Glenn Beck has a plan.  Actually, the Plan.  Which he reveals on his website.

Today, I have stopped looking for a leader to show us the way out because I have come to realize that the only one who can truly save our country…is us. To change America’s course we need to change ourselves, our expectations and our willingness to accept the unacceptable. When we refuse to allow our children to receive a trophy for participation, we are on the road to restoring the meaning of merit in our Republic. When we insist that no one is too big to fail, we will be able to learn from our mistakes, and when we demand that we are self-reliant, we will ensure that others can rely on us, not the government.

[...]

- Education is key, and not just for our children. To that end, we will be conducting a series of conventions. These will be full-day experiences where you will be immersed in learning about topics ranging from self-reliance, community organizing, the economy and how to be a political force in your own neighborhood and country. The first one will be in Orlando at UCF Arena on March 27th. You will also be able to vote to have a convention in your region by clicking here.

- I have begun meeting with some of the best minds in the country that believe in limited government, maximum freedom and the values of our Founders. I am developing a 100 year plan. I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting, using only the battlefield of ideas.

- All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding.

- On August 28, 2010, I ask you, your family and neighbors to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country.

The Soviets and Chinese Communists were famous for Five Year Plans that Americans used to make fun of.  Beck, apparently, figures that their flaw wasn’t the hubris of planning the next five years but stopping 95 years short.

Apparently, the plan has yet to be hatched.  It’s intriguing to announce a 100 year plan but tell people they’ll need to wait nine months and a week to get the details.

If nothing else, Beck has intrigued NYT correspondent Brian Seltzer and a few bloggers. Seltzer reports that Beck “emphasized that while candidates may align themselves with the values and principles that he espouses, he would not take the next step to endorse them.”

Mr. Beck is not the only media firebrand trying to mobilize Americans disaffected with a Democratic-controlled government. The radio host Laura Ingraham is inviting candidates to sign a 10-point pledge on her Web site. Sean Hannity, on his afternoon radio show and prime-time Fox News program, is promoting “Conservative Victory 2010,” his name for the map on his site that will spell out questions for candidates. And the former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, has steered viewers to his Web site, where they can contribute money to his political action committee in support of conservative candidates.

Pundits have used their media stages to encourage political action before, but people like Mr. Beck and Mr. Hannity are taking on outsize roles now, political experts and conservative commentators say. One reason, they say, is the weakened state of the Republican Party.

Beck’s strangeness aside, the idea of reshaping the American political system from the bottom up is interesting.  But while I rather like the idea of pressuring the Republican Party to get back to its small government roots — even by challenging it with a libertarian oriented third party — there’s precious little evidence that there’s anything close to majority support for that as a style of governance.   Like it or not, the Republicans became a Big Government party in recent years because that’s what the people have demanded.

I still see enthusiastic small government types calling for dismantling the Department of Education and other bits of leftover rhetoric from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.  But I doubt that even twenty percent of Americans are in favor of such a move.

The two parties and their constituent interest groups have done a superb job of poisoning the well.  Republicans have virtually ensured that we’ll never have anything short of a massive defense budget and we’ll never have the sort of confiscatory tax brackets for high earners that they have in Europe and we had here as recently as John Kennedy’s administration.  And Democrats have made it a virtual certainty that we’ll not only not cut back on the social safety net but that it will incrementally increase and periodically boom.   The “compromise” solution is massive deficit spending.

While we occasionally get Ross Perot types calling attention to the unsustainability of that approach, the excitement quickly fades.  While all of us can find big chunks of the budget we’d pare, there’s not enough overlap to get anywhere close to majority support — let alone the sixty votes necessary to get much of anything through the Senate.  And those who would face cuts to their subsidies care more and are better organized than those who want the cuts.

Dave Schuler likes to point out that things which are unsustainable will not be sustained.  But the nature of the American political system guarantees we won’t do anything until an absolute crisis forces us to.

A USA Today report that “Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships” and in fact has done so at “a rate higher than any president in more than four decades” combined with  story in The Hill that lobbyists are being routinely invited to fundraisers has, unsurprisingly, generated quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere.

In my New Atlanticist post “Professional Ambassadors Needed,” I argue that “The real issue here isn’t corruption or even Obama’s hypocrisy” but rather “the fact that presidents have the discretion to appoint pretty much whomever they please to more than 5000 senior positions in the government, that vast number of which would be far better filled with career professionals.”

It makes good sense for presidents to appoint loyalists to key advisory and policymaking positions.  The Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, for example, need to be people the new president trusts implicitly.  Ditto undersecretaries and other senior policymakers and, to a lesser extent, senior positions at NSC, independent policymaking boards, and the like.  There are legitimate partisan and ideological differences in the country and it’s perfectly reasonable that the public policy decision-making apparatus of the Executive Branch be staffed by people who largely agree with the elected president and serve at his pleasure.

Conversely, ambassadors and other working-level positions carry out policy rather than making it.   Professional officers of our foreign, intelligence, and military service (uniformed and civilian, in the case of the latter) can be trusted to faithfully and expertly carry out their orders.

Changing the law on this and drastically cutting back the number of appointed positions (which, practically, would have to be done prospectively, going into effect with Obama’s successor) would greatly improve the efficiency of our government.  Not only would it ensure that these positions are filled by competent professionals rather than enthusiastic amateurs but it would mean that they are filled, period.  We’re nearly a quarter into Obama’s term and a substantial number of these slots remain unfilled.  The process of selecting, vetting, and confirming individuals for such a large number of vacancies is a tremendous drain of resources.

And, yes, I’ve held this view during Republican administrations as well.

Photo credit: Reuters Pictures.

Well, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has said that a third of the counted votes in the Afghanistan election were fraudulent and ordered a run-off between Hamid Karzai and second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah.  Karzai looks unlikely to comply and nobody really wants a run-off, anyway.

So, as I write in my New Atlanticist essay, “Afghanistan Election: Now What?” we’re left with some rather unpleasant alternatives.  If Karzai tells the commission to go to Hell and declares himself the winner, we’re in trouble.  If we have a run-off, we’re likely not going to have this resolved until next winter.

Politico’s Laura Rosen and others have said an arrangement is being worked out to allow Karzai to keep the presidency with Abdullah getting a significant portfolio. And, surely, the denial by both sides that this is happening can not be considered dispositive.

Further, as [WSJ's Gerald Seib] points out, “it’s also possible all this agonizing over the election matters more to outsiders than it does to Afghans. “  Not only is the central government less important in their daily lives that it seems from outside but, frankly, they’re not used to Western style democracy and may be willing to accept a few points of corruption as close enough.  Especially since Karzai’s likely to win a two-way race, anyway.

But the United States and its NATO allies, already facing declining domestic support for the war, needs to have at least the illusion of legitimacy to work with here.  Considering the bad alternatives on the table, a deal between Karzai and Abdullah, with a speech by the latter urging his supporters to back the new coalition government, may be the best outcome.

Bad options seem to be all we have these days.

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions.

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio.

From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plagued anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst, if only fleetingly, onto the national agenda after relentless coverage on Fox News, talk radio and in the blogosphere.

“If it wasn’t for Fox or talk radio, we’d be done as a republic,” Glenn Beck declared Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Beck, who’s aggressively pushed the Van Jones and ACORN stories, told the morning show hosts that he plans to devote his hour-long, top-rated 5 p.m. show to new undercover tapes of ACORN employees.

Last week, Big Government, a site run by conservative Andrew Breitbart, showed videos of undercover stings in three ACORN offices, where journalists posing as pimps and prostitutes were instructed by employees on how to skirt legal restrictions on housing. The tapes got big play on The Drudge Report—where Breitbart has worked—and right-leaning news outlets and commentary shows. But only after the Senate voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN on Monday did the story get more attention in the mainstream media.

ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson seemed caught off guard by the ACORN tapes on Tuesday when he told Chicago radio hosts Don Wade and Roma that he hadn’t heard of them, in a clip flagged by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Gibson added that “maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”

Gibson’s executive producer, Jon Banner, echoes that sentiment: “There’s a tremendous amount of – for lack of a better word – ‘noise’ out there. We’re not in the business of noise.”

And he’s got a point. Heck, I saw a lot of these stories percolating on the blogs and Twitter and didn’t get around to blogging about them until they were pretty developed — if at all.  And I’ve long since stopped trying to cover every major story here, going back to focusing just on topics on which I have something to say.

The problem with Banner’s argument, though, is threefold. First, even in the context of a show that gets 22 minutes to cover all the major news of the day, there’s plenty of fluff.  Usually, a good third of the show is filled with fluffy human interest stories. Second, as Jeffrey Lord notes in a tangentially related piece, there’s a pretty long history of the mainstream media gatekeepers keeping a lid on stories harmful to Democrats while running with rumors harmful to Republicans. (Although, to be fair, there are surely examples of the reverse happening.) Third — and most importantly, perhaps — is that the networks are still operating as if they’re the only game in town.  Given that there is now a reasonably mature alternative media percolating these stories to rather large, if self-selecting, audiences, the judgment as to what constitutes “news” has been democratized.  It’s simply unwise for large media outlets that claim to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print” to ignore big political stories when millions of people are talking about them.

Related to the third, because there are alternative media for the left and right, it’s now incumbent on the mainstream press to investigate the big stories that percolate in those venues to ensure that they’re shared outside of self-selected cliques and to present the story in proper context, not just the cherry picked facts touted by the partisans.  Is there more to Van Jones than youthful sympathy with Communists and having put his weight behind the Truther movement?  Is ACORN corrupt at its core or is it merely mismanaged, with a shoddy business model that invites corruption?  Are the Tea Party protesters racist yahoos marching to the tune of Glenn Beck and Freedom Works, a diverse grass roots movement, or what?  The partisan media generally lack both the resources and incentives to report these things.

Update (Alex Knapp):The Daily Show took a look at this last night, and it was both funny and took the media to task on the story:

Update 2 (Alex Knapp): For the record, it appears that at least one of the ACORN workers “caught” in this video was just playing along because she thought it was funny:

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

“They were clearly playing with me,” she said “I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

[...]

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke’s former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

Heh, yeah. I would say that talking with someone is generally a good indication that they weren’t murdered.

And of course, as always, there’s some question over whether the videos were themselves selectively edited to make ACORN look bad:

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN’s office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the “whole thing was a preposterous production.”

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn’t believe the people wanted to propose such a “ludicrous enterprise,” but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

In the video, the filmmakers claim they would bring underage prostitutes from overseas

Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn’t help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

I have to admit, if I saw two people dressed up in ludicrous costumes asking outrageous questions, I might play along for the fun of it, too, at least just to see where it was going.

Update 3 (Alex Knapp): Whew! After reading a few other stories, it looks like Tresa Kaelke is something of a nutjob. Additionally, and just for clarification, I’m not saying that the ACORN workers in these videos are all playing along or anything like that. Just that they have a side of the story, too. I’m generally inclined towards the more conventional interpretation of the videos (as noted in the Stewart clip above.)

Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house.

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

But lets not be hasty, these brave men in blue are putting their lives on the line after all.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

Well obviously Albert Beebe was going 58 miles per hour in his drive way because why would the police lie. Oh…wait, they aren’t sure where all the traffic fine money went, hmmmm….

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

I’m sure it was totally justified and in line with departmental policies. After all, who knows Payne might have had a pencil or paper clip on him. Those are danerous weapons you know.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

What a shock the prosecutor backs up the cop who discharges his gun at an unarmed person in a crowded room and also wounds a fellow cop in the process. Police professionalism at its highest.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

So lets do a quick recap.

• The police shot an unarmed man from behind when in scuffle with 6 other police officers.
• No charges will be brought against the police officer from the local prosecutor.
• Nobody knows where the money from the various speeding tickets went.
• The police were writing tickets outside their jurisdiction.
• City Hall is shut down.

Anyone doubt that the cops saw this as their own private racket and were using the tickets to line their own pockets? And what is up with the police officers in Jericho? Are they all totally out of shape morons that couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? Six of them are scuffling with one man and they can’t subdue him and the seventh feels he has the justification to shoot the “perp”?

Here is a good example of how being an “LEO” (Law Enforcement Officer for those of you not in the know) means getting treated differently than the rest of us. If one of the non-LEO readers here were to have allegations of sexual assault leveled against him by two separate women he’d likely be arrested. He might get out on bail if he can afford the bail. If you’re a cop, why you don’t get arrested, you don’t lose your job, you get to keep working (admittedly riding a desk), and you have your own buddies in Internal Affairs doing the investigation.

HER BACK PRESSED against the wall, Dagma Rodriguez stood in a dark bedroom as Officer Thomas Tolstoy moved closer. She trembled in fear.

It was just after 5 p.m. on April 3, 2008, during a drug raid on the West Kensington rowhouse where she lived. Tolstoy had ordered her into the room, telling her that he needed to talk, she said.

“He started rubbing my breasts, rubbing my nipples,” said Rodriguez, a 33-year-old mother of three. “I was so scared. My legs wouldn’t stop shaking.”

Rodriguez said she grabbed Tolstoy’s wrists to try to make him stop. He didn’t, she said.

” ‘You’ve got some big t–s. I love these t–s. I bet you’ve got big bras. What size are you?’ ” she said he asked. ” ‘Can I see them? Let me see them.’ ”

“I said, ‘No! No!’ I was so nervous, I started crying. He told me to shut the f— up . . . . He kept rubbing me and I started crying more.”

Rodriguez is one of at least three women, including Lady Gonzalez, of Kensington, who say they were fondled and groped by an officer. Rodriguez and Gonzalez later identified the officer as Tolstoy. Police sources say that Tolstoy is also the focus of an investigation into the third woman’s complaint.

Officer Tolstoy works with officer Jeffrey Cujdik who is also under investigation for another string of incidents involving mom-&-pop stores where the cops would reportedly come into the store, disable the security cameras and then take cash and goods from the store. They were pretty good at it too until they ran into one guy who was into tech stuff and set up his camera system to record at his home and part of the raid was captured.

Neither, Cujdik, Tolstoy nor any of the other officers involved have been arrested. They are being investigated. If these guys weren’t cops they’d have been arrested already.

More on Cujdik and his gang here.

More: Dave Krueger, commenting at Radley Balko’s site, noted that the article refers to the incident as “misconduct”. If one of the non-LEO readers here were to be involved in a similar situation it would be called sexual assault. And note that they’ve shown this thug a thing or two, they took away his gun and put him on a desk (as noted by Michael Chaney, another commenter at Mr. Balko’s site). Both good points, IMO. And here is the real reason Tolstoy is on a desk,

“Until we investigate further, we don’t want him taking police action,” DiLacqua said. “We don’t want to expose the city to other accusations or to any liability or risk.”

Not that he is a threat to the public, but because he might cost Philidelphia’s public coffers more money if they let this guy run around continuing like he has. Government you can believe in.

There’s been a meme circulating the Internets the last couple of days that the 789 Chrysler dealerships that were suddenly closed were (1) hand selected by Barack Obama’s “car czar” and (2) overwhelmingly owned by Republican donors.

Doug Ross, who dubs it “dealergate,” seems to have been the chief initiator of the argument.  He cites a Reuters report that “A lawyer for Chrysler dealers facing closure as part of the automaker’s bankruptcy

reorganization said on Tuesday he believes Chrysler executives do not support a plan to eliminate a quarter of its retail outlets.”  Combine the fact that the closings were forced on the automaker by Team Obama and the fact that 92 percent of those chosen for closing donated to Republicans, and you’ve got a rootin’, tootin’ good conspiracy on your hands.

The same Reuters report, however, contains a statement from Chrysler that “:Our position is that the market can’t support the number of dealers that are out there” and “This has been our plan for more than 10 years to combine Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep under one roof.” Further, Chrysler denies Obama’s task force had any role in deciding which dealerships to close.

But they would say that, wouldn’t they?  After all, Obama and his czar controls their fate.

Megan McArdle interrupted her vacation to not that while her “operating assumption is that this story is a red herring” but that “the administration should answer this; it gives the appearance of Chicago-style corruption that is going to further taint a Chrysler takeover which has already left a number of people in the business and finance community wondering how firm the rule of business law is these days.”

Nate Silver suggests the obvious explanation for the discrepancy:  People who own new car dealerships tend to be Republicans.

It shouldn’t be any surprise, by the way, that car dealers tend to vote — and donate — Republican. They are usually male, they are usually older (you don’t own an auto dealership in your 20s), and they have obvious reasons to be pro-business, pro-tax cut, anti-green energy and anti-labor. Car dealerships need quite a bit of space and will tend to be located in suburban or rural areas. I can’t think of too many other occupations that are more natural fits for the Republican Party.

Using a someone crude but reasonable looking search of the FEC databases, he finds that,

88 percent of the contributions from car dealers went to Republican candidates and just 12 percent to Democratic candidates. By comparison, the list of dealers on Doug Ross’s list (which I haven’t vetted, but I assume is fine) gave 92 percent of their money to Republicans — not really a significant difference.

Steven Taylor adds a more generalized cautionary note that “numbers need context.”  Indeed.

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum chimes in to defend Ross et al.

If George Bush’s administration had gone down this road, I’d want someone to watch them like a hawk too.  The crackpotty writing may be a source of amusement, and I have no doubt that these guys are, as usual, going to embarrass themselves in an Ahab-like quest to prove that Obama really did force Chrysler to target Republican donors — with the lapdog mainstream media covering up for him because, you know, that’s what they do.  But even so, I say dig away.  Even blind squirrels find nuts occasionally, and if the government is going to be running car companies, then this is exactly the kind of thing people should be watching out for.  That’s what opposition parties are for.

Indeed.  Of course, it would be even better if government weren’t running car companies.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin thinks Senator Mark Begich, who narrowly defeated incumbent Ted Stevens last November shortly after the latter was convicted on corruption charges, should step down and agree to a rematch now that the Justice Department has decided to drop the case against Stevens.

Palin’s call came after a reporter at the Fairbanks News Miner emailed her a copy of a statement by Alaska Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich calling for Begich to step down.

Asked for her response, Palin simply wrote back: “I absolutely agree.”

When the reporter wrote back to confirm that Palin meant she’d like to see Begich resign in order to hold a special election, the governor responded: “Yes.”

In an email to POLITICO, Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton confirmed the governor’s position. “She absolutely agrees that there should be a special election,” Stapleton wrote. “Stepping down to hold the special election would be the right thing to do.”

In the statement Palin was provided, Ruedrich said that “the only reason Mark Begich won the election in November is because a few thousand Alaskans thought that Sen. Ted Stevens was guilty of seven felonies.”  “A special election will allow Alaskans to have a real, non-biased, credible process where the most qualified person could win, without the manipulation of the Department of Justice,” he added.

It’s not just the voters who thought Stevens was guilty of seven felonies but an Alaska jury.  The Attorney General dropped the case against Stevens prior to sentencing because of prosecutorial misconduct, not because of evidence exonerating Stevens.

Beyond that, it’s not uncommon for narrow elections to be decided based on dubious knowledge on the part of the voters.  Candidates are often smeared with unfounded charges by their opponents and occasionally even charged with actual crimes for which they are subsequently exonerated.  Them’s unfortunately the breaks.  There are no do-overs.

Needless to say, I agree with Jon Henke that sticking up for Ted Stevens is not a plank I’d like to see the Republican Party run on.

Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped the case against Ted Stevens, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports.

A jury convicted Stevens last fall of seven counts of lying on his Senate disclosure form in order to conceal $250,000 in gifts from an oil industry executive and other friends. Stevens was the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, however, he lost his bid for an eighth full term in office just days after he was convicted. Since then, charges of prosecutorial misconduct have delayed his sentencing and prompted defense motions for a new trial.

According to Justice Department officials, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to drop the case against Stevens rather than continue to defend the conviction in the face of persistent problems stemming from the actions of prosecutors.

The judge in the Stevens case has repeatedly delayed sentencing and criticized trial prosecutors for what he’s called prosecutorial misconduct. At one point, prosecutors were held in contempt. Things got so bad that the Justice Department finally replaced the trial team, including top-ranking officials in the office of public integrity. That’s the department’s section charged with prosecuting public corruption cases.

With more ugly hearings expected, Holder is said to have decided late Tuesday to pull the plug. Stevens’ lawyers are expected to be informed Wednesday morning that the department will dismiss the indictment against the former senator.

I’m pretty sure that, unlike Google’s Gmail Autopilot and Guardian’s going Twitter-only [and Jim Henley's merger with Hot Air], this is not an April Fool’s Day hoax.

Unfortunately, while I have no reasonable doubt that Stevens was guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, I also believe Holder is doing the right thing here.  It’s well past time to reign in federal prosecutors who, in high profile cases, seem willing to use any means necessary to get their man.

Whether we’re talking Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Monicagate, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, William Jefferson, Ted Stevens, or Rod Blagojevich, a team of really smart lawyers armed with extreme confidence that they’ve got a bad guy in their sites, unlimited resources, and operating under the white hot glare of the media spotlight, will figure out how to bring charges. In most, if not all, of those cases, there actually is/was underlying wrongdoing on the part of the accused. But making charges stick is often tricky.

Because we have an adversarial system, lawyers on both sides treat the case as a game, stretching the spirit if not the letter of the law as necessary.  Prosecutors, acting as agents of the state, are supposed to be more cognizant of justice — defense attorneys are supposed to get their guy off even if they’re sure he’s guilty, whereas prosecutors are expected to stop prosecuting if they find they’ve got the wrong guy — but it often doesn’t work out that way.

So, good for Eric Holder for making the hard, right call here.  Let’s hope it sends the right message.

UPDATE: And, yes, as Radley Balko points out, prosecutorial excess is by no means reserved for cases involving the rich and famous.

Dave Schuler laments yesterday’s conviction of a Chicago city official on federal mail fraud charges.  Said official was bewildered, saying, “I just did my job the way I was supposed to do it. I guess it’s a federal crime.”

As Dave notes, the man has a point: “Corruption isn’t a perversion of the system here. It is the system.”

That doesn’t excuse bad behavior, of course, but it does make it rather hard to know where the line is drawn.

Graphic by Flickr user Mike Licht under Creative Commons license.

Timothy Geithner may be our new Treasury Secretary but that doesn’t mean bloggers can’t still make fun of him.

Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing at something called The New Ledger, toasts “The Indispensable Mr. Geithner.”

In urging Geithner’s confirmation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered his entirely nonpartisan opinion that “This powerful economic storm demands strong, decisive and wise leadership,” and that “No one is more qualified or prepared for the task than Tim Geither.” Thus, despite the fact that the Treasury Secretary was ridiculously delinquent in paying over $40,000 in back taxes (plus interest), despite the fact that his delinquency stemmed from his inability to master the supposedly complex machinery of TurboTax and his inability to properly read the rules on self-employment taxes that applied in the two years he worked at the International Monetary Fund–all while collecting IMF reimbursement for the taxes he did not pay–despite all of these mistakes that would have landed an ordinary citizen in hot water with the Internal Revenue Service, Tim Geithner finds himself as the latest successor to Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury.

[...]

Now, a churlish soul (like me, perhaps) might remind you that the TARP program Geithner helped design and whose implementation Geithner urged has turned out to be something of a disaster; its accounting procedures are opaque, its functions are haphazard at best and its original mission has been drastically altered from purchasing toxic assets and taking them off of the balance sheet of financial institutions, to injecting capital into banks in exchange for stock. Oh, and TARP has encouraged appalling amounts of corruption. But never mind all of that. Tim Geithner is indispensable.

Iowahawk, meanwhile, has a satirical “Ask the Tax Guys” column offering “Expert IRS Advice from US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY).”  A sampling:

Dear Tax Guys:

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and when I was going through some old receipt boxes in my filing cabinet I suddenly realized I haven’t paid my income taxes for the past 8 years. Am I in trouble? Please help!

- Forgetful in Fort Worth

Dear Forgetful:

Here at the IRS, we realize that many well-meaning taxpayers like you can be distracted by various family illnesses, baseball pennant races, political campaigns, and so on. The rules for late filing can be surprisingly flexible if you have the right qualifying circumstances. According to IRS guidelines, you are eligible for the 306(b)(19) “I Forgot” amnesty if the following applies:

(1) Your total adjusted gross income in the “I Forgot” years was equal to or greater than $8,528,000; and(2) You are a nominee to head a cabinet-level federal agency.

If you answered “yes” to (2), or both (1) and (2), then you are in the clear. If you answered “yes” to (1) but “no” to (2), mail 10% of the total to the Democratic National Committee and request a cabinet appointment. If you answered “no” to both, then I’m afraid you are shit out of luck. Turn yourself into your local IRS authorities, who will assist you in computing appropriate penalties, interest, and parole terms.

- Tim

Less humorously, CQ’s David Nather notes that the likes of Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, and Charles Grassley voted against Geithner and gets in a subtle dig at Republicans in the process:

It’s also worth reading the words of Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a Republican who is so deeply committed to congressional oversight that he even did it when George W. Bush was president. (It wasn’t exactly the popular thing for Republicans to do when they were in the majority.)

Indeed!

Dave Schuler’s arguments and his responses to my cross-examination questions highlight three critical failings in his argument. These flaws are his preference for inertia over strategic assessment, overweighing ambiguous evidence that marginally supports his case while ignoring compelling evidence that refutes it, and a failure to account for what might be called “conditions on the ground.” I will address each in turn.

First, Dave’s insistence that the burden of proof ought to rest on me may be good debate technique, but it is poor policy analysis. As I argued in an earlier post, the burden of proof for making policy changes should not be determined by arcane rules of procedure, but rather by a fair-minded assessment of the current status of the policy. For instance, though I support gay marriage personally, I am cognizant of the fact that traditional marriage is a pretty successful policy, and that as a result gay marriage proponents bear some burden of proof to show that it will not damage the institution. In the Middle East, the reverse case obtains. America’s Middle East policy is a disaster. It cries out for change, and the burden of proof for the status quo rests firmly in those proponents of the status quo. But instead of debating the rules of the game, why not deal with reality? An argument is only as powerful as its ability to persuade.

Dave: Instead of appealing to imaginary judges applying obscure scoring rules, let’s let the readers decide. At the end of this debate, let’s poll the readers of OTB, who are, on the whole part of the best informed and most thoughtful blog community out there. Let’s ask them who they think won the debate.

Second, my claim about the burden of proof relies upon more than just positioning. Ultimately, I think this procedural debate reflects an underlying dispute about what the evidence of the case is. Dave argues the following:

I won’t deny that my motives are partly altruistic but that’s not the only reason we should want stability in the Middle East. Avoidance of oil price shocks doesn’t just benefit the United States but every country that buys oil whether they’re in South America, Africa, or Asia.

He also says,

From World War II to the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine and increased U. S. engagement with the Middle East, the countries of the region went to war with each other and European countries more than 15 times. The U. S. wasn’t a party to any of these conflicts. When the Carter Doctrine was promulgated Lebanon was engaged in a lengthy civil war, the Soviet were engaged in a war in Afghanistan, Iran had overthrown the Shah, invaded our embassy, and was holding our diplomats hostage, and relations between Iran and Iraq had already deteriorated. This deterioration culminated in the war between the two countries that took more than 800,000 lives. The entire region threatened to descend into chaos. That’s when we became involved.

Since our increased involvement there have been additional wars in the Middle East but their tempo and severity have decreased. Nothing has approached the level of tension evident in 1980 at least until the deterioration of the situation in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 following the U. S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 (don’t look to me to defend the invasion of Iraq—I opposed it).

I believe the evidence speaks clearly: the increased U. S. engagement in the region has overall been a stabilizing force.

In short, Dave believes that the Middle East is more stable now that the U.S. is more involved. He’s wrong. It isn’t. The price of oil is not more stable. And conflict has not particularly diminished.

Let’s talk about oil first. One measure of the volatility of the price of oil is to the take the standard deviation of the monthly price and divide it by the current price. There are other ways to measure how stable prices are, but they will show similar results. Between 1946 and 1972, the average monthly standard deviation in the price of oil as a percentage of the price of oil was 1.69%, demonstrating tremendous price stability. From 1973 to 1989, it was 9.41%. From 1990 to the present it is 11.07%. (spreadsheet available here)

As American involvement in the region has deepened, the price of oil has become progressively more volatile. Since the 1990-91 Gulf War prices are more volatile even than the period that cover the “oil shocks” of the 1970s. The consequences have been smaller because we are better now at hedging against volatility with reserves and future contracts, not because the price has stabilized. More American involvement correlates with increased volatility, not stability.

The same is mirrored in the security realm. Yes, there were over a dozen “wars” in the Middle East between World War II and 1980. Dave’s list includes:

1. 1948 Arab-Israeli War
2. 1956 Suez War
3. 1961-1991 Eritrean War of Independence
4. 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War (Saudi, Egyptian regulars participated)
5. 1967 Six Day War
6. 1967 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
7. 1970 War of Attrition
8. 1970 PLO-Jordanian War (Syrian regulars participated)
9. 1973 Yom Kippur War
10. 1973 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
11. 1975-1990 Lebanon Civil War (Syrian regulars participated)
12. 1976 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
13. 1977 Libya-Egypt War
14. 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War

Several of those were pretty minor. The 1970 War of Attrition including involved no significant conventional ground forces but were instead extended artillery duels and quick, vicious air-combat operations. Three more of these “conflicts” were border spats between Iraq and Kuwait in 1967, 1973, and 1976. The 1970 PLO-Jordan War was not a sign of instability, but rather a counter-terrorism operation by the Jordanians. And in the case of the Iran-Iraq War, we quietly supported Iraq. I had never even heard of the 1977 Libya-Egypt War.

There have also been plenty of conflicts since 1980 – multiple Israeli interventions in Lebanon, insurgencies in Algeria, Egypt, and Yemen. Two Intifadas. The difference is not in the overall level of political violence, but rather in the number of large-scale, organized conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That’s where the perception comes from that the Middle East is now more peaceful.

But let’s be honest here, war has never been quite as endemic as Israeli apologists have tried to make it seem. Yes, there was conflict after decolonization in 1948. But the 1956 “war” was just a British-French-Israeli plot to seize the Suez Canal. True, from 1967 to 1973 was a period of essentially open warfare between Israel and a combination of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. But after 1973, three dynamics operated to quell that conflict. First, Israel essentially made clear its nuclear status. Second, politics in Syria and Egypt gradually transitioned from a post-colonization period of rule by populist demagogues into rule by entrenched elites with dynastic ambitions (and hence low risk tolerance). Third, the United States helped sponsor a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and solidified it with a multi-billion dollar annual aid package. From my perspective, that makes the lack of interstate wars between Israel and its neighbors over-determined. And at this juncture, peace between Israel, Egypt, and Syria is sustained by dynamics that operate independent of American actions.

So, the price of oil is more volatile, not less, and the reduction is warfare is mostly an illusion and can be ascribed to broader trends and developments moreso than to active American diplomacy.

One last point about ambiguous evidence: Sayyid Qutb. Without getting down in the weeds, Qutb was an Egyptian intellectual who helped develop the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt. He did influence al Qaeda in some ways, though the differences are more significant than the similarities from an American perspective. Qutb felt that the Muslim world was mired in poverty, weakness, and humiliation because Muslims had turned their backs on Islam. He further made a revolutionary argument that since Muslim leaders were complicit in this rejection of Islam and mainstream clerics were in the employ of these apostate leaders, it was up to righteous Muslims individually to fight for the creation of a new, pure Islamic state. Qutbism is a problem for Muslim rulers. What al Qaeda did was externalize the argument, saying that while local rulers were indeed a problem, no progress could be achieved without first defeating foreign countries that were supporting those apostate rulers – the “far enemy.”

Dave’s argument, which conflates Qutbism with bin Ladenism is at the root of the misguided nature of American foreign policy. The United States simply cannot be against Islamism as a general principle. If people want to be governed by religious law, it is none of our business. It becomes our business when their quest encourages them to attack American interest. Dave’s claims about Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood make my case, not his. There is a powerful populist movement in the Muslim world that ought to be primarily focused on domestic reform and is instead increasingly focused on anti-American violence because of our meddling. We have essentially transformed local grievances into international terrorism.

Finally, a few words about conditions on the ground. Dave would like more contact between Americans and Middle Easterners, rather than less. Let’s discuss the face of American power. The American presence in the Middle East is ominous and provocative. It is missile strikes and renditions. Our embassies are massive concrete structures, set back from the road, with triple rings of security barriers. Our businesses operate behind barbed wire and are protected by private security. Americans travel in armed convoys and stay in secluded hotels that also feature fortress-like precautions. The Lebanon hostage crises of the 1980s, attacks on tourists since 1992 in Egypt, and the 1998 Embassy bombings have combined to create a distance between Americans and ordinary citizens in many Arab countries. We simply cannot turn the clock back to an idealized day when broad-based, informal contact was the norm. Beyond that, there are just not that many great business opportunities. Throughout the region, corruption is rife, security a challenge, language barriers remain significant. The Middle East is just not going to be a particularly promising area for American involvement in the near future.

Engagement and disengagement are not binary values. My call is not for zero presence, but rather for a diminished visibility of our role in the region. I will provide some additional thoughts in final post, but at this juncture I think it should be clearly that the case for continued involvement – as ably laid out by Dave Schuler – is ultimately seriously flawed on procedural, logical, and empirical grounds.

Monkey Cagers John Sides and Lee Sigelman rank the states on corruption and, as expected, Louisiana is at the top.  Surprisingly, Illinois is a relative piker, coming in 6th place but only 61 percent as much corruptitude:

Matt Yglesias is convinced.   The problems, however, with the rankings are manifold.

The measure being used is “the total number of public corruption convictions from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.”  Only the 35 most populous states are included in the study, which was compiled in something called the Corporate Crime Reporter in October 2007.

Is this really what we mean by “most corrupt”? I don’t think so.   As Claire Suddath notes in TIME’s “Brief History of Illinois Corruption”:

Blagojevich is the sixth Illinois governor to be subjected to arrest or indictment — seventh if you count Joel Aldrich Matteson (governor from 1853-1857), who tried to cash $200,000 of stolen government scrip he “found” in a shoebox.

Surely, governors count for more than low profile local officials?

And why divide by the size of the population?  Every state has precisely one governor, two senators, one secretary of state, etc. regardless of population.   It’s true that large states have more Members of Congress and tend to have more local officials.  But, again, adding them in muddies the waters unnecessarily.

Beyond that, the use of “convictions” as a measure is problematic.  Lewis Grizzard used to joke that it was hard to find 12 people in Louisiana who thought stealing was a crime.  It’s not implausible that states and localities with more political corruption have a higher threshhold of tolerance for bad behavior, excusing minor graft as “just the way it is” and willing to punish only those whose crimes exceed the norm.

Questions regarding the Blagojevich scandal.

President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, refused to take questions from reporters this morning about whether he was the Obama “advisor” named in the criminal complaint against Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The complaint states Blagojevich wanted a promise of a high-level appointment or some other reward for Blagojevich in exchange for Blagojevich naming Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett to replace him in the U.S. Senate.

So much for change you can believe in. Sounds more like the same old song and dance we’ve seen for the last 16 years or so.

A Sun-Times reporter pressed him to comment about whether he was the emissary named in the criminal complaint.

Blagojevch was caught on tape saying that he wanted the Obama advisor in question to know what Blagojevich wanted in exchange for the Jarrett appointment.

Blagojevich said, “He asks me for the fifth CD thing, I want it to be in his head.” Emanuel represents the 5th Congressional District in Illinois.

No one in the Obama campaign or administration has been charged with any wrongdoing. Obama said this morning that none of his staff has had a hand in any dealmaking on his Senate replacement.

Well, looks like this is going to be dogging the Obama Administration for sometime now.

Update: Definitely the same old song and dance.

Barack Obama had begun thinking about his Senate successor even before the presidential election, and dispatched Rahm Emanuel days after the vote to contact aides of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to begin talking up Mr. Obama’s preferred candidates, associates of Mr. Emanuel said this weekend.

[...]

Mr. Emanuel didn’t talk to Mr. Blagojevich directly about the matter, by phone or in person, according to people familiar with the matter. He spoke by phone with aides to the governor, those people say.

Neither Mr. Emanuel nor representatives of the transition team would comment for this article.

[...]

The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday that Mr. Emanuel relayed to Mr. Blagojevich’s team a list of candidates who would be acceptable to the Obama camp, and that these conversations were captured on a tape possessed by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. There is no evidence that this was part of a deal or quid pro quo.

[...]

Now the conversations about the Senate seat may be central to whether Mr. Blagojevich’s legal and political problems will spill over and affect the president-elect before he even takes office. The discussions themselves don’t suggest anything improper, legal experts say. Obama advisers say it was natural for the president-elect to take an interest in his successor.

Politicians strike me as pretty much all the same venal and cowardly.

Update 2: Obama’s My Pet Goat moment.

“I was appalled and disappointed by what we heard in those transcripts,” Barack Obama said Thursday about the documented misconduct of the governor of Illinois. That’s right. He was appalled. And it only took him 48 hours to realize it.

If the U.S. attorney is to be believed, we had Rod Blagojevich talking about auctioning off Obama’s old Senate seat. We had him trying to extort a newspaper. We had him trying to parlay a tollway project into a $500,000 contribution from a highway contractor. We even had him trying to shakedown a children’s hospital.

The reaction from fellow Illinois Democrats was swift and severe. Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn demanded that the governor step aside. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin urged the legislature to call a special election to fill the Senate seat. Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan proposed to ask the Supreme Court to disqualify the governor from carrying out his duties.

But Obama had a “My Pet Goat” moment, freezing up in the face of the shock. “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to comment on the issue at this time,” he said. “It’s a sad day for Illinois.” You’d have thought the Bears had failed to make the playoffs.

In other words, he isn’t the “change agent” that he has set himself up to be. Obama is a shrewd and calculating politician who will do whatever it takes to get power and retain it. The idea that he is different or special is just nonsense.

If that’s so, it doesn’t prove that Obama is just another crooked Chicago pol. But it is a reminder that though he is not of the Democratic machine, he has never been exactly against it. Former congressman and federal judge Abner Mikva said of Blagojevich, “You don’t get through Chicago like Barack Obama did unless you know how to avoid people like that.” Note the verb: not “challenge” but “avoid.” His approach to old-style politics was wary coexistence.

Obama may have avoided the corruption that taints so much of Chicago politics, but it also makes it harder to believe he is the agent of change. After all, a good place to make change would be in Chicago politics. Now perphaps the case can be made that chagning Chicago politics is near impossible. But if that is the case how is it going to be any easier when dealing with nation states, terrorists, as well as Republicans who know have something to try to use against Obama?

And his response to this scandal over his senate seat could have some impact on his Presidency at least for awhile. Instead coming in strong now he’ll have a scandal dogging him making it all that much harder to accomplish whatever it was he wanted to do.

Hmmm….maybe this a good thing. A President who has managed to limit his ability to push his agenda by his own foolishness.

On January 23, 1980 President Jimmy Carter enunciated what became known as the Carter Doctrine. He stated, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To give this commitment meaning, the United States began a military buildup in the region that ultimately led to the creation of Central Command, which now has responsibility for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Carter Doctrine came about during the period of the “Big Red Arrow” Soviet threat. Readers of a certain age will remember seeing scary maps back then. A big red arrow originating in Soviet Central Asia, plunging through Afghanistan and toward Iran. A second red arrow originated in Ethiopia and shot up into South Yemen, aimed at Saudi Arabia. This was the context of the significant increase in American military presence in the Middle East.

This transformation was significant. Traditionally, the United States had been pretty hands off in the Middle East. Though the United States recognized Israel immediately after its founding, Israel received more aid from other countries for a generation. Massive financial aid to Israel and Egypt only began following the Camp David Accord during the Carter Administration. Otherwise, the United States had always been willing to remain at arm’s length from developments.

Nearly 30 years later, by a combination of inertia, mission creep, and ill-considered friendships, the United States now finds itself deeply enmeshed in politics throughout the Middle East and South Asia. It is time to reverse that trend. Fundamentally, we have made a key mistake in our relations with the Middle East — we have overstated the benefits of deep involvement and the costs of disengagement while systematically underestimating the risks associated with playing such a visible role in a politically unstable region. Challenging the Soviet threat was a credible basis for a greater role, the hodge-podge of half-considered issues we face today is not.

I have argued for a the United States to maintain a dramatically smaller “footprint” on the ground in the Middle East while actively seeking to reduce our “fingerprints” on policy developments in the region. The U.S. military is too active and too visible. American Embassies are too large. And in general, our role in region is too overwhelming. Poll after poll shows the same thing — The United States is blamed for many of the misfortunes of the region and is considered an aggressive, hostile, imperialist power. At this point, our active involvement is self-defeating.

If we were to limit our involvement, this would impact three issues directly: Radicalism, Oil, and Israel. Let me discuss each in turn.

The big issue for the United States today is the threat posed by radical and violent Islamist movements. I would argue that in this area we would reap the greatest benefits of a more detached policy. Simply put, during the Cold War we accepted a quid pro quo with “moderate” Arab rulers. In return for consistent anti-Communism we would allow them to scapegoat us for domestic repression largely aimed at Islamist groups. That policy worked all too well as over the past two decades the biggest change in the Islamist movement has been increased focus on the “far enemy” (i.e. the United States) and less on the “near enemy” (i.e. corrupt rulers at home). It was a bad bargain during the Cold War, and is an even worse one today. The United States simply can no longer allow hatred of us to serve a steam valve to reduce pressure on Middle Eastern rulers. If we are going to be closely associated with regimes in the region, we have to insist that they forthrightly and consistently defend that relationship with their own people. No more message segmenting. No more blame shifting.

On the reverse side, some argue that we cannot reduce our presence because that is what our enemies want. In short, they believe that to spite groups like al Qaeda we have to go against our own interests. As a matter of strategy, it is tremendously dangerous to allow your enemies to define your interests for you. If we allow al Qaeda to pick the time and place of our confrontations, we cede to them the initiative and choice of terrain. Just because AQ might consider Iraq or Afghanistan a central front does not mean we have to. Yes, they may indeed claim victory if we do retrench. But we cannot make American policy in response to AQ press releases. Reducing the visibility of the American role will reduce the viability of anti-American movements and do more to undermine groups like al Qaeda than anything else, even if it gives them the theme for a crowing video.

The second issue is oil. The U.S. presence in the Middle East does serve to reduce some of the risks associated with the Western world’s reliances on Middle Eastern oil. It does not lower the cost necessarily, but it may reduce some potential for volatility in supply. But the cost of this risk mitigation is tremendous. We pay for lowering the supply risk with increased risk of terrorist attacks, greater hostility from the Arab population, and the costs of men and materiel associated with military commitments. Are there other ways to reduce those risks? Of course there are. They include investments in alternative energy, oil exporation at home, better fuel efficiency from cars. Certainly those are costly measures in the short-run, but so is deep involvement in a volatile region. In the long-run, the calculus is easy. Energy independence is a strategic imperative.

The third issue is Israel. There are some in the United States who believe it is in America’s interests to play “whack-a-mole” against an ever-shifting set of potential enemies of Israel. Yesterday Iraq, today Iran, tomorrow Syria. Ultimately, though, Israel has nuclear weapons and is unlikely to be attacked by any state actor. Certainly, the United States has an interest — as does the entire international community — in preventing terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons, but pursuing a non-proliferation agenda does not require unilateral commitment to the region. The other part of the Israel issue is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Here, I am more pessimistic than most. As long as the Israeli political system is fractured — there are 18 parties represented in the Knesset and the largest party has fewer than one quarter of the seats — and Palestinian political power is split between Fatah and Hamas and even factions within those movements — it is simply impossible to conceive of a lasting, broadly accepted peace. The more visible the American role in brokering such a broken peace, the more resentful enemies we are likely to see emerge. Israeli land-grabs will become American land-grabs in frustrated Palestinian perceptions. Palestinian corruption and violence become American corruption and violence in the minds of angry Israelis. Genuine peace is a fantasy, and before you can visualize hope, you need to recognize reality.

In short, the benefits we believe accrue from deep engagement are largely illusory, and the costs associated with retrenchment are smaller than most fear.

Image by Flickr user Stewf under Creative Commons license.