You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

Politics

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Along with nostalgic audiophiles, it seems there’s another market for those old cassettes: Prison.

60% of the company’s sales are on good old analogue cassette. Why? Because shiny silver discs are banned in many facilities, as the authorities fear that they could be used for purposes other than aural entertainment. Screws in the cassettes have to be removed for the same reason.

Pack Central’s success is easy to explain – prisoners have to buy their music in physical formats because they can’t download it. “I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,” says company owner Bob Paris. “The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have internet access and never will.”

So, what’s been pumping on the cons’ stereos recently? Lil Wayne, Mariah Carey, Usher, Rihanna, Nickelback and Leona Lewis are all currently popular on the inside, while Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon are perennial favourites.

Mariah Carey? I would have thought that constituted as cruel and unusual punishment. Al Green, however, seems perfect for “Date” music.

The World Court is learning that when it comes to the death penalty, you don’t mess with Texas.

Condemned prisoner Jose Medellin looked to the federal courts to keep him from the death chamber Tuesday for his part in the gang rape, beating and strangling of two teenage girls 15 years ago.

The Mexican-born Medellin, 33, faced lethal injection in a case that has drawn international attention after he raised arguments he wasn’t allowed to consult the Mexican consulate for legal help after he was arrested in the girls’ murders.

Late Monday, Medellin was moved from death row at a prison outside Livingston to Huntsville, where he would be the fifth Texas inmate executed this year. His transfer came after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected requests for clemency and a reprieve.
....

The International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, has said Medellin and some 50 other Mexicans on death row around the nation should have new hearings in U.S. courts to determine whether a 1963 treaty was violated during their arrests. Medellin is the first among them who is set to die.

His attorneys contend he was denied the protections of the Vienna Convention, which calls for people arrested to have access to their home country’s consular officials.

President Bush has asked states to review the cases, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that neither the president nor the international court can force Texas’ hand. Medellin’s supporters say Congress or the Texas Legislature should be given a chance to pass a law setting up procedures for new hearings before he is executed.

Gov. Rick Perry, the Texas courts and the state attorney general say the execution should be carried out. The Texas Attorney General’s Office urged the Supreme Court to reject the appeals, saying the execution “fully complies with international law” and noting that the justices already have ruled that the International Court of Justice’s decisions are not U.S. law and not binding on American courts.

This is not the same thing as “Harsh interrogations” where the rules were broken. This guy is a rapist and a murderer who was caught and tried under our justice system and got the maximum punishment allowed under our laws. Rick Perry is basically telling the World Court to pound sand. Good for him.

Congress has, once again, failed to pass a budget on time.  Sometimes I feel like this country is car barreling down the road with no one at the wheel.

Update by Lee: Might I offer a slight variation on your analogy:  Sometimes I feel like this country is barreling down the road, with two drivers who can’t agree where they’re headed, in a car with no steering wheel.

Monday, August 04, 2008

Mark Sanford, often mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, is accused of being one of those whacky libertarians. But is he?

He’s a social conservative. As governor, he’s supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He also supported a bill to require women to view an ultrasound before receiving an abortion. And he hasn’t been making an effort to overturn South Carolina’s drug laws.

In sum, Sanford agrees with libertarians about the size of government, but often breaks with them on the scope of government. You could say that about dozens of other conservative politicians, although Sanford stays true to his small government principles more often than most.

But, really, whether Sanford is a libertarian is beside the point. Given the unflattering context in which the term is often used to describe him, the real question is why Sanford’s critics are all calling him a libertarian. They seem to think there’s some political advantage to be gained from doing so, although it’s not entirely clear what it would be.

My best guess is that Sanford’s opponents face a dilemma that leads them to call him a libertarian. What they really mean is that Sanford is too conservative even for South Carolina—that he favors small government to the point of undermining core services.

So much for that line of attack. What his opponents really mean is, they want people to think he’s a nutjob:

There are a couple of reasons why, given this dilemma, Sanford’s detractors—or any critic of a conservative—might try out “libertarian.” One is that, in a country with such an entrenched two-party system, anything associated with third parties tends to be exotic. In effect, the message here is that Sanford is a gadfly, a crackpot, or somewhere in between.

The other reason is that “libertarian” is largely a blank slate. Most Americans aren’t really very clear on what it means to be a liberal or a conservative. Except for a small, politically engaged group, I doubt they have any idea what it means to be a libertarian. If Democrats set out to brand Republicans as libertarians and libertarians as bad, it’s not as though most people will say to themselves, “But Republicans views on the War on Drugs are completely antithetical to the libertarian ethos!”

This line of attack tends to come from people who are clueless about conservatism in general. Unfortunately this can also include other Republicans who don’t like challenges to the status quo. Mark Sanford seems to be in a position where he can be in the establishment but not of it. Sometimes, being “In between” can be the only way to really get anything done.

The Republicans are fighting back.

Scores of Republican House members will return to the Hill today, despite Congress being on recess, to engage in legislative guerrilla tactics meant to turn the screws on Speaker Nancy Pelosi who has so far refused to allow a vote on domestic oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge.

Republicans took to the House floor on Friday to protest against Pelosi even though the Speaker made sure to turn the cameras and most of the lights off. Their specific complaint was that Pelosi allowed the House to recess without allowing the House to vote on energy legislation.

It was raucous political theater reminiscent of what Republicans did when they were last in the minority in the early 1990s.

Getting stripped of power and the complacency that comes with it seems to have done them some good. I only wish more of them had displayed such cajones when they were the arrogant, big-spending, big-government types.

It’s almost comical ... no it is comical to watch Barack Obama stumble around like Frankenstein in search of an energy policy, side-swiping every bad idea you can come up with.  Take your pick.  There’s:

1) The sudden decision that he might support offshore drilling and tapping the strategic oil reserve.

2) The ridiculous suggestion that keeping your tires properly inflated would give America the same energy boost as offshore drilling.

3) A proposed raft of mandates and lofty goals in which Obama proposes to:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15 percent by 2020.

— Weatherize 1 million homes annually.

— Increase the efficiency of new buildings by 50 percent in the next decade through energy-efficient roofs and better-quality windows and ventilation systems.

— Increase the efficiency of existing buildings by 25 percent over the next decade through retrofitting that includes improved insulation and ventilation systems.

All with mandates and “investments”.  Apparently, we’re going to put a million cars on the electrical grid and reduce our electrical capacity at the same time.  I think this means Barack Obama believes that the Big One is going to send California into the Pacific Ocean since I can’t imagine another way of reducing our electrical consumption by that much.

Note that all of the above are splendid ideas and I would love to see them implemented.  I just think that government mandates and subsidies are bound to have unintended consequences.  And there are probably far better ideas that the nation will implement on its own if we’’re allowed to.

While I’m on the subject of green industry, I’m getting a little sick of the “green jobs” line that brackets the above mandates.  If those jobs were good for our economy, industry would be (and to some extent is) creating those jobs already.  If those jobs can only be created by mandates and subsidies, then they’re destroying a larger number of jobs.

4) I already linked to McArdle’s takedown of his “tax the oil companies and give the money to the poor” idea.  Even Sullivan called it “Obama’s worst idea yet”.

5) Then there’s his ad bashing McCain for taking money from the oil industry, a claim which is dubious at best.  Ironically, it may be the smartest thing he’s said recently.

Really, I couldn’t imagine a better argument against a federal energy policy than the recent stumbles and bumbles we’ve seen from the Obama camp.  If this is what we’re seeing from the Smartest Man in the Senate, we’re better off leaving well enough alone.

In addressing Obama’s tax-and-spend “energy policy”, McArdle makes a great point:

At the most basic level, I am against attempting to trick the American people into accepting policies that they don’t want.  First, if people really are so stupid that they are unable to recognize basic self interest, or so immoral that they cannot act rightly, then probably we should not allow them to vote.

I’ve never thought about it this way.  But it’s true.  The Democrats think we are too irresponsible to provide for our own retirement; we’re too stupid to pick our kid’s schools; we’re too selfish to care for the poor without being forced; we’re too reckless to find our own day care; we’re too gluttonous to decide where to eat; we’re too dim to see the benefits of buying a house; we’re too nasty to pay our workers or care for them properly; we’re too short-sighted to conserve energy; and we’re too mean to clean the environment.  Government must force our hand on all these things through taxes or regulations.

Apparently, the only we thing we are qualified to do is vote.  Even if we’re convicted felons.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

From the Heads-Up-Their-Asses Department we get this.

Small, cheap cellphones have become ubiquitous in the workplace. But federal tax rules governing them date to the days of big handsets, big bills and big hair.

Major employers, including the University of California system, have been hit with bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes for violating the anachronistic laws. If the rules aren’t changed, many employers say they will stop handing out cellphones to their workers.

The problem stems from the tax code’s inability to keep up with technological advances.

When the makers of the 1987 film “Wall Street” wanted to convey corporate raider Gordon Gekko’s power and success, they gave him one of the era’s most exotic executive perks: a cellphone.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that actor Michael Douglas carried as he strolled along the beach was roughly the size of a brick and cost $3,995 when introduced three years earlier. A call during peak times cost upward of 50 cents a minute.

Times and technology have changed. Federal tax rules have not. The Internal Revenue Service still considers cellphones to be a pricey fringe benefit and has started enforcing regulations beginning in 1989. That’s when Congress decided that mobile phones should be treated like company cars and other executive perks: Their personal use qualifies as extra compensation.

The law requires employees to keep detailed records of all calls made on their work-issue cellphones, indicating whether they were business or personal. If they don’t, the phone and wireless service are deemed a perk that must be listed as taxable income to the employee.

Most employers were unaware of the rules until the last few years, when the IRS began cracking down and requiring additional taxes to cover the value of the cellphone service provided to employees.
....

A change appears likely. When pressed by Johnson at a hearing this year, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson said that updating the rules sounded “like the right idea to me.” And the IRS’ Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities, calling the rules “burdensome for any employer,” recommended last month that the agency loosen reporting requirements for employers and that Congress change the law.

The IRS is like Rip Van Winkle. Every so often it wakes up and finds that the times have changed. But instead of tying to keep up, it tries to roll back the clock. Your government at work, again.

Friday, August 01, 2008

WTF?:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices.

Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi’s refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m., and they are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess.

At one point, the lights went off in the House and the microphones were turned off in the chamber, meaning Republicans were talking in the dark. But as Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) was speaking, the lights went back on and the microphones were turned on shortly afterward.

But C-SPAN, which has no control over the cameras in the chamber, has stopped broadcasting the House floor, meaning no one was witnessing this except the assembled Republicans, their aides, and one Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has now left.

You have to read the whole thing.  This is just getting bizarre.  The Republicans were using Twitter to bypass the CSPAN blackout.

Update: While Nancy Pelosi is playing “it’s my ball” with the Republicans, the Senate has apparently reached an energy compromise—more offshore drilling in return for higher mileage standards and investment in alternative energies. If I read it right, the $85 billion in spending is even offset with spending cuts and tax increases, which would make it one of the few bills in this Congress to comply with PAYGO.

I can live with this.  Expect Barack “Reach Across the Aisle” Obama to vote against it.

I’m not so sure about this:

Answering a question about his approach to combatting crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US. McCain called them tactics ‘somewhat like we use in the military...You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.’ The way he described it, his approach sounded an awful lot like the surge. As part of his argument, McCain praised the crime-fighting efforts of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Urban League president Marc Morial countered that while New York did experience a drop in crime under Giuliani, there were several major instances of police misconduct. To which McCain promised aggressive prosecution of civil rights violations and a Justice Department free from political cronyism.

I’m not against the get-tough approach per se. Giuliani made it work partly because he went after the small stuff as well as the big. But there are police departments in this country that I would be very skeptical about giving too much power. It all comes down to the question of safety versus liberty. Do we really want to turn our cities into armed camps with the feel of a military occupation? In the long run, I’d still sacrifice some of the former to keep most of the latter.

Looks like the Administration can’t just tell Congress to go to hell:

President Bush’s top advisers cannot ignore subpoenas issued by Congress, a federal judge ruled on Thursday in a case that involves the firings of several United States attorneys but has much wider constitutional implications for all three branches of government.

“The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Judge John D. Bates ruled in United States District Court here.

Unless overturned on appeal, a former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, and the current White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, would be required to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating the controversial dismissal of the federal prosecutors in 2006.

While the ruling is the first in which a court has agreed to enforce a Congressional subpoena against the White House, Judge Bates called his 93-page decision “very limited” and emphasized that he could see the possibility of the dispute being resolved through political negotiations. The White House is almost certain to appeal the ruling.

It was the latest setback for the Bush administration, which maintains that current and former White House aides are immune from congressional subpoena. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to recommend that Karl Rove, a former top political adviser to President Bush, be cited for contempt for ignoring a subpoena and not appearing at a hearing on political interference by the White House at the Justice Department.

Although Judge Bates did not specifically say so, his ruling, if sustained on appeal, might apply as well to Mr. Rove and his refusal to testify.

Bates is a Bush appointee, incidentally.  It must rankle when your hand-picked judges insist on enforcing the law.  There’s some great comments from Lederman here.

I’m fine with the existence of Executive Privilege.  Congress should not and does not have the authority to go on fishing expeditions into White House activities.  But at the same time, Executive Privilege is not meant to create a zone of lawlessness and unaccountability within the White House.  Congress is investigating quite specific allegations of illegal activity.

Slowly but surely, this Administration’s encroachments on the law are being rolled back.  It’s encouraging.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

The American takes apart the idea that things are getting worse for Americans.  I question some of their figures, but most are sound and consistent with what I’ve seen elsewhere.  What impressed me the most were two things

First:

As Americans know, today’s rising food and energy prices are crimping household budgets. But there are other ways to understand the relative size of the rise of food and energy costs. For example, in terms of time worked at the average pay rate, the real cost of a 12-item basket of basic foods has hardly budged. And while the work-time price of gasoline doubled in recent years, a gallon of gasoline still goes for less than 11 minutes of work (Fig. 3). At 20 miles per gallon, an hour of work will get you 110 miles down the road; at 30 mpg, you can go 165 miles.

Most of the progress on food and gas prices was made in the first half of the last century—notably right before farm subsidies kicked in to keep food prices elevated and third world denizens poor.  But there’s also this:

The lament-filled anecdotes about long hours and low pay just don’t stand up to the test of hard data. Real total compensation—wages plus fringe benefits, both adjusted for inflation—has been rising steadily for several generations (Fig. 4). Over time, the fringes have become a larger share of the rewards for work, dampening the statistics on wage increases. At the same time, we’re spending less time at work. An average workweek has fallen from 39.8 hours in 1950 to 36.9 hours in 1973 to 33.8 hours today.

Not all those hours are spent on actual work.  Human resources experts estimate that 1.6 hours a day go to non-work activities; employees themselves say it’s more than two hours. What are workers doing? Most of them are using the Internet for personal business or socializing with coworkers (Fig. 5). It’s no coincidence that the busiest times for online auctions come during the hours when most Americans are supposed to be hard at work (Fig. 6).

We’re not only working less on the job. We’re also taking less time for household chores. Since 1950, the annual hours devoted to work at home has fallen from 1,544 to 1,278. Working less means we have more time for ourselves. The hustle and bustle of everyday life conceals the fact that a typical American has more free time than ever. We start work later in life and live longer and healthier lives, enjoying added years of retirement. All told, only about a quarter of our waking hours are consumed with work, down from 45 percent in 1950 and 35 percent in 1973 (Fig. 7).

I believe those work figures include vacation and sick days as time off work.

The reason these numbers fascinate and inspire me is that time is the only currency that a human being really has.  The reason I hate high taxes is because it means people burn up more of their lives working for the government.  The reason I hate over-regulation and our byzantine tax system is that people lose years of their life to unproductive crapola.

But the big picture is that a person born in 2007 can expect to spend 65,000 hours working, 60,000 on home chores and a whopping 329,000 hours doing everything else.  This compares to 94,000, 81,000 and 216,000, respectively, for the idyllic 1950’s.

People do work hard today.  I certainly do and so most of you guys.  But our narrow vision keeps us from remembering that our parents worked harder.  Housework alone—before the era of appliances—could use up an entire lifetime.  Paid vacations were a luxury; paid sick leave even more so.  We lose that perspective because life is hectic these days.  We’ve also blurred the line between work and home.

Nevertheless, the Democratic meme that people are working harder for less is just garbage.  The only way they can get there is to manipulate the numbers.  They don’t count benefits when they compare wages.  They don’t compare apples to apples when they consider costs.  According to them, I’ve made no economic progress because my car—with A/C, CD player, anti-lock brakes, airbags, crumple zones, 33 mpg, very clean exhaust and 150,000 miles on it—costs about the same relative to my salary as the smoking, shuddering, stifling, unsafe, unreliable, lead fuel guzzling, filth-belching behemoth my dad had 40 years ago.

It’s nonsense.  But we still fall for it because of that human need for martyrdom and our strange willingness to idolize the past.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The WSJ has a scathing editorial on the differences between the two presidential candidates on education.  Here’s McCain:

“Parents ask only for schools that are safe, teachers who are competent and diplomas that open doors of opportunity,” said Mr. McCain in remarks recently to the NAACP. “When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children.” Some parents may opt for a better public school or a charter school; others for a private school. The point, said the Senator, is that “no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity.”

After noting the success of voucher and privatization programs, they list the response of the Teachers’ Unions’ Bitch Democratic Party:

Congressional Democrats have refused to reauthorize the D.C. voucher program and are threatening to kill it. Last month, Philadelphia’s school reform commission voted to seize six schools from outside managers, including four from Edison. In L.A., local school board members oppose the expansion of charters even though seven in 10 charters in the district outperform their neighborhood peers.

It’s well known that the force calling the Democratic tune here is the teachers unions. Earlier this month, Senator Obama accepted the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. Speaking recently before the American Federation of Teachers, he described the alternative efforts as “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.”

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, “although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom.” The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward. Those at the top don’t need voucher programs and they already exercise school choice. They can afford exclusive private schools, or they can afford to live in a neighborhood with decent public schools. The point of providing educational options is to extend this freedom to the “kids at the bottom.”

I’ve written before about translating the Democratic Eduspeak.  Whenever they say that vouchers or school choice will harm “the system”, they are telling you that “the system” is far more important to them than “your kids’ futures.”.  It’s a “system” that does stuff like this:

Ten struggling schools in the Fort Worth district are spending more than $200,000 on staff retreats, including $64,500 by South Hills High School for a three-day stay at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine.

The money comes from grants through the federal No Child Left Behind program and must be used by the schools to analyze student test data, comprehensively assess needs, make a campus improvement plan and team-build, according to the Texas Education Agency, which distributes the money. The retreats are allowed, but some wonder if the venues might be excessive.

No. Don’t hold them accountable, Mr. Obama.  Don’t give parents an opportunity to put their children in schools that are not only better, but cheaper.  Keep supporting “the system”.  The money must flow.

This is bad:

For nearly two years, a young political aide sought to cultivate a “farm system” for Republicans at the Justice Department, hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices.

That aide, Monica M. Goodling, exercised what amounted to veto power over a wide range of critical jobs, asking candidates for their views on abortion and same-sex marriage and maneuvering around senior officials who outranked her, including the department’s second-in-command.

An extensive report by the department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility concluded yesterday that Goodling and others had broken civil service laws, run afoul of department policy and engaged in “misconduct,” a finding that could expose them to further scrutiny and sanctions. The report depicted Goodling as a central figure in politicizing employment decisions at Justice during the Bush administration.

...

Thirty-four candidates told investigators that Goodling or one of her deputies raised the topic of abortion in job interviews and 21 said they discussed same-sex marriage, the report said. Another job applicant said he admired Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, only to watch Goodling “frown” and respond, “But she’s pro-choice.”

She and her aides regularly gave candidates for career civil service jobs a form designed for political appointees that sought information on party affiliation and financial contributions. When job seekers sometimes raised objections, Goodling replied that the form was a mistake, showing that she was “aware that it was improper,” the report said.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why this is important.  I’ve run into a firewall of GOP talking points.  These are political appointees; they serve at the pleasure of a President; this is a partisan witch-hunt. But Morrissey,hardly a left-wing yammerhead, destroys this:

For anyone who may be inclined to think of this as a political vendetta, take a long read through the actual report.  It came from the IG and the OPR, two organs within the DoJ and not inclined towards partisan viewpoints.  The evidence they produced through interviews and testimony is damning, and their conclusions inescapable.

In any federal bureaucracy, jobs are divided up between civil-service or career positions and political appointments.  Vetting for political loyalty in the latter is expected — in fact, it’s why the positions exist.  For other positions, jobs in which policy does not get created or changed, federal law prohibits that kind of scrutiny.  Civil-service jobs exist to conduct the day-to-day business, with consistency and a lack of politicization.

That’s especially important at the Department of Justice.  In order to maintain confidence in the enforcement of law, the DoJ has to conduct itself with impartiality and nonpartisanship.  If prosecutions begin depending on politics, cronyism, or geography, it will corrode the rule of law and undermine the fabric of American life.

...

Instead of getting the best people in place for issues like terrorism and immigration, the three people named in this report instead focused on politics — and left these issues with incompetents or no one at all.  That’s the danger of political cronyism.

Fortunately, the Mukasey DoJ has already adopted the recommendations of the IG and OPR in revamping hiring practices and oversight, and they believe his changes will keep this from happening again.  That demonstrates the desire Michael Mukasey has in correcting the shameful performance of his predecessor.  Even though the report doesn’t directly implicate Gonzales in these misdeeds, he appointed the people who perpetrated them and did nothing to provide oversight to prevent it from happening.

I don’t know what is more appalling.  Some of the crap the Administration has pulled or the number of people who are so willing to defend what is clearly both illegal and damaging to America.  Morrissey, to his credit, hasn’t sold out.  Real conservatives never do.

Update by Lee: “Real conservatives never sell out” ought to be the motto of this blog.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I was thinking over the Greenwald post I linked to earlier and his good, if shrill, response to criticism and particularly the point that Larison makes:

Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions.

This is essentially what this blog has been saying for several years now about the Republicans.  They left us, not he other way around. We don’t owe them our loyalty when they take us for granted and betray everything we believe in.  What Greenwald—and many on the Left—are upset about is that the Democratic Party is proving less loyal to their supporters than vice versa.  Of course, the Democrats are still trying to scuttle free trade, raise taxes, socialize medicine and empower unions.  They’re betrayal hasn’t been nearly as intense.

Where I think Greenwald errs is that he is targeting the Blue Dogs, the guys who were elected in conservative districts, rather than the liberals who were elected in liberal districts and could vote to turn the country over to China for all the difference it would make in the polls.  It’s the same mistake many conservatives made.  As the Republican Party descended into an abyss of spending and constitutional malarkey, Limbaugh and the other voices of conservatism would rail against the moderates—people like Olympia Snowe or Lincoln Chafee or Susan Collins or, especially John McCain.  According to the conventional wisdom, these were the people derailing the Republican agenda so they could stay elected in fairly liberal areas of the country.

Only they weren’t the problem for us any more than the Blue Dogs are the problem for liberals.  It was the supposed conservatives who were the problem.  It was guys like Dennis Hastert and Tom Delay who derailed the Republican agenda.  We had congressmen who had very safe seats in very conservative districts who refused to stand up to the radial Religious Right, who refused to control spending, who wouldn’t consider Social Security reform and who let the Administration trample all over the Separation of Powers.

It’s like Lee says.  You can’t blame a liberal for acting liberal.  And I would add that you can’t blame a moderate for acting moderate.  But you can blame a conservative when he acts like a liberal.

After only a year and a half, the Left is beginning to follow the same path to self-destruction that the Right did—ignoring the decay within their own party.  It’s almost heartening.