparison by "Squeaks from the Squirrel Cage": American Iraq policy, and the Dreyfuss Affair. Similar devil's stew of nationalism, fear, and cultural tension. Sounds like a potentially rich comparison to draw from.

This "estimation quiz" asks factual questions, but allows you to provide a confidence interval: Estimation Quiz.
I got 37%, which is probably fairly poor, but then, the questions are rather Anglo-centric. Give it a whirl...

A manifesto from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.

And check out the "focus group" in NYC!

If this is real, it should make a splash. How would you like to see a real Vietnam controversy?

I just saw Hero, a Jet Li movie with gorgeous sets, cinematography, and a Crouching Tiger feel. I actually liked it much better than Crouching Tiger (the director of Hero also directed Raise the Red Lantern, a similiarly good movie). The story is told in non-linear fashion, in successive approximations of the "truth".

The movie was also the ultimate pro-state propaganda film. This is obvious by the end of the movie, but I saw it coming from the beginning (being a political scientist has got to be good for something, right?). The message is that the unity provided by the state (which saves us from chaos and civil war) is more important than individual lives and loves, and must be protected and submitted to. Very Hobbesian, yes, but as far as I understand, even more Chinese. My Chinese friends are welcome to correct me, but ever since the Warring States period depicted in Hero, the greatest bogeyman in the Chinese political lexicon has been "instability", and the state has ruthlessly put down even mildly discordant elements all the way down to today's Falun Gong.

The movie choreographs this message throughout; the King of Qin (who goes on to unite China) has an army that acts as one unit, an organic symbol of the state's power, and his courtiers speak as a single chorus. The rebels are the only individuals, and in the end they submit and die. Even the King has little personality; he is Leviathan incarnate.

Not the first statist movie of the year; Troy also had a statist message, though a bit more conflicted, as suits a Western movie (our states have a far more tumultous history than the Chinese). But Agammenon had a name at least. In Hero, I didn't hear the name of the King. And the rebel who chooses to submit to the state, ending the rebellion, is Nameless. I guess someone still believes in the social contract.

The Swift Boat smear seems to be running its course. I'm a bit surprised it went this far, given how little was there. If you are going to attack an episode in a man's life, you'd usually want the episode to be unseemly, or at least have the goods. In this case, the critics had neither, and John Kerry comes out looking like, well, a hero. This op-ed from today's NYT sums this up as poignantly as anything I've seen.

The critics, and the president who's men backed them, come out looking like bitter, backbiting old warmongers who have never accepted that Vietnam was a dishonorable, pointless, cruel war, even if many honorable men fought bravely in it. This op-ed pretty much sums that up.

And the effect on the election? Kerry may have been hurt a bit, but the story has no more legs, and could still backfire. The critics have been fairly well shown to be lying, or, to be more generous than they deserve, inconsistent (and they accused Kerry of nothing more than that themselves). To those who are watching, Bush once again reveals himself as a truly ugly and dishonorable man, who will permit his henchmen to impugn a man who showed bravery when Bush showed only cowardice.

The whole thing reminds me of the pseudo-scandals of the Clinton administration. A tissue of lies and innuendo, which, even if true or coherent, wouldn't amount to anything. A scandal whose purpose is to distract attention from real issues, or to apply a broad but vague tarnish to an opponent.

Bush admin scandals, you will note, tend to involve people getting hurt for the profit of others. These, we are told, are nothing by comparison.

No, this isn't about Swift Boats: it's about the old-fashioned kind of bullying that happens between kids on the playground---and now on the internet.

There are several interesting points here, some explicit, some beneath the surface:

1. The internet is a medium, so as usual internet innovation takes the form of an expansion of an old phenomenon into a new context. A little re-invention, but mostly just expansion or substitution.

2. The speed of the internet, the cheapness of copying electronic messages, the ease of composing them, and the seeming ephemerality of electrons once again makes social interaction more fluid, coarse, and broad than before.

3. The internet saves a permanent record, so now adults can more easily see what's going on with their kids. And they may be surprised at how ugly children can be to each other, and just what a large fraction are either bullies or bullied. They may also be surprised at how knowledgeable children are about sex. Neither fact should be a surprise to anyone who's under 30 (40? 50? 100? I can only speak for what was obvious when I was a child).

From Dana Milbank. An interesting mixture of smearing, mishearing, with a few arguable reinterpretations (e.g., a signal you may pull out of a country in 6 months is still a signal you may pull out, even if it is hedged).

See also the blurb at the bottom:

Now for an update on the White House's ongoing effort to kill the press corps. The White House travel office signed a contract last week with an airline called Primaris to fly the press corps to Bush events. The two-month-old company has only one airplane. True, media representatives gave their blessing to the deal. But that was before they learned that the company's president twice had his pilot's license revoked related to his flying of an "unairworthy" aircraft, that the chief executive flopped in his last attempt to start an airline and that the 15-year-old plane itself was damaged in a hailstorm a decade ago and spent most of the past two years mothballed in France.

Probably not as bad as it sounds, but there isn't exactly any love there.

Kerry, McCain, and others have asked Bush to condemn the anti-Kerry "swift boat" ads. (An interesting strategy, asking your opponent to define the limits of his views in this way; sometimes the condemnation is cheap talk, but not this time.) But Bush avoids the question in stunning fashion, even for him. Rather than say what he thinks of the content of the ads, he says no third party political ads should run at all. Quite a non-sequitur, because Bush-backing Republicans are behind the ads in question, and because "third party" smears are the calling card of the Bush dynasty, as Dukakis and McCain learned well.

But the ironies keep coming. Bush wants to change the subject to 527 organizations, and he thinks McCain-Feingold was supposed to stop them (Que?). Of course, Bush didn't support McCain-Feingold until after he opposed it. For a man who calls his opponent a "flip-flopper", Bush has taken credit for a number of things he fought but failed to stop (remember the Texas Patients' Bill of Rights? And federal airline screeners?).

The biggest irony? The man who wants to save "our freedom" also wants to restrict the airwaves to speech by the candidates only. Campaign finance is a difficult area to design effective policies, so I won't venture whether this is right or wrong: just that Bush's instincts when facing opposition seem always to run towards restricting his opponents' liberties.

From the American Prospect, on agenda setting. The name of the game is setting the agenda, in the case, shifting attention from a comparison of Bush and Kerry on Vietnam (or, heaven forbid, anything more recent or policy related) to a minute investigation of not whether Kerry was a brave hero, but exact how much of one he was. And there the WaPo has fallen right into the trap set by the Kerry Swift Boat critics---introduce a little doubt about the details, to wear away a Kerry and remove attention from Bush. But as the article notes:

But what the story actually proves is that a bunch of liars who have in the past contradicted their own current statements can, if their lies are outrageous enough and if they have enough money, control the media agenda and get even the most respected media outlets in the country to focus on picayune "truths" while missing the larger story.

And the larger story here is clear: John Kerry volunteered for the Navy, volunteered to go to Vietnam, and then, when he was sitting around Cam Ranh Bay bored with nothing to do, requested the most dangerous duty a Naval officer could be given. He saved a man's life. He risked his own every time he went up into the Mekong Delta. He did more than his country asked. In fact he didn't even wait for his country to ask.

George W. Bush spent those same years in a state of dissolution at Yale, and would go on, as we know, to plot how to get out of going to Southeast Asia. On that subject, here's a choice quote. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment," Bush told the Dallas Morning News in 1990. "Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

The Republican strategy in Florida is increasingly looking like a concerted effort to suppress black voting, through intimidating police visits and secret vetting of voting rolls. Bob Herbert is hammering away at the issue. I sure hope he gets as effective a response as the Tulia investigation. This sort of injustice can't be allowed to stand in a democracy, least of all the world's most venerated democratic republic.

Before I get to the point, I should get the following off my chest: I don't need a president who was a war hero, and I certainly wouldn't vote on the criterion of "who was the bravest in combat". I only get one vote, and there are more important elements and qualifications in a presidential candidate ("what policies will he support?" and "is he capable of the job" being high on the list). But I understand, of course, that many people will vote for war heros simply because they are war heros (pity the political aspirant who never had a chance to prove himself in combat), or because they think choices made in combat provide a valuable window on character (which may be true, but there are many such windows, so an exclusive focus on war is hard to justify).

Because many undecided voters like war heros, or at least heroic war stories, the details of what Kerry and Bush did during the Vietnam war is valuable turf in the campaign. We know Bush did very little, and was probably absent without leave from his Air National Guard Unit (and of course Cheney had "other priorities", and won a deferment). Now a group of veterans disputes Kerry's well known story of heroism under fire on a small boat in Vietnam. The Washington Post has a nice review of the evidence, and it looks like Kerry was pretty damn brave, no matter whose story you listen to. The worst the anti-Kerry people can do is insinuate that Kerry may have somehow embellished his rescue of a man overboard by adding hostile small arms fire, but all the accounts written at the time---including those by the Kerry critics---support Kerry on the issue. And even without the small arms fire, Kerry's actions seems pretty heroic.

The real beef of the anti-Kerry vets appears to have nothing to do with what happened on the swift boats. They are still mad at Kerry for becoming an antiwar activist on returning home. They are mad he testified to atrocities being committed by American GIs in Vietnam. And they aren't exactly hiding this bias.

Here is what Kerry said to Congress about Vietnam atrocities. Reading his testimony, I am struck by the courage it took to tell the truth about the ugly side of Vietnam. I respect that more than what he did in Vietnam. A man in peril before you cries out for action in a way that a dirty war on the other side of the world usually doesn't. But Kerry answered both calls. And he wasn't alone either time---he spoke to Congress not by himself but on behalf of thousands of other vets who were sick of the atrocities some of their fellow GIs committed. The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth don't appear to accept this fact, partly because they take Kerry's accusation personally. I don't believe Kerry said every soldier in Vietnam murdered innocents, but that too many did. And we know that: the My Lai massacre comes to mind, but look no further than the other Senator named "Kerry", Bob Kerrey, who was part of a platoon that massacred a village, as the New York Times Magazine revealed a few years ago.

So who's trying to abuse history? John Kerry, who has the evidence on his side (and, according to everyone, did some pretty brave things), or his critics, who want to pretend American GIs in Vietnam did nothing wrong?

Nice post on Rob Fannion's blog today on a variety of topics, but especially the eeriely authoritarian staging of the Bush presidency and campaign.

After a long hiatus, here's a quick post today. I've been busy moving to Seattle (and before that, attending a conference at Stanford). I'm going through a bit of culture shock adjusting to my new home, but as soon as I start my regular work routine, hopefully I feel feel more normal. It wouldn't hurt to have my bed and desk here, though...

I don't have time for a long news post, and have been a bit out of touch. So just a few election related items. The first regards Florida, where the GOP already seems to be starting up the intimidate-the-black-vote we know and love. See Bob Herbert for more details. Are state police going to randomly selected homes in a predominantly-black neighborhood to ask about voting? What is this, the bad old days of the South?

Of course, Jeb Bush's administration could try to assuage fears of state-run electoral fraud by creating a paper trail for ballots. But he won't. This article mentions the myriad opportunities for election machine meddling (along with an interesting run down on how the voters of Florida are leaning). And we already know the state of Florida tried to get a bunch of black non-felons thrown off the voting rolls again, as Paul Krugman mentions today.

If there were a "rogue state" out there where the re-election of the government depended on voting in a region governed by the president's brother, with unverifiable voting procedures, evidence of voter intimidation, and documented efforts to illegally disenfranchise opposition-supporters, well, let's just say we'd have what the Bushies consider cause for invasion and "regime change".

We can hope Florida won't be decisive in this year's presidential race. We can even hope that if it is pivotal, at least this time all the votes will be counted, uniformly, with the highest respect for the process of democracy. But we may as well face the likelihood that few of us will trust whatever results come out of the state, because it is clear that the people in charge would sacrifice democracy for partisan (and family) gain. Five years ago, I would have scoffed at the notion that American political leaders would show so little regard for the democratic process. So would most political scientists. We would have been quick to insist that the US is not Sierra Leone or even Argentina. But today...

Which brings me to my second topic. You can see my entry in a 2004 election pool, made up of political scientists, here; my entry is the top right (Kerry 292 electoral votes). Note that 8/9 of us picked Kerry to win it all, but 3/9 have Kerry "winning" Florida. I wonder how that number would change if we had faith in a fair election in Florida.