I am breaking form tonight by throwing an extra post in. I just have to say something about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev getting the death penalty. Regular readers know: I don’t believe in it. Not for Pol Pot. Not for Hitler. Not for anyone. I just don’t see the moral or practical argument for it. But there is more to it than my general philosophical opposition to the death penalty.

There really isn’t any doubt that if his brother, Tamerlan, had been captured alive, that Dzhokhar would not be put to death. This is all about a cultural rite. The society feels the need to have a public execution to solemnize the terrorist act. Tamerlan’s death on the street wasn’t good enough because it had no ritual value. I understand that symbols matters. But this strikes me as pathetic, especially since not one in a hundred people understand that this is what is going on.

In addition to this, it really bothers me that people think that the Boston Marathon bombing was some especially vile act. There are plenty of people who raped, tortured, and murdered many others who didn’t get the death penalty. As a matter of fact, if Tsarnaev had been tried at the state level, he would not have faced the death penalty. What kind of “justice” system do we have where someone’s fate depends upon which bureaucratic structure tries you? But I know what the death penalty apologists respond with. They will say something to the effect that it doesn’t matter about justice in those other cases, we have a chance for justice in this case. That is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t need to be countered. But let me just say that random acts of “justice” is an injustice.

I suppose what really bugs me is that most people will cheer this decision. And that means that collectively, we are just as morally bankrupt as the Tsarnaev brothers were. I understand, we think we have justice on our side. But no one has suggested that the Tsarnaev brothers were psychopaths; they too thought they had justice on their side. They thought they were paying America back for something or other. People always have reasons for doing things. And they always justify what they do — most especially when they murder.

Over at The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain noted, “US Attorney Carmen M Ortiz said in her statement today, the execution of Dzhokhar will send a message that ‘we are not intimidated.'” Really?! Is that the message that it sends? The implication is that it sends that message to the rest of the world. But I don’t think the rest of the world really cares. What Ortiz didn’t mean, but which is correct, is that it sends a message to the American people that “we are not intimidated.” And it is necessary to send that message because we are intimidated. It takes almost nothing to cause us to cower in fear. That’s why spending almost as much money on our military as the rest of the world combined is still not enough for us. We are so afraid that we jump when a young man flips off a security camera.

This is a sad day — not especially for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — but for us.

Update (15 May 2015 11:57 pm)

If Charlie Pierce had managed to publish his end of the weekend post earlier, I wouldn’t have felt the need to write this. He said pretty much what I said. This sums it up:

Over at The American Prospect, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote a great long article, No Cost for Extremism. It is about the rightward march of the Republican Party. In fact, it is subtitled, “Why the GOP hasn’t (yet) paid for its march to the right.” It’s worth reading in total. But a few things struck out to me. The primary one is dealt with right away: this ridiculous narrative in the mainstream media that in 2014, the establishment (or even more bizarrely “moderate”) wing of the party got control and that is why they did so well in the election. That just isn’t true.

I think three things went on. The first is that the Republican Party did a better job of controlling their message. But they did nothing to change the messengers. As Hacker and Pierson note, the Congressional Republicans are more extreme than they have been in the modern era. The second issue is that the mainstream media was so determined to push the narrative that the “adults” were back in charge of the GOP that it distorted the candidates. Rather than report on Joni Ernst’s well documented record of truly loony beliefs, most of the reporting was on her challenger Bruce Braley’s chicken scandal. If you’re covering a truly scary Republican and you are determined to claim that it is the year of the establishment, you make a big deal out of anything that ever happened to the Democrat.

But by far the biggest reason that the Republicans did so well in the 2014 election is found in one number: 35.9%. That was the turnout for the election. It was the lowest turnout of any election since World War II. There are only three elections with lower turnout in the last 200 years: 1942 (33.9%), 1926 (32.9%), and 1922 (35.7%). So as usual, the Republicans do well when few people come out to vote. Because the two kinds of people who have time to vote — the rich and the old — always come out. That’s not to take anything away from the Republican triumph. They appeal to a more consistent voter, so good for them. But let’s drop this idea that the Republicans did well in 2014 because the Republicans moderated or started acting like adults.

Actually, what’s happening is that what were once considered the extremists in the Republican Party are now just defined as the moderates. Look at John Boehner. He is now considered the very definition of the establishment. Everyone feels sorry for him for having to deal with the extremists in his party. But when he came into Congress in the early 1990s, he was considered an extremist. He was to the right of Newt Gingrich. And it isn’t that he’s mellowed over the years. It’s just that the rest of his party has gotten even more crazy.

The article goes on to argue (as I do quite often myself) that Republicans benefit from our system of government where no one is ever held accountable. It is rare that one party is in total control in Washington. So when the Republicans make government dysfunctional, all that happens is that both parties are blamed. What’s more, it only adds to public cynicism about government, which helps the Republicans in the long term.

Ultimately, Hacker and Pierson really don’t provide an answer to the problems that we face. The big issue is that there is a truth: the Republican Party gets more extreme by the day. But the media refuses to report this. It insists upon framing everything as Democrats vs Republicans, as though they were a static frame. Also, it reports Republican victories as if they represented the will of the people. So we can’t have a reasonable political debate for the same reason we can’t tackle climate change: because our media have defined the actual truth as a partisan opinion. Our media is postmodern, and the Republican Party was quick to figure out how to exploit that. We can fight back, but I’m afraid we will only win with the help of a crumbling America brought on by Republican policy.

Remember Luis Lang? I wrote about him a couple of days ago, Man Blames Obama for SC Republican Policy. As I noted at that time, it was “truly heartbreaking” that this man would potentially lose his sight. And it didn’t matter that he was a conservative Republican who chose not to get health insurance. And it didn’t matter that if things were reversed and he saw someone else going blind because of their utter irresponsibility, he would have shown no sympathy. So I’m pleased to pass along some good news regarding Mr Lang, SC Man Will Get Sight-Saving Surgery as Liberal Donors Chip In.

Luis Lang is not a very likable guy. I went pretty easy on him before, because I didn’t know much about him. But in this followup article, Lang does not show himself to be either very self-aware or very gracious. If you look on his Go Fund Me page, you will see that the vast majority of the money is coming from liberals. And some of them come with sarcasm. For example, Mary O donated $25, saying, “Dear Mr Lang, I started to give only $5 but realized I was being stingy because of your political leanings and that is wrong. See how that works? (Oops — sorry.)” But others are all kindness. Ryan Graff, who donated $20, wrote, “No one deserves to go blind, and you’ve had enough lectures and jokes by now. Best wishes for a full recovery.”

I’m not sure that Lang has had enough lecturing. He claims that he was ignorant about different aspects of the law like the Medicaid gap. But let’s be honest: he didn’t care. He was making a good income. He didn’t think that it would ever affect him. So he just voted for the party that told him what he wanted to hear: that he was one of the good people and that that they’d go after those moochers — also known as the working poor. In this regard, I think Lang is rather typical of Republican voters: very short-sighted but insulated from the economic realities that poor people face daily.

He now says he sees the problem being the whole government “state and federal.” But I don’t know what more the federal government could have done to help him out. What he seems to have done here is what conservatives do whenever I argue them into a corner: they throw up their hands and say, “Both sides are terrible!” But they haven’t made the argument that the other side is terrible. It is just their way of closing out the argument — saving face without having to question their biases, because all conservatives believe that government is terrible — that’s why they vote Republican. (See: Conservatives Are Not for Small Government.)

But the kicker to all this is that even when asked if he holds himself responsible, he says “partly.” And then he goes on to discuss paying attention to his sugar levels because he has diabetes. So he’s not taking any responsibility for not having insurance. He’s not taking any responsibility for the actual issue at hand. And if this isn’t the prototypical Republican, I don’t know what is. This is like people who don’t want to pay any taxes, but when there is a hurricane, complain that the government isn’t fixing their houses fast enough.

The reason I’m even writing about this, however, is because of how Lang responded to the politics of it. He was surprised at how people responded to the original article, “It turned into a political thing. That wasn’t my intention when I reached out. This is ridiculous.” How could it not be seen as a “political thing”? He spent half the original article complaining about Obama and the Democrats and the “Not Fair Health Care Act.” He made it all about politics: he was suffering because the Democrats did something to help him, he refused it, and voted for people who limited his options after he refused it. This is ridiculous, but not in the way that Lang means it.

In addition to this, he couldn’t even be gracious about all the support that he’s getting from liberals. In response to the fact that it is liberal donors who are giving to him, he said, “I look at a person as a person. People are acting from the heart, just like I have done in the past.” Well, I would like to see some documentation before I will believe that he’s helped people in the past. But let’s be clear, if there were a liberal whining about the government not helping her out, Lang wouldn’t have dropped five bucks in her Go Fund Me campaign. No, conservatives prefer to fund bigoted bakeries and bigoted pizza shops.

This is who Luis Lang is:

And he hasn’t learned a thing.

Digby wrote a very good article on Wednesday, The Daddy State Strikes Again. It’s about the House of Representatives’ vote to ban abortions past 20 weeks. It’s an amazing, if highly fashionable, move. As Digby noted, “Meanwhile, with their hands firmly implanted in women’s vaginas, they went on to denounce big government and federal interference in their wallets.” But it is more than that. And given that most people — especially in the mainstream media — don’t seem to understand it, I think it needs to be repeated as often as possible: the conservative movement is not about individual rights and small government.

Matt Bruenig writes a lot about how the non-aggression principle does no philosophical work. The reason is because who exactly is doing the aggression is dependent upon the rules that we set down. If I don’t accept the existence of private property and you throw me off your land, the issue is our ideas about property. If property rights are valid, then I am the aggressor because I came on your property; if property rights are invalid, then you are the aggressor because I did nothing wrong. The issue is our definition of property rights. You can’t just assume that your property rights are divinely given and so you are not an aggressor even while you manhandle me.

The same is going on with the ridiculous notion that conservatives are for small government and liberals are for big government. The size of government is totally irrelevant. It means absolutely nothing when conservatives claim that they are for “small government.” For one thing, what does “small government” mean? As a point of modern politics, what it means is that conservatives want the government to be as small as possible (even nonexistent) when it comes to the functions that they don’t like. But liberals feel exactly the same way and they don’t go around pretending that they are for “small government.”

Let’s look at the military. The United States spends almost as much money as the rest of the world combined. The last time I checked, the US spent 48% of all the money the world spends on military. So we spend 48% and the rest of the world spends 52%. Yet it is very hard to find a conservative who doesn’t think that we spend too little on the military. Even fake libertarian Rand Paul now wants to increase military spending. So when it comes to that, conservatives are for “big government.”

As the recent vote in the House indicates, the conservatives would make abortion illegal if they could. And once they did that, it would be just like the War on Drugs. There would be a War on Abortion. And the truth is that I doubt there would be any limit that the conservatives would be in favor of in fighting that war. They would certainly pass a law that required doctors to report cases of abortion attempts or botched abortions. I can even imagine them making it illegal to go outside the country to get an abortion. No government is too big when it comes to pushing conservative policy.

And do you know what? I think that’s fine! But let’s fight about the laws. I will give no ground to the conservatives on the issue of being for “small government.” They aren’t. In fact, they are for the kind of government that is most invasive. And that’s what we should be discussing. Conservatives and liberals believe in different things. But neither has any idea of the optimal size of government — except that it should be just big enough to do the things that we want it to.

I think that the Supreme Court will find for the government in King v Burwell — the silly case where four words in the Obamacare law are supposed to trump everything else said and implied in the law. I just don’t think that any reasonable person could could find the challenge to be anything but laughable and that is why I think only three justices on the Supreme Court will find for the plaintiffs — because three of the justices of the court are unreasonable (and unreasoning) ideologues. But that’s just what I think. What I know is that I can’t predict what the Supreme Court will do — especially in such politicized cases. Who could have predicted the Supreme Court would decide to take Bush v Gore — much less that it would decide as it did.

On Monday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote a compelling argument about what would happen if the court does decide to end subsidies on the federal exchanges, How the Obamacare Subsidies Battle Could Play Out. He thinks that the Republicans will put together a bill that fixes the problem but add to it some kind of poison pill that damages the law. My bet would be that it would be a repeal of the medical device tax. The Republicans hate it, even though it is a very fair tax, given that the medical device manufacturers are getting a government sponsored increase in sales. But if it isn’t this tax, it will be something else. And then the Republicans will “dare the president to veto it.”

But as Bernstein noted, it is very likely that the Republicans won’t even manage to do that. They have shown themselves to be incapable even of passing legislation to embarrass the president, because such a large number of them don’t think any given act of embarrassment is enough. In this case, many Republicans won’t want to do anything to help the healthcare law, even if on balance, they manage to hurt the law. The Republicans are, after all, the party of all or nothing. “Some Republicans, on the other hand, would prefer chaos, even if they take the blame…” Meanwhile, the Republicans do nothing.

Over the weekend, Jonathan Cohn wrote, The Clock Is Ticking and Republicans Still Have No Serious Obamacare Alternative. He puts it in his usual understated but clear manner:

But what have the Republicans done in the six months since the Supreme Court first announced that it would take King v Burwell and potentially deprive health insurance from eight million people? To quote Cohn, “Zero.” He speculated that the Congressional Republicans may talk about fixing the problems just for cosmetic purposes. I don’t think there is any speculation: they aren’t serious about fixing this problem. If they were, they wouldn’t be supporting the lawsuit.

As I’ve written before, the Republicans have backed themselves into a corner. Obamacare is as conservative a plan for healthcare reform as there is. So the moment they labeled their own idea of an individual mandate as a communist plot, they were doomed. So the only thing they have to offer is a pretense of caring “to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance.” But what is really going on is that the Republicans do not care and will do something only in the event that they absolutely have to. In this case, I hope they don’t have to.

We seem to have had a couple of good days this week regarding politics. Of course, a large part of this is due to my greatly reduced expectations. Obama’s slap with regards to the TPP was good news, but there is little doubt that the Senate will eventually approve fast-track authority for the TPP. And on Monday, Jeffrey Sterling was given three and a half years for his leaks to James Risen. Now that’s still a good deal of time to be locked in a cage, but it is nothing compared to the two decades that the government was pushing for.

You should watch the following ten minute documentary by the great Norman Solomon, which was shown on Democracy Now! At this point, I’m not even certain that Sterling is guilty of these “crimes.” One thing is for certain: the government has had it out for him for well over a decade. It all started with a discrimination suit he filed against the CIA. It was thrown out of court for the usual reason: it could compromise “state secrets.” That is, of course, the government’s great “get out of jail free” card where it can never be held accountable — even though decades in the future, we will find out that there was nothing to the claim.

The prosecution of Sterling clearly had nothing to do with any leaks. It was all about getting back at him. The whole thing happened under the Bush administration, and seems to have ended there. It was only under our “liberal” president Obama that the Espionage Act was pulled out of World War I and used against Sterling and others. The whole thing is an outrage. But I hope that Sterling is the leaker. As retired CIA officer Ray McGovern said in the documentary, “I don’t know whether he did it or not, but whoever did it did a service to our country, because our country needs to know.” If Sterling was the leaker, he’s a hero and he deserves a parade. If he isn’t, he’s a martyr. Regardless, he deserves far better than this country is giving him.

The fact that the judge in the case gave Sterling such a relatively moderate sentence has been widely seen as a rebuke to the government. On Wednesday, The New York Times ran an editorial, Overkill on a CIA Leak Case. It described the sentencing as “a significant rebuke to the Obama administration’s dogged-yet-selective crusade against leaks.” As usual, the government argued that the leaks had put the United States in great peril. Of course, that is what the government always argues. Peter Maass noted the ridiculousness of this, Obama’s War on Leaks Faces Backlash in Court. He quoted Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith as noting what ought to be obvious, even to the authoritarians in the White House: that it is “jeopardizing vital credibility through exaggerated claims about the national security harms of disclosure.” In other words: it the boy who cried wolf.

But it is worse than that, of course. As The Times editorial put it:

In fact, as we know, John Kiriakou was given two and a half years in prison for revealing our country’s torture program, but not one person has even been prosecuted for doing the torture. This is our legacy. The Tea Party thinks that the United States isn’t being true to itself? Where is the outrage about this? Nowhere, of course. That’s because to them, the United States is most pure when we never admit to our mistakes. And in that regard, the Tea Party and President Obama are very much in agreement. Let’s look forward, not backward! (Except when it comes to whistleblowers, of course.)