New England springs to life

The New Neo Posted on by

New England is known for its glorious autumns.

But spring’s no slouch either, as I was reminded once again yesterday (as though I needed reminding) on a brief visit to Boston. The trees were in full bloom: magnolias, cherries and apples, and the feathery dogwoods that look from afar like gossamer clouds. The bulbs, too—taxi-yellow daffodils, and tulips in a riot of colors.

But the most beautiful sight of all was the drive I took down Cambridge’s Brattle Street, dwelling-place of some of Harvard’s most illustrious profs, and other movers and shakers of the Cambridge world. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used to be one of them; you can still visit his home there.

But that’s hardly the only grand mansion; Brattle street is filled with them—all different from each other, and nearly all displaying gardens with a spring beauty that seems almost paradisiacal.

Most unfortunately, I had no camera with me. Yeah, I know; mea culpa. So these stock photos of Boston in spring (courtesy of the Boston Globe, and minus the beautiful homes) will have to do.

springboston.jpg

springboston2.jpg

springboston32.jpg

All those Maydays

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féªte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. Who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. It seems that Putin is nostalgic for those good old days, since apparently the quaint custom is being revived.

Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I went to see the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

And so it was that I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Obama and Churchill and torture: let’s use a little logic

The New Neo Posted on by

Several have pointed out that Obama’s use in last night’s press conference of an anti-torture quote by Winston Churchill is highly suspect, in that there’s a great deal of evidence that the British did exactly that—used torture—during World War II. Not to mention the fact that Churchill was a great one for “reciprocity”—for example, bombing German civilians because the Germans had done the same to the British.

No doubt Obama will call for an investigation, ex-post facto.

But I’m more interested in finding the source of the Churchill quote. I wonder what was the exact context, and what Churchill’s definition of “torture” might have been, because there is little doubt in my mind that waterboarding would not have fallen under it, any more than it did for the Bush administration. Come to think of it, Bush himself would have been quite confident he was telling the truth if he’d made the same assertion: “We don’t torture.”

Here’s Obama’s full statement on the subject:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British ”” all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood ”” you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s ”” what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

I’ve done quite a bit of Googling to find what article it might have been that Obama was reading “the other day” about this, and could find nothing. Obama himself was not helpful enough to say who might have written it or where it appeared. I could find no independent source for the Churchill quote, and no description of who these “200 detainees” might have been.

But I very much doubt that those detainees were illegal enemy combatants and/or terrorists such as the waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who were rightly suspected to hold information about future peacetime attacks on innocent civilians. And although in Churchill’s time London was indeed being bombed pretty much round the clock, it’s not as though the 200 detainees would have held information that could have prevented future bombings.

So what would the point of torture have been in such cases, anyway? And I highly suspect that when he said “We don’t torture,” Churchill had in mind some of the more classic and extreme examples of the genre.

Remember, the “torture memos” themselves allowed nothing worse than waterboarding, and even that was permitted only in very limited situations. This is the relevant passage:

The ”˜waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques, is subject to additional limits,” explained the May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo. “It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the CIA has ”˜credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ”˜substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack’; and ”˜[o]ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.’”

Unless Churchill was speaking of waterboarding (highly unlikely), and unless at least one of the 200 detainees in question fit the criteria above (highly unlikely as well), whatever Churchill said about torture is irrelevant to the present situation.

And Obama should (and perhaps does) know that. But, like Humpty Dumpty, that doesn’t stop him from using the Churchill quote however he sees fit.

The specter of Specter haunts the Republican Party

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to start out by saying something that will shock a few people, I suppose: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican Party.

Not only that, but I doubt I ever will be. I doubt I will join any political party again, although I was a card-carrying Democrat for many years. I consider myself an Independent.

So perhaps I’m not the best person to be analyzing what Arlen Specter’s defection means for Republicans. Then again, perhaps I’m more objective than those more ideologically driven.

One thing that’s for certain: Specter’s “ratting” (as Churchill and the Brits would call it) was the most practical sort of decision: Arlen Specter did what was best for Arlen Specter. In doing so, he probably acted no worse than so many other self-centered narcissistic politicians (I know; that’s somewhat redundant)—and at least he’s honest about his non-principled motivations.

Specter had already been angering the vast majority of his fellow Republicans for years, and his support of the stimulus bill was the last straw. With “friends” like this, the Congressional Republicans must have thought, who needs enemies? In what way, exactly, could Specter be considered a Republican any more? And, looking at his record, I don’t see how.

And so it became clear that Specter would be challenged in the primaries by his own party, and would go down despite the fact that he is popular enough state-wide to win re-election. If Specter thought the best thing for Pennsylvania (and himself) would be another term of Specter in the Senate, then his path was clear: he had to become a Democrat or face defeat.

Just what do the Republicans lose by his move? The commentary in the press and blogs indicate that it’s the magical 40 votes that could have stopped some of the ultra-liberal Obama agenda. But was Specter ever one of those votes? I’m not familiar with his entire voting record, but I don’t see any indication that he was.

Yes, if he is now caucusing with the Democrats, the pressure will be on for him to become even more aligned with them. But wasn’t he already aligned with them on nearly every vote that mattered?

I’m more interested in the general question of how big a tent the Republican Party should be, and what it actually stands for. As I’ve written before, no party in America can win without playing to the middle. Those who are looking for ideological purity (such as Jim Demint, for example, who said “”I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs”) may find themselves left with just that: purity and unity of mind in a powerless party.

But if you forsake all principles, what’s the point of power, anyway? If Republicans turn into Democrats Lite, why bother to run for office? That makes sense, too—at least, to those who are motivated by some sort of coherent ideology rather than the self-serving need to have the perks of Senate membership.

One of the problems for Republicans and conservatives is that the middle in the US has shifted to the Left in recent years—or has it? Polls are confusing, but this one, published only a few months before the 2008 election, seems to belie the leftward trend the country has taken since:

Overall, Americans are against the core principle behind Barack Obama’s domestic economic policy – income redistribution – by an astounding 84% to 13%. Republicans oppose it 90%-9%, Independents oppose it 85% to 13%, and even Democrats oppose it 77% to 19%…

A separate question finds Americans more likely to believe government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (50%) as opposed to saying government should do more to solve the country’s problems (43%). This broad question is not directed specifically at the economy, but reinforces the general idea that many Americans are leery of too much direct government intervention in fixing the country’s problems.

So how is it that a Congress and an administration dedicated to doing just those things is gaining power and influence rather than losing it? Some of it no doubt is the fear engendered by the economic crisis, which occurred some months after the poll. But the idea remains that many Americans would vote for “true conservatives” and “real Republicans” if we only had some principled and personable ones around who could clearly articulate the message.

And perhaps it’s even true that this would work. Ronald Reagan was all those things, and he brought many people under the Republican tent and kept them there for a long time.

But short of an unlikely Reagan reincarnation, Republicans seem to be condemned to wander in the desert for a while. Americans don’t seem to be hearing what they have to say right now, and I don’t think it’s just due to lack of charisma. Nor do I think the Specter defection is all that meaningful: he was honestly no Republican at all, not even a moderate one.

What is most important for the Republican Party is to decide what its core message will be, and how to show the American people they mean business about it. The majority of voters may remain amenable to this message if it resonates with conviction as it did when Reagan stated it [emphasis mine]:

We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only “litmus test” of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty. As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.

The principles I highlighted in bold are the ones that draw me to vote Republican. Just as Reagan says, they are the ideological and policy issues the party ought to articulate and emphasize if it wants the best hope of implementing any of its agenda—and of blocking the ultra-liberal one currently in ascendence.

[NOTE: It is interesting that the Reagan quote was offered in an op-ed in today’s NY Times by Olympia Snowe, RINO of Maine. Republicans must decide where to draw the line, and it’s not always easy. Snowe, for example, voted for Obama’s stimulus bill (as, of course, did Specter)—hardly an example of the restraint of government spending that Reagan mentioned and that she quotes in the Times.

But Maine may now be such a blue state that targeting the very popular Snowe in a primary, as Republicans did Specter, is probably not the answer. Therein lies the dilemma. In the 2008 Presidential race, Obama took Pennsylvania 55% to 44%, but in Maine the margin of victory was a whopping 58% to 41%. And that was in an election in which Snowe nevertheless won by a 61 to 38 margin, a bona fide landslide.

This is the sobering reality of what Republicans face today—although that doesn’t mean the situation will be the same in 2010; there are always black swans and wild cards.

But they can’t be counted on to happen, or to help Republicans if they do. Meanwhile, Republicans must be realistic and focused if they wish things to improve. That means deciding what principles are truly important to them, and then framing them in a coherent and appealing manner.]

Neoneocon’s handy guide to investing for the mature set

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a SmartMoney piece on how financial planning for one’s retirement years isn’t the science it was once cracked up to be.

Well, surprise surprise—not! Even I, no financial wizard, could have told you that. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t fall prey to the planner’s charms. And that makes sense, too I suppose: one has to make decisions in an unpredictable world, and it’s reassuring to think that someone is an expert in knowing the unknowable.

My financial history until recently had always been quite simple (in every sense of the word): defer to the advice and counsel of others. My own instincts were to be low-risk: if I’d had my way, none of my money would ever have been invested in the stock market, but in much more conservative holdings instead.

This notion of mine hardly even qualified for the dignity of the term “investment philosophy;” it was more a kneejerk reflection of the monetary habits of my extremely frugal and Depression-raised mother, who had always refused to touch anything connected with the stock market.

I was married for most of my adult life, however, and part of a pooled pair. As such, I decided to let my husband handle the investments. That suited both of us quite well, since he seemed to be more motivated, interested, and knowledgeable about those things. That he was also less risk-aversive didn’t bother me, because during the many years we were married we rode the stock market up and down but mostly up. His decisions had made more money for us than mine would have. I never once thought “oh, if only I’d been investing the money, how much better off we’d have been!”

By the time we got divorced a couple of years ago, there was a certain modest but not insubstantial sum that was now officially Mine rather than Ours, and for which I had to make my own decisions. My gut instinct was to revert to my gut instinct (especially now that I was older)—buy some CDs and municipal bonds and call it a day.

But I hardly had the courage of my convictions; I had seen how the strategies of others had paid off much better than mine. The financial adviser I consulted was, not surprisingly, of a less conservative mindset than I. He said I should get into the market in a way that allowed me to take advantage of what he called “growth;” diversification would protect me.

And so it was that I listened to him, and wound up doing exactly and precisely what one isn’t supposed to do: buying high, at what in retrospect was virtually the peak of the bull market.

So far, at least, I’ve managed to resist the other side of the coin: I haven’t sold low. I haven’t sold at all, actually, just watched the value of my assets sink like a stone, in a way that my adviser had never even suggested was a remote possibility, and yet which—thanks to my mother—I always knew in my heart of hearts and brain of brains could occur (and, by the way, the adviser isn’t doing much suggesting of anything any more).

And that is why the message of articles such as the one in SmartMoney with which I began this essay no longer surprise me. The surprise is that anyone ever thought there would be a way to know the future, or that stocks would be a good idea for investing the bulk of the holdings of someone nearing retirement age who doesn’t have a huge nest-egg.

My new financial strategy is to listen politely to what people recommend, but with great skepticism (so if you want to take my advice you won’t take my advice, if you know what I mean). But for what it’s worth, here are its basic principles (this applies to the investor of a certain age; the rules would be somewhat different for the young):

(1) Buy low and sell high is the laudable goal. The trouble is that it’s extremely hard to tell when these high and low points are actually occurring. Is it just a temporary downturn, for example, or the beginning of a huge drop? Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you they do is telling you a lie. Therefore…

(2) Don’t invest any money in the stock market that you’re not willing to lose. The stock market is not a bank giving a predictable rate of return, even in times when it appears to resemble one. And furthermore…

(3) When you do invest, do so relatively short term. I’m not suggesting day-trading, but set a point ahead of time at which you will take profits and/or cut losses. And then (and this is the hard part, folks) do so.

(4) Don’t look back at all. Made a mistake? Fine—you and a gazillion others, including your financial adviser. Made some money? That’s nice, but don’t think it means you’re a wizard. Probably you just got lucky that time.

(5) If you must hire a financial adviser, get an elderly one, with sufficient memory of the past and some idea of the fact that these things run in cycles, up and down and up and down, and that when a particular portion of the cycle looks as though it will last forever it is always an illusion.

Now take two aspirin and don’t call me in the morning.

Torturous decisions about torture

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in graduate school, I lived in a house with four other women. It was a large and lovely place, with five airy bedrooms, a living room and parlor, a pantry and a little yard.

The rent was a cool sixty-five dollars a month per person. That’s right—and it was a bargain even then. Altogether a wonderful find.

The house was owned by a couple who had emigrated from China at some unknown time in the past. Mrs. Chen could speak heavily-accented and halting English, but Mr. Chen could not. She came by every now and then to tend to landlady business and look over the place, but I only saw him once.

It was a memorable sight. His hands were deformed, the thumbs broken, dangling and useless. We surmised that he’d been subject to torture back in China.

There’s no telling whether we were correct in our supposition. But Mr. Chen’s thumbs often come to mind when I think about torture. And whether or not it’s true that interrogators purposely inflicted his terrible wounds on him in an effort to make him talk, it’s clear that if it were true, there would be no ambiguity, no hesitation whatsover, in applying the word “torture” to that process. His wounds were the terrible and permanent marks of profound suffering.

Those who call the controversial process known as waterboarding “torture” are not necessarily wrong. But it is disingenuous to pretend that the matter is as clear as thumbs made permanently useless. The boundaries of torture are not so well-defined, unless one draws the line at any coercive technique meant to make a prisoner uncomfortable enough to want to give out information to make it stop, a definition so strict as to make the obtaining of such information virtually impossible.

How far are we willing to go in order to keep our own hands squeaky clean in this matter? As I wrote in a previous post on a related subject:

As human beings making choices, I don’t see how we can ever avoid making moral judgments about relative good and evil…In the real world in which we live…moral choices are usually between the lesser of two evils…Failure to make such choices between relative goods/evils would make us into moral monsters of another sort, trapped in a rigid rules-bound way of thinking that would lead almost inevitably to tragic consequences.

Blogger Richard Fernandez has done a lot of thinking about torture and morality. He writes (and I’d recommend reading the entire piece) that those who take the position that torture can never be justified, even if it could save many innocent lives in this country, are at least acknowledging the moral complexity that flows from the fact that sometimes torture actually does work to protect innocent people.

Fernandez writes that those taking such a strict anti-torture stand are doing it from the safety of the hypothetical; it is uncertain what they would do if faced with a more clear and present danger:

But I am afraid that…one day a biological weapon or a dirty nuke might be set off in one or a number of American cities and as the scale of the suffering and carnage becomes clear, that many ”” including the persons who are now so willing to sit in judgment of the persons who drafted the legal memos which guided Bush administration interrogation policy ”” will demand the authorities do something, anything, to put a stop to it.

Although that certainly may be true, I think the more important point Fernandez makes is this one:

It is intellectually feasible to argue…that we ought not to use torture under any circumstances. In the same spirit, we could undertake not to employ Clinton-era “extraordinary rendition”, to which Guantanamo Bay was actually proposed as a more humane alternative; nor accept information from foreign intelligence agencies which use coercion as a method (any more than you would buy shoes made with child labor); and simply rely on such intelligence gathering methods as meet our moral standards and willingly endure the sacrifices implied.

Here Fernandez supplies context for the decision to waterboard. That context was not only the immediate post-9/11 mentality of urgency to discover whether other attacks were imminent, and to stop them before they were carried out (although that was part of it). The context included the alternatives to the setting up of Guantanamo, and the decision to waterboard three detainees there. These alternatives require asking ourselves whether it is okay to allow others to torture for us, and then for us to profit from the fruits of this forbidden tree? Or are we (and especially those advocating a strict “no physically coercive methods allowed” policy) really prepared to “endure the sacrifices implied,” which could be the death of many thousands of innocent Americans—in order to save one terrorist from some reversible and temporary suffering at the hands of others?

In assessing complex moral decisions in the real world, we must look not only at our acts, but at the consequences of our failures to act. Would it really have been more moral, for example, to have not waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed, if the result had been a successful 9/11 type attack in Los Angeles? A person might answer “yes.” But it is disingenuous to assert that such a person is clearly and unequivocally in a position that is morally superior to that of the person who would answer “no.”

There are sins of omission as well as sins of commission. Are we morally responsible—and therefore guilty—for failing to stop an attack that might have been prevented by gaining information through a coercive technique such as waterboarding?

The people who drew up the rules about waterboarding seemed to have been cognizant of these and other moral complexities. They certainly did not intend or allow the United States to engage in the more extreme type of torture endured by Mr. Chen, for example. But they wanted to permit—and to give guidelines for the use of—something strong enough to extract vital information from terrorists, but weak enough to cause no permanent damage to them.

Here are some of the guidelines they drew up:

“The ”˜waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques, is subject to additional limits,” explained the May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo. “It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the CIA has ”˜credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ”˜substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack’; and ”˜[o]ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.’”

This appears to be an effort to accomplish what must be done in making all moral decisions: to balance the harm done against the benefits gained. And it is by no means clear that those opposing the policies described in this memo, or the care taken to draw them up, are the ones occupying the moral high ground.

The following is particularly telling [emphasis mine]:

“In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including KSM and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques,” says the Justice Department memo. “Both KSM and Zubaydah had ”˜expressed their belief that the general US population was ”˜weak,’ lacked resilience, and would be unable to ”˜do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’ Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogation of KSM, KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ”˜Soon you will know.’”

Sooner or later, it appears we will know—whether the actions of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, and well as the release of the “torture memos” and the ACLU-demanded photos, will cause terrorists and other enemies to once again believe that we are too weak to protect ourselves.

Swine flu threat?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s always possible, of course, that this time it will be the terrible pandemic that is feared.

But I wonder. When I did a search of this blog for “influenza,” for example, I came up with this post from the beginning of 2006, which begins with the words:

An article appeared in this Sunday’s NY Times advising us that our relations with our neighbors may need to change if the much-feared bird flu pandemic ever arrives.

Ah yes, remember the dread bird flu? It did kill a number of people, which is a sad thing, just as the swine flu has already done. But this does not a dangerous pandemic make.

The words “swine flu” ring a bell. In 1976, there was a promised epidemic that never came, and a flawed vaccination that caused more deaths than that year’s flu did. Not a good precedent, although much better than that of the worldwide pandemic of 1918, in which the flu killed approximately fifty million people, most of them young adults in their prime (see my post about the scope of that disaster).

A work of great art that was spawned by the 1918 pandemic is the long short story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” by Katherine Anne Porter. Porter herself was nearly a victim of the disease, as she describes in this work of fiction that is based on her own experiences. One of the now-neglected masterpieces of American literature (and a beautiful love story as well), it explains better than anything I’ve ever read what the horror of those times must have felt like to those who were there.

The CIA photos: Obama strikes another blow for transparency

The New Neo Posted on by

In refusing to fight the release of the prisoner interrogation photos, the Obama administration, according to ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, is showing its commitment to transparency.

Yes, it’s transparent, all right—transparently clear that Obama is determined to strike fear into the hearts of CIA agents who did their duty under the Bush administration, even if they acted with the green light of lawyers and Congress.

Transparent that our new President will stop at nothing to discredit his predecessor, including (and perhaps especially) endangering all future intelligence and our country’s security. Do we have a single doubt that, if the ACLU had been trying to release photos of a policy attached to the Obama administration, he would have fought such “transparency” right up to the Supreme Court?

As for the ACLU, the group helpfully pushing for the release of the photos, I have nothing but contempt for that institution (to which I gave money for years long ago, and which still has me on their mailing list). I’m entirely in agreement with Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, who referred to the ACLU’s campaign for the photographs’ release as “prurient” and “reprehensible,” and an action the Obama administration “should have fought all the way.”

Dream on, Dr. Lowenthal. This is custom-made for Obama. He doesn’t have to actually do his own dirty work in pressing for the release of the pictures. He just has to allow others to do it for him.

What is that dirty work? The release of the photos furthers the favored Obama narrative: the US did evil things and must atone, but under the great Obama it will go forth and sin no more. Security? Intelligence? They won’t be needed in the new age of Obama, during which our new rectitude will cause other nations to drop all aggressive impulses in their awe at the guidance of our inspirational moral compass.

Remember way back during the campaign, when Michelle Obama caught such flak for saying that now she was really proud of her country for the first time in her adult life? The reason was twofold: Barack Obama was doing well, and hope was making a comeback (come to think of it, that was one reason, wasn’t it?) It strikes me now that this was a deeply felt sentiment that Barack Obama shares.

I think it’s transparently clear: the man is a dangerous egotist whose narcissism requires that his predecessor be crushed and discredited in every possible way. And he doesn’t care if he endangers our national security to do so.

[NOTE: Rich Lowry has a similar notion.]

[ADDENDUM: And this op-ed by former CIA chief Porter Goss is well worth reading (hat tip: Ann Althouse).

Goss writes with great clarity and urgency:

[O]ur government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.

Read the whole thing.]

Madoff’s chief deputy tells a few tales

The New Neo Posted on by

His name is Frank DiPascali. He was in charge of the smooth operation of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme on Floor 17, a top-secret operation needing a special pass to visit , and featuring an ancient IBM computer server, a bunch of clerks, and little else.

Fortune magazine has a lengthy article featuring DiPascali. The piece mostly recaps already-known facts about Madoff’s history and personal quirks. But there’s a bit of new information, based on reports that DiPascali is starting to do some talking in exchange for a possible plea bargain.

This is what he is alleged to be revealing:

According to a person familiar with the matter, DiPascali has no evidence that other Madoff family members were participants in the fraud. However, he is prepared to testify that he manipulated phony returns on behalf of some key Madoff investors…

It’s a long article, and I read it quickly. But it contains no indications that DiPascali has suggested that these investors-in-the-know actually knew about the Ponzi scheme aspect, or the scope of the fraud—just that they were involved in some fishy bookkeeping for their own benefit. But the part of the article that interested me most was the fact that so far, no evidence—including DePascali’s tale-telling—seems to backup the popular idea of the involvement and/or knowledge of family members.

It’s way too early to say, of course; there’s much more to learn. And whether we ever will know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is doubtful. But I’ve been concluding for quite some time that there is a good chance that Madoff kept his fraud from family members. Whether there was enough evidence available to say that they should have known something was amiss is another story.

However, Madoff has hardly protected his family, even if he kept them in the dark about some things. And I’m not just talking about the money they themselves may have lost. Their reputations are ruined just as surely as his, whether a single bit of evidence ever emerges of their complicity or not. There are many kinds of prisons, and my guess is that they already have gotten a life sentence of sorts.