Nutjobs Ranting About Politics.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Michael Kinsley wrote a new piece on the stem-cell issue in yesterday's paper, and through the miracle of information technology I bring it to you. Dunno about anyone else, but I would pay to see a Kinsley/Laura Bush iron-cage match.

• Dance of the Stem Cells
  
  By Michael Kinsley
  Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page B07
  
  Maybe I missed it, but it seems as if Laura Bush has not had her Lady Macbeth Moment. This is the period, hallowed by tradition if not actually written into the Constitution, when the media discover that the president's wife is the power behind the throne. She is not the sweet helpmate she appears to be. Underneath, there is steel. In fact, she is a (insert a word -- there are more than one -- beginning with "b"). She is her husband's closest adviser and a fierce protector of his place in history. She curbs his partisan instincts or, alternatively, she keeps him on the ideological course. A well-known male rival for the president's ear has been fired on her instructions.
  
  Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush all had their moments. It was a challenge to fit Hillary Clinton into this template, but with a few little fixes (the demure helpmate stuff had to go), she was squeezed in. But when does Laura Bush get her turn? For almost four years she has loyally played along with the treacly conceit, assigned to her at the beginning of the administration, that her only public policy passion is libraries. As far as anyone knows, she has never questioned or failed to obey the instructions of the president's official advisers and spinmeisters. Of course, neither has her husband.
  
  Then last week she suddenly popped off about stem cells. But this was hardly her breakthrough moment. A lot of Republican politicians and operatives spoke out about stem cells last week, all miraculously making the same argument -- an argument so embarrassingly silly and disingenuous that it could only be an official campaign talking point. Anyone thinking for herself would have a hard time getting it out without giggling.
  
  As Laura Bush put it, George Bush "is the only president to ever authorize federal funding for embryonic stem cell research." She noted that "few people know" this. Few may have known it, but many might have guessed. It is true indeed that Bush's predecessors, from George Washington to Bill Clinton, failed to fund embryonic stem cell research. Even Abraham Lincoln. Not a penny for stem-cell research from any of them. Historians believe this might have been because it didn't exist yet. But that's just a guess.
  
  George Bush gave this nascent research a tiny sliver of money and piled on a smothering load of restrictions. As Laura Bush did not note, that makes Bush the only president ever to authorize federal rules against stem cell research.
  
  It is characteristic of George W. Bush that he would not see, or have no patience for, the irony of justifying a policy on moral grounds and then, when it comes under attack, claiming that the policy is not having the very effect he is supposed to want. Meanwhile, it is characteristic of the Bush political machine to be utterly fearless about insisting that things are the way it would be convenient for them to be, despite all evidence that things are the way they really are.
  
  The purpose of Bush's stem cell policy is to discourage medical research using embryos. Bush is supposed to think that these clumps of a few dozen cells are every bit as human as the people who will suffer or die from diseases that stem cells could cure. He had better believe that, because stem-cell research uses embryos being discarded by fertility clinics and doesn't actually add to the embryonic death toll at all. Only a deep conviction about the humanity of these microscopic dots -- which have fewer human characteristics than a potato -- could justify sacrificing real human lives to make the purely symbolic point that these dots are human too.
  
  Scientists are in agreement that Bush's policy is succeeding. Stem cell research has been drastically slowed. Yet Bush surrogates now pretend that the policy's real success is its failure to stop this research completely. Hey! You're supposed to think all those embryos being used in privately funded research are human victims, remember? It's a huge tragedy, remember? Stop bragging about it.
  
  In a display of her husband's famous compassionate conservatism, Laura Bush scolded that "it really isn't fair to people who are watching a loved one suffer" to overplay the promise of stem cells. She said, helpfully, "We don't know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything."
  
  As someone with a loved one (myself, as it happens) who has the disease (Parkinson's) for which stem cells hold the most promise, please allow me to say: Thank you so much, Mrs. Bush, for trying to make sure that I don't get too hopeful. While your husband and Sen. John Kerry make a major issue out of who is more optimistic, it is inspiring to have a first lady with the courage to say: Let's be pessimistic! Optimism is unfair!
  
  But talk is cheap. While Laura Bush is destroying hope by the traditional method of spreading gloom and pessimism, her husband is bringing the pessimist's art into the 21st century by actually destroying the objective basis for hope. While she battles rhetorically against false hopes, he works to ensure that there is no hope at all.
  
  On balance, I think I prefer her approach.
  
  The writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were WDM in Iraq, and that they they were smuggled out of the country to Syria (inter alia?) before/during/after the invasion. Does this not suggest that invading Iraq was a really stupid way of dealing with the problem of Iraqi WMD? Or perhaps that we should have been prosecuting the war in order to prevent this outcome -- i.e., to get control of WMD? I'm just wondering why an outfit as conservative as the Washington Times thinks that they are defending the Administration by floating this claptrap.

Syria had WMD. It acknowledges as much. If Syria will do bad things with them, it could have done bad things before.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(2) I read last week that senior generals wanted something like 250,000 troops,* and that the smaller number came from civilians at the top of DoD. If I get bored, perhaps I'll try to find the story.

* eta/stp: Not Shinseki -- he testified that even more would be needed, as I recall.

According to Matthew Yglesias, who appears to be describing Franks' book, Franks wanted ~250,000 troops for the occupation, or about double what he got:

• Franks envisioned a force of somewhere near 250,000 thousand troops with reductions "tied to effective governance by Iraqis." At no point have we seen effective governance by Iraqis, but we haven't been anywhere near 250,000 troops since the end of "major combat operations."

This is not what I saw last week, which was a quotation of Franks' book, but it is to the same effect.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Michael Kinsley wrote a new piece on the stem-cell issue in yesterday's paper, and through the miracle of information technology I bring it to you. Dunno about anyone else, but I would pay to see a Kinsley/Laura Bush iron-cage match.

Ramesh Ponnuru responds

Kinsley writes that it's "embarrassingly silly and disingenuous" for Mrs. Bush to brag that her husband is the first president to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The research is new, notes Kinsley, and it's just as true that Bush is the first president "to authorize federal rules against stem cell research." Kinsley is wrong about that. President Clinton signed into law a restriction on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research that was arguably tighter than what Bush has done. He tried to interpret the law away, and Bush's policy is more restrictive than what Clinton wanted to do--but it's looser than what Clinton actually did.

Kinsley argues that it's inconsistent for Mrs. Bush to brag that privately-financed embryo research is going on. "The purpose of Bush's stem cell policy is to discourage medical research using embryos." If the Bushes believe that human embryos are human beings, then they shouldn't be bragging about how the private sector is killing them unimpeded. It's a cute argument, but it doesn't quite work. "Discouraging research using human embryos" is one possible purpose of the administration's policy, although not one that the president has to my knowledge declared to be his purpose. If it were his purpose, he could reasonably point out the lack of restrictions on private-sector research as evidence of the moderation of his policy. But in any case, "not putting the imprimatur of the federal government on this research" and "not forcing taxpayers who strongly oppose this research to pay for it" are also purposes that Bush's policy serves, and those purposes are not at all inconsistent with Mrs. Bush's remarks.

Kinsley lays into Mrs. Bush for talking about how promoters of expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research are falsely raising people's hopes. He does not even bother to address the evidence, by now widely known, that that is exactly what is going on with respect, for example, to Alzheimer's disease.

Kinsley, in passing, says that human embryos have fewer human characteristics than a potato. Really? Presumably they have some important human characteristics--we're not having a huge controversy over stem cells taken from sheep embryos.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Ramesh Ponnuru responds

Kinsley writes that it's "embarrassingly silly and disingenuous" for Mrs. Bush to brag that her husband is the first president to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The research is new, notes Kinsley, and it's just as true that Bush is the first president "to authorize federal rules against stem cell research." Kinsley is wrong about that. President Clinton signed into law a restriction on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research that was arguably tighter than what Bush has done. He tried to interpret the law away, and Bush's policy is more restrictive than what Clinton wanted to do--but it's looser than what Clinton actually did.

I have no idea who is right on this point, and have nothing to add. Ponnoru should have stopped here, because it gets much worse . . . .

Kinsley argues that it's inconsistent for Mrs. Bush to brag that privately-financed embryo research is going on. "The purpose of Bush's stem cell policy is to discourage medical research using embryos." If the Bushes believe that human embryos are human beings, then they shouldn't be bragging about how the private sector is killing them unimpeded. It's a cute argument, but it doesn't quite work. "Discouraging research using human embryos" is one possible purpose of the administration's policy, although not one that the president has to my knowledge declared to be his purpose. If it were his purpose, he could reasonably point out the lack of restrictions on private-sector research as evidence of the moderation of his policy. But in any case, "not putting the imprimatur of the federal government on this research" and "not forcing taxpayers who strongly oppose this research to pay for it" are also purposes that Bush's policy serves, and those purposes are not at all inconsistent with Mrs. Bush's remarks.

Bullshit. As club has pointed out, Bush thinks that embryos are human and should not be experimented on. If you think this, you shouldn't be bragging about private research -- you should be talking about criminalizing it.

Kinsley lays into Mrs. Bush for talking about how promoters of expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research are falsely raising people's hopes. He does not even bother to address the evidence, by now widely known, that that is exactly what is going on with respect, for example, to Alzheimer's disease.

If you can't attack him for what he does say, best to attack him for failing to point something else out. Although Kinsley did note that Parkinson's is one of the most promising areas, implicitly acknowledging that other diseases offer less hope.

Kinsley, in passing, says that human embryos have fewer human characteristics than a potato. Really? Presumably they have some important human characteristics--we're not having a huge controversy over stem cells taken from sheep embryos.

Kinsley didn't say that embryos aren't human at all. And they are so different from the rest of us that any similarity could not even have been detected until recent years.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by Ramesh Micah Ponnuru
But in any case, "not putting the imprimatur of the federal government on this research" and "not forcing taxpayers who strongly oppose this research to pay for it" are also purposes that Bush's policy serves, and those purposes are not at all inconsistent with Mrs. Bush's remarks.

It's a legitimate purpose behind a national science policy to avoid offending wingnuts? Let me guess: Bush's Moon base --- you know, the one that dropped off the face of the planet shortly after being announced --- was designed to avoid offending people who think we haven't been to the Moon yet?

I don't believe I should be forced to pay dependent care expenses for military personnel who can't get abortions at overseas hospitals and give birth to unwanted children thanks to GOP policies. Can I opt out of that line item?

Kinsley, in passing, says that human embryos have fewer human characteristics than a potato. Really? Presumably they have some important human characteristics--we're not having a huge controversy over stem cells taken from sheep embryos.

In other words, people who aren't thinking rationally must have some rational explanation for their thinking. Finally, I begin to understand why apparently smart people can be so dogged in their Bush apologetics. It's an article of faith that stupid members of the GOP are onto something.

[SlaveNoMore]

Atticus Grinch
Finally, I begin to understand why apparently smart people can be so dogged in their Bush apologetics. It's an article of faith that stupid members of the GOP are onto something.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

-- Jean Cocteau

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Since you mentioned Tommy, the real question is:

Do you agree with Tommy Franks that Doglas Feith is: "The stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

If so, what does that say about those who appointed him and rely on him?

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(2) I read last week that senior generals wanted something like 250,000 troops,* and that the smaller number came from civilians at the top of DoD. If I get bored, perhaps I'll try to find the story.

* eta/stp: Not Shinseki -- he testified that even more would be needed, as I recall.

That was Shalikashvili -- Chairman of the JCS at the time (about March, 2003). He testified to Congress that roughly 1/4 million U.S. troops would be needed for up to five years to stabilize Iraq. The Pentagon (i.e. Runsfeld's office) very publicly disagreed immediately thereafter.

IIRC, Shalikashvili was moved out of his post soon thereafter and replaced with General Meyers. I'm not clear on whether that had been previously scheduled (in reality, as opposed to spin).

S_A_M

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Do you agree with Tommy Franks that Doglas Feith is: "The stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

It's really no wonder why the GOP is so anti-intellectual, when you stop and consider the intellectuals with whom they're most familiar.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
That was Shalikashvili -- Chairman of the JCS at the time (about March, 2003). He testified to Congress that roughly 1/4 million U.S. troops would be needed for up to five years to stabilize Iraq. The Pentagon (i.e. Runsfeld's office) very publicly disagreed immediately thereafter.

I don't know what you're thinking of, but this article from the NYT from February 2003 is a blast from the past:

• In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon's second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general's assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.
  
  Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
  
  "We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion." Mr. Wolfowitz's refusal to be pinned down on the costs of war and peace in Iraq infuriated some committee Democrats, who noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the budget director, had briefed President Bush on just such estimates on Tuesday.
  
  "I think you're deliberately keeping us in the dark," said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. "We're not so naïve as to think that you don't know more than you're revealing." Representative Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, also voiced exasperation with Mr. Wolfowitz: "I think you can do better than that."
  
  Mr. Wolfowitz, with Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, at his side, tried to mollify the Democratic lawmakers, promising to fill them in eventually on the administration's internal cost estimates. "There will be an appropriate moment," he said, when the Pentagon would provide Congress with cost ranges. "We're not in a position to do that right now."
  
  At a Pentagon news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld echoed his deputy's comments. Neither Mr. Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, by name. But both men were clearly irritated at the general's suggestion that a postwar Iraq might require many more forces than the 100,000 American troops and the tens of thousands of allied forces that are also expected to join a reconstruction effort.
  
  "The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark," Mr. Rumsfeld said. General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: "I would say that what's been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers — are probably, you know, a figure that would be required." He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.
  
  A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. "He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment," Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.
  
  In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.
  
  In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, many nations agreed in advance of hostilities to help pay for a conflict that eventually cost about $61 billion. Mr. Wolfowitz said that this time around the administration was dealing with "countries that are quite frightened of their own shadows" in assembling a coalition to force President Saddam Hussein to disarm.
  
  Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. "I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact," Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables. Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.

We now know that Rumsfeld's explanation that Franks would determine the final number was a snow job, since Franks wanted something like double what he got.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
It's really no wonder why the GOP is so anti-intellectual, when you stop and consider the intellectuals with whom they're most familiar.

I know one guy who's got, like, 40 patents.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were WDM in Iraq

So are you saying that there were never WMDs in Iraq? If so, how did all those Kurds die? And if there were WMDs in Iraq, where are they now? Do you honestly believe that SH destroyed them and left no records of that?

There are fucking records detailing the fraud occurring in the oil for food program. Why wouldn't there be any records of destroying the WMDs?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Not Me
So are you saying that there were never WMDs in Iraq? If so, how did all those Kurds die? And if there were WMDs in Iraq, where are they now? Do you honestly believe that SH destroyed them and left no records of that?

There are fucking records detailing the fraud occurring in the oil for food program. Why wouldn't there be any records of destroying the WMDs?

I don't think anyone now thinks that Iraq had nuclear or biological weapons, though I could be wrong about the latter. So we are really talking about chemical weapons.

Chemical weapons are expensive and of limited military usefulness. E.g.:

• Just as it is easy to underestimate the importance of conventional explosives, it is easy to exaggerate the lethality of most chemical weapons. Many forms of lower level attacks using chemical weapons might do no more or less damage than attacks using conventional weapons. . . . Large high explosive weapons can easily be equal to both chemical and radiological weapons as “weapons of mass destruction.”
  
  It is also an illusion that the effects of chemical weapons are always radically worse or more repellant than the damage done conventional weapons. No one who has actually visited a battlefield and seen anyone with a fragmentation wound in the stomach and then seen a prisoner affected by a moderate dose of mustard gas is going to accept for a second that one casualty is somehow worse than another.

Link. This report was written before 9/11, which certainly proved the point.

For these reasons, one can understand why Iraq -- under the pressure of sanctions -- might decide to give up its chemical arsenel. In addition, chemical weapons deteriorate, and are expensive to maintain. Also, we know that weapons were destroyed after the first Gulf War under UN auspices. It also does not surprise that records are incomplete. Max Weber did not have modern Iraq in mind when as an example of bureaucracy's ideal type, and not just because he died too soon.

[the Spartan]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I know one guy who's got, like, 40 patents.

Not me. I know one patent lawyer who has 40 socks though.