Political MoJo

What's the difference between encouraging activists to hinder an opponent's get-out-the-vote efforts by tying up their phones on election day, and using a paid phone bank to do the same?

Answer: About three years, and some slippery standards.

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This is getting ridiculous. From Media Matters:

In a July 29 article, New York Times reporter Carl Hulse reported that supporters of the energy bill recently approved by the House of Representatives describe the bill as "a step toward reducing American dependence on foreign oil," but Hulse omitted the contrary view, held by energy analysts and even some conservative Republicans, that the bill won't reduce U.S. oil imports.

Crikey. Not only should the Times have quoted those "energy analysts" who know what they're talking about, but Carl Hulse shouldn't have even included the line about reducing dependence, regardless of whether Republicans believe it or not. This isn't a "he said, she said" affair. The recently-passed energy bill simply won't reduce American dependence on foreign oil. It just won't. ANWR has a relatively tiny amount of oil, and tapping its reserves might slow the increase in consumption of foreign oil, but won't come close to reducing total consumption. The Republican party line on this issue isn't "one side of the story," it's not a "point of view," it's not anything but an inability to grasp how the world works. Or it's a flat lie. No matter what, it doesn't belong in any newspaper.

But let's not pick on Carl Hulse; this sort of thing happens a lot: government press releases that are plainly false sneak their way into newspaper coverage all the time. But why? One theory might be that political reporters, at the Times and elsewhere, view the passage of legislation such as the energy bill as a political event, rather than a concrete law that will actually have an effect on millions of people and alter the economic landscape for years to come. Treating a bill's passage as a political event, of course, entails getting quotes from the supporters of the bill who want to release it to great fanfare and make pretty speeches whose meaning matters less than the tone of triumphalism ("This bill is a step towards..."). It also ensures that media coverage will treat the energy bill as an occasion for partisan debate and political spin, rather than as an entity that actually does something. Now by any sensible measure, what a law does matters far more than how it came about or who's bickering over it, but so long as political reporters don't see things that way, they'll very likely continue to omit key points like the fact that the recently-passed energy bill doesn't reduce American dependence on foreign oil. Perhaps that's the problem. Perhaps there's some other explanation. Either way, it's pretty clearly unacceptable.

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The Los Angeles Times had a good piece over the weekend on foreign security contractors looking for and finding work in Iraq. Just as in any other "outsourcing" story, the invisible hand of the market is encouraging the U.S. government, and its contractors to look to cheaper labor markets abroad.

But how much of a deal are these mercenaries? According to a former Dyn-Corp manager, they go at the low end they go for about $2,500 a month. At DoD pay rates, a Sergeant Specialist would have to max out their seniority before they'd start making that much. And most soldiers make much, much less. In theory, the efficiencies of not having to train the contract fighters should make up some of the difference. But most of the American private security guys in Baghdad are ex-military. Some fought earlier in the conflict, went home, and came back at ten times their old pay. (And many of the South American fighters were trained by the U.S. to fight insurgency or narcotics producers in their home countries.) The government has already paid to train a lot of them, and now they're taking advantage of inefficiencies in a Pentagon-created market. The question is complicated, but I haven't seen anything that really demonstrates that the contractors, who are only outnumbered in the occupation by regular U.S. forces, are actually saving the Pentagon money.

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So the president installed John Bolton as ambassador of the UN via recess appointment, thus getting around a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. (Bush's rationale? Bolton was denied an "up-or-down vote." Still don't understand why anyone deserves an up-or-down vote, ever, but okay.)

The real action, though, is watching Bush supporters rationalize this rather sleazy move—yes, sleazy; it would be hard to believe that we wouldn't hear conservatives grinding their teeth if, say, Bill Clinton pulled off this sort of stunt—over at the National Review. Here's Mark Levin: "I agree about the questionable constitutionality of these kind of recess appointments, but they have been made since our first president." So what Bush did isn't exactly constitutional, but hey, everyone's done it! Now that argument seems persuasive to me, but isn't this precisely the sort of deviation from the original meaning of the Constitution that the writers of the National Review have been so up in arms about over the years? Didn't Mark Levin just write a book blasting the Supreme Court for endorsing this kind of logic? This all gets very confusing.

At any rate, the possible silver lining to this Bolton appointment is that he won't be hanging around at the State Department any longer, where he would very likely go out of his way to sabotage the ongoing nuclear disarmament talks between the United States and North Korea. [EDIT: Or not; Clint points out that it looks like Bolton may be spending lots of time in D.C...] Plus, Bolton's so likely to say something brash, obnoxious, or even dangerous at the UN, that he might well embarrass the Bush administration and cause the White House to "over-correct" by taking a more modest foreign policy course or engage in smarter diplomacy. One can hope. Who knows? For super-thorough Bolton analysis, the Washington Note has much, much, much more.

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