Rhinocrisy

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment - I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General - having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now - are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important - one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

What a brave, brave man. His noble spirit embiggens us all.

More nobility from the media:

The mainstream media by and large seem to agree with Bush that the ABC News Report wasn’t so startling, and they have given Bush’s remarks almost no coverage. There was no mention of Bush’s admission in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. There was nothing on the major wire services. And nothing on CNN, CBS or NBC.

Finally, this video from “Condimustgo.com” is worthwhile. Although I might add ‘to jail’ to the end of that URL.

Many liberals are crowing happily about a new study in Nature Neuroscience that purports to prove (basically) that liberals are better at parsing input correctly than conservatives. The study authors are careful to be politically circumspect in their statements, saying that this is only one test, conservatives might do better at others, but it’s pretty clear what they want to say: liberals are smarter.

It’s hard to argue with their results. As you can see from the figure I stole from their paper, the correlation is quite strong. A regression like that is an experimentalist’s wet dream. The only question is, what are they measuring?

I’m deeply skeptical of studies like this. Political orientation is not plastic; people change their views all the time, especially during college (which I imagine is where the bulk of the study sample was drawn from). Case in point: me. When I started school in 1996 I was a Dole supporter, staunchly conservative. When I graduated at the end of 1999 I was an anarcho-communist. Furthermore, political orientation is a very ill-defined quantity. “Liberal” or “conservative” may be taken on many, many different bases, and I would strongly dispute the authors’ contention that there is a political “spectrum”. I do not believe in a holistic “liberal” worldview, any more than I believe in a holistic “conservative” worldview. These are constructions imposed on public discourse by a self-feeding party machinery, and I don’t think actual political viewpoints can be so neatly broken down. I therefore find it hard to believe that there should be fundamental neurological attributes correlating with political orientation. How, then, do I explain these results?

Just prior to performing the trials, the subjects are given a questionnaire on their political orientation. That is, the study primes them to think about politics before they enter the trial. The study methodology relies on the ability of the subject to distinguish between the letter ‘M’ and the letter ‘W’.

Liberals have spent the past eight years imbuing the symbol ‘W’ with a particularly strong sense of hatred. Since they are going into the study primed to think about politics, it stands to reason that those subjects self-identifying as liberals would not see the two alternatives as value-neutral. That is, conservatives are distinguishing between the letters “M” and “W”. Liberals are choosing between “Bush” and “Something Else”, and are therefore bringing different cognitive resources to bear on the task.

This is a conjecture, of course, and easily tested by using two other symbols (say, ‘b’ and ‘d’) that don’t have any political implications. But given the dubious nature of the proposition and the visceral nature of the reactions being measured, I suspect that the choice of letters goes a long way towards explaining this difference.

Tiny Revolution points to this story about Barack Obama’s decision to “seek foreign policy advice” from Colin Powell. Since Obama’s campaign apparently leaked this news, we may surmise that the intent is less related to actual advice and more related to tying Obama’s image to Powell’s, establishing him as a respectable, establishment figure rather than some loose cannon leftist. This seems to me to be almost trivially true - if Obama really WERE a maverick, a progressive and a force for change then he could not possibly have garnered the level of support he has - tens of millions of dollars worth of support. No - Obama is simply a well-spoken, intelligent man with resolutely centrist politics who happens to be black.

I’ve felt this way about Obama from the very moment he hit the national stage, back in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. Then a lowly state legislator, Obama gave the keynote address at the DNC, catapulting him to fame and a Senatorial seat. I remember many liberals speaking glowingly of Obama^*, but upon reading his speech, I wasn’t exactly sure what they were so pleased with. Obama’s speech was rife with the usual plaudits for traditional Americana. “God, what a great country we live in!” was the sense I got. Yes, put a goatee and glasses on the man and he might look like Malcolm X, but he is a long way away from “By any means necessary”.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our Nation — not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That is the true genius of America, a faith — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — at least most of the time.

The words of this speech would ring completely hollow if they were spoken by any white politician. “That we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm,” might seem ironic to most black people in this country, who suffer with worse - hah - infant mortality than all of the developed world and at rates more than twice as high as whites. If a black Republican had made a speech like this it would have been roundly rejected as slavish and sycophantic.

I’ve found relatively little worthy of praise in Obama’s political stances. For example, his behavior during the reprehensible Israeli bombing of Lebanon last year was, appropriately, also reprehensible. True, he has “opposed the Iraq war from the start” (though with what level of energy and devotion might be in dispute). This, however, is a fairly minimal criterion from which to proceed. The Bush Administration is now, quite clearly, a bunch of maniacal thugs. Prudently stepping back from crazed thuggery does not make you a model human being, and I would be disappointed if the only result of the past eight years was to make us sigh in relief to be back in the dessicated cradling arms of our usual liche-kings.

^* The racial politics of most liberal’s adoration of Obama should pretty much go without comment - “He’s black, but he’s not too black.”

I just got home from the victory party of one of the few true liberals who took or kept office tonight. This was Chris Daly, a supervisor here in San Francisco, who uses hardball methods to keep business in check to labor and developers in check to those they could displace. He’s a capitalist who applies basic humanism to the process of wealth creation — something that has been lacking on the national stage for decades.

Meanwhile, on the cable teevee, liberals across the country are dancing to “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, blogging furiously and generally over-enthusing for the marginal victory by the less reactionary party in our national electoral contests.

Personally, I am thrilled to see that dirty tricks and November surprises didn’t break up all the Democrats’ momentum (though they might have wiped out a few house and senate seats). I am a partisan for fair play. But I’m not going to wet myself over the success of a bunch of imperialists over the more-ignorant-and rapacious imperialists to their right. Hell, I’m not even wetting myself over the victory of an avowed leftist just to the south. (You don’t think that’s close? Don’t forget that Nicaragua is closer to Texas than Texas is to Washington, DC.)

The thing is, revolution doesn’t happen because a few new faces sit in leather chairs in Washington. Revolution is inside each of us. And as long as 100 to 200 million people in the world’s richest nation think that money is the ultimate goal in life, that force solves problems and that the eternal salvation awaits those who impose the “Good” Book on others, I don’t think this country has much chance of becoming a force for good.

And changing those attitudes requires going out and talking — and more importantly, listening — to people. Something that the Democrats, to their credit, did some of in this campaign. I would like to be able to say the same of us bloggers.

update after a bit of sleep: Does this election validate the Naderite line from 2000, that having George Bush in office will take down the U.S. empire? Latin America, the Arab world and BRIC are all rebelling, and now there’s a Socialist in the Senate. Interesting.