February 11, 2009

1.  “It’s amazing how quickly Obama started sounding just like Bush, because, when cornered by this question on the Afghan endgame, he reverted to waving the bloody flag of 9/11, just as his predecessor did in the run-up to war with Iraq, and long after the alleged links between Saddam and 9/11 had been thoroughly debunked. The president claims “you’ve got the Taliban and al-Qaeda operating in the FATA and these border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” and he promises a “concerted effort to root out these safe havens.”

The Taliban in Pakistan are not the problem when the Taliban control a great hunk of Afghanistan proper and the domain of the central government is largely confined to Kabul. Furthermore, we have heard much about the alleged presence of al-Qaeda’s shadowy remnants in Pakistan, yet we have seen no evidence. Nor have we been offered any specifics. It seems to me that the president came pretty close to saying, definitively, that Osama bin Laden is in the tribal areas, without, of course, actually coming out and saying it. If he doesn’t know this to be true, then Obama is doing precisely what Bush and his gang did to gin up a war with Iraq – lying.

It always comes back to 9/11:

“The bottom line though – and I just want to remember the American people, because this is going to be difficult – is this is a situation in which a region served as the base to launch an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.”

A whole region? By this same token, then, so did Germany serve as a base for al-Qaeda, since the plotters lived in Hamburg for quite some time, where, presumably, they did their share of plotting. And the original conception of the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be traced back to a meeting held in the year 2000 in Malaysia. Therefore, according to Obama’s logic, these two countries are prime candidates for revenge attacks by the U.S. But this makes about as much sense as invading Italy in order to deprive the Mafia of its “safe haven.”

Terrorists don’t need “safe havens” to plan attacks on the U.S. They can do it anywhere. That’s their great advantage: “al-Qaeda” is more of an idea than a real organization. By running with this “safe haven” malarkey, Obama – far from being “tough” – underestimates the real source and deadly power of the terrorist threat.“

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14224
2.  “#200 for Abe the Warmonger

Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln. I would be perplexed by the Lincoln cult if I thought the prime Lincoln idolizers gave a damn about individual liberty. Lincoln is lionized not because he saved self-government, but primarily because he sanctified and vastly extended Leviathan.

Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for a National Review Online symposium on Lincoln 8 years ago, and a snippet on Abe from Attention Deficit Democracy

James Bovard, February 2001:

How can the same people who vigorously support indicting Serbian leaders for war crimes also claim that Lincoln was a great American president?

Lincoln bears ultimate responsibility for how the North chose to fight the Civil War. The attitude of some of the Northern commanders paralleled those of Bosnian Serb commanders more than many contemporary Americans would like to admit.

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” How would U.N. war crimes investigators react if Slobodan Milosevic had made this comment about ethnic Albanians?

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

…

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. The abuses and tyranny that he authorized set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. President Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

***

Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, ridiculed President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/02/11/200-for-abe-the-warmonger/

3.  First good bailout idea in months:

“How to Solve the Toxic Asset Problem: Give Them to Bank Executives as Bonuses

James Kwak has the best idea I’ve heard this week: solve the toxic asset problem by give those assets to bank executives as bonuses.

As Kwak writes:

Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount – say, $150,000 in annual salary – has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value. . . . That would get the assets off the bank’s balance sheet, and into the hands of the people responsible for putting them there – at the value that they insist they are worth . . . think about the incentives: talented people will flow to the companies that are valuing their assets the most realistically (since inflated valuations translate directly into lower compensation), which will give companies the incentive to be realistic in their valuations.

Of course, there’s an argument that the executives’ base salary should be paid in toxic assets as well. Since these fatcats don’t seem to be motivated to run their companies well so as to save the economy and the people, maybe having their own salaries on the line will motivate them. But if you believe that is too harsh, at least demand that their bonuses be paid in this way.”

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-solve-toxic-asset-problem-give.html