Cheney’s Chutzpa

Dick Cheney's credibility has more holes in it than a Russian submarine. The former vice-president was a central figure in what is widely acknowledged as the most incompetent administration in modern American history. Yet, the man who once shot his hunting partner in the face has the temerity to launch a fusillade against the Obama administration for supposedly ducking the "war on terror" metaphor.

Cheney's latest broadside follows on the heels of an unsuccessful al-Qaeda plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas, which follows on the heels of the Fort Hood Massacre where a disturbed U.S. Army psychiatrist (who happened to be Muslim) opened fire on his fellow soldiers.

Both incidents, in fact, were carried out by devout Muslims who could best be characterized as unmarried social misfits deeply opposed to America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Major Hasan both illustrate the unconventional nature of the jihadist threat. Neither man was following orders as a part of a formal hierarchical organization. Rather, each was inspired by al-Qaeda's ideology to initiate attacks of their own choosing. Hasan and Abduulmutallab may have received "spiritual guidance" which reinforced their impulses to unleash terrorist violence against "infidels." However, the clerics that recruit, counsel, and radicalize lost souls like these probably do not dirty their hands by planning or coordinating specific acts of terrorism.

Al-Qaeda is arguably the ultimate "virtual community," a collection of loosely affiliated groups and cells comprised of career criminals, paramilitaries, religious zealots, and loner terrorist wannabes.

Osama bin Laden is a charismatic figurehead who is the spiritual locus of al-Qaeda, but he largely irrelevant from an operational or managerial point of view. The Bush administration claimed that bin Laden had been neutralized because he could not plan or conduct operations. This view is self-serving and erroneous. Simply put, nothing would deflate al-Qaeda more than the death or capture of their charismatic spiritual leader, who has supposedly evaded U.S. forces thanks to Allah's protection.

The failure to kill or capture bin Laden at Tora Bora (U.S. resources were being diverted to Iraq at the time) must rank very high on the list of the Bush administration's missed opportunities. Killing bin Laden would not have ended terrorism as a technique, but it could have delivered a knockout blow to al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration instigated one of the greatest strategic blunders in military history when it invaded Iraq. Toppling Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the first step in a wave of democratization that would sweep and transform the Middle East. Instead, the misguided and mismanaged Iraq War became a recruitment tool that radicalized an entire generation of Muslims.

The Islamic extremists that are plotting to blow up airliners and attack Western targets are convinced that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam. Bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration regarding the "war on terror" proved to be self-defeating because it reinforced al-Qaeda's deluded ideology, which paints the Muslim world as the victim of America's imperial aggression. The Obama administration is right in downplaying such rhetoric because the struggle against Islamic extremism is an ideological struggle to convince ordinary Muslims that America is on the side of human dignity and social justice.

America won the Cold War against the Soviet Union because it contained Communism and won the ideological battle for hearts and minds of mankind. At the height of the Cold War, however, there were those on the extreme right who insisted that the only way to defeat Communism was to launch a pre-emptive nuclear war against the "Evil Empire." Recently, right-wing extremists like Dick Cheney took America down a path that included pre-emptive war, torture, and other Constitutional abuses. As a result, America's reputation sank and the country nearly drowned in a financial crisis caused in no small measure by the failed economic policies of the Bush/Cheney administration. Dick Cheney's credibility on national security matters is unsalvageable.

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Barack Obama’s Half a Loaf

Barack Obama is drawing the ire of both the far right and the reflexive left. This is probably a sign the president is governing well.

The historian Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations had life cycles. In Toynbee's view, societies pass through the phases of youthful vitality, vigorous middle age, and senescent rigidity. The intellectual bankruptcy, paranoia, and inflexible crankiness that characterize today's conservative movement would seem to exemplify the social dementia Toynbee believed afflicted societies entering their terminal phases.

Thankfully, the conservative movement has been largely marginalized following the disastrous reign of the epically incompetent Bush administration. Solving America's formidable domestic and foreign policy challenges will require flexibility, creativity, and pragmatism, qualities that are in short supply among conservatives.

The far left, however, can be every bit as obtuse as the far right. For example, President Obama has taken heat from the left for his supposed failure to end America's involvement in Afghanistan and for supposedly getting rolled into supporting a flawed healthcare bill. In fact, Obama made a sound decision on Afghanistan. And the Democratic health reform bill represents a real social achievement in that it establishes the principle that all Americans are entitled to decent healthcare.

Regarding Afghanistan, the president's critics fail to understand that ending America's involvement prematurely would pose intolerable risks. To begin with, quitting Afghanistan with an ascendant Taliban would almost certainly consign the country to civil war, which would destabilize Pakistan (a country with nuclear weapons). Further, Islamic extremists would interpret America's withdrawal as a victory over a weakened superpower, a narrative that would embolden jihadists worldwide.

Exiting Afghanistan on America's terms is imperative. Sending additional U.S. troops is not an ideal option, but it is the least bad of truly terrible options. Likewise, the Democratic healthcare bill is terribly flawed, but it may be the best reform that a broken political system is capable of generating at the moment. Critics on the left (like Howard Dean) who insisted that it would be better to vote against the bill and start over, are oblivious to consequences of their idealistic folly. If Republicans had succeeded in stymieing health reform again it would have been a mortal blow to Obama and the Democratic Party. In all likelihood, the failure of health reform would pave the way for Republican victories in 2010 and 2012. Consequently, it would be years if not decades before anyone attempted to reform the healthcare system again.

Barack Obama is a pragmatist who'd rather come away with half a loaf than no loaf at all. Right-wing activists who contend that Obama is socialist who wants to redistribute wealth are certifiably delusional. In fact, the crony capitalism championed by Bush and Cheney amounted socialism for the wealthy as military contractors like Halliburton, the financial industry, and political contributors fed at the public trough until the entire economic system nearly collapsed.

In reality, President Obama is a centrist and an incrementalist. Indeed, he seems to be employing conservative means towards moderately liberal ends. He may be taking flak from both the rabid-right and the utopian-left, but it is probably a good sign that he's steering a course that displeases the insensate fringes of our political system.

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Pantheism versus Theism

The poet William Blake saw Heaven in a wildflower and he found eternity in an hour. Poets are quite mad, of course. But as Plato recognized, the madness of the gods is to be preferred over the sanity of men.
Poets tend to be heretics too. After all, shattering dogmas so that fresh truths can be perceived is part of a poet’s reason for being.

The poet Czeslaw Miloz once wrote, “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge. And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard.”

Miloz, I believe, captured a great truth about prayer and religion. The traditional conception of God as a personal deity who created the world and intervenes in human affairs is no longer intellectually, theologically, or philosophically persuasive. Nikos Kazantzakis, put it well when said, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man.

The paradox in Miloz’s poem, On Prayer, is that although our prayers almost certainly fall on deaf ears they are nevertheless spiritually empowering. Faced with the dark night of the soul, a time when we are acutely aware of our limitations, we instinctively turn to a power greater than ourselves. This is when we are at our most authentic, even divine-like. The power of prayer lies not in catching the attention of some supreme being, who then intervenes on our behalf, but in the way a truthful and heartfelt inner dialogue, fortifies us to meet life’s most formidable challenges.

The root meaning of the word religion is to link back. Both pantheists and deists share the belief that man has sprung from a transcendental source. For pantheists, this source is Nature, which is a reflection of a slumbering but cosmic intelligence. We humans are a reflection of this unconscious and impersonal intelligence. Nature has emerged into consciousness through us and we are quite literally the eyes and ears of the world. Nature, of course, can be terrifying and awe-inspiring. However, discerning the broad brushstrokes of beauty and harmony against the backdrop of individual suffering can be an aesthetic experience that offers a poetic respite from the harshness of the natural order.

Schopenhauer believed that aesthetic arrest represents a moment when a human being temporarily transcends the limitations of their suffering ego and recognizes (however dimly or faintly) their ultimate identity with the noumenal ground of being.

Seeing Nature as a work of art is no easy task. Great poets demonstrate that an immersion in nature need not be some sort of escapist regression, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat implies in his Op-Ed, Heaven and Nature. Put simply, the kernels of insight and enlightenment that poets like Blake convey have the power to recreate in us the same “Ah ah” experience that stirred the soul of poets in the first place.

In contrast, abstract conceptions of an all-good Almighty -- whose sole remaining function these days is to save His creatures from the evils of His own Creation – seems like an escapist fantasy at best and pernicious nonsense at worst. There is nothing more painful than false belief. And I fear that much of the anger that seems to be consuming the religious right in America at the moment stems from frustration that invariably develops when a person’s worldview is at complete variance with the world he or she inhabits.

Ross Douthat theistic apologia is rhetorically brilliant, but his logic is unpersuasive. His chief argument in favor of theism is that pantheism cannot deliver man from the evils and suffering of this world. But using Hollywood homages to pantheism as proverbial straw men allows Douthat to paint “nature worship” in superficial way.

Wittgenstein was famous for dissolving – not solving – philosophical conundrums. His insight, still not widely appreciated, is that the way we use (and misuse) language generates pseudo-problems. For instance, to say, “It is raining” does not mean there is some entity “It” that is raining. In a similar way, theism generates many false problems by positing literal entities – A savior God, Heaven, and Hell – which are not ontologically real. Pursuing mirages is bound to create angst. Ultimately, it may be that theism creates the malady it purports to cure.

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Politics, Professional Wrestling, & Fox News

Politics is like professional wrestling, only it's more entertaining but less edifying. Perhaps that explains why cable "news" personalities like Glen Beck deliberately blur the lines between entertainment and current events.

The social critic Neil Postman once entitled a book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is a rather apt description of the carnivalesque antics the clownish Beck and his ilk have imported into the journalistic profession. War, recession, and national decline are a lot more bearable if our media jesters can somehow divert us from an increasingly unpleasant reality with their foolishness.

Lear called upon his Fool to cheer him up as his psyche and his kingdom crumbled. His fool was wise in a way our media fools are not. Lear's jester traded in the kind of wisdom and insight that surpassed men's understanding; our media fools pander to the lowest common denominator while peddling propaganda and sophistry as if they were the highest forms of sagacity.

What is so objectionable about the likes of Beck, Sean Hannity, and others at Fox News? Fox News is built on two principles: 1) promoting the reactionary agenda of Rupert Murdoch and 2) telling an audience what they want to hear.

Orwell warned that the function of propaganda is to sell the notion that war is peace, that slavery is freedom. Fox News, the "fair and balanced" network – is in the business of selling similar contradictions.

The anchors and hosts on Fox News are not in the business of objective journalism. Rather, they are master sophists. They aim not at truth, but persuasion. Socrates noted that the sophists in ancient Greece were so skilled in rhetoric that they could make the worse argument appear the better. Unlike Socrates' dialectical method, which examines presuppositions, sophists begin with preconceptions and end with them.

Fox News, like Narcissus, is smitten with itself. When you think about it, it's rather perverse for a news organization to spend so much time reporting on itself. Journalists are supposed to report the news, not make it. However, Fox's personality-driven programming is centered on a simple premise: convince credulous audiences that their anchors and hosts speak for them. Fox News calls attention to itself at every turn because it has set itself up as proxy for beleaguered Americans.

War is force that gives us meaning. An Axis-of- Spin – Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly -- promote the notion that the Obama has declared war on the news agency because it plays into the narrative Fox is peddling, namely that Fox is the champion of the besieged masses.

Fox recognizes that a rumble with the Obama administration will attract viewers looking for an entertaining spectacle and an outlet through which they can vent their frustrations and aggressions. Like the World Wrestling Federation, Fox News has a stock of buffoonish characters who aim at stirring up their audiences with over-the-top antics. Similarly, with Fox News reality is beside the point, ratings are everything, and discourse is tailored towards third-graders.

When I think of Fox News I think of Sean Hannity fawning over President Bush; Bill O'Reilly excusing the abuses at Guantanamo; Glenn Beck ridiculing the scientific consensus on global warming; and Neil Cavuto tossing softball questions to a corporate honcho who would soon be convicted of a massive fraud. Are these anchors journalists or propagandists? You decide.

Fox News, like professional wrestling, traffics in entertainment not edification. Both Fox and the WWF create arenas where self-reference abounds and objectivity is obliterated. Climbing into the ring with Fox News is degrading, even for politicians.

 

 

 

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The Death of Michael Jackson and the Demise of Sarah Palin (and what it all means for America)

Few individuals are weirder than the late Michael Jackson, but Sarah Palin comes mighty close. The former Republican VP candidate shocked the political world by announcing that she is resigning her Alaska governorship. True to form, her quirky, unscripted, and incoherent news conference performance left nearly everyone scratching their heads. Palin’s surprise resignation, however, caps a great week for Democrats; Al Franken is finally declared the winner in Minnesota’s senate race, Republican governor Mark Sanford derails his presidential ambitions by admitting to infidelity, and Sarah Palin zany rationale for quitting her post reinforces the perception that the GOP is fatally unhinged. In truth, the Republican Party has even less of a pulse than Michael Jackson, who at least has the chance of making a posthumous comeback.

Sarah Palin’s rationale for leaving office is about as convincing as Dick Cheney’s defense of water boarding. In fact, Palin displayed a smorgasbord of verbal and emotional tics during her news conference that are symptomatic of the GOP’s decline. For example, the Alaska governor seemed constitutionally incapable of stringing together coherent thoughts and arguments, but she had no trouble spouting a train of mind-numbing clichés to explain her decision. She didn’t want to be a “lame duck” and “collect a paycheck” and “kind of milk it.” No, Palin isn’t one “to go with the flow” because “only dead fish go with the flow.” Sarah “Barracuda” Palin is a self-described maverick, but her thought processes seem composed from a string of lifeless banalities and worn out clichés.

There is also an eerie dissonance between the chirpy cheeriness she tries to project and the anxiety and unease betrayed by her body language. Bush displayed a similar incongruity; the exaggerated macho swagger of a bully compensating for his obvious sense of inadequacy. Incidentally, watch just about any of clip of Bush from several years back and I bet you’ll be struck by how fake he comes across. It’s not only the chasm between his words and reality that alarm, Bush’s body language, tone, and demeanor betray disingenuousness.

Palin tried to sell her departure as a selfless act done for the good of Alaskans and the Republican Party. But her strained explanation and incongruous delivery appear to be masking a truth she cannot admit. She strikes me – and apparently many others – as a quintessential narcissist. That is, she has a grandiose sense of self coupled with an inability to accept criticism, acknowledge mistakes, or empathize with others. Do these qualities remind you of another recent Republican leader? (Hint, think flight suit, bring em’ on, and the guy strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned).

In fact, conservatives have extolled and exemplified a national form of narcissism for some time. This vanity was enshrined in the Bush Doctrine: The United States represents the culmination of human history, is utterly unique, and is charged with a messianic mission to spread liberty all across the globe. As far as the neocons were concerned, our system of democratic capitalism was supposed to the model for all peoples at all times. The rise of China and the near meltdown of America’s financial system have gone a long way to puncture that conceit.

The conservative disdain for the notion that empathy is a desirable quality in judges fits with this pattern of narcissism. Along these lines, Sarah Palin disparaged Barack Obama’s efforts as a community organizer; ridicule being the polar opposite of empathy. Think of a national Republican leader – Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter come to mind – and the last quality you will think of is empathy. Sarah Palin is merely a symptom of cultural malady that is afflicting a conservative movement that is in the process of self-destruction. There is a psychological law at work here; those with an inflated sense tend to destroy themselves and everything they touch. Tragically, this was the fate of Michael Jackson, but at least he possessed the talent to create a legacy that will survive him. George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, on the other hand, are the type that tends to leave a trail of disappointment and destruction in their wake.

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Torturing Pelosi

"If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty." Time and again, Conservatives have succeeded in implicating Democrats for crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. John Kerry was supposedly in favor of the Iraq War before he was against it. Democrats saw the same WMD intelligence the Bush White House saw before rubber stamping the Iraq War. And now, Nancy Pelosi supposedly tacitly approved of water boarding before she found it politically expedient to criticize the practice.

Nancy Pelosi has become the proverbial red herring that has been used to bait – hook, line, and sinker – a frenzy of media sharks. "What did Speaker Pelosi know? And when did she know it?" This is a loaded question that has managed to convict the hapless Pelosi, at least in the court of public opinion, of Constitutional crimes conceived and executed by her political adversaries in the Bush administration.

Bush & Cheney proved to be inept when it came to managing our wars, the economy, or Katrina, but they were geniuses when it came to managing public opinion. Put simply, they have a knack for tailoring their arguments to the lowest common denominator. If someone opposed "enhanced interrogation methods," then it must be because they cared about the rights of terrorists more than they cared about the safety of the American people. Such either/or reasoning invariably involved false choices and was deliberately meant to be divisive.

The use of water boarding has proven to be a cataclysmic failure. To begin with, embracing torture decimated America's moral standing, served as a recruiting device for al-Qaeda, and led to false confessions that helped lead us into war with Iraq. Further, U.S. commanders agree that photos of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did more to instigate attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq than any single factor. Dick Cheney claims torture saved lives, but the available evidence contradicts his assertions.

The fact that Dick Cheney vouches for torture is not enough to discredit the practice. However, the vast majority of counterterrorism experts insist that abusive interrogation techniques lead to a conundrum: it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle good intelligence from bad. In contrast, more refined interrogation techniques, which use subtle techniques to co-opt terror suspects, have a superior track record according to the most credible experts.

The use of torture must be weighed against the clear downsides the practice entails: unreliable information, the pernicious effects of institutionalizing barbarity, and the obvious fact that the law must be tortured beyond recognition before it is legal to torture individuals.

The problems with Bush & Cheney's policy of using torture are clear. Simply put, the use of torture has put U.S. service men and women at greater risk; rationalizing torture has perverted our legal system; and condoning torture has diminished America's soft power. Additionally, the Bush administration policies have led to the detention, torture, and deaths of innocents.

There is no doubt – none whatsoever – that water boarding prisoners is a war crime under International Law, the Geneva Convention, and U.S. Law. Nancy Pelosi is a sideshow in all of this.

The principles that animate the U.S. constitution are clear – all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, which include the right to some form of due process. These rights are not granted by any government. Therefore, they cannot be taken away by any government. But this is exactly what George W. Bush did when he insisted he had the authority to designate any individual an enemy combatant who could then be held indefinitely and without charges in a legal limbo. Bush's power grab was a brazen assault on the most fundamental of Constitutional ideals. The perverse notion that the President was a law unto himself opened the door to an illegal war based on false pretenses and the barbarous and depraved treatment of detainees.

Bush and Cheney have long habit of shirking responsibility and spreading blame for their failures. They also have an army of apologists and propagandists trying to revise history and implicate others in the Bush administration's misdeeds. However, the central fact remains: Bush and Cheney authorized what have traditionally and universally been regarded as war crimes and crimes against humanity. History will hold them accountable and so should we.

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Bush’s Big Lie

“This government does not torture people.”
-- George W. Bush

George Bush’s credibility has sunk further and deeper than a Russian submarine. Invariably, the divergence of Bush’s rhetoric from reality has been excused as the result of sincere and honest error. Bush may have misled, the apologists insisted, but he did not lie to the American people. The latter offence of course, is considered far graver than the former, especially by Bush’s Christian base, which tends to take Commandments like “Thou Shalt Not Lie’ very seriously.

Personally, I agree with the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, author of the classic, The Art of War, that a statesman is better off lying if doing so will keep us out of war. Statecraft is an art, not a science. And the same can be said about morality.

Bush, however, stands revealed a complete charlatan, a hypocrite, and a war criminal. He and Dick Cheney ran on a platform that was heavy on things liberals supposedly lacked: namely, moral clarity and accountability. When it came to crafting torture memos, however, Bush & Cheney utterly failed to draw bright moral lines against techniques that have been recognized by U.S and International Law as torture for centuries. Put simply, Japanese officials who used water boarding during WWII were prosecuted and found guilty for committing war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. What the Bush administration’s torture memos did, of course, was to torture the law until interrogators could use any abusive technique Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld wanted to authorize.

Defining torture out of existence, by insisting all practices that didn’t lead directly to organ failure or death were acceptable, is the epitome of moral vacuity and evasiveness. In essence, Bush & Cheney thought they could evade moral culpability through legal locutions and hairsplitting: Sure, water boarding is fine, just as long as the water temperature isn’t too hot or cold, and the victim has a pillow, and is tied down with nylon rope that he doesn’t burn his wrists.

Bush & Cheney are intent on evading responsibility in a no less cowardly way. For years they have feigned outrage at lower-level military personnel for committing abuses that they in fact authorized. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice not only lied when they insisted the U.S. did not utilize torture. They lied in the most self-serving way by allowing low-level military personnel to pay the price for the crimes they knowingly sanctioned. The way Bush and Cheney evaded military service in Vietnam was less than honorable; the way Bush & Cheney are evading responsibility for the abusive techniques they authorized is cowardly and despicable.

The release of the torture memos indisputably show that top administration officials – including the president himself – repeatedly lied to the American people. Their deceptions were not aimed at protecting national security, but avoiding responsibility for policies they knew crossed the line into war crimes.

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The Torture Memos

“Are thumbs fingers?” The question is posed by an obtuse but efficient Nazi interrogator in the film version of “The English Patient.” The scene jumped into my mind as I pondered the tortured legal locutions the Bush administration concocted to justify interrogation techniques that went out of style in most of the civilized world following the Inquisition.

Apologists for the Bush administration, of course, would prefer that these torture memos never saw the light of day. They claim self-servingly, that revealing the “legal rationales” behind the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” methods can only aid the enemy. In truth, the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods were never as effective as advertised. However, the administration’s defenders do have a point; the memos are such a complete legal, logical, and moral embarrassment that their publication amounts to a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda.

The Justice Department has long since repudiated the shoddy legal opinions devised by Bush’s Three Legal Stooges, John Yoo, David Addington, and Alberto Gonzales. They are viewed as cranks by their peers and pariahs by the international community. It is probably only a matter of time before they face prosecution for providing the legal rationale for war crimes.

Many conservatives are apoplectic because they believe legitimate policy differences are being criminalized. This view does not hold up to scrutiny. Simply put, the Bush administration’s lawyers were not looking to the law for guidance; they were looking for ways around the law. Incidentally, the same perversion of justice was at work in the legal rationalizations that culminated in the debacle of Bush vs. Gore, and the run-up to the Iraq War for that matter. In each case, the “legal principles” involved functioned as a blunt extension of political power, rather than as objective standards. This is a pretty cynical approach to the law.

The same ad hoc quality that infects the Bush administration’s quasi-legal reasoning is on display by those who insist torture techniques are what kept America safe since 9/11. Bush’s speechwriter, Marc A. Theissen, writing in the Washington Post for instance, insists that “without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.” What Thiessen fails to mention, however, is that torture also led to “intelligence” that apparently “confirmed” the Bush administration’s preconception that Saddam possessed WMD. In other words, torture also helped lead the United States into a strategic debacle. This illustrates what most counterterrorism experts believe is the fatal flaw from using torture: It is exceeding difficult to distinguish bad information from good. Too often, interrogators who use torture will hear what they want to hear.

Theissen goes on to cite the “success” of using harsh interrogation methods on Abu Zubaydah. However, it is now clear that President Bush overstated the importance of Zubaydah and the information he apparently divulged after being tortured. As the Post’s Eugene Robinson notes, Zubaydah was hardly the pivotal figure the administration claimed he was. And the “vital information” Zubaydah provided after being tortured was in fact information that was already known to the intelligence community from other sources.

The Bush administration has deservedly acquired a reputation for concocting self-serving ad hoc rationalizations: America has not been attacked since 9/11, so naturally it must be because we employed enhanced interrogation methods. To paraphrase Bush’s CIA director, Michael Haydn, enhanced interrogations were done according to the best legal advice available at the time, and those methods worked.

The first part of Haydn’s conclusion is patently ridiculous; even the Bush administration has repudiated the early legal memos that supposedly legitimated the president’s authority to order techniques like water boarding. That tells you how shoddy and scholarly deficient they were. However, it’s no surprise that torture can yield important intelligence. The real question, of course, is this: Could legal interrogation techniques have yielded the same or better results? Members of the Bush administration say no, but most counterterrorism experts insist torture is counterproductive in the long-term.

There are good reasons to side with the vast majority of counterterrorism experts on this one. To begin with, the appalling level of deliberation the Bush administration engaged in prior to authorizing enhanced interrogation methods provides no confidence alternatives were debated or even discussed. As with the decision to invade Iraq, dissension was virtually non-existent, and top administration figures simply chose a course of action and then charged underlings with finding a way to legitimate and rationalize a foregone conclusion.

George Bush believed in a leadership style in which displays of strength and success would breed legitimacy. He got it backwards; legitimacy is what leads to strength and success. Simply put, George Bush and his policies have weakened America precisely because they lacked legitimacy. There is a common thread linking the corrupt decision of Bush vs. Gore, the corruption of the intelligence gathering process that led to the Iraq War, the corruption on Wall Street, and the corruption of American ideals that bred the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; in each case objective standards of decision-making, rationality and accountability were discarded to meet the self-serving interests of those who wielded power.

To be sure, many of the minions who served Bush believed they were protecting America when they justified the use of torture. Let there be no doubt, however; they were not safeguarding America’s ideals or values. America was founded on the principle that all individuals are endowed through Natural Law with certain inalienable rights. These are rights that no sovereign or government can grant or take away without due process of law. The Bush administration, however, made the preposterous and indefensible argument that a single individual -- the commander-in-chief -- could effectively strip any individual of their right to due process under the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, or virtually any meaningful legal framework whatsoever. Anyone who challenged this perverse perspective was accused of caring more about the rights of terrorists than the safety of America’s citizens. This is pure demagoguery that rests on fallacy of a false choice.

Statecraft is an art, not a science. Though torture is odious, there may be some limited instances where its use can be justified. If it is necessary to torture a suspect to save a city, then those circumstances should count heavily as mitigating circumstances when those officials are prosecuted. If I were a judge, prosecutor, or juror in such a case, then I’d recommend only a token sentence if the defendants are found guilty. The bright lines civilization has drawn against torture should not be erased by third-rate legal scriveners. After all, the institutionalization of torture is bound to corrupt the body politic as the practice brutalizes and desensitizes those who use and rationalize it. The practice has certainly demoralized Americans, inflamed our adversaries, and delegitimized America in the eyes of the world. When the debate descends to whether thumbs are fingers, well, that’s an indication that things have gone seriously wrong.

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Dissolving the Dilemmas over Stem Cells

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cautioned that we must be on guard against “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” What the most important philosopher of the 20th century was concerned about here are the problems and confusions dualistic terms (i.e., mind & body) can generate when language goes on holiday. More concretely, the use of conceptually separate terms like mind and body force us to think that there must be real ontological entities to which those terms refer. If I say “It is raining,” for instance, I certainly do not mean to suggest there is an entity called “It” that is raining.

Virtually every neuroscientist recognizes that the terms mind and brain are two ways of talking about the same thing. Of course, brains are “things” only in a loose way of speaking. After all, brains give rise to subjectivity, which is a rather awe inspiring phenomenon. As Wittgenstein noted, “It is the “I,” it is the I that is deeply mysterious.” However, Wittgenstein – like most scientists today – was a monist, which is the say he believed the brain/mind was a single substance (or process).

This is a good thing, since dualism, the notion than the mind is a separate entity from the physical brain, has for all practical purposes been discredited as incoherent and unempirical. Unfortunately, dualism lives on for the scientifically and philosophically illiterate. In fact, dualistic thinking permeates pro-life arguments against abortion. Put simply, if dualism is false – and the scientific and philosophical case against dualism is overwhelming – then the central arguments pro-lifers make against abortion and stem cell research rest on unsound assumptions.

Pro-life groups maintain every embryo is an individual from the moment of conception. From this it follows that every embryo is: 1) sacred, 2) part of the human community, and 3) entitled to the rights and protections we afford every member of the human family. Using words like “scared,” “community,” and “family” in association with the embryo, of course, primes audiences to see things a certain way. Science uses similar rhetorical techniques, but the way scientists use language tends to make objects seem more impersonal. Language, in a sense, can create reality, or at least frame our perception of reality.

The way pro-life advocates use language in relationship to embryos is instrumental in creating moral dilemmas that evaporate if one approaches the matter more objectively. To begin with, the notion that the “moment of conception” marks some miraculous, transcendental, or non-physical event is not an idea that holds up to rational scrutiny. First of all, the so-called moment of conception is not a moment at all, it is an entirely biochemical process that lasts several hours at a minimum. Second, individuality is not something present (or created) at the moment of conception. After all, many zygotes split in two several weeks after conception, a phenomenon which leads to twins.

But the most damning argument against assuming there is anything sacred or miraculous about the typical embryo comes from Mother Nature. Simply put, most embryos never develop into human beings because embryos frequently fail to implant or because they spontaneously and naturally abort.

Pro-lifers frequently resort to false choices. Writing in the Washington Post, for instance, Michael Gerson offers the following either/or choice: 1) embryos are sacred or 2) embryos are protoplasmic rubbish.

Thinking in terms of moral absolutes is what gets us in to trouble here. Put simply, context matters. For instance, imagine the following thought experiment: a fertility clinic housing 1,000,000 surplus embryos is on fire. There is a fifty-fifty chance the embryos can be saved, but only at great risk to the firefighters. Should we ask the firefighters to risk their lives to save the embryos? I would argue, the loss of 1,000,000 insentient embryos is not worth the life of even one human being embedded within a family and a community.

Conversely, it is possible to imagine another thought experiment: a plague has broken out which has rendered every woman of childbearing age on the planet infertile. Only a handful of viable embryos remain anywhere on earth. Under such circumstances, shouldn’t the safety and well-being of such embryos be preserved at all costs until some way is found to perpetuate the human race?

The moral value of an embryo is not nil, nor is it absolute. To a large extent, the moral dilemma of using embryos to create stem cell lines exists because of the way pro-life advocate use – and very often misuse – language. Wittgenstein recognized that the mind/body problem was a function of our language games. There is a lesson here for pro-life advocates.

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How the Bush Administration Bankrupted America; How the Obama Administration can Restore America's Prosperity

Conservatives are like the comedian Rodney Dangerfield these days, they can't get no respect. In the public mind, figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Jindal, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin are a source of bemusement, a slightly annoying but nonetheless chuckle-producing diversion from the calamities the conservative movement helped engineer.

The same cannot be said, alas, for conservative commentators like Charles Krauthhammer, Michael Gerson, and Sean Hannity (a trio of humorless blowhards oozing animus from every pore). I suspect their vinegary dispositions stem from the fact that their most cherished beliefs are constantly at variance with reality. As William James recognized, there is nothing more painful than false belief.

The financial pain America is currently facing can be traced to a set of false beliefs that constitute the core of conservatism's economic doctrine. These discredited principles include: the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves, the idea markets are self-correcting, and the belief that deregulation serves the common good.

Tax cuts are to conservatives what crack cocaine is to lab rats. The basic idea behind supply-side economics is that taxes must be lowered on America's most productive (i.e., wealthiest) citizens because they alone possess the wherewithal to put capital to work. Conversely, transferring resources to the poor, so the thinking goes, will only insure that wealth is squandered on unproductive forms of consumption.

The wealthy received their tax breaks under the Bush administration, but the promised investment glut never materialized. Conservatives have peddled the notion that taxes are a form of punishment, or a disincentive to productivity. But a truer view of taxes comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who held that taxes are the price of civilization. If Holmes is right, then it follows that those who benefit the most from society (i.e., the wealthiest) owe the greatest share in return.

The origins of the current financial crisis are complex. Americans had been living beyond their means on borrowed credit for too long. The United States staked its future on financial services and products, as opposed to manufactured goods. To make up for the trade deficit the United States borrowed heavily from countries like China to keep the good times rolling. Debt-ridden consumers, however, found they could no longer afford to products once housing prices were undermined by deadbeat sub-prime borrowers. By this stage, as British historian Niall Ferguson observes, the United States has become a sub-prime superpower.

To reverse America's economic fortunes, the Obama administration must increase the earnings power of the vast majority of ordinary Americans. Doing this will require substantial and sustained investment to upgrade public education, our healthcare system, and our infrastructure. Investments along these lines are necessary to insure that Americans are the brightest, healthiest, and productive workforce on the planet. When we are once again making the products and services the world wants to buy, then incomes will rise. This will revitalize consumer spending, leading to corporate profits, which will translate into rising stock prices.

Tax cuts disproportionally aimed at the wealthy did not lead to broad-based income gains or the kind of investments America needs to ensure sustainable prosperity. Free market fundamentalism has also proved to be a false creed. Put simply, if the last eight years have shown anything it is that free markers do not inexorably allocate resources efficiently or rationally. In fact, free market fundamentalism has proven to be nothing but a cover for crony capitalism, whereby the powerful and well-connected rewarded themselves by feeding at the public trough. The fact that the financial wizards that created the current crisis walked away with billions, while America's healthcare, education, and infrastructure needs were starved, illustrates the total intellectual and moral bankruptcy of free market fundamentalism.

Looting the financial system and cannibalizing companies could not have happened to the extent it did without wholesale deregulation. The invasion of Iraq was another conservative enterprise predicated on false premises that helped bankrupt the United States, and not just economically but morally too. Of course, conservatives are loath to admit they are wrong, which explains why Krauthhammer and others are trying to portray the Iraq War as a victory. A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but mostly the Iraq War has been a strategic debacle that siphoned America's blood and treasure in a failed bid to leverage our military might to transform the Middle East. As the historian Arnold Toynbee recognized, societies that attempt to remake far off outposts on the periphery of empire are invariably less successful than societies that remake themselves.

Revitalizing America is a herculean task facing Obama. Conservative commentators have generally heaped scorn upon the Obama administration's approach, which will make government a more central partner in shaping the economic landscape of the future. As Michael Gerson ludicrously puts it, "governments don't invest, they spend." Obviously, Gerson is thinking of the Bush administration, not the far-sighted administrations that initiated the GI bill, the interstate highway system, and the Internet.

Krauthammer is even more obtuse than Gerson. The dyspeptic Krauthammer completely fails to see how healthcare has anything to do with the current financial crisis or its cure. Let me enlighten this vapid windbag. The current healthcare system is an inefficient monstrosity with private insurance companies gobbling up resources to feed a vast bureaucratic apparatus collecting premiums from those who don't need healthcare while denying treatment to those who need it.

Ok, that's a bit of a caricature, but it captures an essential truth: private insurers represent a vast layer absorbing our healthcare dollars, but this layer does not deliver healthcare. This system has become an albatross for businesses and individuals. For instance, the cost of health insurance has to be factored into every product, which makes U.S. goods less competitive. Additionally, it stifles individual initiative – i.e., under the current system, employees will be less inclined to leave dead end jobs to pursue more rewarding opportunities if they fear they'll lose their health coverage in the process.

Conservatives like Krauthhammer, Gerson, and Hannity appear congenitally incapable of connecting the dots. These guys are like Rodney Dangerfield – the joke always seems to be on them and they don't get no respect.

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You Can Bank on It

In John Ford's classic western, Stagecoach, a self-righteous bank president browbeats and berates his fellow travelers while he's in the process of absconding his firm's funds. Ford was a filmmaker with a social conscience and the themes explored in his movies seem more timeless than ever.

Once again, life has been caught imitating art. Bank robbers like Jesse James, Willie Sutton, and Bonnie & Clyde, have long been part of American folklore, but the reality is that the biggest and most audacious bank robberies have invariably been inside jobs. The Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s proved one observer right; the best way to rob a bank is to own one.

The current crisis in the financial system dwarfs the S&L debacle. Americans have recently woken up to the fact that the country's most hallowed banks and financial institutions are basically insolvent. Many observers single out subprime mortgage defaulters as the main culprits in the current calamity. However, the true causes of the present economic meltdown are far deeper and more insidious than most Americans realize.

There are vested interests, of course, intent on diverting attention away from the real reasons so much hard-earned savings poured into the financial sector, but vanished down the proverbial drain. Here, Rick Santelli's much-publicized faux-populist rant serves his masters in the predatory class well. Santelli, like many of his fellow carnival barkers at CNBC, have served as avid cheerleaders during the inflation of one of the greatest financial bubbles of all-time. Their shtick, which masquerades as objective analysis, has undoubtedly led innumerable credulous investors astray.

Santelli, of course, would have his audience, many of whom have been burned by bad advice they gleaned from CNBC, direct their fury towards the "losers" that bought subprime mortgages they can no longer afford, a group allegedly at the epicenter of the current crisis.

To be sure, the so-called NINJA loans (loans made to borrowers with no income, no credit, and no job) were a recipe for disaster, but the focus on defaulters ignores the other side of a faulty equation. Thanks to Reagan era deregulation, and Bush administration policies aimed at promoting an "ownership society," irresponsible lenders collected lucrative fees but failed to screen the creditworthiness of their clients. As a result of the way they sliced and diced mortgages, these lenders effectively privatized profits but socialized risk.

Santelli and his ilk have an inherent tendency to attack the economically powerless but fawn over the financially powerful. Thus, taxpayer bailouts for financial titans are pardoned as necessarily evils aimed at saving our financial system, but mortgage restructuring and refinancing that would keep subprime borrowers in their homes is condemned as a socialist blasphemy.

Ironically, America's capitalistic financial bubble was underwritten by the People's Republic of China. In effect, a country where the average worker makes $2,000 a years has used its savings rate to subsidize the consumption rate of the most spendthrift nation in the world. Put simply, Easy credit from lenders like China made it possible for Americans to borrow against their homes -- and against the future -- to pay for tax cuts and consumer goodies.

Those days are over. The easy credit binge fueled the housing bubble, propped up the stock market, kept the good times rolling, and made people feel wealthier than they really were. At the same time, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress spent money like drunken sailors, but "investments" like the Iraq War have proven to be money pits with no return. The IOUs have been piling up, and taxpayers are waking up to the fact that they're on the hook for Bush's imprudent fiscal and foreign policies, a myriad of corporate excesses, and the irresponsibility of greedy lenders and borrowers in the subprime sector.

Santelli's rant is typical of the drivel one finds on cable news, a medium that generates much heat but little light. In truth, America's market system, which is supposed to allocate resources rationally and efficiently, was exploited by a predatory class that rigged the system in its favor. Insiders, paying themselves humongous bonuses, while driving their businesses into the ground, are perfect example of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen termed the "predatory class," a ruling elite that feeds at the public trough while contributing nothing to the social welfare. Don't expect Santelli and his ilk to point fingers in that direction; to do so would be to bite the hand that feeds them.

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Top Ten Reasons Bush and Cheney are Pissed Off at Each Other.

10). Bush insisted Cheney go through metal detector just like everyone else before entering Oval Office, which jolted VP's pacemaker every time.

9). Bush refused to sign executive order rescinding the war-profiteering tax, which cost Cheney, big time.

8). Cheney resented being called Mini-Me, the pet nickname Bush used when referring to the VP in the presence of the military brass.

7). The VP was absolutely certain his incompetent boss would have a serious mountain biking accident in the first 100 days of the Bush administration, which would have paved the way for ten years of a right-wing dream team, Cheney/Rumsfeld. But Bush thwarted his Machiavellian #2 by using a heavily-padded Commander-in-Chief helmet and super-stealth training wheels.

6). Bush vetoed top-secret Cheney plot to use genetically-engineered anti-follicle agent aimed at de-bearding Islamic extremists.

5). Cheney felt snubbed when the president failed to award him combat ribbon following the sharpshooting VP's close-quarter engagement with a trial lawyer while duck hunting.

4). Cheney consistently refused to divulge the whereabouts of his secure location, even to the president, which freaked out the normally unflappable Bush.

3). One person stood between Dick Cheney and his goal of being Master of the Universe. And you don't think Cheney resented his boss?

2). Unbeknown to the media and the public, Bush insisted Cheney dress up as the Easter Bunny every year for the annual egg roll on the White House lawn. Apparently, it was Bush's way of ensuring his overweight and out of shape VP got enough exercise, but Cheney deeply resented hopping around in a hot furry suit for several hours while children laughed at the sight of him.

1). Bush refused every single invitation Cheney made to take him duck hunting.

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Taxing Times for Obama

These are taxing times for Obama's nominees. It would seem only fair that Washington's powerbrokers – the same people responsible for our convoluted tax system – ought to set an example by forking over their fair share of the onerous taxes they impose on everyone.

Of course, like a lot of people I know -- or at least one person I know -- I pay my taxes, which explains why I can't afford a nanny, a chauffeur, or even the $49.95 it costs to buy Turbo-Tax. I suppose the reigning sentiment among the political elite has been "Don't ask. Don't tell" – "Sure I want to be Treasury Secretary. But don't ask me about back taxes, and I won't tell you how much I owe."

Let's face it, "Don't ask. Don't tell" never worked in the military, so it sure won't work with the IRS. Just ask Willie Nelson, Wesley Snipes, and Nicholas Cage. I suppose, however, that former Governor Ron Blagojevich might have invoked the principle to hide any proceeds he might have gained had he been able to sell Obama's senate seat to the highest bidder.

Personally, I think Blagojevich would have been on much firmer ethical ground had he auctioned off the Illinois senate seat on EBay. After all, let Caroline Kennedy and some deep pocket Republican get in a bidding war where the winner has to pay a 7.5% sales tax on the senate seat. This sure would beat the process that is dragging on in Minnesota between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, which has got to be costing the taxpayers in that state plenty.

If it were up to me, which thankfully it is isn't, I'd seat both Coleman and Franken and be done with it. The election was a statistical tie, so giving them half-a-vote each seems an equitable solution; they could cancel each other out all term for all I care. In any event, I do believe Coleman & Franken could rival Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, and Bill & Hillary as one of the funniest duos in history.

As far as the stimulus goes, I have a few recommendations. Instead of bailing out banks that made bad loans why not use government bailout money to directly bolster the true driving force of the our economy – the American couch potato. After all, we're the ones that buy Plasma TVs, plastic surgery, junk food, weight-loss programs, and all the amenities of life we don't necessarily need, but that nevertheless make both ourselves and the economy grow. Helping overextended dead beats like me pay off debt would in turn help banks balance their books, which would lead to bigger bonuses for CEOs, which would mean more money for influencing peddling and lobbyists, which would allow Washington insiders to once again starting hiring chauffeurs, nannies, and dog walkers. Undoubtedly, this would lead to millions of new jobs and maybe even some tax revenue.

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Obamanomics

Barack Obama is inheriting the most challenging circumstances of any president since FDR. The United States is engaged in two major land wars, it is confronting increasing ecological challenges as its infrastructure crumbles, and it is the midst of a global financial meltdown. Such is the legacy of George W. Bush.

The task Obama faces is monumental. His diagnosis and prescription for America's economic ills, which he outlines in a Washington Post Op-Ed, "The Action America Needs," strike me as commmonsensical and fundamentally sound. In short, he must retool the U.S. economy for the 21^st century. To grasp what Obama must do it is important to understand what America failed to do under the previous administration, which will almost certainly go down as one the worst in our country's history.

For the past thirty years, Washington has largely been enthralled by market fundamentalism. This is the superstition that economic, social, and environmental decisions are best left to a rarified entity known as the "free market." The dogma goes something like this: countless rational actors pursuing their self interest (as they buy and sell with each other) can generate a collective wisdom that no government or bureaucracy could ever hope to attain.

Unbridled faith in free markets was supposed to lead to economic equilibrium; instead it has brought the entire global economic system to the brink of collapse.

Unfettered free markets were supposed to allocate resources optimally, obviate the need for long-range planning, and inexorably expand our economic and political freedoms. Instead, a narrow segment of "financial wizards" enriched themselves, cannibalized their companies, banks, and other financial institutions, while leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for a huge government bailout necessary to keep the financial system from collapsing entirely. As a result, most Americans find themselves financially overextended and insecure.

For the past thirty years, we have had a system that privatized profits, but socialized risk. Not long ago, Wall Street was soaring. But much of the paper profits generated by the financial sector have proven to be a mirage. Wall Street was adept at making money out of money, so long as its customers didn't ask any too many questions about the complex financial instruments that were in fact cobbled together with sub-prime mortgages.

Herein lays the essence of America's current misfortune: making money out of money is not the same thing as making something real. As America's financial sector swelled its manufacturing base dwindled. The United States cannot be a prosperous country without making and selling the goods and services the world needs and wants. Enlisting America's best and brightest to repackage and sell debt was never a sustainable strategy for ensuring our nation's economic success.

The most promising new American growth industry will involve so-called "green jobs." Put simply, inventing and selling the next generation of energy sources and energy efficient technologies is America's best hope of transforming our economy and restoring the United States as the world's leading economic innovator.

Accomplishing this goal will require a new social compact, one that recognizes education, infrastructure, and healthcare as public goods that require sustained and substantial investment from taxpayers. For instance, soon after the United States embraced public education it rapidly eclipsed its European rivals economically. Likewise, the G.I Bill paid enormous dividends for decades in terms of productivity and prosperity. Similarly, both Eisenhower's interstate highway program and the government initiative that led to the Internet demonstrate how far-sighted government policies can open up entire new economic vistas.

Universal single-payer healthcare is a matter of both moral and financial necessity. The current system is grossly inefficient on many levels. By design, private insurers seek to cover those that need healthcare the least and exclude those that need it the most. Therefore, taxpayers that pay for private health insurance also cough up tax dollars to pay for public clinics and emergency room visits by the uninsured. Once again, profits are privatized but risk is socialized.

Employers and employees are increasingly burdened by the current system. After all, the high-cost of mandated health insurance discourages companies from adding and retaining employees. And fear of losing employer-sponsored health insurance discourages many workers from seeking more satisfying and rewarding work. In short, universal healthcare can deliver better care to more people, thus leading to a healthier and more productive workforce.

The Obama administration has opportunity to tie short-term stimulus measures to longer-term investments along the lines I've outlined. Most Republicans remain wedded to the discredited mindset that got us into this mess in the first place. For instance, Linda Chavez proposes giving every American a debit card, presumably so we can by a gas-guzzler or another plasma TV. However, if the last eight years have taught us anything it is that an economy predicated on perpetual consumerism is a dead end.

The sagest economists I've read say that the United States can grow its way out of the economic mess the Bush administration has bequeathed us. However, to do so it will have to invest heavily in education, infrastructure, and healthcare, the things that will ultimately help America reinvent the economy. One thing is certain, pouring money into bailouts or consumer toys is not the way create the prosperity of tomorrow.

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Bush Kept us Safe?

Osama bin Laden once noted, "Americans may have the watches, but Arabs have the time." As the clock wound down on President Bush's tenure many of the administration's apologists were quick note that there were no further attacks on American soil in the 2,688 days following 9/11. This is a welcome fact. And I hope historians and future generations will find that for all his faults, President Bush did do some things right. However, it is dangerously simplistic to assume that 2,688 without an attack should count as evidence in favor of Bush's counter terrorism policies.

In his book The Black Swan authorNassim Taleb, a philosopher and statistician who studies improbable events, relates the parable of the turkey who takes each day he is fed and cared as further evidence that the farmer loves him. The turkey's inductive reasoning seems sounder and sounder every day of the year, until Thanksgiving.

Marc A. Thiessen, chief speechwriter for President Bush, is the kind of figure Taleb would likely call a turkey. Writing in the Washington Post, Thiessen cites the 2,688 day figure and then fallaciously deduces that if there is another attack it will be because an Obama Administration weakened the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" policy and other counterterrorism methods.

Thiessen's logic fails on so many levels that it's easy to see how such defective thinking contributed to one of the worst administration's in American history. To begin with, al-Qaeda and other Arab terror organizations operate according to a vastly different time-frame than we do in the West. Put simply, al-Qaeda and it like-minded affiliates are thinking in terms of generations and centuries, while much of America's political class are thinking in terms of election cycles. Insisting a relatively narrow sliver of time without an attack constitutes evidence of success (in a war that Bush himself said will be a generational affair) is not all that different from a turkey crowing "Mission Accomplished" right after feeding time.

Basically, the 2,688 days without an attack spiel is little more than a demagogic ploy, the political equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. A more accurate slogan might go like this: At least Bush kept us safe and secure, excepting for 9/11, Katrina, and the financial meltdown.

Arguing that "enhanced interrogation" methods have kept America safe is patently bogus too. To begin with, "enhanced interrogation" is nothing but a euphemism for torture. The Bush administration resorted to legal sophistry in its Alice in Wonderland interpretation of the Constitution, leading it to define torture in terms so narrow that the concept no longer had any practical meaning. President Obama has brought some much needed moral clarity to the issue by insisting that the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions will govern how detainees in U.S. custody are treated.

Thiessen claims torture works. Undoubtedly, in some cases this is true. But most counterterrorism experts agree that torture frequently leads to false confessions. When torture is involved, it is exceedingly difficult to sort out good information from bad. Indeed, some of the "evidence" the Bush administration used to substantiate its case that Saddam possessed WMD was gleaned through torture. It may be true that torture has prevented attacks, but torture also helped lead to the foolish war with Iraq. Ironically, the subsequent torture and abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib will in all likelihood help breed a new generation of jihadists determined to attack the United States.

Torture also brutalizes, desensitizes, and corrupts the personnel and the institutions that resort to barbarism to extract information. The America people correctly sensed that dispensing with our values, as the Bush administration most assuredly did, would not lead to greater security over the long haul. Put simply, the Bush administration's radical departure from America's traditional ideals regarding the humane treatment of prisoners sapped American morale and expanded the ranks of our enemies.

Theissen's most outrageous fallacy is his claim that if there is a future attack during Obama's tenure, then the fault will lay with his administration. This is typical of the divisive fear mongering the American people are rightly revolted with following eight years of Bush's political demagoguery. If there is another attack, then the blame will lie with those who carried out the attack. America will need to come together to work towards the common purpose of defeating our enemies. Pointing fingers to score political points will be a recipe for self-defeat. There was a moment after 9/11 when President Bush had the goodwill and trust of the American people behind him, but he blew it.

The claim that Bush's extra-legal policies kept the polis safe are not dissimilar to an athlete using steroids who insists a great run is proof of his fitness. Over time, the extra legal techniques of torture will weaken the body politic, just as steroids will weaken the athlete's body. America is a less resilient country because of Bush's policies. The American people were right to reject the self-defeating policies of Bush/Cheney

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Senator Al Franken

America owes an incalculable debt to President George W. Bush. Indeed, the mountain of red ink the Bush administration has piled up on our behalf would make Everest seem like a molehill in comparison. However, Bush's legacy is not entirely awful. After all, no one has done more to discredit the Republican Party than Bush, which has paved the way for a permanent Democratic majority.

The anti-Bush backlash probably helped elect comedian Al Franken to the Senate. Franken, fittingly, trailed his opponent Norm Coleman on election night, but has since prevailed in the recount. The idea of sending the Saturday Live alumni to the nation's highest deliberative body once seemed like a bad joke to the reactionary-right, but it seems the ultra-liberal Franken is poised to have the last laugh.

The Minnesota recount was far from perfect, but it appears to have been a process that respected the will of the voters by striving to ascertain the most accurate vote tally possible. The legal process is still playing out; Coleman is entitled to a final appeal that could drag on some weeks, but the principle of a examining every ballot in exceedingly close elections has been vindicated. After all, if the interests of expediency had triumphed on election night, then the wrong man would have been sworn in and the will of the electorate would have been nullified.

Of course, this is precisely what happened eight years ago when Bush succeeded in shutting down a perfectly legal and entirely appropriate recount in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential contest. At the time, Bush vs. Gore was seen for what it was: a legally dubious and blatantly political decision that was unworthy of the Supreme Court. The subsequent colossal failure of the Bush administration will only serve to reinforce the verdict the Bush v. Gore was a horrendous miscarriage of justice.

The recount process in Minnesota appears to have been transparent and fair. Eight years ago, George W. Bush made a fateful choice in response to a cloudy election: he would rather "win" in an unfair process than risk losing in a fair process. His campaign did everything it could to impede and discredit a process that would have conferred legitimacy on whoever prevailed.

It was right to view Bush's victory as illegitimate. The wrong man was sworn in and the nation has paid a huge price ever since. The verdict of history will be harsh on Forty-three, and on Majority that arrogantly overturned the judgment of the American people and replaced it with their own myopic preference. Still, it's only fair to thank Bush for his help in bringing about a Democratic majority. And if I could say just one thing to the President as he leaves office it would be this: "Don't let the door hit you too hard on the way out, sir."

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