Links today are courtesy of David Lynch, who sent me a pack of quite interesting articles by way of criticism: constructive criticism at its best. It also seems that I have a reader, albeit an unconvinced and perhaps exasperated one. :)

BUSH AS PUPPET OF "SPECIAL INTERESTS"
What I get out of this Paul Krugman piece on the Bush family with oil is that the Bush family hangs out with a lot of oilmen, intelligence operatives, and corporate elites and that they are privileged and used to it. Fine. Sometimes privilege gives people a certain magnanimity, the self-confidence to seek greatness through courageous service to high ideals: thus John F. Kennedy, thus George W. Bush, fellow grandiloquent spokesmen for the cause of freedom everywhere. It also leads to a paternalistic desire to help out the less fortunate: thus Franklin D. Roosevelt, thus George W. Bush, fellow pushers of the welfare state, funders of costly entitlement programs. Krugman actually notes the parallel between the Bush family and the Kennedys and Roosevelts only to dismiss for no reason at all:

As this quote suggests, the Bush dynasty differs from other American families that have mixed wealth with political prominence. While the Kennedys and the Rockefellers may have a sense of entitlement, they also display a sense of noblesse oblige—what one might call an urge to repay, with charitable contributions and public service, their good fortune.

Earth to Krugman: Bush served in the CIA. He was vice-president, then president. His sons are state governors. There's a word for this. It's called public service. Krugman realizes his readers may be on the verge of this insight, so he uses this sleight of hand:

The Bushes don't have that problem; there are no philanthropists or reformers in the clan. They seek public office but, if anything, they seem to feel that the public is there to serve them.

No reformers? Bush has transformed foreign policy, has transformed entitlement policy. Even liberals recognize that the past three years have been radically transformative. The change in American politics places him in the league with Lyndon Johnson, FDR and Reagan! But this is not "reform" because Krugman happens to disagree with the president's policies. (Perhaps "disagree" is too gentlemanly a term for Krugman's animus against the Bush administration.)

"They seem to feel that the public is there to serve them?" They "seem" to, eh? To whom do they "seem" that way? To Paul Krugman, of course. But what about John F. Kennedy? "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country [of which I am president]." Doesn't that qualify as feeling that "the public is there to serve them?" Yes and no. John F. Kennedy, like George W. Bush, wants the public of this privileged country to feel called on to serve a less fortunate world, just as he felt his position of privilege made him called on to serve the country.

The entire essay could be (deserves to be) unraveled in this way. I must admit I didn't read the article very thoroughly. I can't read Krugman anymore. It's hard work. He's so overbearing and manipulative that reading him is like a wrestling match, and if you don't fight fight fight he will pin to the ground and crush your ability to think for yourself. I have trouble turning the pages. After almost every sentence, my inclination is not to read on but to drift off into somber reflection on man's capacity for intellectual corruption, for the self-deceit that springs from hatred. Note to those who did not encounter Krugman before his self-destruction: the stuff before 2000 is totally different. Don't let what Krugman has become deter you from discovering what Krugman was.

In 1919, the philosopher George Lukacs made a conscious decision to become a Bolshevik propagandist, knowing full well that he was abandoning the commitment to truth that had made him a philosopher. My theory of Krugman is that his intellectual collapse was not a gradual process, yielding to laziness here, prejudice there, hubris and pride leading to a sense of lese-majeste when he was not listened to, imbibing anti-Bush rancor by osmosis when he fell in with the wrong crowd at the New York Times, and being blinded by it... No: I think Krugman, like Lukacs, made a more or less conscious, even conscientious, decision to become a liar for the sake of a cause. But I have no evidence for this, so those of you who prefer to entertain a more charitable opinion of him are free to differ.

HOW ECONOMISTS GOT BITTER
Jeffery Frankel was a prof of mine, a charming, friendly guy. We had lunch once and I greatly enjoyed it. There was a certain East Coast liberal narrowness about him but still in general I'm a fan. Here's an article on how guys like him and Krugman came to be so bitter against Bush. Here's how they feel:

We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it.

Well, okay. I'm actually not that far from these economists in a way: I was never a fan of the Bush tax cut either, and I think deficits are a problem. But I also recognize that there are different, valid points of view on this issue, and one of them is Bush's Keynesian approach, which resembles that of John F. Kennedy: tax cuts and big spending to stimulate the economy, and count on a growing economy to repair the deficit. And after all, there is a flip side to "the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc"-- Reagan got us out of stagflation, got the economy moving again, and lowered unemployment, and the deficit ultimately proved closeable (thanks, it seems, to those nerve-straining economists!)

As for international affairs, that is certainly part of the economists' gripe with the Bush administration, but here we have no need to defer to their judgment, because this is not their area of expertise. Pardon the colorful language, but Jeffrey Frankel has blood on his hands. He worked for a Clinton administration which applied sanctions to Saddam for eight years at the expense of hundreds of thousands of children's lives (and the entrenchment of Saddam's tyranny, consigning an entire nation of millions to the deathlike embrace of a prison state) because it was too cowardly to risk the lives of (as they showed in Kosovo) a single American soldier. The Bush administration transcended these moral failings. It preferred doing the right thing to appearing to do the right thing in the eyes of the complacent.

God bless Greenspan, who has offered the real answer to the "fiscal train wreck:" cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. It works better than taxes because taxes may cramp the economy, so their effects are unpredictable. Greenspan can say this because the Federal Reserve is independent and not beholden to political pressure; if Bush said it the AARP would have his head in November. Paul Krugman could say this too, if he were a better man.

NEOCON-O-PHOBIA
I enjoy idealizing the neocons as an incarnation of modern chivalry, white knights of liberation and sacrifice. I'm aware it's a half-truth, and I suspect that if I read Richard Perle and David Frum's new book, An End to Evil, which Michael Lind savagely reviews, I would find myself in sharp and general disagreement. But what the neocons' ideas helped to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the role they played in facing down the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe, justify a few eulogies. Michael Lind is inexplicably dismissive of the war in Iraq:

Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong.

What the heck?! Setbacks and some soldiers' deaths (120 times fewer US killed in Iraq than Vietnam; probably 200+ times fewer Iraqis dead, from estimates I've read; and don't forget that it ends the sanctions and thereby saves Iraqi lives) should not distract us from the magnitude of the achievement: a tyranny which murdered hundreds of thousands and which made millions of people live a lie for thirty-five years is gone, the sanctions are lifted, freedom of speech is a realized fact, a more humane government is almost sure to emerge from the political transition process, and the most stupendous achievement that the war promised to bring about-- that Iraq will become the first Arab democracy-- is by no means a pipe dream, but may well actually come to pass!

The wars critics miss the forest for the trees on a grand scale.

ARUNDHATI ROY
Another interesting comment on the new imperialism from The Nation. The author: none other than the mendacious, maleficent Arundhati Roy. The opening salvo is particularly brilliant:

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.

I like this juxtaposition of Bush and the World Social Forum because I think it makes a good point. Yes, Bush believes "another world is possible." The World Social Forum proclaims that "another world is possible," but anyone with half a brain can quickly figure out that the world they are envisioning-- a world free of any form of domination, where "domination" is defined to include me getting you to do a service for me in return for pay (a phenomenon the left calls "exploitation," while the rest of us call it "employment")-- is not possible. It is one with the airy socialist utopias that have floated ineffectually through the corridors of history, except when someone tries to realize them, in which case they end in the killing fields. Bush, too, is fighting certain rotten features of the Clinton world order, with a vision for a better, freer world, and he may actually have the means to bring it about, through an exercise of power, which we may describe, if we please, as a "new imperialism."

Roy compares this new imperialism to rape, with a clever (I guess it's supposed to be clever) turn of phrase which masks the absolute lack of anything resembling argument:

Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Some 19th-century imperialists were guilty of rape. Far more were engaged in establishing and enforcing laws against rape, and in outlawing other practices cruel towards women, such as India's custom that widows had to burn themselves to death on their husbands' funeral pyres (sutte). Roy, of course, is using rape metaphorically, even though the manner in which her own country (she is Indian) succumbed to British rule is much more like seduction, indeed like a prolonged love-affair, Romeo-and-Juliet style with the lovers deriving from the feuding cultural families of East and West, a love affair of intense passion and mutual admiration; which had its quarrels to be sure, of the abstract and emotional kind to which great lovers are prone, and which ended in break-up, perhaps inevitably in view of cultural differences and diverging life-plans (it was always a long-distance relationship anyway); yet the parting was cordial, and mutual (by 1947, the British were quite ready to leave) and the two nations remain friendly, and each learned much from the relationship, and was changed, mostly for the better. British rule in India was certainly founded on consent, as is illustrated by one of the most astonishing statistics in history: the Indian Civil Service governed India with a mere 900 members! Certainly such a tiny company could not rule over hundreds of millions by force. Nowadays, India, like many people who go through hard times after a break-up, sometimes blames everything on the ex. And yet sometimes there is also nostalgia for the past, on both sides. At the very least, Indians in the decades after 1947 recognized that the promises of independence had been largely disappointed.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of rape, there's no need to stay in the realm of metaphor. Let's talk about real rape. And torture. Lives lived in fear. Children starved. Massive wars waged, hundreds of thousands pointlessly killed, to appease a single man's vainglory. That was what was happening in Saddam's Iraq. Who was going to stop it? The idealistic chanting of the World Social Forum? No. Only the application of military force-- imperialism, so to speak-- could. Of those two believers that "another world is possible," one of them put an end to the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the mass graves, while the other-- if we use Roy as its representative-- made a strenuous effort of obfuscation and rationalization so that it might continue.

You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time. Iraqis, for example, see the new imperialism in a much different, and generally more favorable, light than Roy. If anything, their complaint is not that it is too strong, but too weak.