Call It A Comeback
The Freepers haven’t let me down. One of the more amusing comments claims our cars cost 10 times as much and our air conditioners don’t work as well. The first claim is absurd and the second is empirically false–they actually work better, though that has little to do with CFCs being banned.
Will Cal Thomas or Mona Charen make my prediction come true for the major media? I’m betting so….
I’m sure some out there wonder why I think Sully is worth anything, but a good laugh. I think this post shows why. When he can get himself out of a constant lather, he can have some insightful comments about religion and society.
Unfortunately, such insightfullness is displayed by him less and less.
The Great Illinois Republican Civil War has started. Circle up and fire folks. O’Malley and his clan have decided to committ hari kari in the same fashion as Republicans in California and New Jersey.
As a Democrat, I suppose this should make me happy. It doesn’t. I grew up in Illinois and always admired the moderate Republicanism of Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar. They provided a great check excesses of the left and still respected education funding, infrastructure and individual liberties. Jim Thompson provided the infrastructure that makes Illinois an ideopolis now. Without him, Illinois may well be Missouri with good farmland and a big crumbling city. Instead, Chicago is a world class city (Washington and Daley deserve credit for this as well), education is good in most areas (see posting on Blog St. Louis about rural ed), and Illinois is relatively good on social issues.
No more. Now there will be a huge blow-up in the Republican Party between those moderates who have a motto of “Let’s not get excited,” and the jihad wingnuts who are more worried about homeschooling and abortion than infrastructure. I imagine the wing-nuts will eventually win and we’ll see the Democrats take over the state for years to come. Wingnuts are bad for bidness and Illinois is a bidness state.
That is too bad. Many Democratic leaders in the State of Illinois need to be checked. I like Madigan for what he gets done, but he is all too happy to use state resources to further his political goals (separate from policy goals). Republican cronieism provides a check on that. But it won’t if there aren’t any Republicans left in office.
Errr…scratch that post about Pete Peterson …. via Counterspin Central
Bingo! Brazen lying eventually gets discovered. The ‘energy crisis’ was a sham and now there is actual evidence of it. Why would the government enter into an agreement to keep it secret? Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmm…..
Perhaps this would have been more clear if Governor Blowhard wasn’t mucking up the whole debate, but the Bush and Cheney were lying. How do we know they were lying? Well they are competent businessmen in the energy industry. If they got it wrong, they couldn’t have been mistaken because they were competent, right?
But no, they had to push the Murkowski Solution? What is the Murkowski solution? Feet Stink? Drill ANWR
The Howlers will hate this one–the Wall Street Journal (story not available to non-subscribers) did a piece on the California Electric Market and Krugman picks up on it. I haven’t read the original story yet, but the problem has been obvious for some time. The deregulatory scheme used in California was horribly designed. The Dick Cheney complaints about price caps were nothing but a distraction from the real problem. Too much leverage was given to a small group of companies, long-term contracts were banned or heavily discouraged, and regulators forced the separation of utility branches all lead to a situation rife for problems. Price caps didn’t have a chance to create a problem.
The more important point is this is what happens in Crony Capitalism. I’m a huge fan of deregulation of energy markets. I believe that strategy is the most likely strategy to improve the use of renewable sources. Of course, ‘the reforms” by Gray the Blowhard reduce those incentives. Sidenote: Republicans–what was wrong with Riordan again? Oh, that is right he was reasonable. But Pete Wilson sold the regulatory process to the industry and they got exactly what they wanted. Crony Capitalism of the type we see with Cheney and White harnesses all the power of the market for the few at the expense of the many. Capitalism should be a liberating mechanism, but if the game is fixed, it loses its power.
Josh Marshall has a great article on the lack of competence in the administration. Either one is a genius and knows how to run a business and is fully knowledgeable of rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields and plundering Californial, or one is a boob hired for political connections. You can’t have it both ways.
Why is Saddam different from the Soviets during the Cold War? I think this is a good question and essentially it is what Hesiod is asking here.
The argument is that deterrence worked during the Cold War, why won’t it work now. In some sense this is a good analogy, but it fails to grasp a key difference between Saddam’s rule and that of the Soviet Union.
First though, Hesiod is absolutely correct about the invasion of Kuwait. It was a perfectly rational act based on the information he had. The mistake was the US sounded like it would appease him. Our mistake and the signal was vital to his decision-making.
The difference is great between the two countries and how they are governed. The Soviet Union was a bureaucratically run country after Stalin. This meant, while it was totalitarian, that power was dispersed widely. No single leader was in control and the aims of furthering the regime were held by more than a small group of leaders with one cult of personality at the top. Towards the end of the Soviet Union, political science really caught up with this and started to model the bureaucratic decision-making process and these models continue to be used in China.
Iraq is a very different case though. Saddam, though originally a part of a party apparatus, has shed that baggage by killing off any competitors. The Baathist Party in Iraq is Saddam and his family. In the Soviet Union there were norms to follow and diffuse power that kept any single person after Stalin from becoming a cult of personality. That is an important check.
More importantly, Mark Bowden points out what Saddam’s ultimate goal is. He wants to be a Nassarite figure that stands for and unites Arabs in a nationalist state. In this regard he is like Hitler, though the military comparisons are silly. As long as he or his sons can survive, deterrence will work. However, if he is threatened by a neighbor, the US or most likely a domestic competitor, what is his calculus?
If his goal is to further his legacy, the use of a nuclear weapon is not irrational in attempting to achieve his goal of a Nassar like legacy. His goal isn’t the survival of a state as a bureaucratic organization would see it, it is the survival of his legacy.
Perhaps this is too much psychobabble, but I think his view of his place in the world is well documented. And at that point, one must decide how the institutional differences between the Iraqi state of 2002 and the Soviets during the Cold War are similar or different. I take them as very different creatures and those difference provide a criticial difference in how successful deterrence would be.
As President Clinton pointed out the other night, this creates a huge problem for an attack. How do we ensure that Saddam doesn’t unleash his stockpile of biological agents on the world?
Interestingly, this also provides some insights on who else we may or may not take on in the future, ahem “war on nouns.” Syria, which is a highly relevant threat isn’t run by a cult of personality. It isn’t that Assad isn’t the most powerful member of the Syrian Baathist Party, but the Party is a bureaucratic body that is more than one person. North Korea’s position is debatable, but I would see Kim Jong-Il as a cult of personality–one looking to cut a deal as today’s story concerning the abductions of Japenese Nationals seems to indicate.
The Native American Trust ordeal continues.
Rural vote arguments again. Why would a party want to tie its future to a declining portion of the population? Bueller, Bueller,…
Part of the problem with reporting on the Middle East is it is too damn simplistic. 20 years ago yesterday were the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.
ArchPundit