I haven’t given much thought to the intelligence that supposedly shows that the Assad government launched a chemical weapons attack or even that there was a chemical weapons attack. Certainly I’ve noticed that the words coming out of John Kerry’s mouth sound very much like what the Bush administration was saying in the lead up to the Iraq War. But then as now, it didn’t matter to me. Then as now, the intelligence is simply being used as a pretext for an attack taken for other reasons. But it looks like the intelligence now is as shaky as it was then.

At Truthout, Gareth Porter wrote an amazing article, How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria. Most of it consists of the unclassified summary of the intelligence assessment that was made available last Friday. Porter points out a number of slippery statements intended to deceive—to make the intelligence look better than it is.

Take, for example, the following claim, “We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the UN inspectors obtaining evidence.” But it turns out that the evidence did not come from the United States or the UK, but rather by the Israelis. What’s more, the Israelis released the information to the press themselves. This created that wonderful echo chamber effect we saw in the lead up to the Iraq War. It’s not just the United States that has this information, it’s the Israelis too! None of this means that the information is wrong, but the way it is being used indicates that someone is pushing this war rather than letting the information speak for itself.

What’s more, the context of this intercepted communication may be exactly backwards from what the White House is pushing. This was supposed to be “panicked phone calls” fom the Syrian Defense Ministry to the chemical weapons unit. They seemed to want to know if it had really happened. In addition, the Syrian government let UN weapons inspectors in almost immediately after they asked. So at very least, these communications indicate the the situation is not clear. But it could certainly be the case that the Syrian command didn’t know about a chemical weapons attack or even that there was no chemical weapons attack.

There are other dubious aspects of the report. One of which is the fact that the chemical weapons unit had been in the area before and through the time of the attack. But it, like all of the information was reported by intelligence sources as neutral. It was only when Kerry began screaming for war that suddenly neutral information became “telling.” For example, there was no intelligence to indicate that the chemical weapons unit was doing anything related to a chemical attack. Could they have been preparing a strike? Of course! But there is no indication that they did. So just like in Iraq, the government seems to be distorting the evidence just the make their case.

By far the most troubling aspect of the article is the information it discloses about uncertainties in the very fact of a chemical weapons attack. In addition to the administration’s labeling as chemical weapons victims all the pictures of corpses without obvious physical signs of death, the videos of survivors don’t indicate chemical weapons:

So chemical weapons experts don’t think it looks like a chemical attack. What’s more, the only direct claims of chemical attacks come from two second-hand sources with a distinct ax to grind. But it gets even worse.

Generally, in chemical attacks there are very few survivors: one for every ten fatalities. At first, the administration claimed this must be because Assad was diluting the chemicals in order to sneak it by the UN inspectors. But chemical experts noted that wasn’t very possible. The difference in concentration between having any effect at all and killing is very small. In other words: it’s kind of all or nothing. So since that approach didn’t work, the administration just bumped up the number of fatalities by an order of magnitude, which they also claimed included “426 children.”

The whole thing makes me think that there likely was no chemical weapons attack. God knows it isn’t hard to find lots of dead people in Syria these last two years. And I don’t doubt something terrible happened in Ghouta on 21 August 2013—which may even have killed 426 children. But was it a chemical weapon? It doesn’t look at all clear. But whether is was or was not, it is clear that the administration is pushing for this war regardless of the facts.

This article was originally written in 2013. This is before Dave Rubin became a major star on the right. When he announced that he had “left the left,” it didn’t surprise me. As this article shows, he was never on the left in a substantial way. -FM

I like The Young Turks and I check in on them as much as I can. But there is much about them that I find really annoying. If it weren’t for Cenk Uygur, it would be useless, but I connect well with his anger, even if I often disagree with him.

My issue is mostly with the others. The biggest problem with them is that they are all sub-geniuses. They are smart, but not smart enough to be terribly interesting or insightful. What’s more, they all share a very vanilla middle-class mentality. The show is desperately in need of a little life diversity.

It is in the context of this that I saw the following clip that was posted today, “Drug Testing Catches Shocking Number Welfare Recipients.” It’s about Utah’s law that drug tests welfare recipients.

It turns out that Utah isn’t catching many people but depending upon how you run the numbers, the program is paying for itself. But of course, stopping people from using drugs is not what these laws are ever about. It is about humiliating people on welfare.

Now you know a whole lot more about the story than you would have if you had watched the TYT segment. That’s partly because the show has no wonks and so they aren’t in a position to dig into the numbers and explain anything that isn’t reported straight to them from the Huffington Post. Ever. You would think they could hire a mathematics graduate student or something, but I don’t think they are even aware of their deficit.

Dave Rubin Chimes In

The biggest problem with the story was that it was hijacked by Dave Rubin.

He has the airy demeanor of a liberal who has never thought much about politics. And so he starts out with, “I don’t have a major problem with this, actually… If people are going to be getting government subsidies, for whatever the reason, then having to be drug tested doesn’t strike me as something that’s that intrusive.”

For the record, this is a typical bit of “get the poor” argumentation. If it makes sense to drug test people who are getting welfare, it makes sense to drug test every person who gets any kind of support from the government. And that means it makes sense to drug test every person.

It especially means we should drug test all bankers because they get enormous support via the Federal Reserve and elsewhere. We should drug test everyone who works at Stanford University because that college gets all kinds of support through student loans and grants. If you want to take it far enough, you should drug test everyone who wants to use public roads.

That’s the problem: no one ever passes laws that are consistent in this regard; it is just applied to the poor.

Do you see what I mean about sub-genius? Dave Rubin is just smart enough to be dangerous. He sees half of the problem and is blinded by political framing that others create.

Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola were not much better. Their problem was only with how the program reinforced stereotypes. That’s certainly true. In fact, that’s why the programs exist! If conservatives weren’t convinced that the poor are all drug addicts, they never would have come up with this new humiliating program.

Thank God for Desi Doyen

The only one who made sense was Desi Doyen, an environmental blogger who incidentally is not a member of the TYT network.

She laid out pretty much my case, which she summed up pithily, “This is about punishing the poor.” That cuts through all of the crap.

With people like Dave Rubin leading the liberal movement (which is more or less true), we will always be falling for some clever conservative framing of these issues. And it is already terrible.

In California, getting a hundred bucks in food stamps requires about 50 pages of forms. Bankers getting billions of dollars from the federal government required just 2 pages. That’s where the idiotic, anti-empathic thinking of Dave Rubin gets us.

Image cropped from Dave Rubin by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 3.0.

On this day in 12, the crazy emperor Caligula was born. The French Classical composer Jean Paul Egide Martini was born in 1741. Here is his Plaisir d’Amour, which sounds a lot like The Magic Flute to me:

German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz was born in 1821. Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli was born in 1834. Here is his Capriccio for Oboe, which sounds almost impressionistic:

Educator Maria Montessori was born in 1870. Actor Fredric March was born in 1897. Broadcaster Arthur Godfrey was born in 1903.

Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was born in 1918. Actor G. D. Spradlin was born in 1920. Comedian Buddy Hackett was born in 1924. And actor James Coburn was born in 1928.

Two great musicians are 68 today. The first is Van Morrison. I had wanted to put up “Have I Told You Lately” but he insists that it isn’t a religious song and that annoys me. So here he is doing “Days Like This”:

The second great musician is Itzhak Perlman. Here he is performing Tchaikovsky’s showy Valse Scherzo:

Actor Richard Gere is 64. I have nothing against the man, but his being in a movie is often enough to make me not watch it. The hilarious Julie Brown is 55. Here she is doing what is now a golden oldie, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun”:

If you will stay with me for a moment, Julie Brown has a fine YouTube channel. And she clearly has a problem with Victoria Jackson, which is especially cool because Victoria Jackson is a horrible person. Here is Victoria Jackson Reacts to the Election!

And actor Chris Tucker is 41.

The day, however, belongs to the journalist Daniel Schorr who was born on this day in 1916. He was a very important television journalist when they still had them. (Just kidding! When they still had a lot of them. How about that?) He is famous, for example, for releasing the Pike Committee report on illegal CIA and FBI activities in 1976. He was also number 17 on Richard Nixon’s enemies list!

But I mostly know Schorr from his editorials on NPR during the first years of the century when I was having my liberal awakening. What I liked about him was that while he was clearly and proudly liberal, he was not especially partisan. He was one of those old time New Deal Democrats who calmly watched as the whole center of gravity of American politics moved ever to the right—even if the people didn’t. Here is an example of this, his 15 December 2000 editorial in the Christian Science Monitor about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush Vs. Gore:

(For the record, I suspect that Sandra Day O’Connor regrets stepping down as she did. Two things helped that along. She stepped down and then Rehnquist died. That put more of Bush on the court than she likely hoped for. Second, she was replaced with Samuel Alito, a judge she smacked down when he was on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In addition, since leaving the court, she has made a number of telling comments. The most notable was her “dissent” on the Citizens United case. But isn’t this all exactly what we expect from conservatives? When they have power, they are full tilt evil. When out of power, they suddenly come to their senses. I think it has to do with the authoritarian mindset and its desire to always follow orders. Anyway, she’s fucked the country good!)

Happy birthday Daniel Schorr!

Yesterday, Mark Kleiman wrote a great article over at Ten Miles Square, Martin Luther King vs. Today’s Conservatives. It is written as a letter to conservatives. And what he is addressing is the conservative resentment that the celebration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom isn’t presented as a national triumph but rather a liberal triumph. “After all,” the conservatives say, “We’re against racism too! We love Martin Luther King Jr too!”

Well, maybe. As Kleinman wrote, “But while [King] was alive, and for some time after his death, your faction hated him, and everything he stood for, and tried to defame him. No prominent conservative or libertarian politician, writer, or thinker supported the civil rights movement he led.” But is it even true that conservatives really love King and the Voting Rights Act today? I don’t really think so.

Over at Gin and Tocos yesterday, Ed wrote Fatigue Factor about how exhausting it was as a conservative to constantly say things that differed from what you actually believed. He specifically mentions the Lewinsky affair. Was it really true that Republicans were outraged about it? No. It was just that they didn’t like Bill Clinton, but that wasn’t likely to be accepted as a reason for impeachment.

I think the same thing is going on with civil rights. Most conservatives I talk to will admit that it was wrong to have laws preventing African Americans from voting. But their position toward all other civil rights causes is negative. Whatever the current law is, it is right—even God given. And all those black and brown skinned people should just shut up. What’s more, among older conservatives there is a strong feeling that while the cause may have been just, there was something wrong with King. He was a rabble-rouser and a communist and just generally not a true American. Of course, only the real bigots will say this in polite company.

Jonathan Chait had a great catch yesterday, Conservatives Think Racism Is Dead. They’re Wrong. He compared the National Review then and now. On 15 September 1963, white supremacists bombed a black church. Four children were killed in the bombing. National Review said, “And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law…”

But that was then. They’ve apologized for it! And that’s true, but they are still blaming the African American community for its problems. Chait explained:

Again with the bad schools! First, as I’ve noted, the huge improvements in education in the African American community have not improved their economic standing. Second, conservatives do everything they can to make the schools of the poor even worse. They are totally behind the idea of local taxes supporting local schools, which means that poor students get fewer educational resources than rich kids. But it is all the fault of the black community!

Beyond that, this is just the same argument that conservatives always make: if blacks are suffering it is their own damned fault. Yes, the rhetoric is less vile. But that’s learned behavior: they know they would be ostracized if they were still justifying church bombings. As Ed indicated, the issue here is that the conservatives never say what they mean. And what they mean now is the same thing they meant then: they just don’t care. They are fine with the status quo and they want minority communities to just shut up.

Mark Kleiman finished up his article by noting that conservatives can’t co-opt King’s legacy:

I think that conservatives should just avoid the subject all together. The philosophical foundation of conservatism is the end of history. This is the idea that we have arrived at the perfect society (give or take). And so of course civil rights was a just cause in the 1960s. But when the 1960s was in the present tense, it was not a just cause for these very same conservatives. What this means is that in 20 years, conservatives will look back at now and say, of course marriage equality was a just cause. In 50 years (if we are very lucky) they will look back and say of course income inequality was a just cause. But they will always and forever be behind the curve on these issues. They will always and forever be apologizing for previous opinions. And they will never figure it out.

Afterword

I think I may have been too kind to the conservative movement here. I don’t think that the voter ID laws are primarily about getting electoral advantage—at least not among the conservative base. These are deeply racist laws that demonstrate a world view where whites are the “real” America. And they are, after all, just poll taxes by another name. So maybe it is better to say that conservatives are fine with the status quo with a bit of racial animus thrown in.

Jonathan Chait wrote an amazing article about Syria yesterday. I do not mean that in a good way.

He tells us that, Syria Isn’t Iraq. Everything Isn’t Iraq. Fair enough. But listening to him over the last oh so many years, it is hard to conclude that Chait doesn’t think that just about any military conflict is a good idea. Sure, he’s not for conflicts like Iran. But anything that he thinks we are likely to succeed at is great.

He attacks Matt Yglesias for having his thinking stuck in the Iraq War mentality. I’m not even sure that that’s true. But one thing is certain: Chait is stuck in the Persian Gulf War mentality. Now there was a “bloody good war”! And he seems to want to keep having them. And I’m still not clear what the point was of that war. About 30,000 Iraqis died—mostly conscripts. But apparently, it was great for Chait because we “won.”

No mention is made of the study that Yglesias quoted that showed that such “humanitarian” interventions usually lead to more civilian casualties. As I wrote last night, protecting the civilian population is not the point of this intervention. How could it be after we’ve stood by and watched over a hundred thousand civilians be killed? Chait is wrong to push this as a humanitarian mission at all.

Chait also makes a very strange argument that anti-war liberals are like conservatives on domestic issues, “The arguments Yglesias poses today against a military strike against Syria eerily echo the arguments conservatives and libertarians make against any kind of domestic government intervention.” I don’t understand this. The conservatives are making ideological arguments, “I don’t care if welfare works; it’s wrong!” The arguments that we are making are practical—just like our domestic policy arguments, “This intervention is likely to make things worse.” Is Chait so blind as to not see this distinction?

By far the worst part of Chait’s article is the last paragraph:

This is right out of the politician’s handbook. Of course we don’t want war, but what else can we do? We’re only going to go in to stop the killing. He really ought to watch War Made Easy.

Humor is great. I agree with Elizabeth Bennet when she said, “I dearly love a laugh.” But humor is dangerous as a writer. You can inadvertently says something that you don’t mean. Even worse: you can say something that you do mean.

Patrick Howley is a writer for The Daily Caller, the supposedly libertarian website that is in fact just a conservative also ran that only stands out when it gets a story hopelessly wrong. But last Monday, Howley tried to have a little fun with the Obamas buying a new dog. Look: I get it. I didn’t even mention it because I absolutely don’t care. And clearly Howley was annoyed by the “press release for children” that the White House put out. “So now, in addition to helping with those official duties, Bo takes on the important role of big brother!” Stuff like that is enough to send me to the sink for a bout of retching.

So I’m totally with Howley on this stuff and his article gently mocks the whole thing throughout. I’m not with him when he tries to be serious for a moment by throwing in a line about the unemployment rate. That’s just childish. And it isn’t funny or clever at this point, because every time the president plays a game of golf, the right have a simultaneous orgasm over the fact that he isn’t fixing every problem in the nation. How dare he not be working! But mostly, the tone was about right. I mean “correct.”

Then he got to the end. And he took a very bad turn. Again, he was trying to be funny when he wrote this:

Get it?! It’s because Obama hates whites; even white dogs! Am I right? (Note: the new dog has quite a lot of white fur, but I guess it’s like the old racist laws: if you have any black hair, you’re black!)

The problem here is that The Daily Caller is a racist website. Most of it isn’t overt; it is more along the lines of what I talked about last week: The Racism of Reverse Racism. But it is clearly racist and so when people read such a thing as “The Obamas do not have any white dogs” they understandably go ballistic. Little Green Footballs, for example, calls it “flat-out racist.” Even the non-political site Terribly Terrier called it “dog whistle politics.” But mostly, everyone responded as Media Matter: without comment, since none is really necessary.

Like I said, I think it is all a joke gone bad. I don’t necessarily think that Howley is a racist. But the Aspen Daily News got to the heart of the problem:

But that’s the thing on the right. It is very much like a group of high school jocks who make each other laugh by cracking jokes about what losers the nerds are. That’s to be expected from young people. But The Daily Caller is supposedly a legitimate news organization. If they want to make fun of Obama, they ought to hire P.J. O’Rourke. Otherwise, as stated: you just look stupid—and at least marginally racist.