Goat Resurrected

Please pardon our momentary disappearance. Tragos died temporarily, but, like Lazarus, we have made a comeback.

New material will be arriving soon.

Thank you for your support.

- JLB

Sunday Goat: The Headless One

These guys are playing Buzkashi, a game you may have heard about, which was apparently a fast favorite amongst the American Special Forces Crowd in Afghanistan. The game, which involves dragging the headless body of a goat around a field, eventually to be placed in one goal or another, may remind us of American foreign policy of late. The most striking similarity, of course, is that whoever it is that "wins," it surely isn't the goat.

To this Sunday Goat, I will append a handful of questions, to which I do not claim to have the answers.

Q: Are we "winning" the "war" in Afghanistan?

Q: Did the U.S. gain Musharraf's support by threatening to bomb his country "into the stone age"?

Q: Do Republican Congresspeople have any principles whatsoever?

Q: Do American college students know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto?

Q: Will Flavor Flav find happiness?

Q: Does God exist?

I suspect the answers are: no, yes, no, no, yes, and no -- but like I said, I'm just whistling in the dark here.

"Have You No Sense of Decency Sir, at Long Last?"

Joseph Welch and Senator Joe McCarthy

In lieu of a substantive post of my own composition, I offer you the following very fine column by a colleague of mine: Brian Cooney, professor of philosophy at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Brian writes a monthly column in the area paper, and frequently succeeds in pissing off the locals, not to mention one or two members of the Centre faculty.

Wednesday September 27, 2006

Does America torture?

By BRIAN COONEY
Contributing Columnist

On Sept. 6, President Bush announced the transfer to Guantanamo of 14 detainees from secret CIA prisons in foreign countries. He acknowledged that the CIA used "an alternative set of procedures" to interrogate these prisoners. He refuses to deny widespread reports that these procedures included "waterboarding" or simulated drowning.

He went on to say that "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values." He was lying. And he was playing games with words in a way that demonstrates his contempt for the intelligence of the American people.

Since 9/11, the United States has frequently outsourced torture to countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria, that are known to use brutal methods. This procedure is called "extraordinary rendition." It is expressly forbidden by the U.N. Convention against Torture (Part I, A. 3.1), which the U.S. has signed and ratified. It also violates section 2242 of the 1998 Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act.

When you outsource a task, you remain the primary agent. If I hire someone to murder another person, I am guilty of murder. George Bush is guilty of torture.

The U.N. Convention defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person." Waterboarding would certainly qualify, as would any technique that was really effective at getting information from a terrorist determined to remain silent.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention applies to al Qaeda detainees. This article prohibits "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." In his Sept. 6 address, Bush announced that he wanted Congress to "clarify" article 3 by stipulating that it is consistent with his "alternative" interrogation techniques.

When Bush refuses to call his "alternative" methods torture, when he wants to clarify "cruel" and "degrading" as allowing waterboarding, he reminds me of what Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Wonderland: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

As I listened to this dishonest and belligerent man speak to the press, I was reminded of another bleak and oppressive period in recent American history - a time when, like today, basic American values were being trampled on by a ruthless politician.

On June 9, 1954, something momentous happened during a televised hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The American people finally recoiled in disgust at the way a powerful, fearmongering politician was abusing the power of government to undermine the rule of law.

For two years, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) had used his subcommittee to bully and smear hundreds of people with unsubstantiated charges of being communist spies or sympathizers. He rode a wave of anxiety among Americans over the military threat, subversive activities and espionage of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. McCarthy manipulated these fears into a national paranoia. Politicians in both parties were afraid to stand up to him lest they, too, be accused of disloyalty.

On that June 9, McCarthy went too far. He was facing off with Joseph Welch, senior counsel for the Army. He insisted on entering into the record that a young lawyer working for Welch's firm was once a member of the National Lawyers' Guild, an organization that McCarthy had falsely accused of subversive activities. This entry could have meant an end to the young man's career.

Welch then asked a question that was the undoing of McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Soon after the hearing McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and lost popular support. I hope something like this will happen to George W. Bush as a result of the Sept. 6 press conference.

Bush is the desperate leader of a desperate Republican majority haunted by what could happen to them as a result of their incompetent and disastrous response to 9/11. The latest National Intelligence Estimate, reflecting the conclusions of all 16 intelligence agencies, states that the Iraq war has increased the number of terrorists and the danger we face from terrorism. A record 6,600 Iraqi civilians were killed in July and August. Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, reports that torture in Iraq "is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Bush's response to all this is to ask the American people to let him do more torturing. If you won't, he threatens to label you as soft on terrorism, just as McCarthy threatened to call those who disagreed with him soft on communism. It's time to ask Bush: "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?"

Brian Cooney is the Stodghill Professor of Philosophy at Centre College.

Copyright:The Advocate-Messenger 2006

Friday Reading: Kafka

We are humble subordinates who can scarcely find our way through a legal document and have nothing to do with your case except to stand guard over you for ten hours a day and draw our pay for it. That's all we are, but we're quite capable of grasping the fact that the high authorities we serve, before they would order such an arrest as this must be quite well informed about the reasons for the arrest and the person of the prisoner. There can be no mistake about that. Our officials, so far as I know them, and I only know the lowest grades among them, never go hunting for crime in the populace, but, as the Law decrees, are drawn towards the guilty and must then send out us warders. That is the Law. How could there be a mistake in that?

-- Kafka, The Trial

Now that we have in place a new law that is truly Kafkaesque, perhaps we should think about Kafka's view of the "Law." The passage above is from the first chapter of The Trial. The story is well-known, and might be quickly summarized by its famous opening: "Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." Two "warders" arrive at his home and announce that he has been arrested, then sit down to eat the man's breakfast. In response to K.'s demands to know what is going on, one of the warders offers his rather disconerting legal exegesis, to which K. replies, "I don't know this law." K.'s ignorance, as the warder says, will be "all the worse for you."

K. is a believer in the law of enlightened liberalism. He responds to this intrusion with indignation, the high-minded defiance of a man confident in his own innocence. He asks practical questions and expects to receive comprehensible answers:

Who could these men be? What were they talking about? What authority could they represent? K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force; who dared seize him in his own dwelling?

At first he believes the Law, as represented by consitutions and statutes, will protect him. In his liberal society it is unthinkable that it could be otherwise -- but it soon becomes clear that his view of the world is laughably confused, his questions entirely ill-conceived, and his situation hopeless. Even at the beginning, the sheer oddity of the intrusion shakes him, and begins the long process of the erosion of his faith:

He had always been inclined to take things easily, to believe the worst only when the worst happened, to take no care for the morrow even when the outlook was threatening. But that struck him as not being the right policy here...

The rest of the novel details the horrifying and surreal process by which a man is destroyed by the law. He goes looking for justice, and can't even find the courtroom. The authorities are inaccessible, yet seem to be everywhere. And all the while he is never even charged with a crime -- he is simply charged with being guilty; and in Kafka's world, which is looking uncannily familiar these days, this charge is irrefutable.

In perhaps the most famous and crucial scene, K. visits with a priest. Still seeking answers, still unconvinced of the entirely arbitrary nature of the proceedings against him, he asks the priest for explanations. The priest tells him that he has been "misinterpreting the facts of the case." K. wants to know when the case will be concluded, and what this conclusion will be. At this point, though, it has become clear to us that these are the wrong questions -- questions that apply to the false world of K.'s enlightened imagination, not to the reality of the world as dominated by the Law. The priest insistently tells K. he is deluded -- not about the particulars, not about the prospects, but about the nature of the Law itself. He explicates by way of a parable:

In the writings which preface the Law that particular delusion is described thus: before the Law stands a door-keeper. To this door-keeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the door-keeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. "It is possible," answers the door-keeper, "but not at this moment." Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the door-keeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the door-keeper sees that, he laughs and says: "If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest door-keeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. And the sight of the third man is already more than even I can stand." These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the door-keeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long thing, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The door-keeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the door-keeper with his importunity. The door-keeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the door-keeper. The door-keeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: "I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone." During all these long years the man watches the door-keeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other door-keepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged study of the door-keeper he has learned to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the door-keeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the door-keeper. He beckons the door-keeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The door-keeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the door-keeper, "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to attain the law," answers the man, "how does it come about then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?" The door-keeper perceives that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: "No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it."

K. is like the "man from the country," naive in his faith and sure of his ability to read the conceptual world. The Law is surely a place open to all, not a portal at which we must beg for admittance. His is a world where causes match up with effects, where action is guided by reason, and transgression is a necessary precursor to guilt. In such a world an accusation proceeds to an inquiry, which leads to a judgment based on the principle of justice. But there is no justice in the Law. K.'s struggle leads not to the revelation of a truth but to the execution of a sentence. The facts of the case whick K. misinterprets are not evidentiary, but formal. As the priest explains to him: "The verdict is not suddently arrived at, the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict."

The proceedings merge into the verdict. It is a process such as this, without significant signs to emphasize change, that allows us to suddenly find ourselves in a country where the plight of Joseph K. might actually be a reality. The new law passed yesterday grants the executive branch the Kafkaesque authority to conflate an accusation with a verdict, to convict the accused of crimes of which they don't even know they are accused.

As Kafka knew well, the Law as we know it is only evidence of our first transgression, our originary Fall. It was self-evident to him that we were all always already guilty, and always seeking justice and redemption that would remain inaccessible. And we do so with our delusions about the Law. As Walter Benjamin, the best reader of Kafka, has written, only "the law which is studied and not practiced any longer is the gate to justice."

Common Sense: R.I.P.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

-- Thomas Paine, The Crisis, No.1

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy...

-- The New York Times, 28 September 2006

It is perhaps not surprising that the headlines on CNN right now include the interesting news that Amanda Peet is pregnant, New York City is considering banning "trans fats," and that an attack in Colorado was of "a sexual nature." We apparently no longer place a dear price on our most precious goods, and obviously esteem too lightly the fundamental principles that, among other things, provide us with the luxury of knowing or caring whether Amanda Peet is pregnant or not. While it is surely unfortunate that a girl died from sedatives at the dentist, and possibly interesting that a boy was assaulted by a squirrel, and undoubtedly diverting that a porn star is running for governor, one might be forgiven for wondering why there is not a single mention, anywhere on the page, of the "debate" currently underway in the Senate, after which it seems likely that the body will approve a law -- and this is no shrill, alarmist exaggeration -- that sanctions tyranny.

At this moment, the bill has not passed, and it is still possible that some act of God could prevent it. However, since here at Tragos we reject the notion of a meddling, pedestrian sort of God, we remain pessimistic -- especially since an amendment, which would uphold the writ of habeas corpus (now we need amendments to uphold this), was just rejected 51-48. In case you were wondering, here is a complete list of the un-American, unprincipled rubber stamps who are working diligently to rend the moral fabric of America:

Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-NE)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Stevens (R-AK)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)

As General Jack Ripper warned us:

The enemy may come individually, or he may come in strength. He may even come in the uniform of our own troops.

And so they come, in the uniform of our own troops. Those who will think this alarmist, the paranoid rantings of an irrelevant blogger with a readership smaller than that of the Daily Worker, I invite you to look closer at the bill. This legislation literally legalizes precisely the tyrannical crimes decried by Paine and his contemporaries -- those we like to call The Founding Fathers. The bill is so radical, so authoritarian, that it is really difficult to believe that this is actually happening. Here is Greenwald's assessment:

There is some ambivalence in writing about the torture and detention bill because it seems to be a ship that has already sailed (the only real significant unanswered question is how many Senate Democrats will vote in favor of this atrocity). And, on a very real level, it is actually difficult to ingest the reality of what is taking place. There are nonetheless a couple of points which need to be urgently emphasized.

Opponents of this bill have focused most of their attention -- understandably and appropriately -- on the way in which it authorizes the use of interrogation techniques which, as this excellent NYT Editorial put it, "normal people consider torture," along with the power it vests in the President to detain indefinitely, and with no need to bring charges, all foreign nationals and even legal resident aliens within the U.S. But as Law Professors Marty Lederman and Bruce Ackerman each point out, many of the extraordinary powers vested in the President by this bill also apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil.

As Ackerman put it: "The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights." Similarly, Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."

This last point means that even if there were a habeas corpus right inserted back into the legislation (which is unlikely at this point anyway), it wouldn't matter much, if at all, because the law would authorize your detention simply based on the DoD's decree that you are an enemy combatant, regardless of whether it was accurate. This is basically the legalization of the Jose Padilla treatment -- empowering the President to throw people into black holes with little or no recourse, based solely on his say-so.

There really is no other way to put it.

That opposing this bill is imperative should go without saying. But, nowadays, it seems that nothing at all can be taken for granted -- and while we are busy taking for granted that nothing like this could ever happen in America, there it is, actually happening in America. How many times did we warn ourselves? How many times did we state our determination not to become what we beheld, not to descend into the autocratic, lawless nihilism that we believe consitutes the actual "enemy"? Apparently not enough times, and not adamantly enough to make it clear to our representatives in the government that such legislation is simply not acceptable, is not amongst the "compromises" we are willing to make for our own "security."

Now, at least as far as the vote on the Specter Amendment (retaining habeas corpus) has shown, there is at least solid Democratic opposition to the bill. Some Senators are speaking out, forcefully, against it. The spirit of American Democracy is at least fully alive in the person of Senator Feingold. It's worth reading his statement in its entirety, but here is a glimpse:

At times of great adversity, the strength of a nation’s convictions is tested and its true character revealed. If we sacrifice or qualify our principles in the face of the tremendous challenge we face from terrorists who want to destroy America, we will be making a terrible mistake. If we cloak cruel or degrading interrogations done in the name of American safety with euphemisms like “alternative techniques,” if we create arbitrary dates for when differing degrees of morality will apply, we will have betrayed our principles and ourselves.

Statements obtained through such techniques should not be admissible, even against the most vicious killers in the world, in proceedings held by the government of the United States of America. Period.

Mr. President, in sum, this legislation is very troubling and in many respects legally suspect. I fear the end result of this legislation will only be more delay. It will surely be subject to further legal challenge, and may squander another four or five years while cases work their way through the courts again.

We can and must fight terrorism aggressively without compromising fundamental American values. We must remember what the Army Judge Advocate General told me at a Judiciary Committee hearing this summer: that the United States should set an example for the world, and that we must carefully consider the effect on the way our own soldiers will be treated.

Mr. President, in closing let me do something I don’t do very often – and that is quote John Ashcroft. According to the New York Times, at a private meeting of high-level officials in 2003 about the military commission structure, then-Attorney General Ashcroft said: “Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history. But at least we had fair procedures for him.” How sad that this Congress would seek to pass legislation about which the same cannot be said.

We can hope that the Feingolds of the world will prevail, either here or in the November elections, and that, as is likely, the Supreme Court will eventually dispense with this madness, if it does (which seems likely) pass through the Senate. But the very fact that any of this is being openly debated, even considered, that the American people, through our representatives, have even brought such perverse legislation to a vote, regardless of the margins by which it passes or fails, says something very troubling, and, as Feingold says, very sad about who we are.

The Fleeting Pleasures of "Victory"

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some of those communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

-- Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

-- Thoreau, "Life Without Principle"

Two hundred and fifty-three elected representatives to the United States Congress voted today to legalize torture. Thirty-four of these were Democrats, supposedly members of the "opposition party," and supposedly occupying the (admittedly only slightly) elevated moral ground in this debate. This means, of course, that one hundred sixty voted against, and to these we can offer at least a measure of approbation. But the facts are the facts, and the United States House of Representatives just passed a bill, which Jack Balkin, Professor of Law at Yale, describes like this:

The latest version of the bill blesses detainee abuse and looks the other way on forms of detainee torture; it immunizes terrible acts; it abridges the writ of habeas corpus -- in the last, most egregious draft, it strips the writ for alleged enemy combatants whether proved to be so or not, whether citizens or not, and whether found in the U.S. or overseas.

This bill is simply outrageous.

As he says, the last bit is the worst. The key problem is in the new and improved definition of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant." For explication and amplification, we can look to Marty Lederman, of Georgetown Law School:

...the really breathtaking subsection is subsection (ii), which would provide that UEC is defined to include any person "who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."

Read literally, this means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to "hostilities" at all.

This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's not limited to aliens -- it covers U.S. citizens as well. It's not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it's not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.

Therefore if, as everyone is assuming, this definition does establish who may be detained by the military outside the civilian justice system, it would quite literally give the Secretary of Defense the statutory authority to detain just about anyone he wants, indefinitely. And if that's the case, then the habeas-stripping provision would really be the least of it, because even with all the due process and habeas protections in the world, it would be almost impossible to challenge the grounds on which someone is detained if the Executive itself can establish what the permissible grounds for detention are.

The conclusion?:

Choosing the most indefensible provision in this bill is a tall order -- there are many worthy candidates. But a provision that would grant DoD virtually unlimited discretion to detain "unlawful enemy combatants," as defined by Donald Rumsfeld himself, would be an awfully formidable candidate for that dubious honor.

How does any of this happen? Well, part if it is probably, as Balkin speculates, that the Senators and staffers do not even read the bill. They go along with it out of fear -- fear of the public, fear of retribution, fear of being labelled weak on terrorism. The administration uses the rhetoric of fear to sell its snake-oil every day, and in the end, even if we aren't buying, even when we clearly state our unequivocal opposition to snake-oil in all its forms, we can count on our elected representatives to buy up all the remainders:

The willingness of Senate Democrats to vote for the torture bill appears substantial, at least if one listens to their leader, Sen. Harry Reid. From the New York Times this morning: "Democrats, who have found themselves on the losing end of the national security debate the past two national elections, said the changes to the bill had not yet reached a level that would cause them to try to block it altogether. To underscore the point, Reid said this about the bill: "We want to do this. And we want to do it in compliance with the direction from the Supreme Court. We want to do it in compliance with the Constitution."

The Times article repeatedly makes clear what Democrats have been conveying ever since the "compromise" between the White House and GOP senators was announced -- namely, that a Democratic filibuster of this bill is not going to happen. Sen. Lindsey Graham even claims that an amendment to provide habeas corpus rights to detainees -- a provision that could alleviate some of the bill's most tyrannical aspects -- "will be defeated, I think, in a bipartisan fashion, with a solid vote."

Whether or not Graham is right about Democratic opposition even to habeas corpus rights, it appears certain that not only will Senate Democrats fail to impede enactment, but at least some (perhaps even the majority of) Democrats will vote for the bill and enthusiastically praise it. Their Senate leader is already doing so.

So who even knows who these people represent any more? Is it us? Or is it some phantom simulacrum of the nation, filtered through push polls and the pundit class, molded by repetition, and consecrated by time? Who are we? A population that votes 60% in favor of legalizing the indefinite detention of both citizens and foreigners, without charge or trial, at the demonstrably perverse whim of the Secretary of Defense? Are we 60% in favor of "extracting information" from such detainees through techniques that went out of style with the Inquisition?

Perhaps we are, and if we are we have the representatives we deserve -- venal, cowardly, self-obsessed nobodies with neither spine nor principle, empty power-suits with nothing better to do than tailor their opinions to whatever numbers flash across the bottom of the nearest television screen. And, in the end, for all their cowardly inaction, retraction, and equivocation, they will wind up politically dead, victims of a kind of collective suicide by stultification. As Balkin says:

I am puzzled by and ashamed of the Democrats' moral cowardice on this bill...

The Democrats may think that if they let this pass, they are guaranteed to pick up more seats in the House and Senate. But they will actually win less seats this way. For they will have proved to the American people that they are spineless and opportunistic-- that, when faced with a genuine choice and a genuine challenge, they can keep neither our country nor our values safe.

They think that somehow by sitting this one out they'll dodge the shrapnel, come out the other side looking good, with the limosines of their "liberalism" sailing smoothly into the empty streets that represent their non-existent alternatives to the status quo. They are a pathetic bunch: willing, like their opponents, to trade just about anything for the fleeting pleasures of political "victory." But they ought to know by now, as Greenwald and Balkin have noted, that this strategy will never work. The Democrats don't read Emerson either:

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Shostakovich

(Problems with my internet connection prevented me from posting this yesterday, on Shostakovich's 100th birthday.)

In 1932, Dmitry Shostakovich, who would have been one-hundred years old today, finished his extraordinary opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Initially, the opera enjoyed tremendous critical and public success. However, as Robert Morgan writes,

in January of 1936, after ninety-seven performances in Moscow, the official party newspaper Pravda published an article entitled “Chaos Instead of Music,” which attacked Lady Macbeth for its “negative” libretto, “petty-bourgeois innovations,” and “deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound.” This article marked an important turning point in Soviet attitudes toward contemporary music, which from this moment on were to be consistently repressive. Exactly why this particular work was singled out as an example has never been clear, for it is considerably more consonant, more “melodic,” and more openly tonal than the Second Symphony, Shostakovich’s earlier satiric opera The Nose (1928), or the ballet The Golden Age (1930). Probably it was simply due to Lady Macbeth’s great success and the prominence of its composer, while the unusual international attention it attracted also may have raised suspicions that it was catering to the decadent tastes of the West. In any event, it provided the Party with a pretext to state publicly, in the strongest terms, that the liberal attitudes of the past, which had welcomed experimentation, innovation, and international contacts, would no longer be tolerated. (Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music. New York: Norton, 1991; 246.)

According to today’s NPR segment on Shostakovich, the article in Pravda was provoked by Stalin’s attendance at a performance of Lady Macbeth, which he reportedly disliked. He thus ordered an editorial denouncing the work. It’s not difficult to imagine something similar happening today. After all, how could any music, poetry, literature, visual art, philosophy, theater, or film that embraced questioning, and the questionable character of existence, be received with anything but scorn by the current administration, which insists that uncertainty and hesitation mean “moral and intellectual confusion.” Of course, today, no order would have to be issued for a denouncing editorial. It would always already be in the works, courtesy of the propaganda shock troops of Fox News and the “conservative” (read: “radical revolutionary”) blogosphere.

On the other hand, Stalin was right to be disturbed. Music, like literature, visual art, and philosophy, is in itself revolutionary, though not in the sense that he favored. Music is revolutionary in that it is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, and so hostile to any particular purpose that you might bring to it. Do not look to art for satisfaction or recognition. You will not find it, if you look honestly. Art does not look at you, it looks through you and leaves you shattered. Shostakovich’s later string quartets are a case in point. They will not be appropriated.

(By the way, one of the very best purchases that you might make this year is the complete Shostakovich string quartets, as played by the Emerson String Quartet. But don’t buy the $80+ recording. There’s a reissue that’s much cheaper and just as good.)

Sunday Goats: Your Executive Branch (Update Below)

Thou damned and luxurious mountain-goat,
Offer'st me brass? -- Pistol (Henry V, IV.i)

Pistol's confusion is representative. He misunderestimates his French adversary, who is merely requesting mercy: Est-il impossible d'echapper la force de ton bras? The entire exchange reads like a Bush press conference, or even a cabinet meeting -- full of absurdity, consisting mainly of a resolute determination not to understand what is actually going on.

Among the many things our Sunday Goats don't seem to understand, this one particularly stands out -- something about the Iraq war causing terrorism, instead of "bringing it to justice":

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

D+. A grade with which these people are familiar. This whole thing is a tale told by an idiot indeed.

Update:

Just when you think they can't get any lower, they let Bush "speak" without the teleprompter (from The Carpetbagger Report):

Blitzer asked the president to respond to the nightmare that Iraq has become, but Bush wouldn't hear of it. He dismissed the ongoing crisis as "just a comma."

Update: Here's the transcript:

BLITZER: Let's move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that's the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there's also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

Even by Bush's already-low standards, it was a stunning comment. We're talking about a war that has claimed 2,700 American lives and seriously injured 20,000 more. It's a crisis that has, by any reasonable measure, made the threat of terrorism against Americans considerably worse. It's a misadventure that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, to fight a war sold under false pretenses, and mismanaged with almost child-like incompetence.

Asked to explain himself, the president is unconcerned. Everything we're seeing is "just a comma." I'm sure that will bring comfort to the families of those who have sacrificed so much for Bush's mistakes.

Now, I think I know what the president means. As he sees it, history takes a long view, so three and a half years of mistakes, violence, poor judgment, and corruption are minor details that will be easily overlooked by a long-term triumph. Or so Bush says. Of course, by this logic, everything is "just a comma." Every life, every conflict, and every generation can be dismissed and made to appear trivial by backing up enough degrees.

It is, in other words, the ultimate cop out. Conditions in Iraq are getting worse, not better. The attacks are growing, not shrinking. The casualty rate is going up, not down. More than ever, we're looking to the president for leadership, sound judgment, and clear answers.

Instead, we get, "just a comma." Amazing.