James Fallows

After this item late last night.3) Many, many readers are unhappy with my assertion last night that the AP leak investigation is the one of these episodes that should be held against the president. Samples:

Is it your position that any government official should be able to leak any classified information to a journalist with impunity even when that leak endangers lives and compromises national security? Where are your boundaries?

And:

I don't think you're really grappling with President Obama's argument in favor of the leak investigation. His argument is straightforward: revealing national security secrets is a matter of life and death for Americans overseas. Anyone who reveals those secrets should be arrested and prosecuted as a matter of justice and deterrence. That's a solid argument, and for you to rebut Obama by talking about the lessons of history is an exercise in evasion. When Aldrich Ames exposed the names of CIA agents and sources to the Soviet Union, those agents and sources were promptly arrested and executed. It seems very likely that the wikileaks data dumps had the same result, especially since Julian Assange refused to redact any of the information. The Bradley Manning court case has been an embarrassment, but it's hard to argue that the federal government should not have moved heaven and earth to find the culprit and prosecute him.
 
I could be persuaded that AG Holder was wrong ... and that President Obama was wrong in backing him. But I am skeptical that the verdict of history is self-evidently against the president, who after all does have a responsibility to protect national security. One of the temptations that presidents should avoid is worrying about looking better in history's eyes. As you know, history is greatly influenced by journalists, who have a certain conflict of interest on issues like this. I am sure the President would rather not prevent journalists from talking to sources (in contrast to President Bush, who would have been overjoyed to send a few journalists to prison), but it's not his top priority. Should it be? You still have to do the hard work of arguing that this tactic, in this instance, was misguided.

Several people also pointed out this item, by Kevin Drum, on why the government took such a hard line in this leak case (although they've been consistently hard on leakers all along). And a university math professor said, in response to my claim that "secrets always get out," "My jaw dropped reading that, given the selection bias inherent in the claim!" (If I had said "all secrets always get out," I would have to respond Touché. My point is that every president has had to cope with "shocking" and "dangerous" releases of classified information.)

In explanation of my own hard-line tone, let me be more precise. On the "Administration's side" of the case, I recognize these points:

1) Leaks can do genuine, terrible damage -- mainly by exposing vulnerable informants and sources, in the way Kevin Drum explains. One reason I was never a fan of the Wikileaks approach is that I knew how many sources in China, in particular, were likely to be harmed by this indiscriminate info-dump.

2) Organizations can and should take reasonable steps to police themselves -- that is, to encourage their own members to observe codes of confidence, and to identify and if necessary punish those who transgress. It matters tremendously to me and other staff members of this magazine that we protect the confidence of people who share information with us. That matters in corporations; it matters in government agencies; it matters for doctors and teachers and detectives and on down a long list.

So what is my complaint?

3) There is a very long history of presidents losing all perspective about leaks, and compounding the problems the original leak through a disproportionate reaction. Jonathan Bernstein explains some of that here (thanks to AS). That is the history that I said a figure as level-headed and unflappable as Barack Obama should be aware of. Also see James Traub on this pattern in Obama's time.

3a) There is also a history of leaks usually (though not always) being less damaging than initially claimed. See: the history of The Pentagon Papers.

4) An important exception to point (2) above is that these post-leak punitive hunts are most likely to lead to trouble when they spill over to the press. The CIA giving its own members lie-detector tests or intercepting their mail to see who's disloyal is one thing -- and generally a proper thing, in my view. Same for a police department, a military unit, or within reason a company.

It is something else to force reporters to testify (or go to jail if they refuse), or to seize records of their phone calls or meetings. Let's leave aside the First Amendment issues: the complications are similar to those involved in forcing clergy members to talk about their parishoners, or doctors about their patients, or attorneys about their clients, or husbands about their wives, and parents about their children. The CIA investigating its own is straightforward. Dragging in the press is different and has very rarely turned out well. That is the reality that I expected a leader with Obama's Niebuhrian awareness of tragic possibilities to be guided by.

I think this is it for me on this theme. I hope the first two faux-scandals peter out, and that the issues of secrecy and disclosure in the era of long twilight war get more serious examination.

I have been in China, offline, and in other ways removed from the US news ecosystem through the blossoming period of the three simultaneous problems for the Obama administration. Here is how they look after a day's worth of catching up:

More »

This took place while I was on the road in China, so I didn't catch up with it until just now. It is an editorial in (surprise!) the WSJ ten days ago that represents a certain kind of perfection in false-equivalence / black-is-white thinking. As a reminder:

I was around guns much of my life. Grew up in the Congo, hunting.  Marine Corps recon, professional training and use. CIA paramilitary, more training and use. Three wars: upcountry in Vietnam I had a bunker full of exotic weapons that had been collected over a ten-year period but were not on the inventory and could not be taken home by our military when they left -- we'd take them out and fire them every week; we carried guns everywhere we went, again upcountry just a few miles from the enemy's battalions; then in the Angola War I hired and organized three bands of professional mercenaries, killers by definition. 

In the consulate in the Katanga I had an impressive collection, bought out the weapons of the retiring elephant hunter. And I hunted. And at the family ranch in South Texas I hunted deer and javelinas.  

Then I lost all interest in hunting. I killed a beautiful animal and looked at the carcass thinking how much more beautiful it had been alive. I shot a bird and had the same feeling. Both dead so I could have the dubious Freudian pleasure of pulling a trigger and killing them.

The Katanga had been flush beautiful wildlife; it had been alive, the hills crawling with beautiful animals.  Then came independence and arms turned over to the new armies.  And our war in the Katanga (JFK/CIA), thousands of modern semiautomatic and automatic weapons left in the hands of our disbanded army, and the animals were broadly exterminated, the rolling plains were lifeless--we could drive all day and not see an animal.

In Burundi, where I served, President Micombero got himself a helicopter. Began flying around the shores of Lake Tanganyika machine-gunning hippopotamuses in the water.

 Recalling as a boy in the Congo driving with my father in a truck across the plains area.  We came on a Belgian who had been hunting all day, had a camera, wanted my father to take a picture of him with his trophies. He stood with his gun and his foot on a pile of 26 heads of little gazelles he had killed. In later years we drove through the same plains, and never ever saw another antelope.

 Even here in Austin, we are retired across the street from a lovely quiet park on the river. I walk my dog. Talk to the squirrels - - they sit on limbs not far above my head. Then one morning I found my neighbor down in the park with his son and a 22, killing the squirrels to "teach his son how to hunt." I pleasantly explained to him that he could teach his son how to enjoy live animals, that the squirrels he had killed were gone, dead. (He won-- the park no longer has any squirrels.)

3. Jonathan Rowe, in his posthumous book Our Common Wealth (buy!). As I mentioned two years ago at the time of his sudden and unexpected death, Jon Rowe was a wonderful and original-minded writer who found a way to express concerns and ideas that made instant sense -- once he had pointed them out. His main contribution to The Atlantic was a 1995 cover story, with Ted Halstead and Clifford Cobb, on why GDP growth was a crude-at-best, destructive-at-worst way for a society to measure its overall progress and well-being.

At the time of his death Jonathan Rower was working on a set of ideas that now have taken form in a book edited (from his papers) by his friend Peter Barnes. Its power is, again, to give voice and form to a concept many people sense but that doesn't clearly make its way into political, journalistic, or academic discussion. That is the value of all the things to which we can't attach an immediate profit-and-loss value but that clearly matter to individuals, families, and entire societies in distinguishing satisfaction and happiness from malaise. Which is also a point Jonathan Rauch and David Runciman are addressing.

Please find the time to read these three works.

I am in Internet range for only a few minutes, so let me just type this right out:

1. Today a provision that would increase background checks for gun purchases was blocked in the Senate, even though consideration of the bill was supported by 54 senators representing states that make up (at quick estimate) at least 60 percent of the American population.
2. The bill did not fail to "pass" the Senate, which according to Constitutional provisions and accepted practice for more than two centuries requires a simple majority, 51 votes. Even 50 votes should do it, since the vice president is constitutionally empowered to cast the tie-breaking and deciding vote, and Joe Biden would have voted yes.
   
3. It failed because a 54-vote majority was not enough to break the threat of a filibuster, which (with some twists of labeling) was the real story of what happened with this bill. Breaking the filibuster would have required 60 votes.
4. Since the Democrats regained majority control of the Senate six years ago, the Republicans under Mitch McConnell have applied filibuster threats (under a variety of names) at a frequency not seen before in American history. Filibusters used to be exceptional. Now they are used as blocking tactics for nearly any significant legislation or nomination. The goal of this strategy, which maximizes minority blocking power in a way not foreseen in the Constitution, has been to make the 60-vote requirement seem routine.
5. As part of the "making it routine" strategy, the minority keeps repeating that it takes 60 votes to "pass" a bill -- and this Orwellian language-redefinition comes one step closer to fulfillment each time the press presents 60 votes as the norm for passing a law.

Yes, this is the 20 millionth time I have made this point. (Recently here, with special Orwell-homage.) But here is why it is worth noting again. Just in the past few minutes readers have sent in these illustrations of the success of step No. 5, above:

From Business Insider (source of screen grab above):

GUN CONTROL VOTE FAILS IN SENATE -- Obama Speaks Now On Failure

With Vice President Joe Biden presiding over the Senate, an amendment to expand background checks on gun purchases failed to pass through the body, falling by a mostly partisan vote of 54-46...

Sixty votes were needed to pass the legislation through the Senate.

No, 60 votes were needed to break the filibuster threat. Note that in the "mostly partisan vote of 54-46" the 54 senators were voting for the measure.

From Politico, emphasis added:

The Senate has rejected a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks on firearms and close the so-called gun show loophole, handing President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders a major defeat on one of the key pieces of the president's second-term agenda.

The vote was 54-46, with only four Republicans crossing the aisle and voting with the Democrats in favor of the bipartisan proposal by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Sixty votes were needed.

I won't add the line-by-line explication because you can do it yourselves. Actually, I can't resist: that last passive-voice sentence calls out for "to break a filibuster threat." Look at this home-page splash from Politico (below), and imagine if it said what actually happened: "GOP filibusters gun control."

A little over 10 years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

Ten years ago today the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq. I argue that it was the worst strategic mistake since the end of World War II, and probably the biggest "unforced error" in American history. 

You know the syndrome. And, hey, if you've forgotten, check these two recent examples. Today several hypotheses about its origins. First, from a reader in Colorado, the idea that the false-equivalence reflex -- "extremists on both sides are blocking progress on the budget" -- comes from a kind of mirror-image mentality:

I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.

A reader in Connecticut says we are seeing a grown-up, political-world version of schoolyard bullying:

I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?

Another reader, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT, offers a social-science explanation:

I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work." 

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis. 

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).

Indeed this is an analysis I've thought about before -- thanks to Starr's book, and Jay Rosen's, and many others', and Breaking the News back in the 1990s. But I had not known about the "boundary work" label, which is usefully clarifying. It's a long road ahead.

Most of the country seems to be edging into an "ehh, who cares? It's all politics!" attitude about permanent-emergency government funding. Here is a note from a serving officer about what "the sequester" means from inside one branch of the military.

I've been in the Air Force for a little over four years, and was in training for four years before that. I've recently returned from a small cantonment in the desert, and am stationed overseas in the western Pacific. And I'd like to tell you that the sequester is having a very real effect on our lives here.

But first, a brief recent history lesson. As long as I've been in the Air Force - even when I was a cadet and we were in the midst of two wars, the military has tried to do more with less. In 2006, the Air Force cut down its personnel numbers in an effort to save money that could be used on newer planes. Naturally, the less people meant there was a higher deployment tempo - people were heading to the desert for longer amounts of time and more often. To make up for the smaller number of military personnel, contractors and civilians were asked to take on a bigger role.

I'm sure you've heard about how big a presence contractors have in these wars - the reason for that is a government attempt to save money. Shortly after that, when the recession hit and the stimulus came and left, again we were in a "constrained fiscal environment," as our leadership likes to tell us. For the past 3 years, we've been cutting back, spending less on staying trained and ready, trying to decide what training we could go without for the short term until things get "back to normal."

And now that sequester has hit - while we're still in Afghanistan, mind you - what is it that the military is cutting? We're not cutting any missions - all those will continue on, somehow, despite a cut to half of our operational budget. But instead, our training and readiness funds have been cut to the bare minimum. The belief is that it'll come back when things go "back to normal." But worst, of all, our benefits have started to get cut. DOD civilians - who have grown in number as uniformed personnel have shrunk - have just been given a 20% paycut across the Pacific. And for the military, college tuition assistance funds have disappeared across the services.

I don't know whether to rant against Congress, or our military leadership, including the President. I know Congress is responsible for the sequester. But it's the Pentagon who has decided to cut pay and benefits rather than cut missions. We've been doing "more with less" for a half a decade now, all while waiting for things to "get back to normal." Is this really what the people, what Congress wants? That our military is now prepared to do just as much as it did before, but without a force as well trained as before? And with civilians and military taking a significant haircut?

Even if you think the military has gotten too "entitled" with our free healthcare and assistance for college - there are still people fighting out there in a dangerous place. I'm back safe and sound, andwas lucky to have a quiet deployment. recently But I have more than a few friends getting shot at, mortared, and getting blown up while driving down bomb infested roads. Can't we wait until after 2014 before doing this?

I don't know if I'm making a false equivalence in blaming both the executive and the legislature and the pentagon, but frankly I don't care. I understand the military has to share in the burdens of thecountry - but why are our entitlement programs the first to go? The Murray budget plan includes still more military cuts, while the Ryan plan instead is nice enough to just go after veteran's programs. And this isn't even the policy argument talking about our 30-50 year old planes, ships, and weapons. And I know that the military is only feeling part of the pain - the same thing is happening in every federal program across the country.

And all this so that some big shot millionaire can keep his Bush tax cut?

From today's Politico story about the prospect that an assault-weapons ban will be filibustered in the Senate. Note the three passages in boldface:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a hugely controversial ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, but the measure faces nearly certain defeat on the Senate floor....

The Senate now faces a floor fight in coming weeks over Democrats' push to dramatically alter U.S. gun laws for the first time in two decades. While the Feinstein assault weapons ban is unlikely to overcome GOP opposition and get a vote -- as well as concerns from red state Democrats up for reelection in 2014 -- Democrats and the White House will continue their drive to enact universal background checks on all gun sales.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the assault weapons ban will have a hard time overcoming opposition. "It's pretty clear the other side is locked in opposition [to assault weapons ban.] -- [I] don't see us getting 60 votes," Whitehouse said, referring to the necessary bar to pass the Senate.

I recognize that this theme now lacks novelty value. But here is why it matters to track an engineered usage-change as it is underway:

• It takes 51 votes to "pass the Senate."
• It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
• Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the "necessary bar" for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as "certain defeat," ratifies this strategy. Especially in an "informed" insider political-specialist publication.
  

It wouldn't take any extra space to make things clear. The first highlighted passage could say "nearly certain filibuster" rather than "nearly certain defeat." The last passage could say "necessary bar to break a filibuster" rather than "necessary bar to pass the Senate." To look on the bright side, the middle highlighted reference is exactly right: the strategy is designed to keep the proposal from ever coming to a vote. (Thanks to AS for the lead.)

OK, I can't resist: Let's bring George Orwell to bear on this question. Naturally I'm talking about "Politics and the English Language":

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

If you haven't come across it yet, please do see the open letter published yesterday on our Politics Channel from the directors of three of the U.S. National Labs. These places are famous around the world, and are rightly seen as symbols of American scientific excellence and bulwarks of long-term American strength. The three authors are Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, and Thom Mason, from, respectively, the Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The title of their essay gets the point across: "The Sequester Is Going to Devastate U.S. Science Research for Decades." That may sound extreme, but here is the heart of their case:

It's not yet clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse, halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating, both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and development efforts.

Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the word races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed future opportunities.

My sense from afar is that an "oh, it's not really that bad" attitude is setting in about America's permanent-emergency approach to public funding. This is a reminder that it really could be that bad. And on that point, a scientist I know in California has written:

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were about 2000 'operational' weather balloon sites that released balloons synchronized to be in the middle of the troposphere at 00 and 12 UTZ daily.

When I did a survey of how many there were in 2000, there were about 800. There are myriad reasons, the relative poverty of many countries that can't afford to pay for the programs and geopolitics among them.

The number is about to drop precipitously due to a contrived crisis by a rich nation.

I am deeply ashamed for my country.

More times than I would like, I have turned to the Washington Post's editorial page to illustrate classic "false equivalence" thinking. E.g.: one party filibusters all nominations; therefore "both sides" are to blame for jobs going unfilled. Last month I mentioned a WaPo pinnacle of this mentality.

And beyond politics, on many of the biggest challenges you're going to need ideas from Column A and Column B... [Y]ou can't solve the debt challenge without raising more revenue and controlling entitlement costs... Eventually, in other words, you're going to have to wheel and deal and compromise -- you're going to have to govern. It might as well be now.

OK. Let's suppose you believed this. What, exactly, does it mean? What does Obama do tomorrow? Or, better, "today"?

• Does he propose a budget plan modeled on ideas from revered centrists like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, or Robert Rubin? Oh, wait, he's already done that.
• Does he propose dealing with entitlement reforms? Oh, wait, that was in the State of the Union address.

How about if you, WaPo, try setting out what you consider a "balanced" package of budget reforms -- and then, after giving the details, see if the Administration and the House Republicans agree. My money is on the administration saying, let's look at this, and the House Republicans saying, No. And then ... what? The twin reflexes of D.C. centrist thinking are assuming (a) that a president can "lead" or "govern" his way out of any corner, and (b) that [except for provision (a)] you can't ever really declare one side in a dispute "wrong." Therefore this scenario would presumably end with another plea to the president to "take control."

For more on the intractability of false-equivalence thinking, see this today from Greg Sargent in (another part of) the WaPo:

Imagine that Mitt Romney had decisively defeated Obama in the 2012 election on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to government as the only way to reduce the deficit, dramatically repudiating the President's call for higher taxes on the wealthy, continued implementation of the biggest expansion of the safety net in 60 years, and more government spending to boost the economy.

Then imagine that Democrats in the Senate (the only part of government they controlled) responded to this by proposing to dramatically expand health care and stimulus spending and pay down the deficit only with 100 percent tax hikes -- and not a single penny more in spending cuts -- and on top of that, then suggested President Romney has failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.

The reassuring aspect of this signed piece is insight as to whence the unsigned editorials arise.

With a few weeks' retrospect, it's clear that the most objectionable part of the Chuck Hagel confirmation melee was not the personal smears, nor the posturing by Senators Graham and McCain et al, nor the first-ever filibuster of a SecDef nomination by senators who didn't want their blocking tactic to be called by its real name, nor even the demand by Senator Ted Cruz that Hagel disprove pulled-from-thin-air insinuations that he could be on the North Korean payroll.

The abuse of "filibuster threats" over the past six years has inured us all to the power -- and legitimacy -- of a "real" filibuster.

I am no fan of the way routine minority obstructionism has made 60 votes, rather than the constitutional requirement of a simple majority of 51, the standard for getting anything whatsoever through the Senate. But I have to respect the way the junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, took the floor for 13 hours yesterday to mount a genuine filibuster to the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director*, and to raise questions about the unchecked life-and-death power President Obama has asserted in the open-ended "war on terror."

For more on the substance of Rand Paul's filibuster, see Conor Friedersdorf's summary. Even more important, in my view (since it affects a broader range of public business), is the potential of Paul's demonstration to shame Kentucky's senior senator and his colleagues who have indulged the lazy and destructive practice of fake filibusters. As Dave Weigel reported last night in Slate:

"If a person's going to make a stand on a nomination, this is the way to do it--the way Sen. Paul is doing it," [Oregon senator Jeff] Merkley said. "The American people can watch this and weigh in on whether he's a hero or a bum. That's reasonable. That honors the traditions of the Senate."

Merkley contrasted that with the filibuster that happened right before Paul's speech, one that got perfunctory media attention. For the third time, Democrats tried to advance the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. For the third time she got a majority of "aye" votes but couldn't break the 60-vote cloture threshold.

"That took no time or energy from any member," Merkley said. "It had no impact on the American people. It had no accountability. From the time that leadership struck its deal on the filibuster, they talked about the need for comity. And what we've seen since then is a 100 percent, all-out effort to paralyze this body.

This is the way to do it. In the less than 12 hours since Paul finished his filibuster, this may already have become a banal point, but it's worth re-stating: We've had a reminder of what's wrong with the way the Senate usually does its business, or avoids doing so. A good moment for Rand Paul.

(Photo from last fall, source here.)

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job. In principle a president should be great at: formal oratory before vast audiences; informal persuasiveness in small groups; high-speed fact-absorption and analytical intelligence; slow-paced,  unhurried deliberation; understanding both the past and the future; exercising both IQ and EQ; delegating duties; maintaining physical and emotional stamina; knowing and managing his or her own impulses; and on through a nearly infinite list. No one has all these skills. Therefore the best we can expect from the real people who hold the job is that they recognize their limits and try to address or offset them.

Yesterday I argued that George W. Bush's combination of traits was particularly unfortunate for the choices he had to make in the 18 months between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Joseph Britt of Wisconsin, who has worked as an aide to a Republican U.S. senator, writes about one of the attributes I mentioned -- Bush's apparent desire to be decisive even in areas about which he was not deeply informed:

Per your observations on G. W. Bush's decisiveness, I wonder if you have ever noted an interesting contradiction in the Bush administration's record.

No American President, with the possible exceptions of those who faced civil (Lincoln) or global (Franklin Roosevelt) war, ever made claims for Presidential authority and prerogatives as sweeping as the last President Bush did.  Yet in practice, Bush yielded more Presidential authority to selected subordinates than any President since Wilson had his stroke.

The war on terrorism was effectively run by Vice President Cheney after 9/11.  Both Bush's Secretaries of Defense were left all but unsupervised with respect to war policy -- apart from the Bremer period in Iraq, when Bush gave the former ambassador a free hand to make decisions no one else wanted to make.  Perhaps most striking of all was Bush's unqualified delegation of executive power to his Treasury Secretary at the end of his tenure.  We might with justice refer to most of 2008 as the time of the Paulson administration.

For all the airs he put on as "The Decider," Bush was in many respects an extraordinarily weak President.  The ignorance and intellectual laziness you spoke of often drove his decisiveness toward finding someone else to make decisions.

Context for this discussion and some upcoming items in the queue: not Bush himself, who has been admirably low-profile since leaving office, but our general understanding of the wars America launched 10 years ago this month.

Following this post on the impending tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, and this argument from a "liberal hawk" on why he had been proud to support the war, a few reader reactions. I am behind on this for the usual reasons but also because of the cumbersomeness of Internet connections in Beijing. Here we go with a sampling of response.

Threats aren't always inflated. Many people wrote to make a point similar to this one:

The only example of threat deflation I can think of was George W. Bush pre-9/11.

Further on the G.W. Bush record, from a veteran of Republican politics now in the Midwest:

I have all sorts of thoughts about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, for another time.  I'm probably not the first reader of yours, though, to note that you set the bar for honorable conduct pretty low with your reference yesterday to former President Bush.

Bush was the one person most responsible for the disaster Iraq became; he has never either apologized or accepted responsibility for his mistakes, and has devoted the years since he left office to presiding over his ghostwritten insta-memoirs and giving lavishly compensated speeches to closed audiences.  If you think Bush deserves credit for not criticizing how President Obama has tried to repair the damage Bush caused, you have a more charitable soul than I do.

My capsule view of Bush: I believe that the temperamental combination he brought to the presidency was lethal. I think of the big three elements of this mix as ignorance, incuriosity, and decisiveness.

• Ignorance was his low level of pre-existing knowledge of the complexities of the world.
• "Incuriosity" was his apparent lack of passion about learning what he didn't know.
• Decisiveness was his desire, nonetheless, to make big, sweeping choices quickly -- for instance, ten years ago that it made sense to invade Iraq.

In these matters of temperament, completely apart from political beliefs, you can see Bush as the opposite of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and also of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. I argued nine years ago that even if George W. Bush served only one term as president, his legacy would be large and disastrous. Still, since leaving office he has been an honorable contrast to other members of his team, notably his vice president and first secretary of defense.

I said that Al Gore deserved credit for an early anti-war stand. A reader in Maryland writes:

You forgot Robert Byrd:

Before: "If the United States leads the charge to war in the Persian Gulf, we may get lucky and achieve a rapid victory. But then we will face a second war: a war to win the peace in Iraq. This war will last many years and will surely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In light of this enormous task, it would be a great mistake to expect that this will be a replay of the 1991 war. The stakes are much higher in this conflict."

During: Today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned. Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. (March 19, 2003)

After: Of the more than 18,000 votes he cast as a senator, Byrd said he was proudest of his vote against the Iraq war resolution.  (June 12, 2006)

Back to the Bush family. The message I quoted from a liberal supporter of the war said that one honorable reason to invade Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate the first President Bush. A reader replies:

I was struck, though, by this quotation from your "liberal hawk" and "avowed leftist":

I think just the assassination attempt on Bush 41 is plenty all by itself--what kind of country are we if we let another country's leader pull something like that with impunity?

One trouble with this is that the assassination attempt on Bush 41 was always dubious and has been pretty thoroughly discredited by now.  Another is that the US has attempted, sometimes successfully, to assassinate leaders of other countries -- notably Castro, whom the US tried to assassinate many times.  Would [this hawk] agree, I wonder, that Cuba would be justified in invading the US in retaliation?  If not, kind of country is Cuba if it lets another country's leader pull something like that with impunity?  Obviously that is a rhetorical question, whose answer is "a small, weak, and thoroughly menaced country that knows it couldn't bring the invasion off."  But morally, by this standard, a Cuban invasion of the US would be completely justified....

Which reminds me: Obama's opposition to the war, mentioned by your reader CJ, is highly disputable. I was always criticial, myself, of the whole 'quagmire' argument directed by many American liberals against the Iraq war: it'll cost (us) too much, it'll last too long, it'll cost too many (American) lives.  Imagine a Soviet politician who'd argued against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on those grounds; or a Japanese who'd argued against the attack on Pearl Harbor, or against Japan's imperial conquests in Asia, on the grounds that it would last too long and cost too much, and Japan would become stuck in a quagmire.  What American would hail such people for their great wisdom and insight into world affairs?  Usually we condemn the USSR and Japan for their aggression against other countries, but only "hippies" would condemn the US for aggression.

In the run-up to both Iraq wars I knew some opponents and protesters who argued that, contrary to the promises of our leaders, these wars would not be cakewalks and would last longer and be bloodier and more expensive than we were being told.  I told them that I hoped they were wrong, because they were effectively hoping for a long, bloody, costly war.  I preferred that as few people died or were hurt as possible, and that there were other better reasons to oppose those wars.  When they thought about it, they tended to agree with me.

Having myself made a "quagmire"-style argument before the war, I naturally think that such a perspective was a useful reason to oppose the war. Let's spell it out. Much of the stated case for war was in two parts: (1) Saddam Hussein is evil and dangerous, and (2) there is a quick and feasible answer to that question. I was saying about part (2): No, there is not a quick and feasible answer. In cases of life-or-death imminent existential threat or emergencies like Pearl Harbor, questions of practicality don't matter. But they sure do in a "preventive" war of choice -- which I hoped we would not launch.

One more for now:

I was puzzled at the time, and remain puzzled, by the fact that people who accepted the basically humanitarian argument for war (Saddam is dreadful, and the Iraqis would be better off if we deposed him) did not think: if we depose Saddam for these reasons, a lot depends on how we handle the aftermath. Luckily, we do not have to speculate about this: we already have an aftermath carried out by the Bush administration ready to hand, in Afghanistan. How's that going?

It wasn't as clear then as it is now how badly Bush and Cheney blew that one, but it was clear enough for me to think, at the time: the people in the Bush administration are not interested in any sort of serious investment in making the countries they invade better, more governable, whatever. Rumsfeld will try to prove his theories about how you can do everything with next to no footprint, Bush and Cheney will go haring off after the next big thing, etc. So if someone thought that invading Iraq would be justified IF we were willing to undertake some sort of serious effort to make Iraq a better place, then she ought also to think: what are the odds of that? and then: given the available evidence, not that good.

I did not accept the humanitarian justification for invasion myself. (Not that I doubted Saddam's awfulness -- I was on the Turkish side of their border with Iraq during one of the last bits of the Anfal campaign -- but I didn't think that necessarily meant that invasion would be a good idea.) But I really never understood why the people who did accept it were so apparently uninterested in the evidence of our competence at nation-building provided by our conduct in Afghanistan after the Taliban were defeated.

And, why not, here is one more (from a large harvest). Soon I will be in Shanghai, where the Chinese government's foot-on-the-neck of the Internet is usually lighter than in Beijing, and I should be able to catch up on a range of arguments:

The [liberal hawk] reader comments that Iraqis are surely better off now than they were under Saddam's power....

First, he, and you and I are really in no place to say what makes Iraqis 'better off'. That is a question for actual Iraqis living in Iraq. But from what we can say as outsiders:  Iraq under Saddam was no paradise, but the infrastructure of the country was completely obliterated during the war, leaving people who previously had electricity, running water, general physical safety and comfort with none of those. Second, a huge number of Iraqis died as a result of the war. Huge. Well over a hundred thousand. We should keep them in mind when making throwaway claims about life being 'better' for Iraqis, when the invasion coalition killed so many of them. I had an Iraqi roommate for a time who had lost so many friends in the war he had lost count.

Basically, I just want to acknowledge that there is no straightforward way to measure whether lives are 'better off' as a result of any traumatic event like a war, and that any discussion of such has to include mention of the unspeakable damage that this war has done to a generation of Iraqis. And any discussion of possible future military adventures for the US should too.

From a reader in Seattle, the front page of the Seattle Times on Saturday:

Someone now working for an executive-branch department writes:

As a government employee who will almost certainly be furloughed in the coming months, I have followed the sequester with a sort of horrid fascination.  Not that it is any more or less horridly fascinating than any of our other "crises" in recent times, but the sequester hammers a few points home very well.

First, our public policy discussion has become too wonkish, by being entirely focused on measurable outcomes at the expense of all others.  (Another example: the health care debate, the vast majority of which was about costs instead of the moral imperative of universal health care).  Yes, the sequester will have an economic cost and is a dumb way to reduce the deficit, but the government is not just a contributor to our GDP or a balance sheet.  On the contrary, many of the government's functions -- like keeping us safe, providing justice (hopefully), and researching disease -- cannot be encapsulated by economic impact.  I'm sure the Democrats are emphasizing the economic impact of the sequester in order to make all Americans feel like they have a stake in its outcome.  But that is not what the government, perhaps the sole major institution in this country whose only mission is to serve the public, is about.

Second, the media could cure us of political polarization and instantly bring about bipartisanship if they stopped playing the false equivalence game.  If the GOP's refusal to compromise was labeled as it actually is, they might pay a political price and be willing to cut a deal.  But by blaming both sides equally even though President Obama is offering a balanced solution, the media have severely curtailed whatever political incentive there is for cutting a deal.  After all, if the Democrats are blamed for not compromising even when they have made all the concessions, why on earth should the Republicans ever concede anything?

Blaming both sides for lack of compromise when one side has refused to make any concessions is like punishing all athletes when only some take steroids.  If everyone is getting punished no matter what, why not break the rules and hit some home runs?

I don't agree that a different media tone would "instantly bring about bipartisanship," and probably the writer doesn't even think that himself. But it's certainly true that the current media approach effectively rewards stone-walling, filibustering, brinkmanship, and so on, by not calling them out as pernicious and destructive techniques.