Eric The Blue

Yoo & Bybee, Ltd.

David Cole, writing in The New York Review (behind a subscription wall, alas), points out that the definition of torture offered up by Yoo & Bybee, Ltd., is "literally meaningless."  "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"--what?  You can be crucified or sit in the car in the closed garage with the motor running.  Both cause death but one would expect law school graduates to understand that one causes more physical pain than the other.  Yet by the logic of these memos death always means a certain number on the physical pain scale. The examples of organ failure and impairment of bodily function fail for the same reason. 

Put aside morality and law.  On the face of it, their advice is worthless.

Except that the useless standard, and overall shoddiness of legal reasoning, had the effect of permitting their clients to torture.  If that was the intent, it worked. 

Meanies, dumbos, whacked-out crazies

It's fun to make fun of Republicans, also easy, but they are such poor sports that I am beginning to worry about them.  The incident that occurred at the home of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother, in Ivy, Virginia, captures the half-ridiculous, half-scary essence of the loyal opposition.  Perriello is the Democrat representing Virginia's conservative-leaning Fifth Congressional District whose vote for health-care reform helped ensure its passage last Sunday evening.  A couple of Tea Party patriots, upset over the outcome and Perriello's vote, published on the Internet what they thought was Perriello's home address and urged their readers to "drop by" and "express their thanks."  But the address they published was actually that of Perriello's brother, Bo Perriello.  Then, on Tuesday evening, members of Bo's family smelled gas and discovered that the propane line to a grill on their screened porch had been slashed. 

Politico traced the site where the address was posted to one Mike Troxel, a recent graduate of Liberty University, where he majored in journalism.  We know this because, when contacted by Politico, Troxel admitted to publishing the address before adding, "I was a journalism major in college, so I have every reason to believe my research is accurate."  He said he'd be glad to take it down, however, if Tom Perriello's office would supply the congressman's right home address.  His friend Kurt Feigel, who runs a companion blog, defended the decision to publish the address on the ground that Tom Perriello does not respond to their emails, or their letters, or their visits to his office. 

Of course he doesn't.  He's sane and doesn't want to waste his time with people who aren't.

Meanwhile, another Virginia congressman, Republican Eric Cantor, held a press conference on Thursday in which he blamed Democrats for "fanning the flames" by talking about incidents such as the one at Bo Perriello's house. 

"Just recently I have been directly threatened," explained Cantor, the second highest ranking Republican in the House and a particular favorite of the Power Line philosophers.  "A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I have received threatening emails."  Turns out that this direct threat levelled against Cantor was a random rifle bullet shut into the air that, when it landed, had enough force to penetrate the glass, but not the blind, of a window in a building in which Cantor rents office space on another floor.  When the police investigation of the incident revealed that Cantor was not a victim of a violent threat but, rather, a fan-flaming exaggerater of the kind he pretended to condemn, his response was that he had not known any details at the time of his press conference and was relieved to learn no on was hurt.

It's hard to know what to make of this iceball pack of rage and hapless stupidity.  I don't blame myself for laughing at the dolts but someone could get hurt. 

An eventful Sunday evening

On the night the House passed the healthcare reform bill, Amanda and I dropped the kids at gramma and grampa's and went to the show--The Blind Side, at the Riverview in south Minneapolis, where a ticket for a 7:00 show on Sunday evening is still $3.00.  If you stayed home and force fed yourself corn syrup for the show's running time, you'd be well past three bucks of corn syrup, so it is really quite a good deal.

What did I miss?  I don't doubt George Packer, who called the Democrats' speeches uninspiring and the Republicans'--paraphrasing lightly--rabid, fanatical, crazed, foamy.  What has become of my parents' G.O.P.?  Newt Gingrich tweets that healthcare reform will ruin the Dems for the next forty years, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Yes, what a shameful disaster that was!  No one has ever understood what President Johnson could have been thinking.  Do the Republicans have an argument that does not amount to offering political advice to the other party--the advice being, essentially, not to repeat their finest achievements?   I pick on Gingrich because he has a reputation for being a big thinker of deep thoughts, don't ask me why.  It would hardly be more ridiculous if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner were put forward as the Big Brains of the Republican party. 

Here is a question: who, from the front ranks of the Republican party, deserves to be taken seriously?  John McCain, on the morning after the vote, said that Democrats have "poisoned the well" and will get no cooperation from the Republicans.  What does that even mean?   They got no cooperation on healthcare, passed it anyway.  How's the strategy working, Senator?

These guys seem eager to sweep to power on the shirttails of the Democrats' achievement.  Why?  So that they can invade Iran and rerun the economy into the ground?  The Democrats' occasional victories have the effect of dividing the Republicans' failure into periods.

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker directs readers to a site where they can pledge to support only candidates who will vote to repeal "Obamacare."  But Obama will still be president, and Republicans will not have 67 senators even if they win every single senate race, which they won't.  Being completely divorced from reality is what makes him such an apt spokesman for conservatism, American-style. 

Erik Paulsen puts his best foot forward; Eric the Blue notices the bunions

Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., is not worth two posts in a row from any but the lowliest of bloggers, so here comes #2 on the whimpering weasel.  He went to the same college as I and it's sort of embarrassing.  Here he is putting his best foot forward on his website:

Erik Paulsen represents Minnesota's Third District in the US House of Representatives; a district made up of the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Paulsen is serving his first term in the House of Representatives with a heavy focus on job creation, fiscal discipline, veterans’ issues and constituents service.

Paulsen is a member of the House Financial Services Committee where he has been a champion of fiscal responsibility with a focus on greater transparency and accountability of taxpayer dollars. During his first months in office he successfully passed legislation to create broad authority for a Special Inspector General to oversee bailout spending through the Troubled Asset Relief Program as well as a bill he authored to strengthen small businesses hampered by the recession.  He is also co-sponsoring legislation that will provide reform for taxpayers and small business while creating a strong economic climate for job growth.

Alas, the first two grafs of his autobiography are representative of the whole.  Perhaps while in college the lessons of freshman composition were not a heavy focus of his.  I like how referring to himself in the third person gives the piece a fake journalistic feel, as if it's the straight dope instead of just him trying to brag about airy nothing.  Have you ever noticed, when reading a piece of really terrible writing, how often the bloviations tend to obscure the bullshit?  Take the phrase "he successfully passed legislation."  First time through, he earns the taunt:  "As opposed to unsuccessfully passed legislation, you blockhead?"  But second time through you notice that "unsuccessfully" does serve a subliterate rhetorical function.  If you take it out, the sentence is pared down, with the result that the reader, instead of gliding along mindlessly on puffy cumulus, is called back to the ground, where it will likely occur to him that Paulsen, an obscure back-bencher of the minority party in a congress of 435, could not himself have passed anything.  For small blessings we should all be thankful.

Erik Paulsen proves my point

I have a particular to add to the general complaint of a couple days ago, when I wrote:

Some people like the Theatre of the Absurd but I prefer paying attention to the arguments advanced by Republican politicians.  Their latest talking point seems to be that Democrats, if they use the reconciliation process to pass health care reform, will "poison the well," "destroy bipartisanship," and dash all hope of achieving A Single Other Thing.

Yes, and if I don't kill that rat, he'll die.

Erik Paulsen, who represents the affluent western suburbs of Minneapolis in the Congress, was quoted in a March 16 Star Tribune news story on the Democrats' end game strategy on healthcare reform.  "This is nothing more than a method to ignore the will of the American people and eliminate accountability for doing so," he said. "If the bill was good policy, this wouldn't be necessary."

Well, Erik, it's necessary because there are too many of your ilk in the Congress.  You are part of the great monolithic Republican "No." Which brings me to "accountability."  It's not going to be hard to understand who to hold accountable for healthcare reform.  Almost all the Democrats are for it, and all the Republicans are against it.  How could anyone possibly be confused?  What are you talking about?  And why can't your parents spell a four-letter name?

Occam's razor: a corollary

Is the Roman Catholic Church a religion or a club for pedophiles?  One is no longer surprised by successive revelations, though I once might have doubted that the top guy's taint goes beyond being a standard-issue flunky.  Who still listens to these creeps on this subject and that, which politician to vote for and which not to let drink the blood of Christ?  When a man rapes young boys, they won't even call the police.

But let us not indulge ourselves in supernatural explanations that elevate to platonic forms of depravity men who are merely disturbed.  If sexual attraction to children is such an outrageous anomaly, then why is there so much of it?  The Church can blame the celibacy requirement for its disproportionate problem among clergy.  For some fellows, not being able to marry and have children is a steep sacrifice.  But if you have no interest in marriage and the family, and cannot openly pursue your sexual predilectons anyway, then, by all means, go to seminary.

The latest Republican talking point

Some people like the Theatre of the Absurd but I prefer paying attention to the arguments advanced by Republican politicians.  Their latest talking point seems to be that Democrats, if they use the reconciliation process to pass health care reform, will "poison the well," "destroy bipartisanship," and dash all hope of achieving A Single Other Thing.

Yes, and if I don't kill that rat, he'll die.

Netflix: A Serious Man

The Book of Job translated to the suburbs of the Twin Cities in the Age of Eisenhower.  It's written and directed by the Coen brothers, and one of the adoring professionals has said that "A Serious Man" is the kind of movie you make after winning an Academy Award.  It was meant as a compliment,  but dropping the obligation to entertain is not in my view something to be celebrated.

I would probably agree with all the professional critics if only it were possible to get past how boring it is. 

Hendrik Hertzberg goes to Mississippi; Eric the Blue scans election results in Lafayette County

Since it's a blog post, not an ariticle in the magazine, Hendrik Hertzberg's impressions of William Faulkner's home town at the New Yorker site are "A Missive from Ole Miss" instead of a "Letter from Mississippi," but, whatever you call the piece, it makes for good reading, like everything else he writes.  His deconstruction of the inscriptions on the statue of the Confederate soldier remind me of my own bafflement, around twenty years ago, when, strolling around on the Ole Miss campus, I saw a young woman wearing a t-shirt that on the front displayed the Confederate flag and on the back declared "PROUD OF MY SOUTHERN HERITAGE." 

What, exactly, was she proud of? 

Hertzberg mentions that he saw some Obama stickers on cars parked around Oxford's Courthouse Square.  That was enough to make me look up the election results in Lafayette County, for which Oxford serves as county seat:  McCain, 56%; Obama, 43%--a perfect reflection of the statewide result.  Still, the county has some plausible claim to being relatively enlightened.  Only a quarter of the residents of Lafayette County are African American, as compared to over a third in the whole state, so it seems reasonable to assume that Obama did somewhat better with the county's white voters than he did in the rest of Mississippi.  It's those university "elites"! 

But it's easy to get carried away.  Obama won just 11% of the white vote in Mississippi, so it wouldn't take more than about 1-in-5 white votes to make up for the relative dearth of African Americans in Lafayette County.

Dan Riehl follows them 'round the bend

Thanks to Salon's War Room blog, I find myself reading this exercise in corroboration of Richard Hofstadter's thesis in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."  The explanatory power of the essay is undiminished in The Tea Party Era.  It might be fun, for purposes of comparing and contrasting, to set excerpts from Mr Dan Riehl's post alongside excerpts from Hofstadter's piece.

Here is Riehl, on President Obama:

This neophyte, this joke we have in the White House has absolutely no idea of the force and the rage he is about to unleash on him and his entire political party. If there are not enough responsible adults left within his party to rein in this accidental, affirmative action jerk, this self-styled, extremely flawed little man, then his party is worthless to America. It deserves to be marginalized electorally and, ultimately, utterly destroyed, before being relegated to the dung heap of history with the rest of the marxist, socialist clowns Americans have dispatched before.

Hofstadter:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

Riehl, on the high stakes:

Only a fool with no clear appreciation of, or for, America past and present, would dare undertake what this pustule in the White House is attempting to do. It is contingent upon the Republican Party to undertake every step, every maneuver it can to bring this government to a halt.

Hofstadter:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.

I hate all formulations beginning "Isn't it ironic. . ."--but am having a hard time finding a substitute lead-in to the name of Riehl's blog, which is Riehl World View.  The quality or state of being unhinged is not one that fits easily with my conception of a conservative temperament, but, then, as a fit for the modern Republican party, "unhinged" passed "conservative" many years ago.  For inhabitants of the r-e-a-l world, dissonance is amplified by the way in which messianic self-assurance cavorts with evident ignorance of the meaning of (for example) "contingent."

Reading Carver at 3 a.m.

I couldn't sleep last night and thus found myself, during the three-o'clock hour, scanning the bookshelf for something to distract me.  I pulled down Raymond Carver's collection Where I'm Calling From and found, in the table of contents, "The Student's Wife," ten pages long, about another insomniac, maybe not what the doctor ordered but it seemed apt.  I hadn't noticed before the soaring language that Carver, later in his career, perhaps abetted by Gordon Lish, excised from his prose.  Here are the first two sentences:

He had been reading to her from Rilke, a poet he admired, when she fell asleep with her head on his pillow.  He liked reading aloud, and he read well--a confident sonorous voice, now pitched low and somber, now rising, now thrilling.

Tomorrow, however, will be Friday, the wife of the Rilke admirer's "day for all the four-to-seven-year olds in the Woodlawn Apartments," and she can't sleep.  After her husband unsonorously asks her to leave him alone, she gets out of bed, moves through the apartment, looks in on the kids, smokes a cigarette, thumbs distractedly through magazines.  Finally, as the story ends, the sun is rising:

Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read has she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.

She waited and then moved over to the door and turned the lock and stepped out onto the porch.  She closed the robe at her throat.  The air was wet and cold.  By stages things were becoming very visible.  She let her eyes see everything until they fastened on the red winking light atop the radio tower atop the opposite hill.

She went through the dim apartment, back into the bedroom.  He was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow.  He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched.  As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.

That's the end, except for her kneeling at the bed and asking God to "help us."  You feel she'd have as good a chance with the winking red light atop the radio tower.  This kind of situation recurs in Carver's fiction.  It's always the woman who, using Hemingway's expression, feels the nothing.  See, for example, "I Could See the Smallest Things" (which, alas, I cannot find online).

On the one hand, the facts of the case; and, for balance, bullshit

The local daily yesterday printed, under the headline "Summit displayed deep philosophical gulf on health care," an article, labeled "Analysis," by Dan Balz of the Washington Post.  We learn in the first sentence that, regarding the debate on health care reform, "it's clear that both sides are certain they are right on substance" and that there is "a genuine difference" between the Dems and the R's.  The two sides agree that the health care system is "ailing" but disagree about the remedy:

Democrats think more government is the answer; Republicans say the opposite, that market competition is the best antidote to the ailing system.

Let's begin our analysis of Mr. Balz's analysis with a language note.  An antidote is something taken for poison.  In the above sentence, "the ailing system" stands for the person who, on account of having swallowed poison, is in mortal danger.  The antidote is not to the ailing thing; it's to the poison; and, consequently, the sentence should have been edited--or, if it was edited, unedited.

What is the evidence that Republicans agree that the health care system is in need of repair?  George Bush was president from 2001 through 2008.  For most of that time, Republicans were in the majority in Congress.  Where were their proposals then, when they could have enacted them?  I think, on the evidence, that the Republicans do not regard the failing health care system as a problem.  They constantly repeat the line about our health care system being the best in the world, and wonder aloud, their jowly faces contorted by crooked grins, where Canadiens will get their health care if we "reform" our system.  I take them at their word.

Since the article is allegedly "analysis," you might expect some evaluation of the opposing claims.  What you get instead is the Republican party's talking point about the Dems' solution--"more government"--and a complete failure to address the absurd whopper at the heart of the Republicans' call for market solutions.  What do they think we have now?  It's the market system that has failed.  It doesn't work.  When companies try to profit by selling health insurance, they do things like deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  In tough times, when healthy people decide to do without insurance, they raise rates on their increasingly unhealthy (and desperate) pool of customers, thereby driving out the remaining healthy ones, so that rates must be raised again, and so on.  The result is run-away costs and millions of uninsured.  That's what the vaunted market has wrought. 

If one side were to say that the square root of sixteen is four, and the other were to insist that, no, it's five, Dan Balz would probably write an article praising the "intelligent" and "civil" dialogue of the antagonists before concluding that, since this is a democracy and the different views cannot be reconciled, the voters will decide what is the square root of sixteen.  How wonderful!