No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

RDI predicts that Bush is losing

We are hearing that the improving stock market or the improving Gross Domestic Product, or the (recent) improvement in employment should result in Bush being reelected. The Gadflyer says those are not the models to look at. Look at RDI.

Rdi is Real Disposable (Personal) Income.

As the name suggests, RDI is basically a measure of how much money someone has to pay for things after taxes, inflation, and other things that suck up your paycheck before you get to spend it.

Think of it this way:


GDP gives you a broad picture of overall economic strength, but not necessarily how individual people are faring.


Employment numbers tell us how many jobs have been created but not whether they are well paying or have adequate (or any) benefits, or even how many hours people are working.


RDI shows us the money.

It should come as no surprise then that RDI is a good predictor of presidential elections. Remember all those heavily-ridiculed political science models that showed Al Gore would stomp George Bush in 2000? Virtually all of them used GDP, not RDI, along with other factors. But a model using RDI and overall presidential approval developed by political scientists Larry Bartels and John Zaller not only accurately predicted the nearly split vote, but also would have accurately forecast previous presidential elections.

So what does this have to do with Bush's sagging economic approval ratings? You guessed it: RDI has been trending downward this year. Data for April are not yet available, but those for February and March showed steady declines, despite strong job growth.

In fact, going back to January 2003 and using averages from Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, and Pew Research Center polls, Bush's economic approval ratings have moved in the same direction as RDI nine out of 14 times, or about twice as often.


posted by Richard at 10:22 AM

 

Juan Cole tells where Bush is taking the US

Here is Juan Cole on recent actions in Iraq.

I said the other day I thought Bush was pushing Europe to the left with his policies. I think he is at the same time pushing the Shiite world to the radical Right, and I fear my grandchildren will still be reaping the whirlwind that George W. Bush is sowing in the city of Imam Husain. I concluded in early April that Bush had lost Iraq. He has by now lost the entire Muslim world.

Juan Cole has been telling us what was really happening all along, while the Bush people and the Neocons were listening to Ahmed Chalabi. Now we learn that Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress is an Iranian intelligence operation and has been all along.
Read Newsday. Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld have really blown it big time.

Not only have they NOT protected us from more 9/11-type events, they have set the middle east up into a situation that will cause a great deal more terrorists to develop, and they have made us the targets. If there were any more disastrous ways to screw things up, it is not at all clear what they might be.
posted by Richard at 9:57 AM

 

Juan Cole takes on Andrew Sullivan

Juan Cole skewers Andrew Sullivan with a cogent analysis of his arguments against the New York Times when, prior to the Bush War, it did not fall in line with the misinformation that the administration was spewing to try to induce America to attack Iraq.

It is particularly interesting because Cole points out where Sullivan uses propaganda rather than facts to make his point.

Cole ends with a rather poignant point on how bad the information that both Sullivan and the administration put out to justify the war.

"Saving" the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn't been discredited. Since April 2 they haven't been saving them any more. They have been killing them.
posted by Richard at 11:53 PM

 

Wes Clark on What went wrong in Iraq - followed by my take on the future.

Wes Clark has an article in Washington Monthly in which he describes what the Bush administration has done regarding turning Iraq into a democracy. The following is his main paragraph:

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck.

I have underlined what I consider the central premise of his article. Read the article.

Now, another key point he makes. We did not invade any Communist country. We contained them, a decision made after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. As George Kennan published his seminal Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" the Soviet Union would ultimately collapse as a result of the internal contradictions it was based on. But we had to help.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords proved to be the crucial step in opening the way for the subsequent peaceful democratization of the Soviet bloc. The accords, signed by the Communist governments of the East, guaranteed individual human and political rights to all peoples and limited the authority of governments to act against their own citizens. However flimsy the human rights provisions seemed at the time, they provided a crucial platform for dissidents such as Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. These dissidents, though often jailed and exiled, built organizations that publicized their governments' many violations of the accords, garnering Western attention and support and inspiring their countrymen with the knowledge that it was possible to stand up to the political powers that be.

With the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, it became clear once more that it would be the demands of native peoples, not military intervention from the West, that would extend democracy's reach eastward. Step by step, the totalitarian governments and structures of the East lost legitimacy in the eyes of their own citizens and elites. The United States and Western Europe were engaged, of course, in assisting these indigenous political movements, both directly and indirectly. Western labor unions, encouraged by their governments, aided the emergence of a democratic trade union movement, especially in Poland. Western organizations provided training for a generation of human-rights workers. Western broadcast media pumped in culture and political thought, raising popular expectations and undercutting Communist state propaganda. And Western businesses and financial institutions entered the scene, too, ensnaring command economies in Western market pricing and credit practices. The Polish-born Pope John Paul II directed Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and around the world to encourage their congregants to lobby for democracy and liberal freedoms.

Such outreach had profound effects, but only over time.

It was also critical that the Communist countries were western nations who had undergone the Enlightenment. The Islamic nations are not. The people in the middle east are frequently shocked by what they consider the libertine excesses of the west. Some of that shock has led a few radical extremists to attempt to reject the west through violence, much as a frightened cat will scratch those trying to help it.

The Islamic nations do not have a goal of converting the west in the manner that the Communist nations did. They do, however, want to minimize the damage done to their cultures by any associating with the west. As a result, it is my opinion that they will be much more easily contained than Communism was, but the problems of getting the Islamic nations to adopt democracy will be more intractable.

This would not matter much if they did not sit on as much oil as they do, and if there were not a proxy war between the west and Islam which has been taking place for the last fifty plus years between Israel and the Palestinians. If both the Palestinians and the Israelis did not have outside support, it would have been over long ago. Since both sides DO have outside support, the solution to the war/Intifada or whatever it is called this week will require outside mediation.

The invasion of Iraq (Bush's War) was in part an effort to change the calculus in Israel/Palestine. All it has done is make the solution more difficult to achieve.

In fact, the military invasion of Iraq very probably set back the possible good relations between the western secular democracies and the Islamic world by a generation. The west is extremely strong in armies based on industrialism, but the Islamic nations are learning how to defeat those armies using terrorism and propaganda. Terrorism and propaganda are highly dependent on television, so that the war is actually being fought largely outside of military means.

We can win every military battle and still lose the war strategically. Our superior military simply provides new images to use against the west on TV and in propaganda. Terrorism is used to inflame the soldiers so that they take the actions that make better propaganda. It is a very modern, high-tech, and intellectual form of war that makes bombs and bullets into weapons against those who fire them even more than against those who are fired on.

The Islamic fundamentalists use of terrorism and propaganda will also undermine the desire to remain separate from the rest of the world. This is the inherent contradiction that will undermine Islamic separatism. However, the insistence of our conservatives and Israel's' Sharon to use overwhelming military force against terrorists will continue to poison the well, making settlement of the violence unlikely.

We will have to stop trying to use the apparent "quick fix" offered by our superior military and begin to try to understand what they are afraid of and work to accommodate them on that. We can't just demonize the enemy. In this war, the victory will go to the side that best understands the other. Usually that will be the less technologically advanced party involved. Ask General Giap in Viet Nam.

In short, we need to get out of Iraq, then work with the existing governments in the middle east to minimize anti-western terrorism. At the same time, we will need to build cultural bridges between our culture and theirs, so that they can feel they retain control of how they live without always being afraid of another conquest by the west.

As they industrialize, as they must, they will begin to adopt democratic forms of government, much as the South Koreans and the Taiwanese have done. Military invasion delays that, as resisting such an invasion requires more totalitarian forms of government to continue to exist.

posted by Richard at 9:56 PM

 

Exerpts from the 2000 Republican Party Platform

The following quotes are drawn from the Republican Party Platform at the 2000 convention. In this, the 2004 election season after nearly four years of the Bush administration and three with Republican control of both houses of Congress, they really speak for themselves.


"The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration's diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries." [ed. this is referring to Clinton's administration]

"Gerrymandered congressional districts are an affront to democracy and an insult to the voters. We oppose that and any other attempt to rig the electoral process."

"Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments. A Republican administration working with the Congress will respect the needs and quiet sacrifices of these public servants as it strengthens America's intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and reorients them toward the dangers of the future."


"The current administration has casually sent American armed forces on dozens of missions without clear goals, realizable objectives, favorable rules of engagement, or defined exit strategies. Over the past seven years, a shrunken American military has been run ragged by a deployment tempo that has eroded its military readiness. Many units have seen their operational requirements increased four-fold, wearing out both people and equipment."


"The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice."


"Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness."


"Our goal for NATO is a strong political and security fellowship of independent nations in which consultations are mutually respected and defense burdens mutually shared."


"As the traditional advocate of America's veterans, the Republican Party remains committed to fulfilling America's obligations to them. That is why we defeated the administration's attempt to replace veterans' health care with a national system for everybody."


"The weak leadership and neglect of the administration have allowed America's intelligence capabilities, including space based systems, to atrophy, resulting in repeated proliferation surprises such as Iraq's renewed chemical and biological weapons programs."



"The Social Security surplus is off-limits, off budget, and will not be touched. We will not stop there, for we are also determined to protect Medicare and to pay down the national debt. Reducing that debt is both a sound policy goal and a moral imperative. Our families and most states are required to balance their budgets; it is reasonable to assume the federal government should do the same. Therefore, we reaffirm our support for a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget."



"Inspired by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Republicans hammered into place the framework for today's prosperity and surpluses. We cut tax rates, simplified the tax code, deregulated industries, and opened world markets to American enterprise. The result was the tremendous growth in the 1980s that created the venture capital to launch the technology revolution of the 1990s. That's the origin of what is now called the New Economy: the longest economic boom in the Twentieth Century, 40 million new jobs, the lowest inflation and unemployment in memory." [ed. the reason I find this ironic is becaues it contradicts administration claims that the recession began under Clinton]


"A Republican president will work with businesses and with other nations to reduce harmful emissions through new technologies without compromising America's sovereignty or competitiveness -- and without forcing Americans to walk to work."


"We applaud Governor Bush's pledge to name only judges who have demonstrated that they share his conservative beliefs and respect the Constitution."

"Reacting belatedly to inevitable crises, the administration constantly enlarges the reach of its rhetoric -- most recently in Vice President Gore's "new security agenda" that adds disease, climate, and all the world's ethnic or religious conflicts to an undiminished set of existing American responsibilities. If there is some limit to candidate Gore's new agenda for America as global social worker, he has yet to define it."



"A new Republican administration will patiently rebuild an international coalition opposed to Saddam Hussein and committed to joint action. We will insist that Iraq comply fully with its disarmament commitments. We will maintain the sanctions on the Iraqi regime while seeking to alleviate the suffering of innocent Iraqi people. We will react forcefully and unequivocally to any evidence of reconstituted Iraqi capabilities for producing weapons of mass destruction."

"The administration has used an arsenal of dilatory tactics to block any serious support to the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization reflecting a broad and representative group of Iraqis who wish to free their country from the scourge of Saddam Hussein's regime."


"Republicans prefer an America that is far less dependent on foreign crude oil. A Republican president will not be so tolerant if OPEC colludes to drive up the world price of oil, as it has done this past year."

The following quote comes from the Democratic Party Platform of the same year, and is the only section of either party platform that mentions Osama bin Laden or specific tactics, like breaking up cells and going after terrorist financing, for dealing with international terrorism:


"Whether terrorism is sponsored by a foreign nation or inspired by a single fanatic individual, such as Osama Bin Laden, Forward Engagement requires trying to disrupt terrorist networks, even before they are ready to attack. We must improve coordination internationally and domestically to share intelligence and develop operational plans. We must continue the comprehensive approach that has resulted in the development of a national counter-terrorism strategy involving all arms and levels of our government. We must continue to target terrorist finances, break up support cells, and disrupt training. And we must close avenues of cyber-attack by improving the security of the Internet and the computers upon which our digital economy exists."

I'm really glad that I haven't been given the job of writing the 2004 Republican Party Platform. What can they say that is both honest and to the point? There is simply no remaining overlap between those to concepts applied to the Bush administration.


posted by Richard at 1:33 AM

 

Who is left Supporting Bush?

It looks like the only remaining supporters for Bush's Iraq War are the National Review and Osama bin Laden.

This from Fareed Zakaria via
Josh Marshal.

Zakaria sums it all up in a few short sentences: "Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world."

Then this is from Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthy.

if you were against the idea of transforming the Middle East via war, you should be against Bush because he had the wrong idea. Conversely, if you were in favor of transformation you should be against Bush for making such a total hash of the idea.


The Los Angeles Times reports
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's hopes for a major NATO military presence in Iraq this year appear doomed, interviews with allied defense officials and diplomats show.

The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say.

posted by Richard at 6:02 PM

 

Why is Bush President? He is clearly an ignorant fool with no abilities at all.

Why is George Bush President? Three reasons:

First. America has become a plutocracy ruled by moneyed elites especially in the last thirty years. ]Read "Perfectly Legal" by David Cay Johnston.]
Second. Americans generally don’t vote and consider the antics of the political class unimportant to them.
Third. Bush belongs to the plutocracy and could be pushed to win the election, partly because of the second item above.

Let me elaborate.

First: America is becoming a plutocracy.

1. The tax system is being revised to take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the rich. Then the estate tax is being eliminated to make such collections of wealth self-sustaining no matter what the merit of the individuals who have it.
2. Corporations are run by the CEOs, and the CEO’s are the ones getting the greatest payment from them.
3. Politics today are completely controlled by those who have the money to spend controlling politicians.
4. Control of wealth and your relationship to those who have wealth is more important to personal success than personal merit. This is especially true in government and in older industries.

Second: Americans for the most part do not bother to vote.

1. Many Americans really believe that only private enterprise matters and government is mostly in the way of private enterprise.
2. Many more think their vote doesn’t matter anyway.
3. Those who think about government and politics have generally gotten the idea that their ideas dominate society so that they do not have to organize and work with others to defend them. Voting is enough. America IS a meritocracy today, so why should we fight to make it so? But this is based on history, not on the current news.
4. Most people believe that our elections work well and that the elections administrators will prevent vote fraud. Liberals believe in systems of government and on operating them on a “management by exception” basis. Conservatives believe that nothing happens unless a person makes it happen, so they become more involved in politics. As a result, conservatives are involved in politics and liberals are passive.
5. Most of us understand that the plutocrats have taken control of government. Wealth gets you elected, not merit.

Third: Bush himself.

1. Big money controls the governments of the US now. He has none of the “Meritocracy” infection most Americans have.
2. Name recognition. People thought he was his father.
3. He is truly a born-again Christian Fundamentalist and could attract that group who totally hate the modern world.
4. Related to 3, this nation has a major strain of anti-intellectualism and he met their requirements. Gore, and Clinton before him, are anathema to that group.
5. He comes from an old established Republican power family. Breeding is important to them.
6. He can place a genial façade on the rather nasty Republican programs.
7. He was Governor of the second most populous state in the Union.
8. He destroys his opponents and critics rather than debate them.
9. For the right wing, winning and getting power is more important than the health of the American nation. Bush is an adequate vessle for their power-hunger.



posted by Richard at 5:57 PM

 

Conservatives are certain to fail

From the New York Times.

“Mr. Rumsfeld seemed to shrug off the brutal treatment of the prisoners as the sort of thing that can happen in a system that is not "perfect" — a distressing echo of his costly dismissal of the looting in Baghdad last year as the "untidiness" of freedom.”

It isn’t that disasters like the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison “just happen in a system that is not perfect.” Nor was the (predicted) looting after the invasion simply the “untidiness of freedom.”

When conservative Republicans who dislike government on general principles are put in charge of government, it should be no surprise when they inevitably fail to control and lead it properly. They don’t know how and don’t want to learn..

posted by Richard at 5:13 AM

 

Abu Ghraib

Every once in a while Thomas Friedman gets it right. New York Times



The only problem is that he got this one right too late.

Bush is six months from the election, and his only possible issue to run on is the war in Iraq. Firing Rumsfeld will be an admission that even Iraq is going bad for him. If Bush fires Rumsfeld now, Bush loses in November. It is that simple.

posted by Richard at 10:43 PM