perfidy

Or something. Drudge has linked to an article by Clifford May in the National review online, which suggests that the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA was not exactly, well, secret. If this is the case, then there was no "outing" of a CIA agent, and therefore no treason and no reason for getting our collective panties in a bunch.

Remember that the primary focus of this is still the uraniumgate pseudo-scandal, and that the British still insist that their intelligence was correct, and that Saddam was trying to buy Uranium somewhere in Africa. Also, Wilson, by his own admission, spent several days drinking mint tea and talking to people, and on the basis of this thorough investigation concluded that Saddam wasn't trying to get the fissionable materials. It sounds as if Wilson, who was a vocal opponent of the administration before his mission, was doing a decent job of discrediting himself before any of this happened, which makes you wonder why someone like Karl Rove would go to this effort to do it himself. If Karl Rove is the satanically brilliant Machiavel with his hand working the strings controlling marionette Bush, why would he be so stupid as to commit an easily discovered treasonous act? We have a problem with conflicting conspiracy modes.

Unless I hear a lot more evidence, or at least a significant amount of convincing evidence, this goes into my unlikely at best folder. It tastes a lot like the BUSH LIED!!! story we've been hearing so much of lately.

Is it possible?

Because that's incredibly illegal*.

Dan Drezner sure is pissed off about it. (see also an exhaustive list of links to updates at Drezner's site)

And all Condi can say is "we don't recall"?!?

[update] Looks like Ross has beaten me to this story. Well, la de dah and a tip of the hat for this insight " since the demise of the Independent Counsel statute, there isn't any way to get an unbiased look inside the White House. "

* I originally used the word "treason" here, but that word's bandied about all too freely these days. However, in the words of Seymour Skinner, "Prove me wrong, children! Prove me wrong!"
What, you ask?

From the Post:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

That.

When I was a tot, I remember reading an old Mad Magazine history of the United States. The civil rights era was summed up by one panel: a group of African Americans were in the background, singing "We Shall Overcome." In the foreground, a group of dull-looking whities were looking smug, and one was saying "they can over come, as long as they don't come over here." Funny, funny stuff. Riiight.

What does this have to do with the price of soy sauce at Lucky Star Grocers of Delancey Street?

This: The ACLU has finally gotten around to suing the Secret Service for arresting anti-Bush protesters who have the temerity to wave a negative sign in sight of our hallowed Regis Noster. Hope they win big.

Story via Reason's hit and run.

The New York Times is reporting that MiniLuv--oops, I mean, The Justice Department, is "using its expanded authority under the far-reaching [USA-PATRIOT Act] to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said. Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise."

Ahhhh. And these people are all terrorists? Right? Because that's what the law was for? Ahhh... they're "otherwise." Because that's what the law was.... oh.

In the meanwhile, kids, don't worry! They're not using it against the libraries! Remain calm... all is well, America. Your reading materials are safe. Hey... you're not one of them... potheads... are ya?

The Boston Globe is running a thought-provoking piece in which correspondent Matthew Miller interviews Milton Friedman and Willam Bennett on the role of the "birth lottery" in shaping people's lives.

It's a bit of a mind-blower, in that we find Bennett taking a stand directly BETWEEN nature and nurture, and Friedman asserting that free will isn't really free, not exactly.

In his Washington office, I asked Bennett which he thought was a bigger factor in determining where people end up: luck (by which I meant the pre-birth lottery), or personal initiative and character.

The normally voluble Bennett fell quiet.

"Genes are part of the first?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Parents are part of the first?"

"Yes."

"The first," he said. That is, luck.

Recalling his years as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, he explained, "Having visited the schools, I'm convinced that you can change people's lives and people can change their own lives. But it's hard. Those things [genes, parents] matter hugely. They don't matter completely. But they matter hugely."

What should that imply for public policy? I asked.

Bennett cited the Marine Corps as proof of the "plasticity" of human nature, and of the potential for institutions to alter luckless lives for the better. Kids from the inner city come back from boot camp after 11 weeks and they're transformed, Bennett said, with new values, a new spirit, a new future. Mediating institutions -- family, churches, schools -- can create opportunities for people to "exercise autonomy and make a difference in their own lives. A lot of people aren't there because they're in crappy families, crappy schools, crappy neighborhoods."

. . . . . . .
Early in his career, Friedman (the son of poor Hungarian Jewish immigrants) wanted very much to prove -- mathematically -- that luck isn't as important in human affairs as we instinctively presume. In a 1953 paper called "Chance, Choice, and the Distribution of Income," he argued that inequality of income results not merely from chance, but also from the choices, tastes, and preferences of individuals. People who have a taste for working less, for example, and for spending more time basking in the sun, earn less. It's their own choices -- not luck -- that helps shape the inequality of income. . . .

"I think that luck plays an enormous role," he went on. "My wife and I entitled our memoirs, 'Two Lucky People.' Society may want to do something about luck. Indeed the whole argument for egalitarianism is to do something about luck. About saying, `Well, it's not people's fault that a person is born blind, it's pure chance. Why should he suffer?' That's a valid sentiment."

So what are the implications of luck for public policy?

"You've asked a very hard question," he said. In part, he added, because it's not clear that what we think of as luck really isn't something else. "I feel," he said, "and you do, too, I'm sure, that what some people attribute to luck is not really luck. That people are envious of others, you know, `that lucky bastard,' when the truth of the matter is that that fellow had more ability or he worked harder. So that not all differences are attributable to luck."

"I know it's not all luck," I agreed, but I added that it's legitimate to wonder whether it's luck, as opposed to personal initiative and character, that most accounts for where one ends up.

"That's right," Friedman said. "But that's luck, too." Was Friedman saying that character was ultimately a matter of luck? Where does luck stop and free choice begin?

"See, the question is. . . What you're really talking about is determinism vs. free will," he explained. "In a sense we are determinists and in another sense we can't let ourselves be. But you can't really justify free will." . . .

This awareness of luck's role -- even if he wouldn't have put it quite this way as a younger man -- is what led Friedman to stress the importance of providing equal opportunity via education, and of keeping careers open to talent. Friedman also told me that it inspired his call for the provision of a decent minimum to the disadvantaged, ideally via private charity, but if government was to be involved, via cash grants that in the 1950s he dubbed a "negative income tax."

There's more-- read the whole thing. It's an interesting contribution to the debate over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Personally, I lean towards the "allowing all equal opportunity" end of the spectrum, because it's impossible to give everybody the same exact piece of pie. But to go too far toward the "equality of opportunity", to wit, asserting that circumstance doesn't matter as long as the law is blind, is deterministic, mechanistic, and profoundly un-humanistic. And also stupid.

Of course, the article is a bit of a puff piece, not a policy statement, so the question as to what, if any, social programs aimed at improving the situation of people unlucky enough to be born to crappy parents in a crappy neighborhood with crappy schools, would be appropriate.

It's Friday! Hedonism rules!

Over at Slate, Mike Steinberg is bashing California wines, and well may he do so. The vast majority of the California wine I've had recently has been the oenophilic equivalent of Con Air: big, loud, clumsy, vaguely shameful, and a chore to get through.

Recently the taste in the "O" household has run more toward New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, and Chile. The cheaper end of the scale from those regions still offers good balance, depth, and interest, and since Chile especially isn't yet well-known, you can get some insane bargains. Goodwife O especially likes the tropical fruit flavors that sometimes come across in the Aussie wines, and I'm a sucker for South American whites for some reason. Better for us a $7 bottle of Yellowtail ("Australian for 'wine'") than a $25 bottle of some overfruity Moulin Rouge California Zin.

But that's not to say that no California wine is worth tasting. The Goodwife and I got a case of Rancho Zabaco 2001 Dancing Bull Zinfandel for our wedding, and it was just... great... and they're from Sonoma.

I'm not getting paid to do this or anything. I just want everyone to enjoy the good things.

But whatever. Tonight it's martini time! Or Reisling time. Depending on whether I make it to the wine store. But martini time sounds more hep. "Throw some Arthur Lyman on the hi-fi! It's martini time!"

I offer, without commentary, this post from Right Wing News that features a quote from Ted Rall, the focus of a recent thread on this here website thingy. As an added bonus, it has a similar quote from Jonathon Chait, a senior editor at TNR.

From the comment thread on my recent France post, Johno said about the Anglosphere concept and the split in the west:

Buckethead, I think that may be true only insofar as it's always been true.

When the GI's went into France back in Dubya Dubya Two, there was considerable culture shock on both sides. Although the US and Western Europe have grown familiar with each other on a day-to-day basis, there are both systemic and current reasons why they won't necessarily see eye to eye. You know that as well as I do.

I wouldn't make too much of this grade-school crap. The US and France have been at odds before, and will again and again. At least we're both Constitutional Republics.

It wasn't the deck of cards exactly that prompted the anglosphere comment, but rather the trends we see in Europe that are most visible in the growth of the EU bureacracy, and in the language of the proposed EU constitution. England was always distinct from the general political climate on the continent. The United States, and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia, have focused on the very things that made England different, and are thus more different. The unparalleled success of the United States in, well, damn near everything is dragging the other English speaking nations in its wake, while the continent is pursuing its dream of a thousand year socialist Frankenreich. The two political natures of the west, once more or less evenly distributed seem to be settling into a kind of geographic division. This might actually drive further separation in the core of the west.

Others, such as Huntington, have already suggested that the West has already split twice - that Russia and Latin America are already distinct, though related civilizations. Is it that farfetched to imagine that a similar process could be dividing the west again?

The Don has a post over at the Post about nation building in Iraq and elsewhere. This is an interesting piece, for several reasons.

He examines, as too few people have done, the different results of different types of nation building - in Europe after WWII, Kosovo, and East Timor.

Also, he focuses on the efforts to involve Iraqis in the reconstruction - physical, moral and political - of the their country.

Back in the day, before the libervasion, I thought that we could make a go of civilizing Iraq, and helping them build a republic of law. And that the key would be setting up the institutions of local government before letting them have a go at national government. It seems that we are doing that, and that makes me happy for two reasons. One, I'm right; and two, the Iraqis will have some experience with how democracy works before the training wheels come off.

The contrast that he points out between the current efforts in Iraq and the UN led efforts in Timor and Kosovo are significant. The fact that our desire to leave is obvious will I think contribute to our success.

How interesting! The national do not call list has been blocked by TWO federal courts, and the people are mad as hell.

What we have is a situation where the will of the people and the mandates of the US Constitution cannot work in tandem. The fault here? A stupidly written bill that differentiates between different kinds of legitimate speech. The second judge putting the screws to the list cited the First Amendment, noting that it is unconstitutional for a law to make such a distinction. Therefore, the bill is no good.

Well fair enough. But fifty million people-- that's a LOT-- clearly want this bill passed pretty damn badly. Why can't they just rewrite the legislation to take out the distinction between telemarketers and charities/political entities, and ban all unsolicited calls?

Ohhhh... right... because they're politicians.