Hilzoy has a nice post highlighting Bill Kristol's hypocritical opinion on this topic.
Actually, most of my post is lifted from a comment I made on that thread.
There was an ethics-101-style example that these sorts of "but we meant well, there was just incompetence" defense calls to mind. In one story, you back over your neighbor's tomato plants while pulling out of your driveway, and you excuse yourself, saying, "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention."
The example continues by noting that using incompetence as a defense would not work had you instead backed over your neighbor's toddler.
If you are that incompetent, if it was just "poor execution", then jesus, resign and let the grown-ups lead.
It's not really an incompetence dodge, though (although the WSJ editorial sort of puts it that way). It's more that if the crime wasn't for personal benefit, it shouldn't be punished. Myself, I'm a lot happier with someone committing a crime for a little personal benefit than I am with someone committing a crime to subvert national policy.
What still shocks me is the topic about which he was acting:
OUTING A CIA AGENT!?!?!??!?!?
Jeeeez, what does it take! How do the Republicans constantly get the media and/or public from not seeing how they attack people who have served our country with distinction?
See, I agree with these Libby legal defense fund people. It IS a blow to the Bush administration, they ARE largely incompetent, and public officials DID lie. Including Libby.
It's kind of nice that we can all come together on these things.
And that is seriously messed up.
It is extremely messed up, yes. The only two possible explanations of that defense are (1) someone who is so goddamn high/disconnected/stupid/fluffy-wuffy that they think intentions are everything and the whole concept of consequences is somehow unfair or (2) someone who has as their conscious agenda the furtherance of the all-powerful executive and wants to paint these silly laws about telling the truth under oath and these silly cultural concepts of responsibility and accountability as standing in the way of Those With Will to Lead so that they can try to erode those concepts to increase their own personal power. Oh, wait, those two cover everyone in this administration.
4: I'm not sure I'd buy the personal benefit/non personal benefit distinction. I don't think Clinton's blowjob deserved any of the ... scrutiny that resulted, but I wouldn't want to sanction, say, stealing a lot of tax money from a program that wouldn't really be hurt by the loss, on the grounds that it wasn't public. Not that I think you're arguing for that, but what seems to do the work is not whether the crime was public or private, but whether it was a big deal or not a big deal.
Blowjobs? Objectively not big deals. Outing a CIA agent because your case for your dumb war was damaged? Big deal. Big deal even though the immediate harm was pretty small.
And you know it strikes me again that we as a nation would be in much better shape if Dick Cheney hadn't taken his former taskmasters' being alternately abhorred and restrained by a shocked and distrustful public as some personal affront he had to rectify by turning around and bullying them thirty years later. Jeez, Mr. Veep, nice overcompensation there.
I think I want to stick with the distinction. Remember the LA election where someone corrupt, who I can't remember, was running against David Duke with the unofficial slogan "Vote for the crook: It's important"? That doesn't mean that private corruption shouldn't be prosecuted -- it's a bad thing in itself (although I'd think of the Lewinsky thing as not even corruption). But I have no problem believing that a thief could be a good political leader; someone who's willing to abandon the structure of law for their policy ends, on the other hand, is always going to be a problem.
8 is clearly wrong. While stealing a lot of money for personal gain would be bad, at least it's a forgiveable impulse. Subverting national policy is just evil.
And if blowjobs are objectively not a big deal, well, you're doing 'em wrong.
Subverting national policy is just evil.
Serious question: How do you feel about Philip Agee?
Didn't he quit and then speak out publicly? That's not subverting policy, or at least it's not doing it in a covert way that substitutes one's own personal judgment for checks and balances.
Dear god, I'm sounding all proceduralist and mealymouthed now. But still.
Certainly agree that the Gilliard Obit is nice and welcome. He was indispensible in the first year of the war, and during the 2004 election and after.
Yeah, I can't think of all that much of his from the last year or so that stuck with me, but back when there were still respectable, reasonable sounding people advocating for the war, he was very important to me: a sane, reasonable person willing to be aggressive about saying all the things I was still feeling tentative about.
The blatant yet un-self-aware "rule of law!" hypocrisy during the Clinton impeachment was exactly what finally broke the Republican zombie spell for me. So adamant that about the violation of trust represented by Clinton's lie, while shrugging off things like Watergate, for fuck's sake. The dissonance between *outing a covert CIA agent* and declaring Libby's blamelessness is of similar magnitude, to my eyes. (yikes, I don't know if I've ever admitted here that I'm a recovering Republican. I'm all better now, really!)
We've got a couple -- SCMT's right with you. And of course baa still is one.
a sane, reasonable person willing to be aggressive
Yeah, I think there was something special about the combination of content and style that Steve achieved. He was at least as knowledgeable and shrewd in his analysis as any of the "respectable" people out there talking about the war (and other issues), but he didn't engage in the equivocating language typical of elites. His direct and slightly coarse tone separated him from the elites by class and I think that was important: it demonstrated that members of the rabble could make more sense than the elite opinionmakers. It helped to break the spell of top-down punditry.
One of the neocons (Harvey "Manliness" Mansfield) recently came out against the rule of law, more or less. If you read the books about the Strauss -- Schmitt relationship, what they shared was a contempt for liberalism and the rule of law, and a belief that "strong rulers" are a necessity. ("Strong rulers" here is scare quotes -- that's not their actual words).
Schmitt became a Nazi, but poor Strauss was out in the cold. When he left Germany for France, the Frenchman he most wanted to meet was Charles Maurras, who ended up as a Nazi collaborator and was very lucky to escape hanging.
I've never heard anyone speak of a "road to Damascus" change of direction in Strauss's thinking. When the liberal US gave him refuge, he slyly retrofitted his philosophy for display in a liberal environment, as per the basic principle of taqqiyah (expedient dissimulation) he learned from his Shi'a teachers.
This sounds pretty extreme, but a non-Straussian who familiarizes himself somewhat with Strauss and his followers will be hard put to come up with a milder judgement.
I will never get used to the idea that the nice CIA wants me to help protect them against mean people.
Okay, that bit is disturbing. But in theory there's nothing wrong with having an intelligence service, and the part of it we're talking about didn't appear to be doing anything notably evil at the time.
'twas reunion week at U of C, and I was in some obligatory Strauss conversations. I heard somebody say "The regime he had dreamed of wanted to kill him."
Which ones did you manage to read, John?
Stephen Moore, from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, was on the Diane Rehm show this morning talking about the Scooter Libby verdict, and among his reasons for saying that Libby should be pardoned was that Valerie Plame wasn't really a covert agent. It's been pretty well established that she was, right? Ticked me off that no one on the show called him on it.
It's been pretty well established that she was, right?
Yes.
Off-topic, but "thousands of Turkish troops" just entered northern Iraq.
Here's the AP report. It would be nice if somebody would trot over and confirm the presence of "thousands of Turkish troops": you'd think they'd be noticeable.
Ottoman Empire on the move! Better get Lawrence to lie to the Arabs!
There are two books out about Strauss and Schmitt. There's more about this at my URL.
I was peripherally connected to the Straussian clique at the very beginning when it was just forming, and I was good friends with one for awhile. I was always aware of their rightism, but at that time they didn't seem as toxic as they do now. Straussian scholarship remains interesting, and they do talk about important things that others seldom do.
Oy. The "Turkish tanks roll across the border to reclaim Kurdistan as part of Turkey" or something similar, was one of the parade of horribles I was expecting at the beginning of the war that I had sort of given up worrying about -- not so much for any good reason, as that it just hadn't happened yet. Worrying back in full force, now.
Those are Armored Personnel Carriers on the transporters in the AP photo, btw, not "tanks." Which make a lot more sense.
What is the distinction, 33?
Story seems murky, with quibbles and denials here and there.
The point of a tank is to blow stuff up while moving forward and not getting blown up in return. The point of an APC is to carry troops from place to place without getting blown up.
(And 'tanks' was meant to refer to what I'd been worrying about, not to analysis of whatever's happening right now on the Turkish border.)
36: I was reacting to the AP caption, not your usage of these terms, which is quite sophisticated.
It will never stop amazing me that gay people can vote Republican. Cerebrocrat, what was wrong with you?
Jose Ferrer, coughing.
I agree about the distinction btw Straussian scholarship and Straussian cult politics. My teacher George Anastaplo is sometimes, as in one of the essays for his festschrift, referred to as a "liberal Straussian." Strauss's reading of Locke, for instance, is interestingly compatible with Hazlitt's, which I did not encounter until years after I read Strauss's.
re: Libby. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. I have no use for criminal behaviour in the pursuit of policy. In the case of a Contitutional question, i.e. the Exec thinks it can but Congress says no, and the Exec is later found to be in error by SCOTUS, then a prosecution is not in order.
re: Clinton, it wasn't the BJ, it was the perjury. That the perjury occured in a civil case is not important.
And what the hell is up with Sany Berger giving up his law license? Smells fishy at best.
re: Turks. Going after PKK (not PK, B.) is certainly a provocation, but probably can be swept under the rug if they don't stay to long.
cerebrocrat? Really? I'm sending you hug-vibes, child. Sheesh. Now get out there and fuck some ass.
In the case of a Contitutional question, i.e. the Exec thinks it can but Congress says no, and the Exec is later found to be in error by SCOTUS, then a prosecution is not in order.
I could agree with this if it excludes circumstances where the Exec maintains secrecy for the purpose of avoiding oversight. Open defiance of Congress, tested in the courts, I could see prosecution being inappropriate.
3 seems backwards to me. Presumably the tomato plants weren't in the middle of your driveway, and they're not moving around, so to run them over you'd have to do something that was objectively very incompetent, like back the car into the neighbor's front yard. The toddler on the other hand was probably in the middle of your driveway when you ran her over, and for that matter probably had just run out into your driveway and wasn't there when you had very responsibly looked to make sure nothing was behind you only a second or two before. So the "sorry, I just wasn't paying attention" excuse is actually much more understandable in this case. Doesn't mean your neighbor won't be upset about the smooshed toddler in the driveway, but that's a different matter.
47: Everybody knows that kid's outrageously fat father used to hang out in the paths of streetcars. What'd the mom expect, anyway?
41: what was wrong with me was called "brainwashing," and was the result of growing up with stridently right-wing parents for whom politics were a constant topic of conversation (my father was in the state legislature, even). In my defense, I was always socially very liberal, I just thought that those issues weren't as important as the steely-eyed economic and foreign policy realism supplied by the daddy party. Of course, after the scales fell, the worst fight I ever had with my parents was when I tried to point out that the social policies they favor have measurably negative consequences for them (for instance, no grandchildren in state).
It really is pretty embarrassing to admit being a gay (former!) Republican.
And 45, thanks, I'll take 'em!
The brain in a bottle was at the wheel of a runaway trolley bearing down on someone's tomato plants. A fat man.....