Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Peggy Noonan’s column today heralding President Obama’s imminent political death is one of the more garbled, disjointed, and confused documents I’ve seen in a long while.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen.

Ok. What are those central and immediate concerns? Noonan lists three. First:

The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic.

Have they really? Who exactly would describe the scenario in which high government spending leads  to the undoing of the republic—in the end—as a central and immediate concern in their lives? In the midst of a historic recession and ten percent unemployment, it is simply insane to think that "the American people" wake up each morning, send their kids off to school, and then spend the day brooding about the federal debt-to-GDP ratio. Maybe Noonan and her friends do. But then again, Noonan and her friends—dare I venture a guess—are not among the millions of people receiving unemployment benefits or whose homes have been foreclosed upon.

And has it only been two years that we have been living with the danger of the undoing of the republic due to high spending? I am sick of having to post this graph but Noonan could at least mention the role of the previous administration in causing the dystopic nightmare that she bizarrely thinks is imminent:  

She then laments the president’s "day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration."

First of all, does Noonan really think that the only thing preventing the passage of comprehensive immigration reform is President Obama’s "indifference" to the issue? She already hit him for the "tearing and unnecessary war" over health care reform, as if Republicans had nothing whatever to do with that. And for whom was health care reform "unnecessary"? Again, certainly not for the 30 million Americans who have no health insurance. How about for Noonan and the denizens of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page?

So when the president fights and battles his way to a historic legislative victory on a policy Noonan doesn’t like, the process is "tearing and unnecessary." But when Republican intransigence makes something impossible which Noonan does like, it’s because of the president’s "indifference." Her arguments read like campaign theme primers. 

And again, I simply can’t believe that Noonan really thinks that the story of the last two years is that of the American people singularly devoted to their concerns about the national debt and immigration. These are deeply complicated and abstract policy problems, and by definition they are neither "immediate" nor "central" to most actual human beings in this country. And on immigration she might have mentioned the evolving views of embattled demagogic Republican primary candidates such as John "Complete the Danged Fence" McCain. But no, it can’t possibly be partisan hackery that is to blame, just Obama’s "indifference".

Noonan then launches into her political analysis of the oil spill, and it’s very difficult to pinpoint her argument because she makes several contradictory ones.

In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—"catastrophe," etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won’t see the big picture.

First she criticizes the president for not dealing with our immediate and central concerns, and then she criticizes him for having factual command of the issue and for not stepping back and appreciating the "big picture." Which is it? Is he too aloof from immediate concerns, or not aloof enough? Or is the skeptic of big government paternalism really just looking for a president to bite his lower lip and tell us that everything’s gonna be ok?

Noonan goes on to describe the oil spill as indicative of the bankruptcy of the president’s political philosophy:

His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable.

Is she saying that if only the government didn’t concern itself with petty problems of need, injustice, and inequality, it would have a better technological command of how to cap gushing deep water oil rigs? As Kevin Drum notes, expertise in repairing oil blowouts is not something we have ever expected of the federal government. Noonan surely knows that in America the government does not drill for oil; it merely regulates those who do. Perhaps it would be helpful if she took a look back at the regulatory record of the previous administration.

Noonan simultaneously blames the president for not fixing the oil spill, not having a plan to fix it, having too many facts about how to fix it, not seeing the big picture, not seeing the immediate picture, and finally for thinking that government could manage such a "faraway" responsibility to begin with. She ends on a similarly confused note:

But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

But why will Republicans blow it? Noonan herself says earlier, about the lessons of Katrina:

[E]ven though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not.

So if conservatives got this point, why then will they screw up the next disaster? If they are wise enough to know—indeed to know "without being told"—that they shouldn’t be bothering with things like health care, poverty, and injustice, they should have plenty of time to tend to government’s "most essential jobs"—things like earthquake preparedness and deep oil rig repair. Someone get John Boehner a wetsuit!

This is incoherent enough, but Noonan actually makes a point that she doesn’t intend to. Republicans agree with her that faraway Washingon shouldn’t handle everything. But the problem is that among the things they think Washington shouldn’t handle are the very things that Noonan here says they should. Republicans were against a binding debt-reduction commission. They are against comprehensive immigration reform, and only want to Finish the Danged Fence. Katrina was a disaster because the Bush administration thought preparing for disasters was overrated, and so FEMA was hollowed out and populated with half-wits. BP had no plan to fix the well because of a Republican philosophy that is hostile to public regulation of private business. Noonan’s party leadership sees tax cuts as the only essential task of government, and thinks shipping terror suspects to Gitmo and torturing them is the one faraway job that Washington should devote much more time to.

Conservative intellectuals like Noonan would do the ol’ teetering republic a huge service if they stepped back from their attachments to fantasy narratives and irrational doom scenarios, and bent their brows to the essential task of rebuilding a serious, coherent, modern conservatism. I have no idea what they’re waiting for.

The arrival of the World Cup is always a great time to remember that nationalism ain’t going anywhere. The best matches, well for someone who writes a political blog anyway, are the ones with awkward geopolitical implications. I find most people, sportswriters included, can’t escape the pull of framing World Cup matches in the context of whatever history of war and tension the two countries happen to share. I remember this gem in the Boston Globe from a Germany-Poland match during World Cup 2006:

The Germans dominated this contest, piling on the pressure in the second half as about two-thirds of the 70,000 crowd urged them on and the other third vociferously supported the Poles’ resistance.

Yes the Germans sure did dominate the Polish Resistance. At least he didn’t call the German offensive a blitzkrieg.

The difficulty countries have in trying to overcome and transcend these historical perceptions got me thinking about the concept of nation branding more generally. Nation branding is just what it sounds like: countries using corporate-style advertising techniques to define and promote a particular national identity with the aim of boosting tourism. It’s now a trillion dollar industry. We see these national branding attempts all the time. Some are getting quite creative, like the Party in Sweden’s Pants campaign, and this bizarre ad featuring a Danish actress purporting to be looking for the father of her baby after having a one-night stand with a tourist. With the impending World Cup spotlight, South Africa is certainly giving it a go. Other countries have their work cut out for them:

Slick advertising campaigns that depict your country as hip and desirable might indeed get you a few more tourists, but there are real limits to this sort of heavy-handed image crafting, mostly because we’re all very savvy consumers, and also terrible racists. Nation branding expert Simon Anholt explains: "Views about other countries are deeply ingrained cultural prejudices which they hold from a very, very early age. I think what I think about Uganda because I’ve thought it all my life and the idea that a series of advertisements is going to change my mind about that is absolutely ludicrous." And of course countries cannot overcome bad policies or endemic social ills just by selling a slick image. Maybe South Africa will come off well after its World Cup hosting; then again, look at this recent amazing, awful interview with the mayor of Johannesburg, and tell me how you think the branding campaign will work out.

It turns out that one of the best ways to create a lasting positive national brand is through good old cultural imperialism: you need to have a few popular, well-regarded international consumer products that are indelibly associated with your country. Think Swiss watches, Japanese electronics, German cars, Italian or French fashion, Hollywood, and other American hegemons like Nike and Apple. Even as most of the companies try to downplay or obscure their national associations in order to have truly globalized appeal, their tremendous success as international brands have a rub-off effect on the reputations of their respective countries of origin.

And it’s interesting that many corporations and countries seem to realize the mutual symbiotic advantage of having a product associated with a place and a place associated with a product. IKEA fits this maybe. And the ubiquitous Amstel Light "Dam Good Beer" ads, in which you can’t even tell what they want you to buy, the city or the beer.

There’s a great article in the Post today on how China is starting to feel its glaring dearth of global marquee name brands, both economically and in international prestige. While it assembles and stitches together all the world’s products, it has no associational brands to call its own:

Last year, China overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter, and this year it could surpass Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy. But as China gains international heft, its lack of global brands threatens its dream of becoming a superpower.

No big marquee brands means China is stuck doing the global grunt work in factory cities while designers and engineers overseas reap the profits. Much of Apple’s iPhone, for example, is made in China. But if a high-end version costs $750, China is lucky to hold on to $25. For a pair of Nikes, it’s four pennies on the dollar.

"We’ve lost a bucketload of money to foreigners because they have brands and we don’t," complained Fan Chunyong, the secretary general of the China Industrial Overseas Development and Planning Association. "Our clothes are Italian, French, German, so the profits are all leaving China…. We need to create brands, and fast."

In typical fashion they are attempting to spur innovation with a series of heavy-handed, government-directed initiatives:

Domestically, it has launched the "indigenous innovation" program to encourage its companies to manufacture high-tech goods by forcing foreign firms to hand over their trade secrets and patents if they want to sell their products there.

Yep, nothing says "indigenous" like stealing the trade secrets and patents of others!

I think the moral is that China would be better off in its branding efforts by just hosting the World Cup and doing really well in it. It worked for Germany. Speaking of Germany, my early geopolitical dream scenario for the 2010 World Cup: Germany vs. Greece: Greece plays poorly, but Germany loses after a series of costly mistakes late in the match. Morning headline will be: "Moral Hazard: Germany bails out Greece in the end." Can’t wait.

This Rand Paul case has been picked over pretty thoroughly the last few days, but it’s a fascinating issue so indulge me.

To recap: In a series of interviews, most recently on Rachel Maddow, Kentucky Republican candidate for Senate Rand Paul has stated that while he supports the government banning discrimination in all public places and institutions, he thinks private businesses should have the right to engage in racial discrimination if they so choose. Asked if his approach would have allowed lunch counters to deny service to Martin Luther King Jr., Paul said that he abhors racism, that he would not go to that lunch counter, and he would criticize that lunch counter, but it would be wrong to legally prohibit the lunch counter from denying service to black people. "[T]his," Paul said, "is the hard part about believing in freedom."

As writers have commented on this all over the place, I notice a general tone of grudging respect for Paul’s ideological purity. No one is accusing him of racism or dogwhistling or anything like that. Once you go down the road of libertarian absolutism, this is where it quickly takes you. I must say, kudos to Rand Paul for not shying away from all the ruinous logical extensions of his first principles. But that doesn’t mean he’s right about, well, anything.

Adam Serwer at the American Prospect has a great post on Rand’s idea of the "hard part" of freedom:

Paul would never face the actual "hard part" of his vision of freedom, because it would never interfere with his own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Rand Paul would not have been turned away from a lunch counter, be refused a home, a job, or denied a loan, or told to sit in the black car of a train because of his skin color, or because of the skin color of his spouse. Paul thinks there is something "hard" about defending the kind of discrimination he would have never, ever faced.

And Matt Yglesias twists the knife:

In this context, it’s worth recalling that Paul isn’t actually a 100 percent consistent opponent of government activity. He’s a medical doctor. And he opposes reductions in Medicare’s payments to medical doctors. Saying “the Civil Rights Act was morally wrong” might be the hard part of freedom for a black libertarian but it’s not the hard part of freedom for Rand Paul. For Paul, the hard part would be saying that he and his colleagues should get less money from the government. But he doesn’t say that. That’s too hard.

So much for his ideological purity. But that is the problem with chasing purity down the rabbit hole. The chase never ends. You can start with your foundational principle, as Paul does: "Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?" So that quickly leads you to oppose easy things like smoking bans and calorie labeling and trans fat regulations. But then, in your pursuit of consistency, you have to say, as Paul does, that if the owner of the restaurant owns his restaurant, then he can keep out whomever he chooses for any reason he chooses. Then you have to admit that the restaurant owner should have the freedom to not wash his vegetables or to properly store his meat. And then he probably has the freedom to have faulty wiring exposed and dangling from the ceiling. And maybe then he can institute any homicidal employee policies that he wants. After all, unfettered right to contract. Free market will pick the winners and losers. And on and on it goes…

Rand’s ideas on racial discrimination hinge on his distinction between public and private action. Charles Lane nails the main problem with this: "There is no such thing as "private" discrimination with respect to a public accommodation. Like any other claimed property right, it could not exist without government support."

Suppose an African American customer sits down at a "whites only" restaurant and asks for dinner. The owner tells him to leave. The customer refuses and stays put. What are the owner’s options at that point? He can forcibly remove the customer himself, but, as Paul concedes, that could expose the restaurateur to criminal or civil liability. So he’ll have to call the cops. When they arrive, he’ll have to explain his whites-only policy and ask them to remove the unwanted black man because he’s violating it. But they can only do that on the basis of some law, presumably trespassing. In other words, the business owner’s discriminatory edict is meaningless unless some public authority enforces it.

Yes, so either goverment chooses to enforce integration, or else it has to enforce discrimination. The idea that there is some "no government" position available is a fantasy. And of course we have experience in how this goes. It’s called Jim Crow. Now Paul is clear that he does not in any way support "institutional racism" which is again his attempt to parse the difference between public and private action.

To illustrate Lane’s point, here’s a list of statutes from Louisiana’s Jim Crow glory days. The State, in giving private entities the "freedom" to segregate, found itself then having to enforce that freedom under penalty of law:

1894: Railroads [Statute]
Depots must provide equal but separate waiting rooms for the white and colored races. "No person shall occupy the wrong room." Penalty: Persons who insist on entering the improper place may be fined $25 or imprisoned up to 30 days. Agents failing to enforce the law guilty of misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $25 to $50.

1908: Public accommodation [Statute]
Unlawful for whites and blacks to buy and consume alcohol on the same premises. Penalty: Misdemeanor, punishable by a fine between $50 to $500, or imprisonment in the parish prison or jail up to two years.

1908: Miscegenation [Statute]
Concubinage between the Caucasian or white race and any person of the Negro or black race is a felony. Penalty: Imprisonment from one month to one year, with or without hard labor.

These were private entities engaging in discriminatory practices, backed up by public coercive authority. You simply can’t have one without the other, which makes Rand Paul’s public/private distinction completely meaningless in practice. That Paul has missed this quite obvious demolition of his worldview means he is either willfully misrepresenting his position or his motives, or else he is deeply ignorant and hasn’t really thought much about any of this. I vote for the latter.

Another problem I have with Paul’s absolutism is, when deciding on the prudence of this or that public policy, there are all sorts of criteria one must appeal to. Liberty is an important one, but it’s not the only one! Every day we weigh our right to liberty against a host of other competing goods, most commonly: security, social cohesion, prosperity, equality. These are tough debates and often necessitate tough trade-offs. Denying that there’s even a debate to be had—because liberty always wins—might be philosophically satisfying, but far from it being the "hard part", it’s in fact quite easy. If your answer to the question of how we can best foster security, social cohesion, prosperity, and equality is liberty, liberty, liberty, and liberty, well you may think you’re appealing to a sophisticated political philosophy, but in reality it’s just the cop-out position of the person who has no inclination or ability to think through the actual compromises that make governance possible. It’s not the high-minded tenets of a coherent ideological system, it’s the petulance of a child who just wants to take his ball and go home.

I can see how ideological absolutism of this sort can be intellectually attractive. But having just finished the first volume of Deutscher’s biography of Leon Trotsky, I can also see that while it is useful to have such doctrinaire extremists as part of the public square—since they force us all to reconsider why we believe what we believe—it’s equally useful that they never be allowed anywhere near positions of power, ever.

Arlen Specter saying that he twice voted for Adlai Stevenson (b.1900), in an attempt to show his Democratic bona fides, reminded me of one of the greatest Simpsons episodes ever, Homer at the Bat (1992). Mr. Burns wants to stack the company softball team with professional ringers to make sure they win the upcoming championship game, and so he tells Smithers to go out and hire a bunch of “professional baseballers” including Honus Wagner, Cap Anson, and Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown. Smithers has to break the news to him that all his ringers are either retired or dead, and in fact his proposed right fielder, Jim Creighton (in the picture) died 130 years ago.

Mr. Burns of course goes on to get players like Don Mattingly, Wade Boggs, and Ozzie Smith. And Homer’s arch nemesis, Darryl Strawberry:

I largely sympathize with Peter Beinart’s much-discussed, important essay in the New York Review of Books. Beinart writes of the growing ideological gulf between older, uncritical supporters of Israel—whose views are championed and reflected back to them by the American Jewish establishment—and the younger generation of secular American Jews who increasingly see an unresolvable conflict between Zionism and their universalistic liberal values:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

This is a fascinating piece and there is too much for me to summarize. But one major theme bothers me. Beinart focuses his blame on the American Jewish establishment organizations like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference, and I think this focus is largely misplaced. Yes, these organizations have "actively opposed" a brand of Jewish nationalism that sees criticism of Israeli illiberalism as a central, and indeed foundational, responsibility of Zionism. But young liberal Jews aren’t abandoning Zionism because AIPAC is uncritical of Israel. They’re abandoning Zionism because there is an unreconcilable contradiction between universalistic liberal-democratic values, and identifying oneself with a tribal, ethnocentric nationalism.

I probably share a lot of Beinart’s policy preferences regarding Israel. But his call for a renewed liberal Zionism does not register with me whatsoever, and I have trouble even grappling with the concept intellectually. Here’s why: The liberal Zionism that Peter wants has a problem with the Jewish establishment’s tribal affinity and ethnocentrism leading it to support undemocratic, illiberal Israeli behavior. Peter and other liberal Zionists want that tribal affinity and ethnocentrism to lead to support for more liberal and democratic Israeli behavior. But I find objectionable the tribal affinity and ethnocentrism to begin with! 

A concern for the fading character of Israeli democracy is by definition a parochial concern. And privileging the dispensation of one nationalistic project over any other seems to me to be illiberal on its face. I sometimes get the feeling that liberal Zionists support Palestinian nationalism only insofar as that is the only way for Israel to live up to its own ideals and remain democratic and Jewish given the demographic realities of continued occupation. While this is certainly true, it is a cynical liberalism. It sees Palestinian nationalism only as a sort of reflection or culmination or imperative of Israeli Jewish nationalism. Palestinian statehood isn’t dealt with on its own merits, but is merely a demographic and strategic calculation, and a moral concern only for what it says about Israeli character and Jewish values. It’s leagues better than the establishment position, but it’s still thinking with the blood, and it’s uncomfortable to me.

So BP has a suggestion box for ideas on containing/fixing the oil spill. Does this comfort you?

Some 5,000 suggestions have been submitted through an online suggestion box set up by the oil giant and the Coast Guard, and thousands more are circulating through Youtube videos, in Internet chat rooms and in e-mails sent to media organizations.

"It is just unbelievable," said BP spokesman Mark Proegler. "People are not only offering products, we are getting a lot of calls — even here in the media center — from people with ideas on how to fix it. Anything ranging from crazy ideas to ones that actually sound sensible." […]

BP and the Coast Guard said they are evaluating each and every idea for its "technical feasibility and proof of application."

On one hand, crowdsourcing the problem seems like a fine idea—what’s to lose? But the main question this conjures is: Why didn’t anyone have this little brainstorming session before there was a catastrophic spill? Maybe this particular type of blowout is unprecedented, but regardless of the cause, the one verity about offshore drilling is that there will be spills sometimes. Some of those spills will be big. It’s sadly no surprise, in this post-Black Swan world, that as recent as twelve months ago BP grossly underestimated the dangers of an accident at this particular rig. But the almost comical blindness to the possibility of unexpected future events does not get excused by now turning the cleanup into some sort of reality gameshow:

"It is just unbelievable,” said BP spokesman Mark Proegler. “People are not only offering products, we are getting a lot of calls — even here in the media center — from people with ideas on how to fix it. Anything ranging from crazy ideas to ones that actually sound sensible."

Why not just go the whole way and let people present their solutions on national television to a panel of acerbic but loveable judges, and let America vote for their favorites? The initial episodes could frontload the crazy ideas for comic effect, and the judges would dismiss them by saying things like, "Sir, what on earth made you think you’re cut out to be America’s Next ‘RBS-8D ultra-deepwater, column-stabilized, semi-submersible drilling rig’ Idol?" It would have to be a very quick competition because the problem is rather pressing, but it’s May Sweeps so I think there’s enough ad revenue and interest out there to support a 4- or 5-nights-a-week show.

A country that successfully crowdsourced the problem of how to make Ke$ha a multimillionaire can surely be counted upon to handle this little issue. I’d actually be interested to hear what Ke$ha thinks of the cleanup challenge. Ah, but I see that she is already in disaster demand elsewhere: She’s in Nashville helping to solve the floods there. Her first reaction of the view from her plane: "I looked outside and I saw lakes, except for in the middle of the lake there would be a roof. I was a little confused." Of course she was confused; it’s confusing!

Look how confused BP is.

I was a little unfair to Bob Wright yesterday. I disagreed, and still very much do, with his insistence on confusing proximate and ultimate causation when considering the question of what led Faisal Shahzad to load a Nissan Pathfinder with (non-functioning) bomb parts in the middle of Times Square.

My point is that trying to enumerate Islamic outrage so as to prevent it is a futile affair. But (this is where I was unfair) that is most definitely not to say that we shouldn’t desperately seek to avoid, and grievously regret, such outrages as Abu Ghraib and torture and blowing up weddings in Afghanistan. Foremost they are moral calamities, but they are also strategic nightmares and do terrible harm to our ability to project power and garner the support or goodwill of host populations. Saying that someone has a legitimate and understandable grievance when NATO inadvertently drops a bomb on their birthday party is one thing. Just as the Kurds have a legitimate grievance and the Greek Cypriots have a grievance and the Armenians have a grievance (I picked those at random but funny that Turkey has a hand in all of them). Contrition and compensation for injustice is a fine thing. But it’s quite another to say that anyone with such a grievance has license to target innocent civilians for reprisal slaughter. 

This causation argument is tricky because the subtlety it requires often necessarily obscures one’s meaning. Let’s look at another example: It is a fact that America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to a rise in anti-American sentiment in Muslim-majority countries. But did the invasion "cause" Sunni extremists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to blow up the Samarra Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, in 2006? Even granting that the incident would not have occurred if there was no Iraq War, it was the general Shia-killing and mosque-bombing policy of al-Qaeda that is to blame for the incident, not the U.S.’s decision to overthrow the Baathist regime. I don’t know if Robert Wright would accept this or not.

All you need know about Faisal Shahzad and Major Nidal Hasan in order to make sense of their actions is that they were in sway to a medieval fundamentalist ideology which they believe gave them explicit religious sanction for the mass murder of Americans. There’s your ultimate and proximate cause. If another Fort Hood incident occurs, it will probably be because their shared religious mentor, Anwar al-Awlaki, has called it the duty of all Muslims serving in the military to "follow in the footsteps of men like Nidal." The new shooter, just like Hasan and Shahzad, will state all sorts of "reasons" for doing what he did, and rest assured none of them will be, "I believe my religion mandates that I kill innocent Americans." Go round and round as long as you like, but that belief simply cannot be "traced back" to some original American provocation.

Back to that religious mentor. Anwar al-Awlaki is a charasmatic English-speaking imam hiding in Yemen. He was the imam in a mosque in Falls Church in 2001 which was attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, along with Major Hasan. He and Hasan subsequently had a prolific email correspondence. Awlaki also advised and trained Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen, and was cited by Faisal Shahzad as the inspirer of his attack. Awlaki finds impressionable young men who are struggling to reconcile tensions in their self-conception of their identity, and fills their head with the nobility and legitimacy of killing unbelievers, soldiers, women and children, and oneself, in the name of Islam. "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies," he wrote on his website last year. "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not."

There is no U.S. policy that "causes" Awlaki to want to implement the rule of Allah on Earth, and there is no U.S. policy that is to blame for the violence and death and destruction wrought by adherents of this ideology.

David Brooks writes today about Elena Kagan’s resemblance to something he calls "Organization Kids":

These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic. […]

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

Andrew Sullivan piles on:

Kagan strikes me as the Democratic elite’s elitist: free of any conviction that is not caged in a web of Clintonian caution, punctiliously diligent in every aspect of her career, motivated by a desire never to offend those with power, and rewarded in turn by the protection and praise of these elites.

Look, I am superficially sympathetic to Brooks’ wariness of Kagan’s rote strategic obsession with career advancement, and Sullivan’s distaste for her ostensible intellectual timidity. But I cannot see how she is unique in this regard. Are we really supposed to act shocked that people who want to advance in giant public bureaucracies end up exhibiting behavior that is "prudential rather than poetic"? Are we to be surprised that the men and women who reach these soaring heights in political life do so precisely because they’ve mastered a degree of "caginess" and personal discipline at the expense of capriciousness? This is the U.S. government, not Google Inc.

And maybe there is something bad about the Harvard-Yale stranglehold on the Court, though honestly I’m not really sure what that would be. Both Brooks and Sullivan mention that Kagan is part of the "Acela Corridor Elite" and intend for the appellation to be something of a smear. But if there is indeed an Ivy League backlash, and it suddenly becomes politically advantageous to go to school in the Midwest, then all the strategic megalomaniacs who aspire to these types of jobs will go to school in the Midwest, out of the same sense of caution and expectation that leads them now to Harvard or Yale. I know this is a source of daily frustration for David Brooks, but intellectual risk-takers are generally not so interested in devoting their lives to the sort of soft sycophancy necessary to successfully navigating massive political bureaucracies. The benevolent age of the Philosopher-King has not dawned yet, David. And when it does dawn, you’ll see a whole lot more political hopefuls majoring in philosophy.

Yes, we can go ahead and blame the modern confirmation process for elevating thoroughly uncontroversial blandness to an art form. But there was no golden age where rakish bon vivants were banging down the doors of top-level public service. Even intellectual pugilists like Antonin Scalia evinced a deep understanding of career strategy: Scalia refused Reagan’s initial offer to be appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court, because he was holding out for the more influential D.C. Circuit, which was, and is, a more conventional springboard to the Supreme Court.

And look what is in store for even an uncontroversial blank slate such as Elena Kagan. Joshua Green of the Atlantic notes that the frothing anger of the conservative base will force many Republicans to vote against Kagan, even though just a year ago several voted to confirm her as solicitor general:

While some, like Olympia Snowe, can probably do so again without fear of reprisal, others–especially Jon Kyl and Orrin Hatch–are going to have to execute a flip-flop or steel themselves for some serious intra-party hazing (how likely is Hatch to vote "yes" after Utah Republicans’ patricide of his counterpart, Bob Bennett?).

Across the aisle–last I checked–is political invertebrate Arlen Specter, who will be flip-flopping in the other direction with the panache of Kerri Strug. Before he was an endangered Democrat, Specter was an endangered Republican who voted against Kagan’s confirmation as Solicitor General. There really isn’t much mystery as to how Specter will vote this time.

If we are disappointed when confronted by evidence that Court hopefuls act like politicians, it’s because we know deep down that they are politicians. Once they get the first tiny hint that their professional ambitions are actually attainable, their career choices become barely-disguised political campaigns. How else can they possibly navigate such absurd atmospheres as described by Josh Green above? A judge’s advancement and livelihood are dependent upon impressing a town swarming with vendetta-seeking "political invertebrates": You think Orrin Hatch or Arlen Specter admire intellectual risk-taking? Do they seem particularly hostile to the idea of suppressing or shifting principles for the sake of one’s career?

I don’t have a strong opinion on Elena Kagan’s fitness for the high court, but I think some of this criticism is out of line, and I’m confused as to exactly when someone’s success in responding to the career incentives in front of them became such a liability.