Thursday, October 27, 2005

Scooter on a Crutch



Reuters published this photo of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with crutch, supposedly after breaking a bone in his foot. However, sources close to the administration are leaking like drunk sailors in alleyways, and they passed on this transcript of a conversation recorded in Karl Rove's office:
ROVE:
Scooter, you're going down. Someone's got to take the fall for the Wilson job and you're "elected".

LIBBY:
Oh yeah, Fat Brain? Well, If I'm going down, you're coming with me, and I'll be peddling you for cigarettes to guys named "Bubba".

ROVE:
Joey, show Scooter what I mean when I say he's going down.

JOEY:
We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Mr. Libby.

LIBBY:
No, wait, Karl, we can talk... YEEEEEEEEARGH!

ROVE:
You've got only two choice now Scooter. You can go down with one broken bone, or you can go down broken in a lot more places. Tomorrow you'll tell Patty that I was duped in your crazy obsession to "get" Joe Wilson. Do you "get" me? Say 'Yes Mr. Rove.'

LIBBY:


ROVE:
Joey, help Scooter up.

Tortured Logic

In another forum, Reductio had this to say about the pro-torture language that Dick Cheney is urging a Congressional conference committee to include in a bill for a Congressional vote:
I realize the combination of dropping a supreme court nominee and the potential indictment of senior administration officials for high crimes and misdemeanors is somewhat distracting, but I think recent developments in the area of the Bush administration's support for torture as a component of its policy are worthy of mention.

Congress attaches an amendment to the military appropriations bill to make clear that under US law, torture and related prisoner abuse is always and everywhere illegal for Americans. Now admittedly, just about all right thinking people can see that the current state of the law is also pretty clear on this matter, but apparently there are a few folk (which would obviously include the [Attorney General] and other administration members up to and including Bush) for whom the current law is insufficiently explicit, and therefore believe that there are situations where torture is legal (under US law). So the world's most august deliberative and legislative body takes action to make the law more explicit, in order to clear up that confusion.

What is the administration's reaction? First to threaten a veto outright, scuttling the entire bill to preserve the loophole in
current law, that only they believe exists, and which they maintain makes it legal for them to engage in torture.

Then, they come up with a proposed legislative compromise; they are OK with US military being always and everywhere prohibited from torture, and with everyone being prohibited from torturing IN AMERICA, but want the president to be legally able to order (or in the case of this administration, keep ordering) torture abroad, as long as it is not done by the military.

Now, in the past, when I've indicated my position that one could (and IMO should) well infer from the existing evidence that the administration supports torture and prisoner abuse as part of its policy, I have been accused of engaging in hyperbole. Further it's been suggested that my view is that of an anti-Bush ideologue, rather than a gimlet eyed assessor of the facts (which is how I see myself).

So, I guess my question ... is this: Now that the administration has made clear its support for the president's right
(and I use that word loosely) to order torture, and even threatened to bust out the veto to preserve that right, and further has outlined legislation to codify and enshrine that presidential prerogative, is there now sufficient evidence for me to infer that the administration supports torture and abuse as policy options without being derided as a hyperbolic Bush-hater...?

Naturally I expect to continue to be mocked as a hyperbolic anti-Bush ideologue for other matters, I am just inquiring about this particular `support for torture and abuse' inference.
Now let's be clear: Torture isn't one of those many government policies which one can choose to disagree with, and yet support its advocates in other matters. Advocating laws to permit government operatives to enagage in torture, in defiance of intenational treaties, common decency and rock-bottom morality, should permanently disqualify you from government service in the United States of America. There is no wiggle room on this question for a moral nation. Those who advocate such laws are traitors to America, pure and simple, and should be tarred, feathered, and exiled forthwith as black stains on the proud heritage of this country. There is no excuse for torture. None. It is the most egregious form of barbarism, and has absolutely no place in civilized society. Just as its advocates have no place in a civilized society.

Surrender your thirst for blood. It is degrading.

Thanks to Rex Saxi for the New York Times link.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

The Game of Life

Amid all the inkthirsty slavering over Plamegate, (and yes, I thirst, I thirst) I thought to take a step back and consider a more fundamental matter upon which both the seemingly inexhaustible radiation of scandals and criminality emanating from the business and political spheres and the current debate over the inclusion of the theories of evolution and intelligent design in education touch: what is the basis of morality?

When partisans of the teaching speak publicly about Intelligent Design, postulating a supernatural guiding force as the author of biological constructs, it isn't the Unknowable that forces them to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge with God. Were that the case, quantum physics, with its unfathomable action-at-a-distance and fluidity of material and energetic states offers plenty of cracks in reality into which to press the mortar of Deity. No, the prime justification for the hypothesis of an active, living, meddling Creator appears to be the primal fear of an amoral void at the heart of existence.

Consider this quote from an NPR interview with Senator Santorum, (R-PA):
"[Intelligent Design] has huge consequences for society, and it's where we come from. Does man have a purpose? Is there a purpose for our lives? Or are we just simply, you know, the result of chance? If we're the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us."
Or this quote from a Salon interview with Richard Thompson, an advocate for the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools:
"If you are nothing but an accident of nature, then nothing you do is dependent on objective truth," he says. "You can set your own rules. There is no life after death. There are no set moral codes. If you go to bed, and if you die its OK, you're just another piece of matter bouncing around and you'll change into something else. That's why, even if 100 million scientists say we are unplanned, that we're just purposeless beings in this universe, the general population won't buy it. And neither will I."
Setting aside the notion of investing in scientific theory by popular vote, what seems to me the critical idea underpinning these remarks is the absence of morality coupled with the absence of God.

Prior to a single, moral deity governing existence, humans had acquaintance with a variety of supernatural beings whose morality was, at best, questionable, and yet somehow human society in a bewildering spectrum of forms, managed to survive and prosper, which, I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize would have been impossible absent some meaure of moral code that prevented a bloody, unwinnable, "war of all against all".

Which leads me back to our crime-ridden political and business spheres in the United States. consider the Prisoner's Dilemma:
Partners in crime are held in separate cells, and the prosecutor offers each one a deal. If you rat on your partner and he stays mum, you go free and he gets ten years. If you both stay mum, you both get six months. If you both rat, you both get five years. The partners cannot communicate, and neither knows what the other will do. Each one thinks: If my partner rats and I stay mum, I'll do ten years; if he rats and I rat, too, I'll do five years. If he stays mum and I stay mum, I'll do six months; if he stays mum and I rat, I'll go free. Regardless of what he does, then, I'm better off betraying him. Each is compelled to turn in his partner, and they both serve five years-far worse than if each had trusted the other. But neither could take the chance because of the punishment he would incur if the other didn't. Social psychologists, mathematicians, economists, moral philosophers, and nuclear strategists have fretted over the paradox for decades.

There is no solution for a single trial. But, repeated trials allow players - partners in crime - to observe and study each other's behavior and develop a better paying strategy. Dawkins describes two competitions organized by Robert Axelrod that showed superiority of a simple strategy Tit for Tat: start mum, then do what your opponent did on the previous trial. In general, strategies were divided into two classes: nice and nasty. An adherent of a nice strategy never rats first, a nasty fellow does. It so happened that, on the whole, nice strategies outperformed the nasty ones.
The fear that without God there is no moral code, I submit, is groundless. Morality arises from necessity. While short-term advantage may be gleaned by individuals through amoral or immoral behavior, the odds are against long term success, even for the individual. Consider the current political climate, and what a strange mirror-image it presents of the decline of the Nixon adminstration. It appears that immoral behavior, as manifested by the Republican party during the last twenty years, as manifested personally by President Clinton, and as mainfested by businessmen such as Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom and Ken Lay of Enron is not a long-term strategy for overall success, or, presumably, survival. Some individuals will certainly prosper, but the odds appear to be against them.

Game theory and statistics trend towards rewarding cooperative, alturistic behavior as a survival strategy over selfish, destructive behavior. Personal gains can be made through immoral behavior, but that true immorality requires society seems to provide an inherent check on the behavior. Nice guys may not finish first all the time, but large groups of nice guys tend to finish first more often than their nasty fellows.

Absent direct evidence to the contrary, a belief in a moral deity appears to be a manifestation of an intuitive grasp of survival odds, a shorthand back-justification and explanation for moral behavior that must occur if a species with volitional behaviors is to prosper. Whether it's bilking investors or the voting public, immoral behaviors have their success stories to tell, but in the end, the more likely outcomes are prison, poverty, or a bloody, corrupting moral quagmire half a world away.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Schadenfreude

The German word for "joy at other's misfortune" has been thrown around a lot lately in Left Blogistan as the Republican Party sinks deeper and deeper into its numerous quagmires of corruption, malfeasance, obstruction of justice, money laundering and the slaughter of innocents, but the word doesn't fit what's happening now.

Misfortune is lightning setting fire to your house, or your new car breaking down far from home, or your considered investments taking a turn for the worse due to unforeseen circumstances beyond your control.

We need another word for watching as the organized crime oligarchy ruling this nation comes apart and starts turning state's evidence, and their oh-so-carefully constructed machine gets dialed all the way up to "every chrony for himself."

Is there a word for "joy at Justice"? Because it's not misfortune, it's the operation of justice that's beginning, where evil is rendered impotent, if not outright punished.

Less than a year into Bush's second term, the administration's political fangs are pulled. From the social security debacle to the meatgrinder-without-end in Iraq to the most recent Supreme Court nominee (Harriet Quagmiers), everything this administration touches is turning into garbage.

There's a man who's been appointed to take out that garbage, and his name is Patrick Fitzgerald. Perhaps Bush in his fevered dreams imagined himself as the instrument of the Almighty, as so many have assured him he is. But those dreams are ringing more and more hollow as the quiet work of a man dedicated to the rule of law comes to fruition.

Indictments issued or not, Patrick Fitzgerald has reminded the unjustly mighty that America might still exist. An America of laws, a nation of Justice.

To conclude, a shout out to the Rude Pundit, who saw fit to print a letter from one of our Boring contributors, and link back to this tedious repository of Boredom.