Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room

In case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend taking a look at the International Committee of the Red Cross confidential report that details the torture of prisoners held in US captivity. The ICRC is tasked by the Geneva Conventions to provide an objective analysis of the treatment of prisoners, and if violations of the Conventions are discovered, the country in question must proceed with an investigation or else violate the terms of the treaty. Typically these reports are confidential to encourage government cooperation, but this report was leaked to the New York Times.

The report details the abusive treatment of 14 different detainees. All the claims are "alleged" because they are based on interviews with the detainees themselves (and I think some US officials as well), but there is not much doubt as to the authenticity of their accounts because of their high level of detail and consistency with one another.

Especially gripping are the excerpts from interviews (Annex 1 and 2 in the report), which give you a true idea of how far off the deep end the United States went in prosecuting the "war on terror". An excerpt of the excerpt:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room.... After some time...I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.... I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go the toilet, which consisted of a bucket....I was given no solid food...while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit...Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day....

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face....

Later, the "real torturing" starts:

I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles....

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply....The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

He then goes on to explain that he was routinely waterboarded after that, as well as beaten by being slammed into the wall with the towel as described above. The account of the worst of the treatment ends with this chilling, Nazi-esque image:

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.

The United States tortured, and these actions were authorized at the highest levels within the Bush administration. They were done in accordance with secret memos of dubious legal merit that were drafted by the President's lawyers--memos that were kept secret not just from the public, but from the other co-equal branches of the government. We now know that for seven years since the attacks of September 11, the executive branch continuously and systematically flatly breached the Constitution of the United States--by violating the Fourth Amendment, by internally declaring for itself the power to violate any other number of provisions in the Bill of Rights (including those contained in the First Amendment), by assuming for itself the power to unilaterally strip citizens of their habeas corpus rights, by violating the United States' obligations under the Geneva Conventions...

If these deeds go unacknowledged, let alone unpunished, it means that the Constitution is de facto non-binding. It means that everything that America proclaims itself to be, at it's core--a free nation, a nation of laws--is a simple factual untruth, because it will be the case that any President who has the will can violate those freedoms and ignore those laws without consequence.

So I am now watching the Obama administration with extreme interest, and hoping that he understands the following: that after this serious a bout of lawlessness and quasi-despotism, reinstituting a proper liberal democratic regime is not enough--that he must pro-actively take steps to address what happened in the previous administration, and establish a precedent that such lawbreaking at the highest levels of government will have consequences. If he does not, then he reveals himself to be not a President but a Napoleon--a benevolent dictator who chooses to allow us our freedoms and who chooses to circumscribe his own power in accordance with the Constitution, but is by no means actually required to do any of these things.

Of course, in a way, this is already a lost cause, because I am reduced to pleading to the executive branch to enforce the Constitutional limits of executive power. Just as a legitimate democracy can't be founded by executive decree, a broken democracy can't be relegitimized by executive decree--because the ultimate source of democratic legitimacy is not the decree of a single will, but the consensus of many wills. Sadly, there does not seem to be a sufficient consensus in 21st century America--neither amongst the public, the press, nor the members of Congress--that basic tennants of democracy such as the rule of law and due process are not mere suggestions, but real and rigourously enforced contraints on power.

To DC

Tonight I fly to Washington, DC for the inauguration. I was in DC four years ago for Bush's second inaugural, and was able to get tickets for the speech and everything. I must say it was all pretty fun (my loathing for Bush notwithstanding).

In any case, if anyone's interested, I will be Twittering the main event (at the behest of my sister). You will be able to see the updates here.

Harper's

On the flight to LA I switched things up a bit and picked up a copy of Harper's instead of the Economist (my usual airplane fare). It was okay: a little more literary than the sort of thing I'm used to reading. The increased creative freedom of the writers turned out to be a double-edged sword, because sometimes you'd come across a truly memorable "gag" (as Bertie would call it)--for example, noting that a gambler's eyes had the "watchful opacity" of a security camera--but other times I felt it was just providing rope for the author to hang himself with, as with the not-so-impressive "everybody making out like a bandit with his own designer neckerchief pulled over his nose". That sounds like what I imagine Adbusters is full of.

In any case, there was an interesting article by one Scott Horton that outlines the political dilemmas entailed by prosecuting Bush et al with warcrimes, and how such a process might be designed. Ultimately he recommends a "two-part solution", where an investigative commission is formed in such a way that it enjoys broad public support--and has robust fact-finding powers such as top-level security clearance and supoena power--but that does not have the power to prosecute. Instead, at the end of the investigation it would make a recommendation for a formal prosecution if the facts supported it. From there the government would be in a position to decide if it should appoint a special prosecutor to make a case in the federal courts.

Douthat, Greenwald, Torture

Ross Douthat, a (sane) conservative blogger at the Atlantic writes a searching, brutally honest post about his conflicted thoughts on the torture issue; and Glenn Greenwald proceeds to blow him out of the water. Says Greenwald:

I don't want to purport to summarize what he's written. It's a somewhat meandering and at times even internally inconsistent statement. Douthat himself characterizes it as "rambling" -- befitting someone who appears to think that his own lack of moral certainty and borderline-disorientation on this subject may somehow be a more intellectually respectable posture than those who simplistically express "straightforward outrage." In the midst of what is largely an intellectually honest attempt to describe the causes for his ambiguity, he actually does express some "straightforward outrage" of his own. About the widespread abuse, he writes: "it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral" and "should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on."

Nonetheless, Douthat repeatedly explains that he is burdened by "uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved," and one of the central reasons for that uncertainty -- one that is commonly expressed -- is contained in this passage:

But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

This is the Jack Goldsmith argument: while what Bush officials did may have been misguided and wrong, they did it out of a true fear of Islamic enemies, with the intent to protect us, perhaps even consistent with the citizenry's wishes. And while Douthat presents this view as some sort of candid and conflicted complexity, it isn't really anything more than standard American exceptionalism -- more accurately: blinding American narcissism -- masquerading as a difficult moral struggle.

There is probably also some severe cognitive dissonace going on. Greenwald continues:

The moral ambiguity Douthat thinks he finds is applicable to virtually every war crime. It's the extremely rare political leader who ends up engaging in tyrannical acts, or commits war crimes or other atrocities, simply for the fun of it, or for purely frivolous reasons. Every tyrant can point to real and legitimate threats that they feared.

Ask supporters of Fidel Castro why he imprisoned dissidents and created a police state and they'll tell you -- accurately -- that he was the head of a small, defenseless island situated 90 miles to the South of a huge, militaristic superpower that repeatedly tried to overthrow his government and replace it with something it preferred. Ask Hugo Chavez why he rails against the U.S. and has shut down opposition media stations and he'll point out -- truthfully -- that the U.S. participated to some extent in a coup attempt to overthrow his democratically elected government and that internal factions inside Venezuela have done the same.

...

But none of those facts justify tyranny, terrorism or war crimes. There are virtually always "good reasons" that can be and are cited to justify war crimes and acts of aggression. It's often the case that nationalistic impulses -- or genuine fears -- lead the country's citizens to support or at least acquiesce to those crimes. War crimes and other atrocities are typically undertaken in defense against some real (if exaggerated) threat, or to target actual enemies, or to redress real grievances.

...

The laws of war aren't applicable only in times of peace, to be waived away in times of war or crisis. To the contrary, they exist precisely because the factors Douthat cites to explain and mitigate what our leaders did always exist, especially when countries perceive themselves at war. To cite those factors to explain away war crimes -- or to render them morally ambiguous -- is to deny the very validity of the concept itself.

Cowardice at the New York Times

The New York Times editorializes that "top officials" in the Bush administration should be investigated for their role in implementing a torture program, with the possibility of bringing charges--however, it somehow stops short of saying that Cheney and Bush should be held accountable as well:

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.

It's all quite baffling. Why shouldn't Cheney and Bush be investigated along with Rumsfeld and other "top officials"? If the torture programs was somehow carried out without the knowledge or approval of the elected officials in charge, then an investigation should bear that out. And if the elected officials did approve the programs, then they should be held at least as accountable as their underlings, if not more so. It simply does not make sense to believe that we should consider bringing charges against officials as high ranking as the Secretary of Defense, and yet at the same time also believe that the President that Secretary served under should get a free pass.

Of course, the editorial doesn't explicitly state that Cheney and Bush should be exempt--but the omission is glaring. I imagine that there was quite a heated discussion amongst the editorial board about how high to set the target--whether it would be "top officials", or Rumsfeld, or all the way up to Bush. I imagine that they believed, in the end, that calling for the investigation of Bush and his possible arrest for war crimes would be going too far, banishing the paper to the "angry left" and polarizing a debate that can only succeeed if it remains unpolarized. Maybe they're right.

However, at the end of the day, the press isn't doing its job if it refuses to take risks in speaking truth to power when the stakes are highest. I understand that a newspaper can only be persuasive to a large number of people if it remains, by and large, comfortably within the mainstream. But what is the point of saving up all that "persuasion capital" if you don't spend it on something as important as holding an American president responsible for war crimes? Maybe Barack Obama cannot let himself be perceived as trying to take down the soon-to-be ex-President, but there is no reason why the New York Times should have any reticence.

By refusing to "go there", the NYT reinforces the conventional wisdom that to hold President Bush himself accountable for war crimes is outside the mainstream and not a view that Serious People hold. But this conventional wisdom will have to be overturned if America is to even begin to rectify the abuses that have been going on since September 11.

Ah, Nader

In case you haven't seen it, here's Ralph Nader holding forth on Obama's victory:



More than anything else, it just goes to show what a lazy idealogue Nader has become. Yes: any black politician who disagrees with Ralph Nader's politics is an "Uncle Tom". Right.

It's kind of weird that I voted for this guy back in 2000, when I was 18 years old. Back then, we had had 8 years of frustratingly centrist leadership from the Democrats and Bush was running as a center-right non-interventionist. Nader's thesis that Gore and Bush were essentially the same made sense to me, so I jumped ship (of course, being in California, my vote wasn't too meaningful anyway). By the time 2004 rolled around, that thesis had been completely shattered: 9/11 had happened and Bush had used the occasion to get us into a war in Iraq on false pretenses and secretly wiretap Americans without warrants. Moreover, he was able to muscle through an extraordinarily right-wing agenda. When election time came, it was obvious to me that electing Bush had been a blunder of the highest order, and that the task for everyone from the middle of the spectrum leftward was to kick him out. Nader, though, somehow didn't see this: he ran again, potentially splitting the Democratic vote, still making the now-ridiculous contention that Kerry and Bush were essentially the same. If he hadn't already alienated most of the left by handing Florida to Bush in 2000, this definitely put him over the line: he was now a genuine pariah.

I don't begrudge Nader for having the out-of-the-mainstream views that he does, or even for running for president in 2000. Within the suboptimal electoral system that we have, third-party runs are a legitimate way to exert force on a major party that tacks too far towards the center, and he could not have known how dramatically the political landscape would change a year later, when America came under attack. However, I do begrudge Nader for the way that he has, since 2004, divorced means from ends, effectively casting his movement even further into the wilderness than it already was by alienating just about everybody in the country who would have lent him a sympathetic ear.

Ralph Nader was a fine activist; but he was a terrible politician, and one who shall remain forever unburdened with power.

PS: I think Shep Smith is overdoing it in the video...a little melodramatic, no?

A question of loyalty

Via Paul Krugman, a remarkable opinion piece in the WSJ:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have.

...

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

This is a really bizarre outlook, and the sort of thing that would make Will Wilkinson puke in his mouth a little. I hardly need to say that there is no obligation of loyalty of the American people to the President of the United States; in fact, I would say that the only real loyalty there needs to be is that of the President of the United States to the Constitution. By this standard, George W. Bush has been most disloyal, and his presidency really can in my estimation be called "a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House."

John Hodgman, member of reality-based community

Phil says "pssst" and gestures to this AV Club interview with John Hodgman (who is, incidentally, currently guest-blogging at Boing Boing), where he gets into some interesting insights into the campaign:

The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them.... So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining. They were writing their own book of fake trivia and that's a fine way to make a living, but I don't know that it's a very productive way to run a country. And I think we are seeing the results of that right now. So from a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I've found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don't make my living off of it, I endorse reality.

The "reality-based" community concept comes from this famous quote from a Bush aide in the political glory days following 9/11, which appeared in a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Creepy--and so, so wrong. Has any President been spanked harder and more repeatedly by reality than George W. Bush?

The importance of "intellectual vigor"

As you might have already seen, Colin Powell has given an as eloquent an endorsement of Obama as ever you'll find:



One thing I find very interesting is Powell's emphasis on Obama's intellect: his "intellectual curiosity", his "intellectual vigor". Powell cites these things as key because he knows, more than most, that a President that lacks these qualities is one who can be easily manipulated by a small cadre of advisers with sufficient presidential access. This is, in fact, precisely what occurred in the Bush White House during his tenure as Secretary of State.

Let me relate to you an excerpt from the (excellent) book I'm reading, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, and you'll have an idea of what I mean:

Afghanistan, like the United States, had signed the Geneva Conventions, but the President's lawyers argued that this was of no conern because the country was now a "failed state".

...

At the State Department, Powell and his legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV [!], fought a rear-guard action against Bush's lawyers and lost. This fierce fight took place almost entirely outside the public's view. In a confidential forty-page memo to [Office of Legal Council lawyer] John Yoo dated January 11, 2002, Taft argued that Yoo's analysis was "seriously flawed." Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was "untenable", "incorrect", and "confused." Taft disputed Yoo's argument that Afghanistan, as a "failed state", was not covered by the Conventions. "The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state," he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the United States took the war on terror outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions--and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder--but President Bush could be accused of a "grave breach" by other countries, which would mean he could be prosecuted for war crimes.

...

Taft sent a copy of his memo to [Alberto] Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.

...

But Taft's access to the President was no match for that of Cheney, who, as an administration source put it, "always got both the first and last bite of the apple." It remains unclear, in fact, whether anyone ever fully explained the countervailing arguments to President Bush before he signed off on the plan. According to top State Department officials, Bush decided to nullify the Geneva Conventions on January 8, 2002. This was three days before Taft sent his memo to Yoo. Evidently, the State Department was too far out the loop to catch up. [Emphasis mine.]

...

After losing the battle to uphold the Geneva Conventions, Powell concluded that Bush was not stupid but was easily manipulated. A confidant said that Powell thought it was easy to play on Bush's wish to be seen as doing the tough thing and making the "hard" choice. "He has these cowboy characteristics, and when you know where to rub him, you can really get him to do some dumb things. You have to play on those swaggering bits of his self-image. Cheney knew exactly how to push all his buttons," Powell confided to a friend.

Colonel Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, was more scathing. "You can slip a lot of crap over on someone who doesn't read a lot or pay attention to the details if you have no scruples," he said.

[Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side, pp. 122-125.]

So what happened is George W. Bush was given some very radical and unsound advice from a select group of advisers--Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and a few others--and acted on this advice before even seriously entertaining any dissenting arguments. Had Bush taken an interest in the Geneva Conventions or read about them, or had he been pro-active about making sure he has heard all sides of the debate on the issue before issuing a decision, it may well be that the United States never would have abandoned the Conventions.

Undoubtedly, Colin Powell sees Barack Obama's deliberative way of coming to decisions and now-legendary insistence on hearing all sides of an argument as insurance that a President Obama's powers will never be hijacked by a radical faction within his administration. And, just as certainly, he must see John McCain's volatile temperment and impulsive decision-making as antithetical to a properly-functioning Presidency.

PS: Extra props to Powell for going out of his way to reiterate that, not only is Barack Obama not a Muslim, but it is wrong--and un-American--to think that there would be anything wrong with him if he were a Muslim. Also, his story about the Muslim mother weeping at the grave was very powerful, and one I hadn't heard before.

Beyond Wooster

Over the years, George W. Bush has been maligned as an idiot for his malapropisms, which I always thought was not quite right: Bush isn't an idiot, he's a nitwit. I think the difference is, whereas idiocy implies a definitive lack of intelligence, nitwitism implies a perfectly fine intelligence that, due to a certain kind of breezy temperament, is directed with 100% force towards utter inanity. The nitwit isn't unintelligent so much as incurious; not bloody-minded so much as cheerfully uninterested in reason. And so it is not uncommon for a nitwit to have a certain imaginitive capacity with language, but for it to reveal itself in ways that no serious person can countenance--for example, the ingenious stupidity of a line like, "they misunderestimated me".

The nitwit par excellence is, of course, PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and many observers have noted the similarities between the chummy, Edwardian, blue-blooded bachelor and the 43rd US president (both would do nearly anything to help out an old pal--although whereas for the former this meant ruffling the feathers of an aunt or two, for the latter it meant the destruction of New Orleans). So George W. Bush's distinct style of buffoonery has a bonafide literary pedigree, and is one that can be appreciated, I think, as a subtle form of genius. After all, Wooster is a nitwit, no doubt--but he is a nitwit who has in him the capacity to utter such inspired prose as, "In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts."

In the last few weeks, we have had to come to terms with a new and more advanced type of linguistic trainwreck, in the shape of Sarah Palin. Palin doesn't seem to be a species of nitwit--indeed, her responses to questions are so excessively incoherent that the entire exchange barely qualifies as an act of human communication. The things that Palin verbally responds to--which we would normally think of as questions--are probably better understood more generically as stimuli. For example:

Reporter's verbal stimulus: “Do you think that our continued military presences in Iraq and Afghanistan have inflamed Islamic extremists?”

Palin's response: “I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.”

In another case, her response seems to press the Wittgensteinian limits of language's very ability to express any meaning at all:

Katie Couric's verbal stimulus: "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"

Palin's response: "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak. Random noise, after all, contains just as much information as no signal, but it is tactically advantageous for the signaler: it costs nothing to produce, but time and resources must be expended on the receiving end to verify the absence of information. In the strategic space thus afforded, she airs her true "argument"--which is not an argument at all, but something that eludes language and even reason: the fact of Sarah Palin. There can be no reasons or words about the fact of Sarah Palin, of her Downs baby, of her moose hunting, of her good looks, of her accent--the concept of transition from actual to ideal is transcended by the simple fact of her being, and this juxtaposed with the fact of her campaign suggests--not through any function of reason, but by a sort of directed free association--the fact of Sarah Palin in power. The linearity of reason is dispensed with in favor of the more primal, more visceral one-dimensional point that just is Sarah Palin, reformer--that just is John McCain, maverick. There is no space left for anything that would have meaning; motion is a conceptual impossibility. Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.

...

It appears that I have gone mad.

Uh oh

Today when I left work, everything looked on track for the bailout. All sides had agreed on the principle points: $700 billion, government buys equity in the firms, oversight of the federal purchase of assets, relief for Main Street, limits on executive compensation. The consensus was that a bill would be signed by the weekend.

But after a thoroughly enjoyable evening dining with Marian and the great Harinder Chahal, I come back home to find this NYT headline staring me in the face:

Talks Implode During Day of Chaos; Fate of Bailout Plan Remains Unresolved

When the economy is on the verge of utter, Depression-level collapse, the last thing you want is some salient public event to panic everyone into thinking that everyone else is panicked, thus causing everyone to pull their money out of the system. It's a collective action problem. So words like "chaos" and "-plode" in the morning headlines do not bode particularly well.

Moreover, it is not a good sign that the level-headed authorities that are supposedly piloting us through these troubled waters are doing things like entreating House Speakers on bended knee and pleading with them not to blow things up:

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

Before tonight, I thought there was an air of cautious optimism that some kind of package--however suboptimal--would be agreed upon that would stave off financial collapse. But it seems like that has been replaced with something far more ugly, visceral, and frightening: panic. It's palpable. It's in the language people are using. "Madness", says Krugman. "This sucker could go down", says Bush. Bailout plans are in "disarray", says WSJ. And Drudge? "BREAKDOWN" (although, it should be noted that there are no siren animated GIFs--close shave there). And on top of all this, Washington Mutual failed and was bought out by JPMorgan.

Of course, all this is just one layman's gloss of the whole thing. Hopefully I'm mildly embarrassed tomorrow and nothing extraordinary happens. But I have the sinking feeling that tomorrow will soon have the word "Black" attached to the front of it.

PS: Apparently, the key figure to keep an eye on is not the stock market but the so-called "TED spread". This measures the difference between the interest on 3-month Treasury bills (T-bills) and the 3-month LIBOR. Let's see if I understand this well enough to explain it coherently:

A T-bill is a security that the federal government issues as a way of borrowing money from the general public: you pay, say, $1000 for the T-bill, and the government agrees to pay you back $1100 in three months. T-bills are considered one of the safest possible investments, because they are backed by the federal government--the government, of course, being the only player in town capable of raising funds by coercive force (taxes) or, if it comes down to it, by simply printing more money. Interestingly, the interest rate of the T-bills is determined by a regularly held auction, so that it is constantly fluctuating depending on how much demand there is for people to lend money to the government (or, put another way, how much demand there is for T-bills). If there are lots of people who want to lend to the government, then the government can command a lower interest rate for itself, because lenders will be undercutting each other at the auction with lower and lower interest rate offers. If there aren't a lot of people who want to lend to the government, it will be forced to borrow at a higher interest rate. If investors don't have confidence in private institutions, then they tend to flock to the safety of federally-backed T-bills, driving down the T-bill interest rate.

Meanwhile, in just the same way that the government borrows money from the general public (including big banks), big banks borrow from other big banks. The LIBOR is the average interest rate at which this interbank borrowing takes place.

The upshot of all this is that, when times are good and investors are very confident in the private banking system, then banks will consider loaning to other banks to be as safe a bet as loaning to the federal government--and so the interest rates will be about the same for lending to each, and the difference between the rates (the TED spread) will be small. However, if there is little confidence that banks can repay their loans, then no one will want to risk lending them money unless they get a juicy interest rate in return (e.g., I'm not gonna take the risk of lending First Shitty Bank International a billion dollars unless there's a significant upside in it for me--like, say, that First Shitty will borrow from me at high interest rate). And so the average rate at which banks lend to each other--the LIBOR--will be higher.

To put it all together: if there's high confidence that private banks can repay their loans, then these banks can demand interest rates as low as what the government demands. However, when confidence in the banks' ability to repay is at an ebb, borrowing banks cannot command a good interest rate from lending banks, and so the average interest rate of interbank loans (LIBOR) rises. Moreover, since investors are flocking to the federal government (since it's too risky to lend to private banks), the interest rate of T-bills goes down. The rising LIBOR and falling T-bill rate means a higher TED spread.

The TED spread, then, reflects the amount of credit that is available: a high TED spread means there is not that much credit around (i.e., not much money available that can be borrowed), and a low TED spread means that credit is plentiful (i.e., it is easy to get an affordable loan).

The big danger is that credit will "freeze up"--become unavailable--and that all of the parts of the economy that rely on there being credit--people being able to buy houses and cars, businesses being able to stock inventory and keep operations going during a revenue slump, financial institutions being able to pay investors who unexpectedly want their money back--will simply stop. And this will cause a negative feedback loop of investors pulling their money out of the system (i.e., liquidating their assets--i.e., selling their assets--i.e., turning their assets into cash), leading to a flooding of the market with assets, which will cause the value of the assets to plummet (too much supply, not enough demand), which will cause the financial institutions--whose net worth is tied up in the assets--to have even more losses, which will make confidence in these institutions' ability to repay their loans sink even lower, which will make interest rates even higher (and thus, credit even scarcer), and so on, until we wake up and Depression II is upon us, and a huge chunk of the economy has gone out of business, and unemployment is at 25%.

Phew! So, I'm not sure if all that is correct. It is my best understanding of the whole situation, and I am, I hasten to remind you, a layperson when it comes to this stuff. But I think the basics are there, and in any case, I recommend keeping a tab on Paul Krugman's blog tomorrow, as he will no doubt have some kind of analysis of that all-important TED spread figure.

Oh, and by the way: here is what the TED spread actually looks like. We're already way up in the 3% "credit hell" zone--let's see what tomorrow brings.

September 11

Seven years ago, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a deadly attack on innocent civilians in downtown New York, murdering nearly 3,000 people. When an aide told President George W. Bush "America is under attack", he responded by sitting and doing nothing for seven minutes. He did not ask where the attack occurred. He did not ask if the attack was large or small. He did not ask if further attacks were expected. He did not ask if the attack was conventional or biological or nuclear. He did not ask for a single further iota of information for a full seven minutes. This was the President of the United States--after being told, simply, "America is under attack".

In the months that followed, President Bush persuaded the American public that Saddam Hussein was partly culpable for the September 11 attacks, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave and imminent danger to the United States. Both of these claims were false. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Today, Osama bin Laden remains at large. Somewhere in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he wakes up every day and breathes the air we breath and gets warmed by the sunshine we get warmed by and experiences the thousands of subtle joys of being alive--joys that he deprived nearly 3,000 innocent people of on September 11, 2001.

And George W. Bush is still the President of the United States.

Why we say, "the GOP is out of ideas"

The following chart shows the top US marginal income tax rate from 1913 to 2003:




In 1980, when Reagan was elected, every dollar you earned past $215,400 was taxed at a rate of 50% (70% for unearned income). After the tax revolt of the 80s, that rate was drastically reduced: to 28% at its lowest point. In the Clinton years that rose back up to 39.6% for dollars earned past $250,000 or so.

Under George W. Bush, that rate was reduced to 35%, where it remains through today. Under Obama, the top rate would move back up to where it was under Clinton: about 40%.*

From the way that Republicans have been pounding their fists and shouting to the rafters, you would think that Obama was proposing a top income tax rate increase of epic proportions. In reality, he is proposing an increase of 5%. That's right: a difference of a nickel of every dollar earned after about $300,000. And the top rate would still remain low overall by historical standards--well under the >50% seen in most of the 20th century.

But what about capital gains (i.e., money earned from investments rather than a paycheck)? The current rate is the lowest it has been since 1933: 15%. Obama would raise that to somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%, which is about where it was in the Clinton years and somewhat higher than it was during much of the 80s. So let's put that increase at 10%.

The final tally, then: the top income tax rate increased by 5%, and the capital gains tax increased by 10%--both levels raised to what they were during the prosperous Clinton years.

The Republicans carry on as if the tax revolt of the 1980s never happened--as though the wealthiest Americans--the investors, the entrepreneurs--were still forfeiting over half of their post-$200,000 income to Uncle Sam. But they are fighting a battle that Reagan already won, and that the Democrats already conceded. There is not one serious politician left who advocates that we return to the pre-Reagan tax rates. And yet still, impossibly, bloody-mindedly, the Republicans insist on more tax cuts--despite dramatically increased federal spending (on both entitlements and two concurrent wars), and despite ballooning deficits. And they continue to depict Democrats as if they were advocating the absurdly high marginal rates of the Great Society years.

We cannot, as the backwards saying goes, have our cake and eat it too. To acknowledge the necessity for a modern infrastructure, a quality education system, a functional healthcare scheme, and a superior military is to acknowledge the necessity of a tax rate that is high enough to cover these tremendous costs. Perhaps there was a time when we could believe that the Republicans would offset their tax cuts with reductions in federal spending, but George W. Bush and his agenda of big government conservatism--and his pet war, Iraq--put that idea to rest.

I've noticed lately that I've been describing the Democrats as "adults" and Republicans as "children". No where is this more true than in fiscal policy. While the Republicans shout gleeful impossibilities in between schoolyard taunts--"Obama is a celebrity! I'll pay for $1000 billion worth of tax cuts by cutting $72 billion in earmarks!** Obama eats arugula!"--the Democrats reasonably suggest, as a starting point, that we return to a tax rate scheme that has been shown to work in the past. It is almost as if the Republicans themselves don't really believe that they'll be in power, and that all they have left is the grim catharsis of pretending to be Ronald Reagan in front of an audience of their peers.


*Hm..but is this quite right? According to one blogger, the de facto rate could be higher: "Senator Obama would raise the top individual tax rate back to 39.6 percent, impose an additional 2 to 4 percent tax on earnings for some over the existing Social Security wage cap, and bring back the phase-out of the personal exemption and certain itemized deductions for higher-income taxpayers. When added up, the top effective marginal tax rate rises...from 37.9 percent to roughly 48 to 50 percent." If true, this argues against my point--however, it is unclear from this post whether the additional nickel and diming would affect a large number of wealthy people or a relative few, or what. Also, it would be unfair to factor in these hidden costs of Obama's plan without also factoring them into the historical tax rates that form the baseline we are comparing against. So I think the most reasonable thing to do is ignore the de facto tax rates for now, and look naively at the explicit tax rates to give us a general idea of where Obama's plan stands historically.

**"Permanently extending the tax cuts would reduce tax revenue by $1 trillion over four years. If Mr. McCain eliminated every earmark (including money for the gas pipeline that Ms. Palin wants to build in Alaska), the savings would total about $18 billion a year. He hasn’t offered any idea of where he’ll get the rest of the money." (NYT editorial)

Bush, torture, and McCain

Andrew Sullivan has a must-read.

"We are governed by fools"

John Derbyshire at the conservative blog site The Corner laments:

There are some spectacles that are at once tragic and farcical. One such has been the sight of Georgian troops scuttling back from assisting us in whatever it is we imagine we are doing in Iraq, to help defend their homeland, while Condoleezza Rice stamps her foot, George W. Bush watches a basketball game, and John McCain says that he will do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

We are governed by fools. At least Putin knows what he wants, and how to get it. If only freedom had such leaders!

Always interesting to watch grandiose internecine battles being played out between the different elements of the conservative camp. I think it's a testament to the Bush administration's sheer political power in the early 2000s that they were able to steer the nation onto the radical and reckless course of world-domination-for-democracy over the objections of liberals and a large swath of conservatives (the so-called "foreign policy realists" of the George H.W. school).

A war criminal, according to some

Kind of striking when you realize this is coming not from some MoveOn/Kos type, but a conservative:

Some of the least superficially awful techniques - such as the Gestapo-perfected "stress positions" and "hypothermia" - can actually be the worst in terms of suffering. There is no doubt at this point that the president of the United States is a war criminal. The only question is whether he will ever be brought to justice.

Well, more a libertarian, really. And an Obama-supporting one, at that. So maybe not all that striking.

War powers

In response to the inability of Congress to prevent the President from duping it into going to war, some graybeards have decided to do a study of the effectiveness of the War Powers Resolution:

In a report released on Tuesday, the study group concluded that the 1973 law, which is known as the War Powers Resolution and was adopted in the wake of American involvement in the Vietnam War, was lacking in a number of regards.

For one thing, the authors said, it allows the president to wage war without any Congressional consultation or approval for up to 90 days. It sets forth conditions under which a president can commit troops, including an unspecified “national emergency,” but provides no mechanism for Congress to enforce its provisions. It also requires the president to report periodically on the progress of any conflicts, a provision that has been regularly ignored.

Many scholars consider parts of the resolution unconstitutional, including the requirement that military action be ended within 90 days unless Congress specifically authorizes it.

The study group recommends a slightly different set of conditions and duties to impose on the Executive branch, but even they admit that such tweaks are small potatoes. Says group member Lee Hamilton: “Presidents will do what they want to do, and they have the constitutional power to do it. What we hoped to ensure is that they hear other points of view before they do." In other words, the President must have Congress over for tea before he starts a war--not exactly the kind of oversight that's going to prevent another Iraq War.

The thing is, so long as the President has control over the intelligence, the President has control over war powers. As we saw during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the President has a more or less free hand in determining which data is released to the public and which data is kept secret (secret, even, from most of Congress). The upshot of this is that the President can manipulate intelligence to generate a false empirical justification for virtually any war action he feels like taking. Of course, such misbehavior can eventually be uncovered by a diligent, subpoena-issuing Congress--but by that time, the war will have already started.

What is needed is not Constitutionally questionable limits on the President's war powers, per se, but a serious overhaul of how military intelligence is to be shared amongst the political branches and with the public. The current system that allows de facto arbitrary classification and declassification of intelligence by a single elected official has failed spectacularly, and there is no reason to think it will not fail again. Simply put, it concentrates too much power in the hands of a single individual.

More diversity within the pro-Israel movement

For those of you interested in what a non-neoconservative, pro-peace, pro-Israeli position looks like, you might want to check out J Street. Here's a sample of the sort of thing you can expect from them:

Speaking to Israel's Parliament, President Bush accused those who believe in diplomacy to make America and Israel safe of indulging in a "foolish delusion" and the "false comfort of appeasement." Even more offensive, he likened us to those who favored talking to rather than defeating Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II. How dare he invoke the memory of the Holocaust to justify his disastruous policies.

It's good to see some other perspectives out there.

UPDATE: And here's a little promo video:

George W. Bush is Bertram W. Wooster

I've always maintained that the appropriate characterization of President Bush is a modern-day, American version of Bertie Wooster. Like Wooster, he was born to privilege and attended an elite university, where he demonstrated more interest in school pride than actual academics. Like Wooster, he has an affable and aloof manner, and is prone to, er, grammatical ingenuity when he speaks. And, finally, like Wooster, he'll do anything to help out a pal whose landed himself in the soup.

A recent interview only confirms these Woosterish tendencies. Here he is, stoically giving up golf in a show of solidarity with the soldiers:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

...

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

And here he is, glassy-eyed with sentiment as he talks about his pals:

In January he plans to return to e-mail, which he gave up when he took office to avoid leaks. He said he looks forward to “e-mailing to my buddies,” and said he was a heavy e-mailer in Texas.

“I can remember, as governor, I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off e-mails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals,” he said.

Ah, man. You know--I think in a funny kind of way, I'm gonna miss him.