As anyone who tours the Montana blogs knows, I spend most of my wasteable time at right wing places, engaging in debate with the likes of “Max Bucks”, Craig Moore, Dad, “Jerry Chung”, aka “Rook”, “Knight”, and “Checker”. There’s also Rob Natelson and Steve somebody-or-other (“Rabid Sanity”), Carole (Missoulapolis), Shackleford (MtPundit), Gregg Smith, and the late-great Craig Sprout of mt.politics.net. And Budge. Big Swede and rightsaidfred are always interesting. And there are others I am missing but do not intend to slight. It seems there are far more conservative blogs these days than liberal, and far more conservatives posting than liberals.

Usually the exchanges are testy, and I get called names, and occasionally resort to saying things I wish I hadn’t. Most times I maintain my cool, but from the other side, it appears as though I am thoughtless and dogmatic. In the end, I regret those exchanges that bring out my worst and their worst. (I do, however, love to taunt Budge. He gets very insulting. Yesterday I stopped at “incoherent drool”. I’d bet he said something interesting after that, but I have no idea what. He lost me.)

They will not change. A few of them are thoughtful – they know who they are. But for the most part, it does no good to be kind to them. And that is a shame, because the thoughtful conservatives have a lot to offer us, and we need to listen to them. I’ve been around liberals enough to know that they can be light and feathery, and not hard-nosed enough to deal with the world as it really exists. I’m not so dogmatic as I appear, but I do react to dogma with counter-dogma, often knowing I am merely being a contrarian. To yield an inch is to lose a yard.

Anyway, it occurred to me this morning that it would not hurt to pick on an idea taken from a right-wing perspective, and give it due respect. The one that instantly comes to mind is the notion that to give people unearned benefits destroys their individual initiative, and makes them wards of the state.

It’s true. We’ve all seen it. In its worst form, it is the single mother, unwedded or abandoned and irresponsible, kept away from her kids by the requirement that she work a job that doesn’t cover the cost of childcare, which thereby becomes a public expense. She has us over a barrel – her uterus is a claim on the public treasury. The kids are victims who will soon make their own claims on us. The whole situation is tragic.

Then there is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was revamped during the 1990’s into a pure welfare program. The EITC started out as a means of refunding payroll tax to low income workers, but has become something else. It is heavily weighted towards people with kids. Again, at its root, is irresponsible reproduction – people who cannot afford kids having kids. It’s troubling.

I see the point of the other side of that debate. I don’t know what to do about it – raise more responsible adults? Birth control? Mandatory sterilization? We tread a line between individual freedom and tyranny. Liberals tend to glamorize these people as victims, when we have all met them. That slice of humanity that I have dealt with is often drugged or liquored up, useless to themselves and to us. The conservatives are right about them, and the liberals too soft to give them the tough love they need.

That is just one of many points on which conservatives are right, and yet … they don’t have a solution for us. Neither does our side. It is seemingly intractable, though deep down many conservatives simply want them to perish. I have tended lately to fall back on something offered years ago by William F. Buckley – that it is not a bad thing to feed these people, but don’t feed them too well. Instead of food stamps used to buy starchy and sugary processed foods that make us all fat, give them access to basic foodstuffs. Let them eat, but not enjoy it too much. To the degree possible, resist giving them cash. They usually don’t spend it well. Liquor stores often benefit.

And about having all them kids? Birth control on every corner. Free condoms, pills, shots in the arm – whatever it takes. We can’t stop them from copulating, but we can make it less productive.

Anyway, I depart the conservative philosophy regarding indigents when it comes to two things that can help lift them out of both moral and physical poverty – education and health care.

Some other time.

The Obama Administration has begun to take shape, I am reminded of the haughty arrogance of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, two of the intellectual powerhouses that led us into Vietnam. McNamara has to a large degree repented for his sins. So too has Bundy, to the extent he was able.

I’m thinking of Vietnam, of course – a catastrophe given us by Kennedy’s Whiz Kids, David Halberstam’s “Best and Brightest“, the leaders of academia and industry whom JFK recruited to give his administration a spit-shine unlike any before.

As I watch Obama assemble his team, I’m looking for parallels to Camelot, and I don’t have to look far. The haughtiness of high intellect is there, the star power, the ability to make grand mistakes in a grand way.

And the playing field is also there – Afghanistan. I don’t know what we are fighting about over there – the origins of 9/11? Maybe so, maybe not. But I do suspect that if we were to pull out now, just leave it be, we’d be far better off. The place is a desolate wilderness whose most meaningful contribution to improvement of the human condition is the annual poppy seed crop.

Afghanistan is some sort of power vacuum – a place that will be occupied by others if we don’t. It is strategically situated between Pakistan and Iran – I suppose that matters. But I wonder what the worst would be – what if the Taliban took over? Will the people suffer? Of course. But the U.S. is not concerned with the suffering of ordinary people, aptly demonstrated in Iraq. There is something more at stake here. I wonder if, as in Vietnam, our leaders have given exaggerated importance to the place as egos slowly displace strategy.

Where Alexander failed, where the Russians failed, we will succeed. We are the exceptions.

Succeed in what? Devastation of an already impoverished citizenry? A massive display of industrial firepower on an agrarian countryside? Sounding familiar? What is there to prove?

Obama, during his campaign, had to appear hawkish to avoid the perception of a weak-kneed conflict-adverse liberal. Iraq was unpopular, Afghanistan supposedly the “good war”. So he staked his phallus on it – that’s where he chose to be a man. My fear is that he will follow through, fearing a legacy of retreat.

That’s the Vietnam mindset.

We can only hope that calmer, lesser minds prevail – that the Obama Administration is also stocked with people of vision and humility who know enough not to spend our youth in an unwinnable quagmire.

I just freed a whole bunch of comments from the approval queue. I did not know they were there. They go back a little ways.

For some reason, WordPress is intercepting comments with only one link – it is set at two. I have reset it to three. I hope it works.

Some passing thoughts on the FISA bill:

The ACLU is taking the government to court on the matter. There’s only limited hope that this effort will succeed, as the Bushies have been busily packing the courts these past eight years with right wingers. But right now the courts are our only hope. It’s important to see that the two-party system did not protect our liberties. It rarely does. First, unwanted change is forced upon us (Republicans) and then that change is incorporated into our status quo (Democrats).

As Glenn Greenwald notes (linked here, but only to main website), we don’t know and now will never know what abuses took place. I have suspected from the beginning illegal eavesdropping on politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizen activists. To suspect less of this administration is naive and foolish. These people have not missed an opportunity to abuse power, and to assume that they have been doing what they say they have been doing, using extra-judicial powers to spy on supposed “terrorists” requires suspension of disbelief.

Consequently, I naturally suspect that many of those in Congress who voted for the FISA bill have themselves been compromised by eavesdropping, and are therefore powerless to stop Bush. I know that sounds paranoid, but let me ask – when it comes to lowering standards, to achieving objectives by whatever Machiavellian scheme he and his advisers can devise, has Bush ever let us down? Is there a bottoming out with that guy?

The Democrats are the prime reason this bill passed. Obama was the prime reason the Democrats were unable to mount serious opposition. He cut their legs out from under them.

It’s an interesting spectacle. Not too long ago Democrats were poised and quite able to stop the nomination of Bush operative Michael Mukasey to the post of Attorney General. But at the last moment two quislings, Diane Feinstein and Charles Schumer, pulled the rug. Even when they can win, and win easily, they choose defeat. (Interestingly, at final count there were 40 votes in opposition to the Mukasey nomination, enough to filibuster, but no leadership to organize the opposition. Two conclusions: One, there was no will to fight, and two, many of those votes were probably not sincere.)

This time it was Obama who sold us out. It’s always someone. Democrats now are doing their usual dance, accepting this defeat but claiming he will be there for us in other battles, that once elected and with a stronger majority in Congress he will fight a better fight.

Don’t bet on it. This was his moment. This was the time to fight. We know him now. Nothing new going on here. Move along.

II just got done reading another right wing editorial about solving our energy woes by drilling more oil wells. (Investors Business Daily, “What Do the Democrats Take us For? – you have to have a subscription, but any damned fool could have written it for them, so don’t bother.) It’s inescapable logic, hence its appeal to the right, but also (typical of right wing thinking) overlooks a few things:

In peak oil terms, there’s a couple of hundred billion barrels left to be discovered, but they won’t come on line fast enough to offset the decline that is going to take place naturally as we use up existing reserves. That’s already happening. Has been for many years now.

Drilling for oil and finding oil are two different things. ExxonMobil these days invests more money buying back its own stock than it does exploring. There’s a reason – most of the significant deposits have been found. The elephants are gone, rapidly depleting. What’s left to explore now are areas under polar ice (soon to be freed), and in Iraq, which deliberately set aside potential reserves for future development. That’s a big reason for invading – a very big part.

The electric car, which was used in California for a short while before GM canned it, was developed in response to strict California regulations forcing development of zero-emission vehicles. The regulations were killed, the car vanished. Fact is, necessity does spur invention, and the market is slow to respond, since it waits for an emergency, while government can be ahead of the game and create necessity through regulation.

If global warming is real … ah, don’t go there.

Even successful drilling will not overcome the declining dollar and market speculation. In terms of the euro, the price of oil hasn’t gone up that much. And since most oil is held in futures contracts hidden behind a black curtain, we don’t really know what it would trade for in a truly free market.

Why the push now to drill drill drill? It’s a never ending saga. Corporations have lobbyists because they want stuff from government – stuff like subsidies, exemption from regulation and, in this case, cheap access to the commons – our public lands. They are using the current price run-up to pressure the public into allowing them to drill the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That’s but one prize dangling before their eyes – others are protected offshore areas off our coastal areas. Drilling these areas won’t solve our energy problems – it will only extend the deadline by a few months. And it will be at least a decade before any new finds hit the market.

It’s public relations – the oil men are using current high prices to get the things they always want anyway. We need to hold the line. The real challenge right now is alternative energy, and it’s going to take a massive government effort to spur development. The private sector isn’t capable.

The private sector is not able to think long-term. They can’t see beyond next quarter’s results. Government, not subject to investor pressures to achieve instant results, can afford to think long-term.

I wrote a post in April of 2007 regarding Luis Posada Carriles, a known terrorist who killed 73 innocent people when he blew up a Cuban airliner in 1976. Since the victims were Cubans, they don’t count, and the U.S. has elected to shield Carriles, refusing his extradition to face charges. We are harboring a terrorist.

I concluded the post with the words “We should **** Washington.” I was referring to the fact that Bush (and Clinton before him) reserves the right to bomb any country that harbors terrorists.

I was reminded by commenter Sally Ramage that my closing words could (“should”) be construed as inciting terrorism. I quickly redacted. In viewing Ramage’s bio, I suspect that she is not a friendly offering counsel. This was not a warning to take lightly.

It’s a reminder of our repressive climate – “terrorism” is the new “communism” and is used as a lever to not only conduct aggressive wars and hostile activities abroad, but also to collar and silence our citizenry domestically. And it will continue for so long as Americans are cowed in fear.

Shame on us. Our founding fathers weep.

I ran across two stories that are kicking about.. They are seemingly unrelated, but for some reason bring to mind the subject of hypocrisy.

In the first story, the United States is claiming the right to kidnap British citizens wanted for crimes in this country. (See also: War of 1812.) Americans have bypassed traditional extradition procedures and grabbed people by force and brought them here for prosecution.

In the second story, which has been around for a while, Donald Rumsfeld had to flee from France into Germany to avoid possible arrest for war crimes. The scope of the accusations is narrow – out of a full spectrum of infamous crimes, he is wanted only for his role in the Abu Ghraib torture affair. He had to hightail it out of France. Nice to see this chicken hawk squawk and dodge and run.

Are the two stories related? Yes, I think so. Not sure why.