The always insightful Tom Tomorrow is out with a new installment of This Modern World, We Tortured Some Folks. You should click on over to see the whole thing. But I thought this first panel was the best part of it. That government whistleblower is, of course, John Kiriakou. He is currently in federal prison. He got two and a half years for disclosing classified information. But that was only because the government couldn’t make a stronger charge stick. He is in prison because he disclosed government waterboarding.

I’m afraid that now, most people don’t know what to make of waterboarding. But until it was disclosed that we were doing it, the government had always been clear on the practice: it was torture. It was only when it was revealed that the government was doing it that all the apologetics started to fly. According to ABC News, “Water boarding was designated as illegal by US generals in Vietnam 40 years ago.” As Tom Tomorrow lampoons in his comic, “Brave patriots working under pressure made mistakes.” I think an actual hot war where there are two armies going at each other has far more pressure associated with it than the highly asymmetrical War on Terror.

But what works so well in the comic is the contrast: it was well meaning patriots who tortured many people, at least some of which were completely innocent. But the guy who revealed this misconduct was not a well meaning patriot. Good God, no! I mean, he actually embarrassed the government! A patriot would never embarrass the government. But in the heat of four years after 9/11 with detainees who were inside a prison that was itself inside a prison, of course mistakes would be made by patriots who were only looking after the good of the country and weren’t just functional psychopaths.

Obama has an amazing ability to show empathy and kindness to his political enemies. I like that. I share that! I’ve always been in favor of a 9/11-aftermath “truth and reconciliation commission.” I don’t want to punish the people who did wrong during this time. Let’s just think the best of them. But let’s admit what we’ve done. So I’m all for forgiving the abuses of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, I’m also for forgiving my own side. Obama doesn’t share that feeling. He seems afraid to stand up for his own side, most likely because he is.

Of course, John Kiriakou doesn’t need to be forgiven. He is an American hero. The Obama administration needs to apologize to him. But you can be sure that Obama won’t do that. And you know the reason, because it is the same reason for everything: Obama can’t do anything liberal because then everyone would know he was a liberal. And don’t forget: Obama is black! So if he showed any empathy for the poor and the weak or (God forbid!), someone who didn’t think the country should be torturing people, well everyone would know he was black, or liberal, or a human being. We can’t have that!

So America’s response to its previous torture is to put the man who told us about it in prison. Case close. Can’t look back! Gotta look forward! You remember the Obama slogan:

Via The Daily Show, by Bill Wright, Indianapolis, Radio X in Basel, Switzerland

See Also

Torture Worse Than Torture Disclosure
Kiriakou on Conviction
Problem with Unenforced Laws
How We Treat Real American Heroes

David Frum has written a very interesting article over at The Atlantic, Why the “Libertarian Moment” Isn’t Really Happening. It is a major push back against this idea that that the country is ready for a libertarian Republican Party. Frum did an excellent job of explaining why this idea is total nonsense. But he’s wrong about why libertarian rhetoric has become so big in the Republican Party since 2009. This is hardly surprising. Frum is a Republican, and as much of a reformer as he may be in some areas, he’s just not willing to admit certain truths about his chosen party.

Before getting to that, let’s lay out the environment, because Frum does such a good job of it. He notes that the idea that young people are turning libertarian is based upon three facts: (1) they are more open to LGBT rights and drug legalization; (2) they aren’t as supportive of Social Security; and (3) they aren’t very fond of either party. If this collection of facts doesn’t sound like libertarianism to you: ding ding ding! You win the prize: you are smarter than a reporter at The New York Times. Frum observed, “[These three facts] reveal (modest) generational self-interest, social liberalism, and political demobilization.”

Frum also noted that the libertarian policies that the Republican Party has been pushing are not the ones that the people want. This is Frum at his absolute best and most insightful:

He followed this brilliant insight that (to me) leads clearly to the answer, with a vague argument about the difference between libertarians and conservatives being effectively a matter of degrees. He claimed that the party’s recent flirtation with libertarianism was just a matter of despair. And then, he claimed, “For mainstream conservatives, concerned about the growth of government since 2008, libertarianism can sometimes sound like only a slightly more exuberant version of what they already believe.” Frum really needs to get out more. As Jonathan Chait wrote just this morning:

All the “growth of government” has been due to automatic increases in social safety net programs because we just went through the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Yet Frum just parrots the patently false Republican talking point that the federal government has grown thanks to the secret Kenyan socialist in the White House. No wonder Frum is confused about his party’s recent infatuation with libertarianism.

The issue is very simple. There are big funders who push a one-sided version of libertarianism—most notably the Koch brothers. There is a whole conservative media echo chamber that does the same thing. We must abolish the IRS because of liberty! We must never allow same sex marriage because of religious liberty! The libertarian rhetoric works very well to push the same old Republican desires: cut taxes on the rich, cut benefits for the poor.

But let’s remember back to the start of the Tea Party movement with all its libertarian rhetoric. Remember: it didn’t start because the Bush administration was bailing out the banks. No, it started when the Obama administration decided to use a lot less money to help out middle class homeowners. But the truth is that the movement would have gone nowhere if it hadn’t been for all the money that the Koch brothers put into it and for the constant advertising that Fox News and hate radio did on behalf of it. And when all was said and done, what was the one issue that all these supposed libertarians agreed on: abortion should be illegal. And it is no surprise that the Paul family are libertarians except when it comes to reproductive rights. Because libertarianism in the Republican Party is nothing but a pretense. It is simply a way to make their funneling of money from the poor to the rich look ideologically reasonable.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

Well, Jonathan Chait has let the cat out of the bag. He actually wrote down what I’ve been thinking for a couple of years but was too superstitious to put into print or bits or whatever it is we are doing here. I probably have mentioned it along the way, but I didn’t write a whole article about it! My mother always told me, “Don’t tempt the gods.” So I try not to. Apparently, Chait never learned this lesson, because today he wrote, Have House Republicans Extended the Economic Recovery Into 2016? Well, in a word: yes. In a couple of words: almost certainly.

The speculation is that by doing everything they can to stop the recovery, the Republicans have only succeeded in creating a slow but very long recovery. The economics on this is actually pretty simple: left alone, economies do recover. In a downturn, people may put off buying new cars, but eventually they will have to do it. So unless the government just does everything wrong, the economy will heal. The Republicans have had enough power to do really bad things to slow the economic recovery (for example: the Budget Control Act of 2011 with its sequester), but they have not had enough power to stop it.

So the economy continues growing, but slowly. As it is, the unemployment rate is 6.2%. Even if you forget about the fact that this is artificially low because of all the discouraged workers, this is much higher than the 4%-5% unemployment rate generally thought to be full employment. So barring anything surprising happening, the economy should continue to grow at its anemic pace for long enough to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 (or whoever else the Democrats run).

In one sense, there is no fear of letting the cat out of the bag. The Republicans have already created this destiny. It’s not like they could start legislating properly, allow an economic boom, and hope for a bust some time in the middle of 2016. But in another sense, this is extremely dangerous. There are things the Republicans could do to destroy the economy in 2016. In particular, they could refuse to raise the debt ceiling and throw the world economy into untold chaos. Now the people might actually blame the Republicans for this and destroy the party. But I’m not convinced it would work out that way. It could quite easily lead to President Ted Cruz.

Regardless, I think it is a mistake to give the Republicans the idea that they have painted themselves into a corner with regard to 2016. This will only encourage the consistent call from their base, “The problem with the Republican Party is that it isn’t conservative enough; we need to destroy the economy in order to save it!” More and more, it seems that the Republican Party will do anything to get and keep power. I don’t, for example, ever remember a minority party actively sabotaging the economy because they thought it was in their best political interests. So I don’t know what they’d do if they got the impression that 2016 was hopeless. Most likely, however, they won’t conclude that. Instead, they will stay in their own echo chamber and assume that economic calamity is just around the corner, and the country is as conservative as they are.

Dean Baker made a great observation this weekend, Robert Samuelson Says Economics Is An Inexact Science, Except When He Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare. For those of you who don’t know him, Robert Samuelson is a Washington Post columnist who spends much of his time talking about how we have to cut entitlements for the kids. You see, his great interest is that we are taking money out of the pockets of future generations. But of course, raising taxes (like the payroll tax cap) is unacceptable to him. So he isn’t really interested in future generations in a general sense. He’s worried that the taxes of the rich in the future might go up a bit.

What Baker noted is that Samuelson’s arguments are generally dependent upon long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office. Like all long-term economic projections, they are famously useless. But okay, you use the best economic information that is available. This week, however, Samuelson has written a column calling for the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates because he’s afraid that inflation will go up and “take on a life of its own.” And he specifically says that we shouldn’t listen to those economic models that he so loves to use to argue for cuts in Social Security. It’s truly amazing.

Note why this is an instructive case in point: because it is necessary to make his point. It is not an instructive case in point when it comes to entitlement “reform” (the smart conservative word for “cuts”). In fact, reading his constant stream of articles about how we have to cut Social Security now now now, you would never get the impression that economic projections weren’t handed down to Moses himself on Mount Sinai.

More broadly, Samuelson is making the argument that low inflation is a Very Big Deal. But as regular readers here note, modest inflation is good for everyone who actually works for a living. About the only ones who would suffer due to 4% inflation would be Robert Samuelson’s rich friends who have a lot of money in bonds. Dean Baker went on to note what it all means:

And he ended the article with, “But hey, we all have our priorities.” And that is the ultimate problem with Samuelson and the scores of other conservative pundits like him. They have their priorities, which are to enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else. But they know they can’t say that. So they claim that they are looking out for the common good. I appreciate the bind that they find themselves in. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that they represent a small slice of society without admitting it. And that makes them pernicious. But hey, what do you expect from Fox on 15th Street.

D R Tucker over at Political Animal brought my attention to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on Face the Nation to chat with Bob Schieffer about Watergate 40 years later. Tucker was impressed with it, which amazes me. I’ve come to think rather highly of his work, but he missed it on this one. I realize that everyone is having a great good time this week dumping on Nixon, but we don’t want to let that blind us to our modern reality.

Let’s start with the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on CBS. Schieffer notes at the beginning that the dynamic duo’s two books All the President’s Men and The Final Days had just been reissued by Simon & Schuster. And they just happened to be owned by CBS. Gee, I wonder why the guys weren’t over talking to George Stephanopoulos?

Shieffer starts with a really stupid observation that people found Watergate so hard to believe because it was so stupid. But the whole scandal was never really about the Watergate break-in. That was simply want led to the plumbers and the CCREEP slush fund and all the stuff that did matter. The real reason people found Watergate so hard to believe is that most people are a bunch of sheep who never want to think that the power elite would act so badly. The president couldn’t possibly be doing this kind of stuff because he was the right kind of person. (For the record conservatives: there is a big difference between being open to malfeasance by the president and just assuming it whenever the other party is in power. Bill Clinton had Vince Foster killed? Really?!)

Some of the interview is rather good. But it’s strange. Woodward says that the piston of the Nixon administration was hate. But later, when talking in more depth, it is clear that this isn’t true. Paranoia and resentment is more what drove him. Later, Woodward talks about how the Republicans put nation over party. That’s not true at all. And that’s what gets to the core of Watergate: if it hadn’t been for the tapes, Nixon wouldn’t have been forced to resign. It was only because there was a smoking gun that the Republicans turned on him.

But what I most hate about this is how self-congratulatory the whole thing is. I don’t mean that about any of the participants especially, but about journalism itself. The truth is that what Woodward and Bernstein did was great work. But can you imagine the Washington Post allowing reporters that kind of latitude today? And look at the work that Woodward does today: he’s just a Republican hack, although admittedly, a careful one because he actually has a reputation to protect.

Shieffer’s last question is whether it could happen again. A better question is whether the corporate controlled media would ever allow it again. As we see today, Glenn Greenwald is hated by most establishment journalists. And if the journalists are like that, you can imagine what their employers think. I believe that if there hadn’t been the tapes, Shieffer wouldn’t have had the segment today. There would have been 40 years of Republican disinformation to convince everyone that Nixon was totally innocent. And Shieffer wouldn’t be certain.

So yeah, now 40 years later, CBS runs a segment talking about the great success of journalism. Shieffer is there to say, “Go team!” But when it comes Edward Snowden who has provided us such important information about what the government is doing to its own people, Shieffer has been incredibly harsh. When it has come to NSA spying generally, he has been nothing short of an apologist. But looking back 40 years, sure: fight the power!