Phil Carter, well known to longtime denizens of the blogosphere as the former proprietor of Intel Dump, has suddenly resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy. The NYT buries this news on A20:

The Defense Department official in charge of closing the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has resigned after only seven months in the job, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Phillip Carter, who was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, resigned last Friday because of “personal issues,” a Pentagon official said. Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment and no other reasons were given for his departure.

Mr. Carter, 34, a lawyer and an Army adviser to the Iraqi police in Baquba in 2005 and 2006, was in charge of veterans outreach in President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged that it will not be able to close the prison by Jan. 22, the self-imposed deadline Mr. Obama announced immediately after taking office.

Mr. Carter has also left in the middle of the administration’s efforts to prosecute some of the Guantánamo detainees and find a location in the United States to house perhaps 50 to 100 terrorism suspects indefinitely. The Cuba prison now has 215 detainees.

Phil’s extraordinarily talented, having reached such an exalted position at a very young age through hard work rather than connections.  He is an autodidact expert on terrorism and related matters, having established himself as not only a leading blog authority on the subject but one who was regularly published in Slate, the Washington Post (which later enticed Phil to move his blog to their space) and elsewhere.   One of the best thoughtful critics of the Iraq War, he was called to active duty from the Army Reserves and served there ably and honorably as a captain.

While the timing of Phil’s departure suggests a principled political opposition to Obama policy, the “personal issues” could be real rather than a polite dodge.  Glenn Greenwald has some not unreasonable speculation on the former front.

I have no idea what actually motivated Carter’s abrupt resignation, but here’s what I do know:  so many of the detention and other “War on Terror” policies Obama has explicitly adopted were the very same ones which Carter (as well as Obama) repeatedly railed against during the Bush years, in Carter’s case primarily in blogs he maintained both at The Washington Post and at Slate.  Whatever else is true, the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.

Greenwald spends the next several paragraphs laying out that case in a very convincing manner.

Ironically, given that Phil was a relatively senior appointee in the administration, my position on these issues is closer to the president’s than his.  But this is perhaps the most substantive issue area in which President Obama most sharply differs from Candidate Obama.  From my perspective, this is a classic case of a naive candidate being hit with reality when confronted with the reality of being responsible for America’s national security and I applaud the president for alienating his base rather than doing the wrong thing.  But for a true believer, I could see how the dashing of Hope and lack of Change could be too much to bear.

UPDATE:  Noah Schachtman, a mutual acquaintance and good friend of Phil’s, talked to him on the phone and was told, “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”   Phil says the same in an email to me.   I see no reason to doubt his word.

Laura Rozen thinks it’s odd that Phil hasn’t been more specific.  Maybe he’s operating under the presumption that the details are none of our business.

Glenn Greenwald revisits an old debate, arguing that “Our war-loving Foreign Policy Community hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Building off of Marc Lynch’s blog post yesterday pointing out that General McCrystal’s strategic review calling for more troops in Afghanistan was written by “a dozen smart (mostly) think-tankers,” Greenwald writes,”What would a group of people like that ever recommend other than continued and escalated war?  It’s what they do.  You wind them up and they spout theories to justify war.  That’s the function of America’s Foreign Policy Community.”  He elides the fact that Lynch’s point is not that this represented some grand think tank consensus but rather than the deck was stacked when McChystal chose people predisposed to a COIN-centric approach.

In my New Atlanticist essay, “Foreign Policy Community War-Mongers?” I explore the theme further, arguing that the real problem with the foreign policy Establishment is not its inherent hawkishness but the reluctance of most of its members to weigh in:

The nature of expertise is such that it’s easy to fall into this trap.  First, because our peers are all reading the same things, we do tend to come to a ready agreement on the basic facts, usually leading to a realization that the problem is much more difficult than it’s portrayed by the op-ed columnists and TV talking heads.  But this leads to a sense that “everybody knows this” and therefore a reluctance to be banal.   Second, because things are indeed more complicated than understood by the pundits, there’s a reluctance to weigh in before the facts are known.   But the nature of the debate is such that it has already moved on to another topic by the time all the evidence is in.  So, the handful of experts willing to jump right in without fear are going to dominate the discussion.   Typically, these are the ones employed by ideological think tanks who exist to advance a set agenda.

Much more at the link.

Adam Serwer is incensed because he has “a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists” who are “now struggling to find work” and yet Jenna Bush Hager now has a job on Today despite having only a few years’ teaching experience.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, there’s unlikely to be any outrage on the right over Hager getting a job she’s manifestly unqualified for simply because she’s the former president’s daughter, despite right-wing affectations toward “meritocracy.” There’s something revealing here about the right’s attitude toward those who succeed despite not being privileged — the only way they can make sense of someone like Sonia Sotomayor rising to excellence from modest beginnings is through “preferential treatment,” because what does it say about their own privilege, intelligence, or ability if that’s not the case?

The Sotomayor comparison is a red herring.  While I maintained from the moment her nomination was announced that she was qualified and should be confirmed, it’s indisputable that the desire to diversify the federal bench helped her get appointed to ever-higher positions by presidents Bush 41,  Clinton, and Obama, likely over people they would have judged more outstanding were gender and ethnicity not considerations.  Whether “diversity” is a goal worth pursuing at the sacrifice of other assets we value is a worthwhile but entirely unrelated debate.

There’s no such thing as being “qualified” to go on a morning chit-chat show and yap. It takes technical competence to work behind the camera.  To be successful on air requires being attractive and glib.  So, Hager’s lack of credentials does not faze me.

Of Today lead anchors past and present,  virtually none had broadcast journalism degrees. Indeed, Matt Lauer, who technically left Ohio University a few credits shy of graduating (but was rightly awarded the remaining credits years later for his professional accomplishments) seems to be the only one who majored in that subject.  Of course, Hager isn’t a main anchor, she’s going to be an education reporter.  And, strangely, she actually has a degree in education and some teaching experience.

To be sure, she got the job because of who her daddy is, not because she’s a world-leading authority on her subject matter.  Is that “meritorious”?  Nope.  But Today isn’t a scholarly society, it’s an infotainment program in competition with Good Morning America for viewers.  I guarantee you that Hager has more “merit” in that regard than the J-school grads Serwer knows but the morning news audience does not.

“Merit” is defined in different ways for different lines of work.  For example, professional athletes make millions of dollars despite not having gone to an Ivy League institution.  Indeed, most didn’t graduate college at all!  Ditto supermodels and actors and musicians.

In a perfect world, having a famous last name would not be a huge asset in politics, the media, and the entertainment industry.  In reality, the ability to instantly separate from the herd at the outset of one’s career is a tremendous advantage.  So, of course, are connections and insider knowledge. But even those fields are largely meritocracies down the line, at least if “merit” is defined as the ability to get elected, sell records, or put butts in the seats.

Glenn Greenwald laments the rise of “American royalty.”

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it.  They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.  They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency.  Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.  There’s a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

Some of the examples are more egregious than others.  Murkowski is the most outrageous; plucked out of nowhere to be appointed to fill her father’s vacant seat by her father. Arguably, at least, those elected to public office to follow in the footsteps of famous fathers have to stand the scrutiny, such as it is, of the voters.  And Chris Wallace at least legitimately worked in the news business for years before getting tabbed to host a show.  Jenna Bush and Megan McCain seem to be celebrities solely because of who their dads are.

Liz Cheney is an especially odd case.  She is genuinely well qualified to comment on a variety of issues owing to having served for years in very important public policy posts.  Alas, it’s doubtful whether she’d have been appointed to said posts were her last name Smith or Jones.

I’m also a bit dubious of the inclusion of Goldberg, Kristol, and Carlson on the list.    Carlson and Goldberg had ever-so-modestly famous parents who presumably helped them get a foot in the door.  But it’s doubtful that Carlson got on TV based on who his parents were. Nor is it obvious why being a literary agent is of great help in launching a son as a conservative pundit. Kristol’s father was a giant and certainly helped launch his son’s career but he’s not in the same category of Podhoretz, who essentially inherited his dad’s magazine.

Glenn Greenwald rebuts those who think his strident attacks on Presidents Bush and Obama for abusing their power make his blog “an ideological wind tunnel” and that he is “oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.”

By the design of the Founders, most American political issues are driven by the vicissitudes of political realities, shaped by practicalities and resolved by horse-trading compromises among competing factions.  But not all political questions were to be subject to that process.  Some were intended to be immunized from those influences.  Those were called “principles,” or “rights,” or “guarantees” — and what distinguishes them from garden-variety political disputes is precisely that they were intended to be both absolute and adhered to regardless of what Massing calls ”the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.”

We don’t have to guess what those principles are.  The Founders created documents — principally the Constitution — which had as their purpose enumerating the principles that were to be immunized from such “practical considerations.”  All one has to do in order to understand their venerated status is to understand the core principle of Constitutional guarantees: no acts of Government can conflict with these principles or violate them for any reason. And all you have to do to appreciate their absolute, unyielding essence is to read how they’re written:  The President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  “[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” ”Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”  ”The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.”  ”No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  Even policies which enjoy majoritarian support and ample “practical” justification will be invalid — nullified — if they violate those guarantees.

Much more (of course) at the link.  And he’s right.

The advancement of technology have blurred some lines and simultaneously increased the potential costs to society of strict obedience to the Bill of Rights, and made it much easier for government to abuse its power.  I frequently disagree with Glenn as to precisely where the line ought be drawn on various matters but fundamentally agree with his insistence in the rule of law.  As Barry Goldwater famously put it, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”  Less famously, in the same speech, he observed,

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Many seem to think this notion only applies when their party is out of power.  Greenwald, at least, recognizes that it’s just as true when his own guy is in office.

Responding to understandable public outrage, President Obama is vowing to figure out a way to get back the money AIG paid to the people who ran the company into the ground.

President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of “recklessness and greed” and said he intends to stop it from paying out millions in executive bonuses.”It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession.  “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,” the president said.

Obama spoke out in the wake of reports that surfaced over the weekend saying that financially strapped American International Group Inc. was paying substantial bonuses to executives.

Noting that AIG has “received substantial sums” of federal aid from the federal government, Obama said he has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

The public is right to be mad at the bonuses and Obama is right to want to recoup the money.  It’s indeed hard to fathom how a company that’s taking millions in bailout money from the taxpayer can in turn transfer some of that money to reward the people who caused the problem in the first place.

Glenn Greenwald who, as noted previously, is outraged that the administration didn’t head this off before it happened, argues rather persuasively that AIG’s chief defense — that they were contractually obligated to pay these bonuses and had no choice — is bunk.  He points out, for example, that the administration insisted that UAW workers tear up their contracts as a precondition for bailing out Chrysler and GM.

As any lawyer knows, there are few things more common – or easier — than finding legal arguments that call into question the meaning and validity of contracts. Every day, commercial courts are filled with litigations between parties to seemingly clear-cut agreements.  Particularly in circumstances as extreme as these, there are a litany of arguments and legal strategies that any lawyer would immediately recognize to bestow AIG with leverage either to be able to avoid these sleazy payments or force substantial concessions.

I think that’s right.  To be sure, the AIG and UAW cases are different, in that the UAW was a second party to the bailout and the terms of the Big 3’s labor agreements were considered by many to be a major contributing factor to the pickle they were in.  But, surely, the AIW bailout negotiations could have stipulated that certain contractual obligations be renegotiated as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars.

Lawrence Cunningham, a GW lawprof and “leading authority on law and accounting, particularly in corporate governance and securities regulation” provides a whole list of plausible legal loopholes off the top of his (expertly trained) head.

Megan McArdle, an MBA rather than an attorney, tackles a different question entirely:  Is it good public policy to kill said bonuses?

But the AIG retention bonuses raise a question the government is going to have to ask again and again before all this is over:  do we want to make a point, or do we want to make money?

[...]

Why not just say “no bonuses for anyone at AIG”?  To hell with the bums!  Well, we now own the company.  If we hasten the flight of quality employees out of the company, that will cost us money.  The answer might be some kind of performance bond.  But as in other financial firms, traders often take as bonus what should be salary, which means that they need at least part of their bonuses to maintain their lifestyle.  If they’re faced with bankruptcy, the traders who are talented will go elsewhere–the financial market is shrinking, but the top traders still have other opportunities.  AIG has a lot of positions to unwind.  Do we want to leave the job to the dregs of the organization?

A tricky issue, indeed.  One could be flip and note that, since the division in question screwed the pooch so impressively, that it must have been entirely comprised of said dregs.  But, alas, that’s likely not true. As Megan notes, we have no way to know from the outside who the good people and the bad people are.

That said, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary earned $6 million in bonus money last year.

Jules Crittenden is shocked that lefty firebrands Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald have continued ranting and raving about injustice now that their guy is in charge over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One possible explanation for this is that, rather than having simply been partisan hacks fomenting faux outrage at the Bush Administration, they’re intellectually honest ideologues who are genuinely motivated by principle and actually outraged when their government violates said principles.

Having come of political age during the dying days of the Carter administration and then twelve years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, I was a strong believer in the existence of Liberal Media Bias.  Then came the Clinton administration.  Suddenly, those liberal pinkoes in the press, like Sam Donaldson, were giving Clinton a hard time.   After a few years of that, I had to conclude that maybe — just maybe — most of the elite press were actually trying to hold politician’s feet to the fire rather than simply carrying water for the Democrats.

To be sure, I still think the elite media outlets are overwhelmingly comprised of liberals with sympathies for the Democratic Party and that they bring certain biases to the table and filter the news accordingly.  But that’s a different thing than being overt hacks.

Similarly, the blogosphere came of age during the George W. Bush years.  The medium as we know it started gaining steam after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and really took off during the early days of the Iraq War from 2003-2004.

We naturally judge the more heated partisans of the other side poorly, presuming that they’re either venal or crazy.   The more animated blogs were easily dismissed as either suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome or as Rovian Robots carrying out marching orders from BushCo.

Probably, that was true in many instances.  But we’ll see over the next few months and years which bloggers are intellectually honest.  Are they praising Obama, or at least excusing him, for conduct that they thought Bush should have gone to jail for engaging in?   Alternatively, are they excoriating Obama for things they praised or excused Bush for?   We’ll soon see.

Photo by Flickr user cdresz under Creative Commons license.

Meet the new boss — same as the old boss:

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees, and he has broken with that administration on questions like whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a government lawyer, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.

This will, I wager, not be the last time that the change in administration has no bearing.  Being responsible for national security is rather different from commenting on it from the outside and entering office tends to make presidents conform to their new role.

Others are more surprised.   Even some Obama supporters are letting him have it.

Glenn Greenwald titles his long post on the matter “Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully.”

What makes this particularly appalling and inexcusable is that Senate Democrats had long  vehemently opposed the use of the “state secrets” privilege in exactly the way that the Bush administration used it in this case, even sponsoring legislation to limits its use and scope.  Yet here is Obama, the very first chance he gets, invoking exactly this doctrine in its most expansive and abusive form to prevent torture victims even from having their day in court, on the ground that national security will be jeopardized if courts examine the Bush administration’s rendition and torture programs — even though (a) the rendition and torture programs have been written about extensively in the public record; (b) numerous other countries have investigated exactly these allegations; and (c) other countries have provided judicial forums in which these same victims could obtain relief.

Kevin Drum: “So Obama is adopting the same expansive interpretation of the privilege as the Bush/Cheney administration, and using it in order to cover up American involvement in torture and rendition programs that have been in the public record already for years and can hardly even be said to be secrets, let alone state secrets that are vital to U.S. national security. This is decidedly not change we can believe in.”

Armando Llorens (Big Tent Democrat): “Holder and the Obama Administration are BSing us on this issue. Unlike some, I believe that there are appropriate situations for application and invocation of the state secrets privilege. I think it serves an important function. The Jeppesen case is about as far a case as one could imagine where the invocation of the state secrets privilege can possibly be deemed appropriate.”

Andrew Sullivan:  “This is a depressing sign that the Obama administration will protect the Bush-Cheney torture regime from the light of day. And with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in them.”

Thoreau: “The machine is on autopilot, and nobody who wears that Ring is going to toss it into the volcano.”

Cernig: “Thus, the Obama administration collectively become accessories to the Bush administration’s crimes. In my opinion, any cabinet member who had an ounce of spine and an ounce of belief in the rule of law for all would resign over this travesty of justice. Watch for an utter lack of that.”

Ron Chusid calls this a  “disappointing move” but argues “While I disagree with what appears to be a general policy from Obama to avoid prosecution based upon the crimes of the Bush administration, this still does not place Obama on the level of those in the Bush administration which actually committed these acts. We can be disappointed in this decision by the Obama administration to hinder prosecution for past acts while still applauding their decision to refrain from such actions in the future.”

Daren Hutchinson points out that, “If the Obama administration wished to drop the policy in this particular case, it would have done so prior to today’s oral arguments. Most lawyers, however, do not shift positions in order to lose a case. Furthermore, the privilege can help secure victories in future cases; accordingly, DOJ will continue asserting it.”  He adds, “The DOJ’s position is less about creating a wall of governmental secrecy; instead, it represents a powerful litigation strategy. Although acceptance of the privilege by courts results in the dismissal of anti-torture litigation, very few lawyers would forgo such a powerful strategic device.”

That strikes me as exactly right.  Obama’s president now.  He has ostensibly discontinued the policy of “extraordinary rendition,” the extent of which we will likely never know.  But he’s neither going to compromise national security secrets nor give away potentially useful presidential powers now that he’s in the White House.  I’m surprised anyone’s surprised by that.

Glenn Greenwald notes that Joe Klein has changed his mind in the last five-and-a-half years about President Bush’s now infamous flight suit gambit.

• Now:  “The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.”

• Then: “[T]hat was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day.”

Says Glenn,

People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged.  But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media — our leading media stars — played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can’t be re-written or forgotten. Truly learning from one’s mistakes — as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandoment of  previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power — requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one’s own role in what happened.

But Klein’s role in Bush donning a flight suit and congratulating the crew of the Lincoln was . . . to watch it happen and give his instant impressions.

At the time, the publicity stunt was almost universally perceived as brilliant political theater.  We had, with the loss of fewer than 200 American troops and in record time, toppled the government of Saddam Hussein and were met by cheers.  Bush’s approval ratings were in the 90s.  Over time, the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner began to seem like a cruel joke, as the mission morphed from regime change to counterinsurgency and stabilization of Iraq.  That mission is still not accomplished all this time later and it has cost an enormous amount of treasure and more blood than anticipated.

Although the war has largely faded from the national consciousness, with some even calling the current stalemate “victory,” Bush’s presidency is almost universally thought a failure.  Even moments of triumph are, through that lens, viewed cynically. Of course, every move Bush ever made was horrendous, all his appointments incompetent buffoons, everything that went wrong his fault, and everything that went right sheer happenstance.  That’s just the nature of the presidency.

None of it, in any event, is Joe Klein’s doing.

Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs.

So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of individual bloggers with relatively no overhead and free content will surely undermine the clout of such magazines over time.

It may be that the blogosphere will kill off opinion journalism as we have known it. In so far as that might mean less groupthink, less control by a few big money machers, and lower barriers to new talent and expertise, that strikes me as pretty good news overall. Or maybe the print magazines will hang on as appendages to the online debate, as a way of milking those email addresses for money and offering a luxury product that will still be worth it.

The main advantage magazines have over blogs, it seems to me, is institutional gravitas.  Television and radio bookers, publishing houses, opinion columnists, mainstream journalists, and other influence leaders are far, far more likely to turn to someone with the imprimatur of an institution that to a self-published blogger.

There are exceptions, of course.  Markos Moulitsas, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and others have managed to become regular talking heads almost exclusively through their blog-gained fame and at least three of them got book deals, too.   I can’t off the top of my head think of a conservative counterpoint, though — maybe Glenn Reynolds?

Ultimately, it’s television that matters if you’re trying to get the word out.  Bill Kristol, George Will, Bob Novak, and others have had much more impact with their on air commentary than for their written work.  Indeed, most viewers are only casually aware that these people have columns at all.

Influence, not pageviews, is the ultimate goal.

Glenn Greenwald, reacting to reports that Barack Obama has told Harry Reid that Joe Lieberman should not be stripped of his committee chairmanship and thus making it very difficult for him to do so, has written a long and passionate plea for a return to vigorous separation of powers with strong institutional jealousies.

[W]hatever the outcome here is, it’s vital that it be the Senate’s decision, not Barack Obama’s.  How the Senate organizes itself and which members chair its Committees is about as purely within the legislative domain as it gets.  It makes sense that Senate Democrats want to cooperate with Obama and that they have good feelings towards him in light of his election victory.  Still, if the Senate has any sense of its own institutional integrity and any intention to defend its constitutionally assigned prerogatives, the last thing Senators would be doing is allowing Obama to interfere with, let alone dictate to them, how they proceed in deciding what to do about Lieberman.  If they don’t jealously safeguard that arena from executive intrusion, what do they safeguard?

[...]

That is what “separation of powers” means, and it’s at least as vital — probably more so — for it to be honored when the same party controls the White House and both houses of Congress.  What fueled the abuses of the last eight years as much as anything else was the ongoing (and severely accelerated) abdication of power by Congress to a bordering-on-omnipotent presidency.  It’s critically important that an Obama administration reverse the substantive transgressions of the Bush era — closing Guantanamo, ending torture and rendition, restoring habeas corpus, rejuvenating surveillance oversight, withdrawing from Iraq, applying the rule of law to political leaders past and present — but it’s at least as important that this be accomplished in the right way, that our constitutional framework be restored.  That means restricting the President’s role to what the Constitution prescribes and having Congress fulfill its assigned duties and perform its core functions.

This is anything but an abstract concern.  Central to the design of the republic is the power of the citizenry to remove all members of the House and 1/3 of the Senate every two years.  That’s the central mechanism by which the people, through their representatives in Congress, keep the Government responsive.  But none of that matters — it’s all just illusory — if Congress has no real power and exists as little more than a passive and obedient vassal of the President.  We shouldn’t want that arrangement even if, at a given moment, we are lucky enough to have a magnanimous President who makes good decisions and wants to do good things with his centralized, unchecked and imbalanced power.

Greenwald makes clear that he’s not blaming Obama for the advent of the imperial presidency, merely calling on the Congress to push back.

While I think he overstates things a bit, he’s right on the principles here. Indeed, I’ve made similar calls over the years, including calling on a Republican Congress to carry out its oversight duties much more vigorously against a Republican president.

As a practical matter, political parties create a cross-branch bridge that simultaneously makes it easier to govern and yet weakens the individual character of the institutions.   Reid’s free to do whatever he wants within the limits of his considerable power, as will be Obama.  Yet, while Reid theoretically answers only to his delegation in the Senate and the people of Nevada, Obama is the effective head of his party.

Since at least Franklin Roosevelt, presidents have taken on many roles clearly delegated to the Congress in the Constitution.  They submit budgets, propose legislation, and otherwise have significant a priori sway over the workings of Congress rather than serving in the reactive role — sign or veto — envisioned by the Framers.

More significantly still, the expansion of government is not so much a function of the passage of more laws but rather the creation of permanent regulatory bureaucracies.  These institutions carry out virtually all of the Enumerated Powers:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;

All but a handful of these things are run by federal agencies and bureaus through the quasi-legislative processes of rule making and regulation rather than by Acts of Congress. The president and his designated representatives run these bureaucracies on a day-to-day basis with Congress acting only in reactive mode — if at all — through the oversight process.  In other words, we’ve stood the Constitution on its head.

While I agree with Glenn that Paul Begala’s statement “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool” is antithetical to the way our government is supposed to operate, it’s actually a pretty apt description of how it has come to operate.

Furthermore, while Congress can and should do more to reclaim its prerogatives, the only practical way for them to shift the balance of power very far back in their direction — there’s simply no question but that the Framers intended the legislature to be the dominant branch, schoolboy lessons about co-equality notwithstanding — is to radically decrease the number of federal bureaucratic agencies and the scope of their power. We’ve seen very little of that with any Republican president going back at least to Richard Nixon — and the GOP is supposed to be the small government party. I have zero hope that we’ll see it happen under a Democratic president with commanding Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress.

Documents released today by the government offer some strong circumstantial evidence linking Army scientist Bruce Ivins to the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

Army scientist Bruce Ivins had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with “certain genetic mutations identical” to the poison that killed five people and rattled the nation in 2001, according to documents unsealed Wednesday in the government’s investigation. Investigators also reported tracing the type of envelopes used to send deadly spores through the mails to the lab where Ivins worked.

The scientist, depicted in the newly released papers as deeply troubled, committed suicide last week as investigators were preparing to charge him with murder in the attacks.

The documents were released as the FBI held a private briefing for families of the victims of the episode, and officials said the agency was preparing to close the case.  More than 200 pages of documents were made public by the FBI, virtually all of them describing the government’s attempts to link Ivins to crimes that his lawyer has said he did not commit.  Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer, who attended a briefing for congressional staff, said FBI agents had told the group there was no evidence that anyone else was involved.

According to one affidavit made public, Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators “an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of” the attacks and sought to frame an unnamed co-worker.  He was also said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

I’ve paid only scant attention to the case since reports of Ivins’ suicide Friday.  There’s been quite a bit of conspiracy theorizing on this, especially on the Lefty blogs, notably Glenn Greenwald’s.  My guess is that these documents — or, perhaps, any evidence — won’t dispel that talk.   Given how little lay readers, myself certainly included, understand the science and forensics involved here, the topic virtually defies intelligent public discussion.

This 2003 photo provided by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases shows Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a bio-defense researcher at Fort Detrick, Md., participating in an awards ceremony. Ivins, the scientist who was developing a vaccine to combat anthrax, died Tuesday July 29, 2008, in an apparent suicide in a hospital in Frederick, Md. U.S. prosecutors investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks were planning to indict and seek the death penalty for Ivins in connection with mailings of the deadly anthrax toxin that killed five people.

(AP Photo/U.S.Army)

Alan Jacobs: “Nothing could better justify Ross’s decision to start moderating comments on his blog than the comments on the announcement itself.”

For those who don’t click links, Ross Douthat has announced that, “From now on, one of the Atlantic’s crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that run afoul of our comments section’s terms of service” and that, furthermore, “I’ve instructed him to err on the side of deletion if he’s uncertain about whether a comment crosses the line.”  Apparently, said intern has quit, misunderstood the instructions, or lives in a different time zone.

Lacking an intern, I’m rather sporadic and inconsistent in enforcement of OTB’s site policies.  I do, however, heartily support the idea of enforcing some modicum of civility in discussion threads.  For popular blogs or highly trafficked posts, however, it’s almost an effort in futility. This diagram, credited to the “New York Times via Ed Philp,” is about right:

This is a subject we’ve discussed before.  Many times.  Oddly, it seems to be a particularly popular topic in July:

• Comments on Blogs (July 6, 2004)
• Blog Comments II (July 7, 2004)
• Comments on Blogs: Left vs. Right (February 1, 2005)
• Washington Post Blog Shuts Off Comments (January 20, 2006)
• Glenn Greenwald’s IP Address Stolen (July 20, 2006)
• Bloggers and Real Life (July 29, 2006)
• Commenting Quality on Blogs (February 11, 2007)
• Blog Polarization and Self-Segregation (July 1, 2008)

Yesterday’s announcement that Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb is taking a leave of absence “to serve as deputy communications director of the McCain campaign” has been greeted with surprising interest from bloggers across the political spectrum. Just sampling those in my RSS reader:

• Radley Balko points out that “Goldfarb has written (falsely, by any reasonable reading of the Constitution, Federalist Papers, or diaries of the Constitutional Convention) that the founders believed the president should have “near dictatorial” powers when it comes to war and foreign policy.”

• Matt Yglesias: “Some folks take comfort in the fact that up until 1998-99 or so McCain had reasonably reasonable views about foreign policy, but he’s been way out in crazy-land for years now and all indications are that his administration will be staffed by neocons too fanatical or dim-witted to have served in the Bush administration and been discredited.”

• Andrew Sullivan: “Uh-oh.” (I’d say “Read the whole thing” but, alas, you just did.)

• Glenn Greenwald cites some Goldfarb posts he disagrees with and adds, “Does one even need to point out that there are few things more incompatible with one another than “straight talk” and The Weekly Standard?”

• Steve Benen mentions without comment in a “Campaign Roundup.”

• Ditto Laura Rosen.

• John Schwenkler, new at PoMoCo, has a long rant about how this proves McCain=Bush and closes, “[The thought that] Mr. Goldfarb might resurface in the more appropriately water-carrying role of Press Secretary to a (shudder) President McCain ought to be enough to turn one’s vote elsewhere.”

I’m afraid I don’t get it. I’m only vaguely familiar with Goldfarb’s work as a blogger but he’s apparently been in the writing business for quite some time, including a stint at Time.com more than a decade ago. One presumes he’s qualified to write press releases and carry out other duties associated with the job which, as described by Bill Kristol in the announcement post, is pretty low-vis: “He’ll be focusing on their online activities.”

Kristol joked (one presumes he wasn’t serious) about Goldfarb being National Security Advisor to a President McCain but Schwenkler’s right: something in the communications shop is more likely. But so what? Ronald Reagan employed Pat Buchanan as his Communications Director, after all.

George Allen hired Jon Henke in a similar capacity, as did Mitch McConnell. I don’t recall either of them making a sudden shift to neo-libertarianism. That’s just not the nature of these gigs.

Presidents and presidential candidates hire all manner of people to serve in all manner of roles. They’re not interchangeable. Goldfarb is supremely unqualified to serve in a foreign policy role, let alone as Attorney General. His opinions on the scope of presidential power are therefore irrelevant.

McCain’s foreign policy is too neo-con and “national greatness” for my tastes. Bill Kristol has been one of his biggest boosters for years, which would seem to trump the Goldfarb association in terms of meaning. But we know where he stands based on his decades in office and his two runs for the presidency.

UPDATE: For more discussion, see “McCain’s Weekly Standard Posse.”

Tim F. offers the “Deep thought of the day” that “any honest discussion of race will inevitably reveal that some people are honestly racist morons.”

The corollary, of course, is that there will be widespread disagreement on whose these people are.

For every Glenn Greenwald reader who thinks the description aptly fits Glenn Reynolds, there will be a Glenn Reynolds reader who thinks it fits Glenn Greenwald. Both groups, incidentally, will be mistaken.