A Failure of Compassion

I have a rather long post over at The Daily Gotham about how the Bush administration's commitment to ideological fanaticism is undermining its own much-trumpeted efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.

The very short version: USAID and HHS, at the instigation of Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), attached a requirement to the disbursement of PEPFAR (that's Bush's $15 billion anti-AIDS effort) funds requiring that any organization receiving the money sign an "anti-prostitution pledge" -- precluding them even from spending their own private money on AIDS prevention and assistance for sex workers anywhere in the world. The result has been that the most marginalized and at-risk segments of the population in many countries are being abandoned, and those who still seek to work with them are shunned by NGOs fearful of losing the funding. The whole thing runs directly counter to best practices in public health and humanitarian services, and threatens to make PEPFAR more an agent of harm than good, undermining much of the work that has been done so far, and sacrificing the AIDS-prevention cause to silly ideological nonsense. Last year a federal judge found the pledge unconstitutional, but the Bush administration has responded by only making things more difficult for relief organizations.

This video titled "Taking the Pledge" (it's about 13 minutes) has more, including interviews with relief workers affected by the policy. You can also read about the Open Society Institute's lawsuit against the pledge here.

Labels: AIDS, Bush administration

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:42 PM 0 comments

  "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are"

It's hard not to giggle at Peggy Noonan's latest lament at the Wall Street Journal. Noonan has been doing the "Dubya's not a real conservative" routine for a couple years now (Glenn Greenwald, for instance, called her out on it last October), and she's really getting it down to an art. Now it seems that, with the immigration bill, Peggy has discovered another Shocking! aspect of the Bush administration: its political ruthlessness:

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

"Too bad" refers to the administration's total unwillingness to account for the views of those who disagree with it on matters of policy and/or principle -- again, Noonan and her fellow disillusioned conservatives suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of something that's been infuriating everyone else for years now.

Noonan, the ex-Reagan speechwriter and dutiful conservative noisemaker of long standing, should not of course be surprised by the arrogance and viciousness and small-mindedness of the administration she and her compatriots helped to build. The conservative movement modeled the very same behavior on its way up; it's perversely Gandhian, really, the way the movement has been the change -- the ugly, degrading change -- it wanted to see in the world.

Nor should we be surprised by how Noonan and her ilk suddenly seem to be so interested in disagreeing with the president on matters of principle, now that his approval ratings seem tethered to the conservative project in a way that looks much less like a buoy and much more like a lead weight. There's an inverse relation, it seems, between the political fortunes of the Bush administration and American conservatives' devotion to principle.

I positively squealed with delight at Noonan's last paragraph, wherein she descends into a kind of political self-help affirmation:

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

It's time to heal, Peggy! Without getting into yet another rehash of the saga of compassionate conservatism (though it's the only narrative that can make any sense of Noonan's argument here), one boggles at the notion of conservatives having to "take back" the Republican party. From whom? Nelson Rockefeller's magic elves?

They would have to "take it back" from themselves, of course. It's almost as though Noonan is caught up in her own psycho-thriller, a Memento for the conservative movement. You want to reach out to her and tell her: it was you all along, Peggy! You committed the crime. But she isn't programmed that way, anymore. None of them are. The entire conservative movement is lurching along from moment to moment in a fog of memory loss, consulting the notes they've scrawled incohately on their arms: George W. Bush did it. Don't trust him!

We can safely guess that it's not going to end well.

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, Peggy Noonan

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:40 AM 2 comments

  Impaled by Immigration Again

People keep pointing out -- correctly -- that immigration is an issue that should divide Democrats as well as Republicans. Yet it's the Republicans who keep finding themselves on the pointy end of the wedge.

In part that probably has to do with the parties' contrasting philosphies - differences over the issue are mitigated somewhat when everyone agrees on the importance of unionization and a strong social safety net. But it also has to do with political circumstances -- specifically, the role of a Republican White House dedicated to the pursuit of Hispanic votes (if no longer for itself, then for its own strategists' plan for the future of the GOP national majority).

Conservative pundits are looking at the McCain-Kennedy bill with alarm (though, to be fair, the bill has critics from across the political spectrum). At NRO, for instance, the Editors are freaking out over the notion that the bill's "probationary status" and "extreme hardship" provisions will effectively grant amnesty to undocumented aliens the very day the bill passes, regardless of the administration's claims about enforcement; Stanley Kurtz, meanwhile, thinks the fiendishly clever Ted Kennedy is suckering Republicans by promising them a move from family-based immigration to a skills-based points system that will never actually happen.

Whatever becomes of the current bill, on a larger level the Republicans continue to find themselves on the horns of rather ugly dilemma. It isn't the philosophical debate causing them so much trouble, of course, it's the political problem. Fred Siegel compares the issue to the Dubai ports controversy, in that once again "the Bush administration seems to be undermining its own core principles by failing to put security first." That analysis does beg the question of whether "putting security first" really is the administration's core principle, as opposed to, say, political self-interest (it also begs the question of whether "security" is really the best paradigm from which to approach the issue). Still, it's an interesting comparison inasmuch as one could argue that, either way, both cases involve the White House acting irrationally against its own prime directive.

An anonymous NRO contributor illustrates the supposed political irrationality at work in a satirical "memo" from one "H. Dean to HRC." This mysterious Mr. Dean is delighted by the Bush administration's support for immigration reform, arguing that "the Republicans are handing us the future on a silver platter.... The 'bi-partisan McCain-Kennedy plan' seemed almost deliberately designed to help Democrats and hurt Republicans." Why?

First and foremost, most Hispanics are Democrats.... The record shows that since the Second World War, the Hispanic community has supported Democrats for president ranging from a high of nearly 90 percent for their fellow Catholic JFK to a low of 60 percent for Mondale, McGovern, and Kerry, for an average of roughly 2 to 1 Democratic. So any amnesty plan will create more Democratic than Republican voters in the foreseeable future. It took the last wave of Catholic immigrants — from the Irish famine refugees of the 1840s and Southern/Eastern workers of the post-Civil War era — nearly a century to consider voting Republican for Ike in the 1950s. Now a similar scenario is being set up again.

Morevoer, the issue divides Republicans and will undoutedly lead to more business support for Democrats. What does it all add up to?

The likely end result of this will be a nasty fight in the Republican primaries of 2008, an alienated business community, very few Hispanic Republicans, more Democrats, and a depressed GOP base. The textbook definition of a disaster is getting the worst of all worlds.

Ross Douthat argues that Bush's strategists correctly diagnosed the GOP's major problem, but they've prescribed the wrong cure:

The GOP can build a political majority around the married, Middle-American middle class, but not if it remains a lily-white party: It needs larger percentages of the Hispanic and yes, the African-American vote to offset the growing Democratic advantage among white, socially-liberal Bobo voters who might have been Reaganites a generation ago.... Bush's insight in this regard was correct, but his strategy for winning a larger share of the minority vote rests on three wobbly pillars - gay marriage, which won him Ohio in '04 but won't be a national issue for much longer; the war, which worked until it became clear how badly he mismanaged it; and amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is aimed at precisely the wrong part of the Hispanic demographic. There's no evidence that middle-class Hispanics, the people the GOP needs to woo, are likely to reward the Republicans for legalizing millions of maids, dishwashers, and migrant laborers, and the migrant laborers themselves certainly aren't going to vote for the GOP anytime soon.

And thus we arrive at the Big Question that seems to drive much of the right's internal debate over immigration: are Hispanics natural Democrats or natural Republicans? Douthat suggests that "they're like any immigrant population, natural Democrats while they're in the barrio and natural Republicans once they've reached the suburbs." Our anonymous satirist, on the other hand, argues that "even if Rove’s vision of middle class Hispanics eventually turning Republican is true, at best, they’ll be a swing vote replacing older whites in the Sun Belt who have voted 2-1 Republican in the last generation."

It's unclear what the anonymous paleocon would have Republicans do to combat their central demographic problem -- though he doesn't in fact appear to view it as a problem in itself. It's not that he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that the GOP is a "white Christian" party; he seems to believe that this is the party's strength, and the more Republicans seek to diversify their party, the more they will alienate their base. This is undoubtedly true in the short term, but it's this short-term calculation that is crippling the Bush administration's effort to plan for the long-term health of the GOP coalition.

And here let's return to the wider project of compassionate conservatism, which was designed to solve a number of political dilemmas for the Republicans. Some of these were immediate -- for instance the need for Bush to disassociate himself from unpopular Republican congressional leaders. But some were long-term, particularly two linked issues: changing American demographics and the public's rejection of Republican anti-government ideology. The strategy has largely failed because of its own inherent limitations, but also because it comprehensively antagonized so much of the Republican establishment, which establishment was itself the product of 40 years of anti-government, pro-white Christian movement-building. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that the current immigration debate is one last reprise of the right's Wars of Compassionate Conservatism.

The big question, though: if the conflict has been a conservative civil war, which side represents the Lost Cause?

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, immigration, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:15 AM 0 comments

  Falwell Dead; Conservatism Ailing

One could cut and paste today's New York Times headlines into a pretty instructive narrative about the state of American conservatism today. Something like this:

First, The death of conservative evangelicalism. Okay, not the death -- that's far too optimistic. But the passing of Jerry Falwell is symbolic of a shift in the politics of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Falwell, by founding the Moral Majority in 1979, founded the modern Christian right. Too often these days we forget that evangelical Christians have by no means always been a conservative force in American politics. In other eras they've been progressive forces -- even radically progressive; in still others they have simply been politically disengaged. The equation "evangelical=fundamentalist=right-winger" is very much a creation of Jerry Falwell and his allies. As the Times obit puts it, the Moral Majority's "very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics."

But now the line is blurring, as moderate evangelical leaders guide their flocks away from conservative dogma, and as the conservative movement's elites and intellectuals are emboldened to advocate for abandoning core Christian right priorities. It's more than cosmic coincidence that Falwell died only days after the frontrunning candidate for the GOP presidential nomination openly embraced a pro-choice, not-anti-gay line. So have you checked out the National Review lately? It's full of conservative pundits spinning away on Rudy's behalf. Falwell is dead; his movement may be going to the grave with him. What that means for the Republican Party is yet to be seen.

Second, Republican candidates cling desperately to war and terror. The conservative elites' eagerness to embrace Giuliani has much to do with the perception that his electability is based in the very issues that, in recent history's most operatic irony, have been both the GOP's greatest strength and its great downfall. War and terror are Republican specialities; if they do not own war and terror, they own very little in a country whose electorate moves inexorably into the progressive column on issues of government, economics, and teh gays. Having brought the public far more war and terror than anyone ever really wanted, along with their incompetence, their mendacity, and their cronyism, the Republicans can only hope to reinvigorate the brand. The various candidates' enthusiasm, during last night's debate, for more torture!, more war!, more Gitmo!, might be understood as rather confused efforts to do just this. But it was Giuliani who best defined himself, precisely as his supporters have hoped he would, as the Candidate of War and Terror -- But Better This Time!, when he seized an opportunity to blow-torch a straw man dressed up to look like the inimitable Ron Paul. We'll let the National Review's Byron York tell the tale:

It all started when Paul was asked how September 11 changed American foreign policy. “Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?” Paul answered. “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years…”

Questioner Wendell Goler, of Fox News, asked, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul said. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

Enter Giuliani. “May I comment on that?” the mayor said, interrupting the orderly flow of things for the first time in the debate. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

The audience loved it. As the applause built, Giuliani added, “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

Paul didn’t back down, but by cutting in, Giuliani had scored some of the best, and perhaps easiest, points of the night.... Giuliani’s aides seemed genuinely happy with his performance Tuesday night, in contrast to the way they seemed to be faking their happiness in California. “He was better,” said Jim Dyke, a top Giuliani adviser. “9/11 is very personal to the mayor. You can’t coach something like that.”

Giuliani, of course, "lived through" the attacks of 9/11 much as I "lived through" them -- by being in the city at the time. The idea that he was some sort of hero that day, or in the days thereafter, is a myth. But it's not the myth that matters here -- it's the conservatives' need to believe in it. It appears to be all they have. And for its sake, they'll abandon the coalition that made them what they are today (or at least, what they were before last November's elections).

Finally, the crony capitalism machine churns on. I mentioned this in a previous post, and I should continue to emphasize it. As giddy as we can be over all the various acts of immolation and cannibalism on the conservative side, let's not forget that, in perhaps its most essential function, their movement has continued to hum along quite efficiently. My own thesis, advanced many times, is that since conservative principles for government don't work, conservatives wind up governing without principles. And so you get things like this:

A senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.

[...]

As chairman of the commission, Mr. Baroody’s salary would be $154,600. With the severance payment and an additional lump sum of $44,571 for unused leave time, Mr. Baroody would receive $349,171 this year. That amount, which excludes Mr. Baroody’s pension and retirement payments, nearly matches the $344,607 salary that Mr. Baroody earned as the second-highest-paid executive at the association last year.

The nomination of Mr. Baroody, executive vice president at the association, has provoked heavy criticism from Democrats and consumer groups. He is the latest in a line of industry officials and lobbyists to be given senior jobs by Mr. Bush at federal safety agencies that oversee matters like workplace and mine safety and transportation as the administration has sought to roll back hundreds of regulations that businesses viewed as excessive.

Of course, you could argue that there is a principle at work here, and you wouldn't be wrong. There are more than one, I'd say. "Reward your friends, punish your enemies" is a principle that seems to crop up a lot in this administration. It's not much, as principles go, but it's a good general rule of thumb for, say, a street gang. On a larger level, there's "keep those meddling bureaucrats from messing with American business." That's a principle that could almost, if you argue it right (and conservatives are very good at arguing things right), derive from a legitimate philosophy, which is that "capitalism works better than government, so don't pollute capitalism with government." That's a numbingly foolish, short-sighted, and simple-minded philosophy, but it is a philosophy nonetheless.

So we can't say the Bush administration operates entirely without principles (and I won't delve here into a discussion of whether the president's devotion to his war counts as a principle or merely as evidence of insanity), though the few remaining principles in evidence seem to have almost nothing to do with an argument about the good society, and a lot to do with looting the Treasury and gutting the regulatory apparatus before the electoral hordes can finally break down the White House doors.

Modern Republican party conservatism isn't a pretty picture. Denuded of principle, fleshed by mutual purge attempts, insensately clinging to its once-fearsome reputation as the party best able to use violence and the threat of violence to further its own aims, it seems to hurtling toward some kind of reckoning. We can only guess how much of the public interest it will drag along toward that doom.

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, Jerry Falwell, Rudy Giuliani, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:01 AM 1 comments

  We Don't Need No Stinkin' Czar

Terence Jeffrey of the National Review agrees with Rahm:

Commander-in-Chief Bush would not be micromanaging if he personally directed his new Iraq-war team. He would be doing the job the Constitution gives him, and the people elected him to do.

Of course, the subtext here is the rote conservative complaint about Congressional Democrats taking action on the war. But what's interesting is how Jeffrey realizes that the 'War Czar' concept undermines that key Republican argument. How can you insist that the President alone should be the Decider, if the President himself delegates someone else to do the deciding?

Labels: Bush administration, Iraq, National review, Terence Jeffrey, War Czar

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:18 PM 0 comments

  "The White House Will Cave"

So says the National Review's White House correspondent Byron York, who tells us that, as much as the administration would like to prevent Karl Rove and others from having to testify before Congress about the US attorney scandal, the White House doesn't have a leg to stand on.

York points to this report put together several years ago by the Congressional Research Service, listing the many precedents for White House aides testifying before Congress. As York notes, no fewer than 31 members of the Clinton administration made appearances - mostly regarding the Whitewater investigation.

According to York,

The Congressional Research Service report quotes historian Louis Fisher on the issue of White House testimony: “Although White House aides do not testify before congressional committees on a regular basis, under certain conditions they do. First, intense and escalating political embarrassment may convince the White House that it is in the interest of the president to have these aides testify and ventilate the issue fully. Second, initial White House resistance may give way in the face of concerted congressional and public pressure.”

Of course, this is an administration that has proven to be remarkably insulated from giving a damn about political embarrassment or congressional or public pressure. Or, as York puts it:

[T]he Bush White House, of course, has tried to restore some of the presidential prerogatives that officials believe were unwisely given away by earlier administrations. The fact that the Clinton White House allowed so many of its officials to testify, some Republicans argue, does not mean that the Bush White House has to do the same.

York, I should point out, still refuses to see any actual substance in the scandal. He cites a former Bush administration attorney who insists that the congressional hearings are just a "perjury trap," and that nobody has alleged any legal wrongdoing on the part of the White House.

This, of course, is wrong, but you don't need me to tell you that. What's interesting here is that even some conservative correspondents believe that the White House, one way or another, will have to accomodate Congress - and Rove will have to talk. Says York:

In the end, though, the question will be settled not on the merits but on the numbers. Democrats have 51 votes in the Senate and 233 votes in the House. To some extent, the White House will have to make accommodations. “They posture mightily,” says one Washington insider of White Houses past and present, “and then they grab some fig leaf to give Congress what it wants.”

Labels: Bush administration, Byron York, National review, US Attorney scandal

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:43 AM 2 comments