Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 251

The View From Your Window

Ålesund, Norway, 12 pm

A Rebuke From Within Against Obama’s Syria Policy

In an interview on Tuesday, former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford let loose with harsh criticism:

Ford, who served from 2010 to 2014, basically thinks that Obama was warned that Syria was going to hell, and did nothing to stop it.  “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat,” the ambassador said. “We warned even as long as two years ago that terrorist groups” would take advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a base of operations — a warning that, of course, turned out to be correct.

He also doesn’t see the deal removing most of Syria’s chemical weapons as making up for…much of anything, really. “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about ninety-three percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.” According to Ford, the State Department believed “as much as two years ago” that the US needed to give much stronger support to friendly, non-extremist Syrian rebels. Support the right guys, the argument goes, and the terrorism problem doesn’t loom so large.

Greg Scoblete takes down Ford’s argument for arming the “right” Syrian rebels:

Ford blithely brushed off the question of how the U.S. would ensure custody of those weapons by assuring us that the U.S. government had “information on reliable groups” whose “agenda was compatible with our national security interests.” Of course, even if the U.S. did have a finely tuned understanding of various rebel groups and how they would act if they were to receive large shipments of U.S. weapons (a skill that Washington has curiously failed to manifest elsewhere) this is hardly the only argument against arming factions in Syria’s civil war.

A more serious objection is that backing one side to “victory” does nothing more than implicate the U.S. in the creation of yet-another failed state. Ford, and those cheering him on, have a [surprisingly] naive faith in the power of Syria’s rebel groups to not only depose Assad but to stand up a relatively cohesive and secure state in his wake. Where is this faith coming from? It couldn’t be from Iraq or Libya, where the U.S. directly and indirectly toppled regimes only to see chaos flower in the aftermath. The U.S. directly implanted a government in Afghanistan at the cost of billions of dollars and is now leaving the country at the mercy of a still-potent insurgency.

Larison piles on:

Ford unintentionally draws attention to some of the main reasons why it has never made sense to arm any part of the Syrian opposition. First, there is no such thing as a truly “reliable” group in these conflicts. No matter how agreeable a group’s stated agenda and ideology may appear, the U.S. gains no meaningful influence and control over the groups that it arms, and it cannot rely on these groups to do anything except pursue their own goals. In the short term, that may seem expedient because they claim to have similar goals, but that guarantees nothing later on. The main problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks information about the groups requesting weapons, though it might, but that it doesn’t know what will happen if it succeeds in promoting regime change by proxy.

But Walter Russell Mead agrees with Ford that Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria has created international security problems:

Twelve thousand foreign fighters, 3,000 of whom come from Western nations, have entered Syria as jihadists since the war began. The prospect of experienced terrorists with Western passports, native accents, and ties to local communities returning home to the United States and Europe presents a daunting security challenge. … The Soufan Group, an international intelligence and security firm, offered a stark warning this weekend that, as a result of the Syrian war, al-Qaeda “is probably in a better position now than at anytime since October 2001.” On Tuesday, Bashar al-Assad held sham elections that sent a clear signal to the world that he was bound and determined to remain in power. Ford is just the latest of many Washington figures, professional as well as political, Democrat as well as Republican, to decry the President’s weakness in response to the ever-worsening crisis. Will he now act? Can he?

Beinart weighs Ford’s views alongside the similar argument that Vali Nasr makes in his book, The Dispensable Nation:

The Ford-Nasr critique is hardly self-evident. Nasr assails the White House staff for putting domestic politics too much at the center of foreign policy. But Obama’s refusal to take bigger foreign-policy gambles may reflect an accurate assessment of the domestic mood. (It’s noteworthy that the one time Obama did take a big overseas risk—the raid on Osama bin Laden—it was in pursuit of a goal Americans truly cared about). …

Either way, the Ford-Nasr critique deserves more attention because it’s the one most likely to influence Hillary Clinton, who was more supportive of arming Syria’s rebels than Obama, more supportive of a larger Afghan surge and, according to Nasr, more supportive of talks with the Taliban earlier on in the conflict. Intellectually, Clinton has been more influenced by the Balkan Wars than Obama has, and less by the trauma in Iraq. And her self-declared doctrine—“smart power”—which envisages the coordinated use of different aspects of American might, is closer to what Ford and Nasr are proposing than to the Obama Doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

How Not To Forget An Atrocity

Candlelight rally marks 25th #Tiananmen anniversary in Hong Kong ow.ly/xDbw9 http://t.co/fFuLIdxxCU—
CTV News (@CTVNews) June 04, 2014

Keating  that China’s tightly enforced collective amnesia about Tiananmen Square doesn’t extend to Hong Kong:

In contrast to the tense silence on the mainland, the commemoration of Tiananmen was very much in evidence in Hong Kong, where as many as 150,000 people attended a candlelight vigil [yesterday].  … Hong Kong is currently undergoing the dual and seemingly contradictory processes of becoming more closely integrated with mainland China while theoretically transitioning toward having a fully elected democratic government. But China and Hong Kong together aren’t just “one country, two systems”—another favorite slogan—they seem to be one country with two memories, and two very different understandings of recent history.

In addition to the regularly scheduled vigil, Rachel Lu reports on a smaller, more politically charged event that also took place in the city yesterday:

The organizers of the new gathering — two groups called Civic Passion and the Proletariat Political Institute – claim to espouse a complete rejection of the Chinese Communist Party and its rule, rather than holding out hope for reconciliation, reform, or redress of past wrongs. The large banner hoisted on the stage read in Chinese: “Don’t Need [Chinese Government] to Redress June 4″ and “Want the Demise of the Communist Regime.” The new gathering only turned out a small fraction of the attendance at its storied counterpart in Victoria Park. The organizers claimed more than 7,000 were present, but police estimated approximately 3,060.

Simon Denyer visits Hong Kong’s new Tiananmen Square museum:

In a tiny fifth floor room in an office building in Kowloon, Hong Kong, a museum was set up in April to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989, better known by some as “Tiananmen Square.” It has already already attracted about 6,000 visitors since it opened. Only a few dozen people can fit into the 800-square-foot exhibition space at a time, but by the end of Wednesday, about 400 visitors had come. Johnny Li, a 26-year-old staff member, said about 40 to 50 percent of visitors come from mainland China. “Some are surprised because they didn’t know the history of June 4, but some already know, and share and discuss with other people in the museum,” he said.

Simon Denyer points out that the anniversary comes at a time when Hong Kong’s ties to the mainland are severely strained:

Under the terms of the territory’s handover from British rule in 1997, China promised significant autonomy under the “one country, two systems” model. At the time, many here were happy to see the British go, but that sentiment has since gradually eroded. China has promised the territory universal suffrage and genuine democracy in 2017, when the job of chief executive, the most powerful political role in Hong Kong, next comes up for grabs.

But many here fear that Beijing will fix the contest, to ensure one of its local allies wins. There are also growing concerns that China is gradually diluting Hong Kong’s cherished civil liberties and media freedom, while a massive influx of tourists and immigrants from mainland China has caused growing local resentment. The resentment undermines any hope Beijing might have of persuading the people of Taiwan to ever join mainland China under a similar “one country, two systems” model, and it is a constant reminder of a democratic spirit among Chinese people that refuses to go away.

Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity, Ctd

The ‘Home’ children pictured in Connacht Tribune 1924. Calls for Govt inquiry #tuam #babies @TodaySOR @rtenews pic.twitter.com/gErGaCT2ma

— TERESA MANNION (@MANNIOT) June 4, 2014

In Ireland, there are stirrings for a full investigation into the staggering news that a former home for unmarried mothers and their children was effectively a death camp for infants, and close to 800 were buried in a septic tank. It’s important to note that we have not yet had a thorough investigation of the site, formal confirmation of all the alleged tiny corpses, or the kind of inquiry that could answer many as-yet-unanswered questions. But it’s notable that no one in the church or civil authorities have simply denied the account. The order of nuns responsible for this grotesque atrocity, and its subsequent cover-up, are apparently consulting with their bishop.

There are now calls to investigate all the sites once run by this sadistic, wicked order in order to discover how many children were neglected, abused and thrown away like so much trash. I’d say that’s a start. In my view, the entire order should be shut down by the Vatican until we have a much better understanding of these crimes, who knew about them, and when. There should also surely be a thorough attempt to find anyone still connected with this cover-up for investigation and possible prosecution. Like war crimes, these horrifying abuses should know no statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, it simply staggers me to find bloggers deflecting blame away from the church. So we find this:

What’s troubling to me is the insistence that the abuse that occurred at The Home is “Catholic” abuse. It also troubles me greatly that people are using hatred of Catholicism as an excuse for those who saw these starving, neglected children and did nothing to intervene. This easy scapegoating of Catholicism removes everyone’s responsibility and any need to make change for children suffering today. There is no rational reason for identifying this as “Catholic” abuse.

Pardon my language but yes there fucking is. These children were treated as sub-human because their births violated a Catholic doctrine that there can be no sex outside of marriage. The young women – denied contraception, of course – were equally subject to horrifying stigmatization, hatred, and inhumane rules that took their children away from them. None of this would have ever taken place without this doctrine, and the insistence that it be enforced without exception and relentlessly. No society has ever lived up to this standard, but in Ireland, where the church was fused with the state, they gave it about as good a try as possible. And in order to enforce it, in order to inculcate shame at the deepest level imaginable to prevent human love, passion and sex breaking out, cruelty was necessary. Whenever a society attempts to impose without exception an impossible abstraction on fallible human beings, such cruelty will always be necessary. You can check the roster of totalitarian and theocratic regimes for the results.

Rod Dreher comes back with the argument that the effective imposition by society, church and state of the no-sex-outside-marriage does not have to lead to atrocities like these. And since we have such a teaching still propagated and we no longer have this kind of horror in the West, he obviously has a point. But from the point of view of those who imposed this regime for much of the 20th Century in Ireland, this argument indicts itself. Today, without ruthless stigmatization of women who have sex outside marriage or of gay men and women, we have much higher levels of sex, illegitimacy, and perversion. From the point of view of the sexual sadists who imposed this regime, their worldview stands vindicated. See, they would argue. Sex is so primal a desire that the only way to get human beings to conform to the only valid Catholic norm, you have to brutalize gay people and women who have had sex before marriage. Or more to the point, you have to make illegitimate children, their mothers and gay people invisible. If their existence were confirmed, if it were even manifested in their own communities, then the entire edifice of Catholic sexual teaching would implode.

After all, isn’t that why Rod has pursued the Benedict option in our allegedly decadent society?

Without this kind of enforcement of sexual orthodoxy, our public square is riddled with examples of grotesque sin: gay people not only having sex but also marrying each other; young women exploring their sexuality with self-confidence and curiosity, protected by contraception; young men and women marrying later after many sexual partners; and an online sexual world where all kinds of options unknown even to Dante are instantly available. “See!” the ghosts of Tuam past would say. “These are the wages of sin. Our world was brutal and cruel and foul, but it prevented more sin than the current regime.” And in their understanding of sin, in which throwing hundreds of child’s bodies into a septic tank is a necessary evil but masturbating is wicked, they surely have a point.

Now do all regimes of theocratic sexual orthodoxy become this callous? Well, when you look at societies which are still like Ireland once was, where church and state were fused, you see much of the same horror: the dehumanization and subjugation of women, female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, and the brutal murder of gay people. Does Rod not see a pattern here? And the entire fiction of a more virtuous past is only made possible by literally making its victims as invisible as those infant bodies in a septic tank. The countless gay lives of intense psychic pain, the innumerable heart-breaks, the forced separation of mothers and children, the brutalization of innocents, and the immiseration of people whose only crime was to experience their own bodies in ways unsanctioned by authority: these are all buried in order to retain the lie that this sexual ethic is the only virtuous one.

There are sane and good arguments to be had about the best form of sexual and emotional life as an ideal and as a reality. But the absolutist paradigm in which any sex outside marriage is anathema is such an impossible standard for most that it will fail if not enforced with the kind of brutality seen in Ireland in the 1940s or Iran in the 2010s. My contention is that the rigidity of this standard is inextricably tied up with cruelty. And that cruelty is far, far greater a sin, than surrendering to our deepest nature, hurting no one. That’s the lesson I get from Jesus’ words to the adulteress at the well. That’s the lesson I get from the Gospels as a whole. Love one another; and forgive one another. And these before everything else; mercy before everything else; love before anything else.

That septic tank is one massive rebuke to all of that, which no rationalizing can rescue.

(Photo: The High Cross in the town square of Tuam, County Galway, circa 1990. By RDImages/Epics/Getty Images.)

The Price We Paid For Bergdahl

Zack Beauchamp profiles the five Taliban commanders we freed in exchange for our POW:

Internal Pentagon reports label all of them “high risks” to the United States. These Guanatanamo dossiers, helpfully reviewed by Daily Beast reporters Eli Lake and Josh Rogin, suggest that some of them have links to al-Qaeda and Iranian plots against American troops in Afghanistan.

Independent experts are somewhat skeptical of these claims. [Afghan Analysts Network's Kate] Clark, for one, calls the documents on the five inmates “peculiar, opaquely sourced and peppered with factual errors.” The “claims made in the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and in press reports sourced to un-named US officials,” she says, “frequently do not stand up to close inspection.” But even if we throw the US intelligence reports completely out the window, this prisoner swap should still be troubling. Even Clark concedes there’s good reason to believe [Mullah Mohammad] Fazl committed war crimes.

Eli Lake relays concerns from the intelligence community that Qatar, where the five detainees are being transferred, will accidentally-on-purpose lose track of them:

[T]here are other reasons U.S. intelligence officials are worried about Qatar. The emirate is a good place to raise money for terrorist organizations. Late last year, the Treasury Department placed sanctions on Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, a Qatari history professor and human rights activist, for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for al Qaeda’s affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen.

In March, David Cohen, the undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a speech to the Center for a New American Security that while Qatar is a longtime U.S. ally, it also has “for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability.” Cohen also referenced press reports that indicated Qatar’s support for extremists in Syria. The State Department’s latest report on counterterrorism says that while Qatar has cooperated with the United States in some important areas of counterterrorism, its efforts to stop fundraising for terrorist groups have been inconsistent.

Like Greenwald, Sean Davis suspects that Bergdahl was just the administration’s cover for closing Gitmo:

It was never about Bowe Bergdahl. Make no mistake: judging by the behavior of the White House as this story has unfolded, the Obama administration’s primary goal was not the return of likely deserter (and rumored defector) Bowe Bergdahl. The primary goal was making it easier to finally shut down Guantanamo Bay, a 2008-era campaign promise that President Barack Obama was regularly mocked for failing to keep. Bowe Bergdahl was just the perfect political cover, or at least he was supposed to be.

Allahpundit is on the same page:

The “euphoria” Obama expected after Bergdahl’s release was supposed to be the perfume masking the stench from sending five lethal degenerates back into the jihadi ranks as a prelude to closing Gitmo entirely. Remember, he said in his State of the Union address in January that this was the year he wanted the prison shut down; that was one month after the ransom idea for Bergdahl had been dropped. Having resolved to exploit his lame-duck status to the fullest in 2014 and proceed with shuttering Gitmo, he recognized that Bergdahl would be better used as a consolation prize in handing over Taliban leaders than as part of some dubious ransom deal.

Bazelon criticizes Obama for his willingness to let these high-risk Gitmo prisoners go while dozens of others remain locked up indefinitely despite having been ruled innocent and harmless:

[W]hat about the suffering of Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, the Syrian held in Guantánamo for 12 years without a trial, a man on the 2010 list of recommended transfers, who is being strapped against his will into a chair so a feeding tube can be forced into his nose and down his throat? The government doesn’t want to send Diyab back to Syria in the middle of the war there. Uruguay has offered to take him and five other detainees. Yet they’re still in Gitmo. As Andy Worthington writes at PolicyMic, for the 78 men cleared for transfer who remain imprisoned, “the release of the five Taliban prisoners is unlikely to cause anything but despair.”

P.M. Carpenter focuses on the nomenclature pundits are using to describe the “worst of the worst”:

Are the freed Taliban “warriors” terrorists? Were they prisoners of war? Are they jihadists? [the WaPo's Kathleen] Parker conflates the three as though there are no distinctions to be bothered with, or troubled by. Yet the distinctions are critical ones; there’s a vast gulf in meaning between “prisoner of war” and “terrorist,” and even between terrorist and “jihadist.” … President Obama released prisoners of war, precisely as George Washington did. Such clarity might not kill the right’s outrage–would anything?–but it would contribute to more calm in the mainstream debate, which, at the moment, is hopelessly muddled and all over the road.

Will Saletan defends making the deal on the same basis:

Sgt. Bergdahl was not a noncombatant. He was a prisoner of war, captured on the field of battle. Therefore, by definition, his capture wasn’t terrorism. Negotiating for his release, trading enemy combatants for our own combatant, isn’t a concession to terrorism. It’s conformity with the long-standing tradition of exchanging POWs.

According to Sen. Ted Cruz, “The reason why the U.S. has had the policy for decades of not negotiating with terrorists is because once you start doing it, every other terrorist has an incentive to capture more soldiers.” That’s ridiculous. Terrorists didn’t invent the capture of soldiers. It’s a basic military objective, with a standard option to trade the enemy’s soldiers for yours. The reason not to negotiate with terrorists is to discourage the seizure of civilians, not the seizure of soldiers. So Obama’s critics are wrong to believe that negotiating for Bergdahl sends a dangerous message to terrorists. But they’re also ignoring the message his abandonment would have sent to our troops, their families, and prospective military recruits. It would have betrayed our pledge that if you’re captured in service to our country, we’ll free you.

But a Taliban commander close to the negotiations confirms that the Bergdahl trade makes his compatriots more eager to capture American soldiers:

“It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people,” the commander said, speaking by telephone on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”

The commander has been known to TIME for several years and has consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity.

Previous Dish on Bergdahl here, here, here, and here.

MoDo-Proofing Edibles

Gillespie offers a qualified defense of MoDo’s pot column:

Dowd’s column—and her admirable willingness to talk frankly about her experience in all its inglory—raises real issues about the process by which pot legalization will be vetted. The fact is, there’s a societal learning curve that’s every bit as real as individual learning curves. It takes a while, and oftentimes a lot of trials and errors, for a society to figure out how to deal with major changes (divorce, gender and racial equality, etc.).

The sooner we acknowledge that the end of pot prohibition will require a lot of conversation about what works well and what doesn’t, the faster than the new normal of “marijuana on Main Street” will be accepted for the huge leap forward in freedom and peace that it really represents.

Jon Walker suggests that “the ‘Maureen Dowd test’ be the new, unofficial metric by which [edibles] regulations are judged”:

If legalization advocates want to avoid a potential political backlash the regulations don’t just need to be sensible and easy for a regular person to understand, they need to be idiot-proof. They need to be so clear that even someone who goes to buy edibles with a Maureen Dowd level of ignorance can’t say they misinterpreted the instructions.

The Colorado legislature has already approved new laws intended to do just that. While some people might find it annoying that future labels may have extra large instructions, edibles won’t come in certain shapes, and that packaging will need to clearly separate individual doses; that is what is necessary to make something idiot-proof.

Alyssa is more sympathetic:

She got much higher than she wanted to because she made the not-unreasonable assumption that a candy bar was a single serving, eating the whole thing in one go. “A medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices,” Dowd explains that she finds out later. “That recommendation hadn’t been on the label.”

It is one thing for experienced consumers to scoff at Dowd’s lack of knowledge. But she is not going to be alone, and asking for labeling or instructions is not unreasonable. Similarly, new marijuana consumers may look to analogous delivery mechanisms and social rituals when they are smoking joints for the first time, and expect that they ought to treat joints exactly like cigarettes.

Charles Pierce recalls “two less-than-pleasant experiences with marijuana and both of them involved eating the stuff rather than smoking it”:

These two episodes taught me two things — a) that, in terms of how quickly it hits you and how hard it hits you, eating dope is radically different than smoking it and, b) the only way to cope with the difference is to get the hell out of where you are and get out into the world in one way or another until your head settles down. The worst thing you could possibly do is determine that you will have your first serious marijuana experience by gobbling down an electric candy bar and then sitting there alone in your hotel room while waiting for the newspaper taxis to appear at your door, waiting to take you away.

Weissmann uses the the column to argue that “the cannabis business is probably the sort of industry that would be better off dominated by big, name-brand manufacturers”:

It’s perfectly fine to have government-mandated product testing. But it’s even better to have companies that mass produce a highly standardized product and are willing to invest in the technology to get it right every single time. From a safety perspective, you want a Hershey’s or Entenmann’s of edibles, rather than a hodge-podge of pot boutiques and small companies distributing locally. At the very least, we’d be better off with companies the size of large craft brewers, which tend to be more attentive to quality control than their tinier cousins, in part because they have the money to spend on it.

The Palinite Tendency And Bowe Bergdahl, Ctd

This is now becoming quite a spectacle, and it’s hard not to see Tomasky as prescient when he immediately grasped how the Bergdahl rescue would galvanize so many. There is the legitimate concern that this was a bad deal, of course. But the following factors bear remembering: the war in Afghanistan is drawing to a close; since we went to war against the Taliban regime, their POWs require repatriation and release; finding a way to do that while also getting our one POW back to safety is a perfectly legitimate option for a commander-in-chief to weigh in negotiations for ending the war; and the military ethic of doing everything possible to retrieve POWs is extremely deep (reiterated by Dempsey and McChrystal in the last week).

There’s still room for a debate, of course, but that’s not what we are witnessing. We’re witnessing something much more primal – and it reaches deep into the id of the American right. Michelle Malkin, as is her wont, put it all together yesterday:

The Bowe Bergdahl mess isn’t just a story about one deserter, but two.

Those two would be the president and the POW. In other words, this is classic Dolchstoss stuff. And what’s remarkable, in fact, given its emotional traction among the GOP base, is that it hasn’t all but defined this presidency.

Obama, after all, inherited two failed and catastrophic wars of occupation. He was elected in large part to end them. Since the wars had been failures, no “victory” was possible, despite the astonishing human and economic cost. My own fear back in 2007 and 2008 was that any attempted withdrawal from Iraq could lead to a humiliation that the right would then deploy brutally against the traitor Muslim in the White House. I feared we would become stuck in quicksand because the Palinite right could not accept failure and tar Obama as a surrender-monkey. I worried about the same dynamic in Afghanistan. A Vietnam-style departure, handing the country back to the forces of Islamist extremism, would also be catnip for the Palinites. Even though they knew the war could not be “won”, they could pivot to blame Obama for “surrender without honor.”

That the president has somehow managed to extricate the US from those two catastrophes without such a rightist revolt is, to my mind, the real story here. You can put that down to various factors:

the public’s own utter exhaustion with the war; the freshness of the disasters in people’s minds; and the canniness of Obama’s long game in Afghanistan – giving the military much of what it wanted in the “surge”, showing the impossibility of a permanent solution, and slowly, painstakingly, withdrawing over the longest time-table available to him – eight long years. This has been one of Obama’s least noticed achievements, and shrewdest political moves: ending two wars without being blamed for surrender.

What the Bergdahl deal does is give the right a mini-gasm in which to vent all their emotions about the wars they once backed and to channel them into their pre-existing template of the traitor/deserter/Muslim/impostor presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. This venting has been a long time coming, it springs from all the frustrations of losing wars, and it can have pure expression against a soldier with a hippie dad and a president they despise. It’s a bonanza of McCarthyite “stab-in-the-back” paranoia and culture war aggression. They don’t have to vent against Cheney, the true architect of the defeats, because now they have a cause celebre to pursue Obama over.

They also get to avoid the messy awful reality that Cheney bequeathed us: an illegal internment/torture camp with 149 prisoners with no possibility of justice or release. Permanent detention and brutal torture of prisoners are not issues to the right. They invariably refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary cost of Gitmo to the moral standing of the US or its increasingly tenuous claim to be a vanguard of Western values. Instead, they wallow in terror of the inmates – being so scared of them that they cannot even tolerate them on American soil – and impugn the very integrity and patriotism of a twice-elected president when he tries to untie the knot Bush left him.

They have no constructive solution to this problem, of course. They have no constructive solution to anything else either – whether it be climate change, healthcare or immigration. But they know one thing: how to foment and channel free-floating rage at an impostor/deserter president for inheriting the national security disaster they created. This they know how to do. This is increasingly all they know how to do.

And the beat goes on.

(Photo: Butters talks to reporters as he arrives at a closed door briefing on Capitol Hill on June 4, 2014. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Making Peace With Growing Old

Linda Fried suggests it’s the key to a long and happy life:

There is a growing body of impressive research showing that our attitudes toward aging affect our health, our resilience in the face of adversity, and our very survival. Becca Levy at Yale, a pioneer and leading researcher in this area, conducted a study that followed several hundred adults (50 years and older) for more than 20 years. She and her colleagues found that older adults who held more positive age stereotypes lived 7.5 years longer than their peers who held negative age-related stereotypes. …

Unfortunately, negative stereotypes are much more common than positive images; indeed, according to some researchers, ageism is more pervasive in our society than negative stereotypes based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. Our negative attitudes towards aging blind us to the fact that millions of people in their ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and beyond are robust, active, functional, experienced, capable, and talented – and that they want to remain engaged and contributing. However, we have not yet created the social structures, roles, and institutions to capitalize on our success in adding years to life by also adding life to years.

Quote For The Day

“When I entered the Prime Minister’s Office for my second term, I was summoned to Washington. ‘Not one brick,’ they told me (referring to settlement construction in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem). I was threatened specifically: ‘Not one brick.’ The pressure from the international community and the Americans was enormous. I don’t think anyone in Israel was under such pressure. And still, after five years on the job, we built a little more than “one brick.” But the important thing is to do it in a smart way, in a quiet way, without inflammatory statements.

Do you think it’s a problem for me to say, “I am a hero, I am strong, I don’t care about anything, what do I care what the world says?’” I don’t have any problem saying that, but it would be a lie. Whoever tells you that doesn’t deserve to be prime minister; he is a populist. This is not a future leader. A leader knows to stand up to international pressure by maneuvering.

Imagine yourself standing on a hill overlooking the whole valley. You get to see all the obstacles below from above – some from the right and some from the left – and then when you walk down, you know exactly where to go in order to avoid the obstacles. What matters is that we continue to head straight toward our goal, even if one time we walk right and another time walk left,” – Bibi Netanyahu, in a private speech to young Likud supporters, on his goal of permanent occupation and ethnic social engineering of the West Bank.

Translation: suckers!

(Photo: Abir Sultan – Pool/Getty Images)

Seattle Maxes Out The Minimum Wage, Ctd

Earlier this week, Seattle’s city council approved a measure to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 over the next seven years. Jordan Weissmann revisits the debate over whether this is a good idea:

The economics literature suggests that moderate increases in the minimum help workers more than they hurt them, because the raises outweigh the cost of lob losses. At $15, the effects might well be different. Some businesses may cut jobs. Others simply might not choose to open or expand in Seattle. Others could try to find ways to automate jobs. But, as Reihan Salam has written, the effects may also be more subtly damaging. As wages rise, businesses could simply seek to hire better educated and skilled employees, some of whom may well live outside the city limits but suddenly find themselves happy to commute for a fatter paycheck. … The upshot: the $15 minimum doesn’t have to turn Seattle’s labor market into a flaming wreck for it to cause harm.

Kevin Roose calls the minimum wage hike “a Kennedy School study in shifting the Overton window on contentious issues”:

Supporters of the bill are hoping it will spread. Already, labor activists in cities like Milwaukee, Providence, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, and New York City are calling for similar wage hikes.

And crazier things have happened — even though economists warn that raising the minimum wage by such large amounts could wreak havoc in the labor markets, it’s still a political slam-dunk for progressive politicians hoping to play up their populist bona fides.

But taking the $15 minimum wage nationwide won’t be easy. Seattle’s experiment had a lot of factors in its favor: a progressive voter base; an already-high minimum wage above $9 an hour, which made $15 seem like a lesser jump; the timing of a mayoral race in which both candidates found it politically advantageous to back the wage hike. Not every city can replicate that. And on a federal level, the minimum wage seems stuck in the single digits — Congress and big business have so far successfully fought President Obama’s attempt to phase in a $10.10 minimum wage.

In the short term, it appears that the minimum-wage battle will be fought on a city-by-city basis. Which makes it much more interesting to watch.

Paul K. Sonn is hoping for that trend:

Looking abroad, Australia has a minimum wage of more than $15 per hour yet enjoys low unemployment and strong growth. Closer to home, Washington, D.C., instituted a substantially higher minimum wage and benefits standard for security guards in 2008, successfully transitioning an $8 occupation to one where guards now earn $16.50 in wages and benefits without evidence of ill effects on the commercial real estate industry, which pays the guards’ wages.

Similarly, Los Angeles, San Jose and St. Louis have all phased in minimum wages and benefits of more than $15 for airport workers without adverse effect. And San Francisco already requires all employers to provide minimum wages and benefits that together total $13.18 per hour for large employers, yet the restaurant industry has seen stronger growth in the city than in surrounding counties. Equally significant, it is not just workers but also growing numbers of business voices that are backing the need for transitioning our economy to a $15 minimum wage.

But Scott Shackford doesn’t approve:

There’s … already some information about how a $15 minimum wage may affect the area. Voters set a minimum wage for jobs at hotels and parking garages serving the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to $15 last fall. The change went into effect with the new year. The Seattle Times looked at some of the impact in February. While acknowledging that it’s still too soon to truly evaluate the consequences, the paper noted some price increases and “casualties” …  Several business leaders in Seattle’s Asian community submitted a commentary to the weekly warning about the terrible impact of the wage increase on immigrants and minority-owned small businesses. Read it here.

Scott Sumner, who prefers a low minimum wage supplemented with wage subsidies, explores some counterintuitive outcomes that may arise from the wage hike:

Liberals tend to argue that low wages are a huge problem for the poor.  Thus a $15 dollar wage would offer significant improvements in living standards (BTW, I agree with this, although I’d prefer the government paid the bill.)  Let’s say liberals are correct, and that the Seattle policy is a huge boon to the poor.  In that case low wage workers from other cities should flood into Seattle looking for one of those precious jobs.  Yes, the cost of living is high, but no higher than some other bigger affluent cities with minimum wage rates that are far lower.  The low-skilled workers will park themselves in the informal economy, or live off welfare, until they find one of those jobs.  Thus we have the odd situation where the law will be a boom to low wage workers if and only if it leads to a large rise in Seattle’s unemployment rate.

“But in the longer run,” John Aziz writes, “I highly doubt that a higher minimum wage is the right policy to ensure a decent standard of living for the poor”:

The key factor is the emerging economic phenomenon of robotics. Robots have already taken over many roles in the manufacturing industry, and are now moving into roles including food servers, bank tellers, telephone operators, receptionists, mail carriers, travel agents, typists, telemarketers, and stock market traders. The higher the minimum wage goes, the lower the threshold will go for robots to replace humans in many minimum wage roles.

While there are sure to remain many jobs that still require a human touch — think personal assistants, janitors, home health aides, and security personnel — and while lots of new human professions will likely emerge, the automation revolution is already putting lots of people out of work. To me, this suggests a better approach is universal basic income, a version of which was first advocated in America by Thomas Paine.

Previous Dish on Seattle’s minimum wage hike here and here.