Shame On Elaine Chao

By Christopher Hayes

This just in from Nation Washington Intern Te-Ping Chen:

There have been so many egregious dealings emerging out of Bush's cabinet -- the rancid workings of former Interior Secretary, allegations of Thomas White's insider trading -- that perhaps it's not surprising that the tracings of one cabinet member, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, have gone under-scrutinized.

But no longer, advocates say. With one year left of the beleaguered Bush Administration, American Rights at Work is hustling to shine light on Chao's record.

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February 12, 2008

Richard Rorty, RIP

By Christopher Hayes

A brilliant, humane scholar. A public intellectual in the finest sense, and a profound influence on the way I think about politics, long-time Nation contributor Richard Rorty has died.

I had the pleasure of meeting Rorty a few years ago and wrote one of my earliest pieces about a debate he had with Jurgen Habermas here in Chicago. Rorty had an uncanny ability to stare into the post-modern abyss, in which nothing is grounded in the divine or universal, and yet somehow, some way, find a kind of practical empathy that could serve as a beacon in the face of nihilism, authoritarianism and cruelty.

He will be greatly, greatly missed.

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June 9, 2007

This Is What Democracy Looks Like?

By Christopher Hayes

Iraqi parliament votes to end the occupation

The American public favors withdrawal

The cause of Democracy apparently demands we ignore both.

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May 10, 2007

Bad Guys

By Christopher Hayes

I hesitate to get into an inter-magazine pissing match, but I just couldn't let this post by The New Republic's James Kirchick go unanswered. Kirchick takes aim at the Nation's latest issue, which contains a symposium on Cuba, its future and the problems with US policy towards it. Kirchick's critique is two-fold. First, he finds the entire choice of topic and presentation musty, boring and predictable. "Leave it to the Nation," he writes, "that stalwart fount of 'unconventional wisdom since 1865,' to offer a platform to a dictatorship's toady." Well, let's remember that this comes on the website of a magazine that did everything in its power to push the US into a war that its own former editor now describes as a "disaster" and "tragic," and which has resulted in the deaths of tens, most likely hundreds, of thousands of innocent civilians. So Mr. Kirchick may want to check himself before calling out The Nation, a magazine that got the single most pressing foreign policy question of our times right. (And, it should be noted, has published numerous articles critical of the Castro regime in the fast few years alone, including in the very issue that Kirchick criticizes.)

As for his substantive critique, it is this: Because Cuba is ruled by a dictator, any representative of the government is by definition a "toady," spouting "disreputable opinions." His complaints, therefore, cannot have merit, and must be necessarily ignored by anyone who shares Mr. Kirchick's impeccable moral judgement. If this kind of logic seems familiar, it's because it is. It's the same logic that led the New Republic and the establishment to support a sanctions regime against Iraq that almost certainly killed more than a hundred thousand Iraqi children. You see, because Saddam was evil, his government's contention that the the sanctions were killing its civilians had to be wrong. And because Saddam was evil, his government's claim that it had, in fact, been disarmed, could not have been true, even after the UN weapons inspectors confirmed it.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that the "the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time." The Nation published an issue that contained both the voice of the Castro regime and those critical of it. It can be the case that the Cuban regime is a bad regime, and that it has entirely legitimate complaints to offer towards the US. But this is precisely what Kirchick finds so odious. His moral cosmology is that of the Bush administration which says that there are good guys and bad guys in this world, and we just don't talk with or listen to the bad guys until they stop being bad.

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April 30, 2007

The Big Con

By Christopher Hayes

It's really pretty amazing to see the way that a consensus is forming, one that crosses the political spectrum, that the Bush administration has been an historic disaster. I was at a lunch this past weekend with a very, very conservative young law student, and even she could only muster a half-hearted defense of the administration and seemed to almost apologize for her support of it.

That's all well and good, but the next battle will be over how to understand the Bush failure. You're already seeing conservatives rushing to distance themselves from the administration and chalk up its manifest failtures to mere incompetence. But while that's part of the story, it's not most of it.

Enter Rick Perlstein and The Big Con to fill in the story. Rick's written two books (the latter of which is forthcoming) documenting the rise of the modern conservative movement, from Goldwater through Nixon. He's now writing a blog over at Campaign for America Future, in which he documents the ways in which the failures of the Bush administration are the failures of conservatism as an ideology and governing approach. Check out this opening post on E Coli Conservatives.

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April 19, 2007

Politicize the War

By Christopher Hayes

Generally that was a predictable performance by the Decider, but one thing stuck out to me. The New Rationale TM for the war, (I've lost track of how many this is) is that the generals say the surge will work and the politicians should just butt out and let the men do their jobs. As Josh Marshall points out, this is patently untrue. The generals didn't think the surge would work so Bush replaced them with someone who did. But even more absurd is the notion that the people executing war policy should be actually determining war policy, that we should just outsource the decisions about the duration of our occupation of Iraq to the all-knowing David Petraeus.

This is particularly ironic against the backdrop of the US Attorney's scandal. The administration's MO from the very beginning has been to overide the judgement of experts and career civil servants, whether they be scientists assessing climate change, or public health officials evaluating food and drugs, or US attorneys weighing whether there is sufficient evidence for an indictment. In short they have politicized every last function of the government, so much so that the work product of the entire federal bureacracy must now be assessed as if it were little more than an RNC press release. And now, on the single most vital political issue, Bush wants to argue that politics should play no part and the judgement of a single man should dictate the entirety of US policy.

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April 3, 2007

We're Winning

By Christopher Hayes

There's been a lot of evidence recently that the Bush administration is causing (or perhaps amplifying) an ideological shift among the American public away from Reagan/Gingrich conservatism, towards something resembling social democracy. That might be a touch pollyanna, but check out the latest data from the massive Pew survey released last week. Kevin Drum runs down the most important data points: a sharp decline in the percentage of voters identifying themselves as Republicans, a significant increase in the percentage of people who think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt," and similar decline in the percentage of people who think "school boards should have the right to fire homosexual teachers."

In other words the populace is getting a) more socially liberal b) more economically progressive c) more identified with the Democratic party.

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March 26, 2007

Connecting the Dots

By Christopher Hayes

Over at TAPPED, Ezra Klein proposes the following maxim as a means of understanding the Bush administration: "Bush's Razor: Given a possible universe of explanations for a particular administration action, the most morally pessimistic and politically cynical will inevitably be proven correct."

As the details of the US attorney purge leak out, it's clear that the Bush administration sought to convert the Justice Department into a partisan sledgehammer reminiscent of the way Nixon subverted the machinery of the state to pursuing his own petty vendettas. So here's the next question: We know that the administration has the power to wiretap any American it wants. Back during the Nixon administration, the White House used similar powers to spy on political enemies. Has the Bush administration done the same? As of now there's no evidence that they have, but given their record, and the hyper partisan mo that the most recent scandal is illuminating, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

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March 14, 2007

"Tax" Is Not a Four Letter Word

By Christopher Hayes

Down in the Texas state capitol for the day, enjoying both the buzz of activity that comes with the legislature actually being in session (they only have regular sessions for five month, once every two years) and the good ole boy lobbyists stalking the halls, making deals. Just had an interesting interview with a Republican State Senator in which he raised an interesting point. Basically, he was complaining about how the conservative movement had essentially been reduced to one single, inviolable principle: never raise taxes ever. It's crazy he said. "I'm as much against having my taxes raised as anybody, but the the voters don't send us to the capitol just to make sure taxes don't get raised, they send us here to spend their money wisely. And if there's some program that can benefit the residents of the state, then we should fund it."

But instead, Grover Norquist's infamous no-tax pledge has created an untenable situation across the country, one in which state governments are increasingly resorting to gimmicks, tricks and the outright Russian-style auctioning off of state assets in order to fund government. This despite the fact, that, as this Republican legislator pointed out to me, spending on social programs is quite popular. "The notion that these are programs Democrats want and Republicans abhor may have been true thirty years ago, but I feel like there's been a shift. Now, everybody wants the programs, but one group [the Republicans] is unwilling to pay for them, and the other group [the Democrats] is unable to pay for them."

The only way this is going to change is if there's a) an organized lobbying effort on the part of citizens and interest groups to increase taxes b) some bold legislators vote for tax increases and find out that they won't necessarily get ridden out of town by angry voters. But I was amazed that this Republican legislator was so frank about the problem. And googling around I see that Republican presidential front-runners Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have both yet to sign the no new taxes pledge. It does suggest that the "tax revolt" may indeed be coming to a close.

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March 8, 2007

Black Snake Groan

By Christopher Hayes

I saw Hustle and Flow, and while I liked, even admired, parts of the film, I could never get over the fact that the movie seemed to simply refuse to interrogate or grapple with its lead character's misogyny and the problematics of his relationship to the women he pimped. That's not to say I wanted some kind of judgement from the film of the character, or for him to get some comeuppance, but the movie seemed to think we should be rooting for its lead simply because he was a guy with a dream, and I didn't have any interest in doing that.

So, though I haven't seen Black Snake Moan, the new film from Hustle and Flow's writer/director, Dana Stevens' review seems spot on to me:

I guarantee that the words provocative, bold, and courageous will be bandied about in discussions of this movie, and they won't be entirely misplaced. Writer and director Craig Brewer, who made 2005's Hustle and Flow, has a fine sense of locale (here, the Tennessee countryside), a way of coaxing thrilling performances from actors, and terrific taste in music. But can we just start with something very basic here? Chaining someone to your radiator is wrong. Depriving a near-naked and recently assaulted stranger of the most basic physical liberty for days on end is a sick, perverse, and cruel thing to do. Black Snake Moan appears to be--or, worse, pretends to be--oblivious to that simple fact. And that obliviousness makes all of the movie's supposed risk-taking seem more like exploitation

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March 2, 2007