William Kristol is a Fool and Mountebank

Right Wing Editorial Troll William Kristol wrote an opinion piece for today's NYT which caught my eye because it referenced my hero, George Orwell. A lot of people have a lot of admiration for Ol' George, often including the last people you'd expect, such as rightist pundits and power-worshippers like Kristol. True, Orwell had some positions that they would have liked (he didn't shirk from the use of force against tyranny, which would score him some Neo-Conservative credentials) but a huge load of ideas that they would have had very little time for (such as his socialism and his frank contempt for conservative political thought). I think he's a confusing person for them, because he was virulently anti-Soviet and highly critical of some socialists--i.e. sandal-wearing vegetarians and others he considered embarrassing to the movement--which is something they like, so they just mentally breeze past the fact that he made all those criticisms pursuant to strengthening the socialist movement in the hopes of putting an end to capitalism and people like Kristol.

Anyway, to the editorial. Kristol begins his argument from something Orwell wrote about Rudyard Kipling, which was that Kipling was in one light disgusting because he toadied to the ruling class and supported their positions, but from another angle was admirable, because serving the rulers imbues one with a more concrete sense of what is desirable and responsible in governing. Being a member of the permanent opposition erases one's responsibility for coming up with serious ideas, as one merely needs to oppose, not actually govern. Orwell's criticism was once again very specific to his own context; he is aiming this barb at the people in his own movement who were intellectually sympathetic to Socialism but too doctrinaire or too eccentric to do much.

Kristol says, "aha! I have discovered that the Democrats are the irresponsible party of opposition and the Republicans are the practical, serious-minded governing party!"

There are a few problems with applying this to the American political scene, as Kristol tries to do:
1) There isn't really a "ruling party" in American politics. In the American system, unlike Parliamentary systems like that in Britain, it is possible for one party to control the executive and another to control the legislature. In this case one can consider the party in control of the executive the "governing party" but in practice it isn't quite so. This has been a fairly common situation in American politics, prevailing through the substantial part of the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations.

2) I wouldn't trust the Republican party to run a lemonade stand and neither should you. Suggesting that the Republican Party is somehow more "responsible" than the Democratic Party is specious. Both Reagan and G.W. Bush dramatically increased expenditures while reducing tax revenue, with the effect that this two administrations caused a hugely disproportionate share of the national debt. Moreover, the Bush administration has proven itself utterly irresponsible many times in the past seven years (e.g., our disastrous war of choice in Iraq, widespread appointment of incompetent cronies as in the Katrina disaster, forgetting about the war in Afghanistan, squandering all of our diplomatic capital, taking zero action on critical issues like infrastructure, alternative energy, and global warming, etc. etc.).

3) Support for the Iraq war != Responsibility. One of Kristol's main points in how the Democrats are irresponsible is that they have failed to adapt to a changing situation "on the ground" in Iraq. (As a rhetorical sidenote, I am amazed at all the things going on "on the ground" in Iraq. With all the suicide bombings, corner-turning, adapting to win, listening to the generals "on the ground", I wonder how they have any room at all. Maybe that's why all of their intellectuals are doing their best to flee the country--lack of space.) Implicit in this argument is that things actually have changed substantially enough to require a real reassessment of our aims... which it hasn't. Violence has been reduced overall due to the overwhelming presence after the "surge", but there's no sign of political rapprochement and no reason to believe that violence will not resume just as before the moment our troop levels drop. Moreover, less people getting blown up each day is only one measure of progress, and other key indices (like oil production, employment, electricity, potable water access, and so on) haven't really improved.

Finally, and painfully, the Iraq responsibility argument has to go back to basics. George W. Bush and his Republican party aggressively sold the American people and Congress on an invasion of a country which was no threat to the USA, using deception and fear-mongering to obscure their real reasons. While Kristol (who has always been a big support of the Iraq War) no doubt still feels that it was the height of responsibility to go into Iraq, 64% of Americans now feel otherwise and, to avoid suggestion of argumentum ad populum, basically it's indisputable that we originally went in to find WMDs and depose a dictator, and we have found that there were no WMDs and the removal of Saddam hasn't really improved things very much at all.

4) Support for Warrantless Wiretapping and Telecom Immunity != Responsibility. Kristol also suggests that House Democrats are irresponsible because they failed to pass Bush's wishlist of wiretapping and immunity for the Telecom industry and so endangered America. I'll make no bones about this one--this makes William Kristol him a lying asshole. America is not in any more danger now, because we have simply defaulted to the old rules on FISA, which offer more than adequate freedom to our intelligence agencies and allows them to just wiretap the shit out of anybody they want... as long as they get FISA court approval for tapping calls within the United States (always speedily granted, in point of fact). This is the real rub for Bush and crypto-Fascists like Kristol; they want to be tapping people without any oversight or review whatsoever. The standard FISA rules would pretty much allow them to tap the same lines just as quickly (a FISA warrant can be acquired after surveillance has already begun), but it would leave a paper trail and record of what is going on. This is good for the protection of our freedoms but bad for limitless executive power, so as far as Kristol (and Bush) is concerned it has to go.

The second element is telecom amnesty. This is a long story which I'll briefly summarize (more information on it can be found on the internet, naturally). The NSA and other intelligence agencies approached telecommunications firms like AT&T and Verizon and asked them to help the government engage in activities which both parties knew to be totally illegal and grounds for everybody to get in big goddamn trouble if the story came out. Some telecoms refused, but others (like Verizon and AT&T) smelled huge profits and agreed. Later, as should have been predictable, they all got caught and they are now in big goddamn trouble, of the kind that has multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits attached. The Telecoms have replied to this by salting away large amounts of money to congresspeople in the hopes of getting something rather unprecedented: retroactive immunity. This would mean that, even though the telecoms knowingly and intentionally broke the law, a later action of congress will decide that it doesn't matter and they get away with it (additionally meaning that they will have no motivation to assist further investigation of the lawbreaking they colluded in, meaning that their co-conspirators in the government will also effectively get away with it).

Now, some people (lying assholes, as I said before) have suggested that we need to give this unprecedented, colossal giveaway to the telecoms for any number of reasons. Like if we don't, there'll be a chilling effect and they'll refuse to help future, legal requests from government agencies (bzzt, wrong, telecoms are legally obligated to comply with requests from the government, as long as the attorney general has certified the legality of the request--they can't refuse).

So what I'm saying is that William Kristol is a dishonest neo-authoritarian apologist for the worst presidential administration in American history, and that far from "preserving" anything, the bill that the House rejected was explicitly designed to prevent telecoms from being punished for their indisputable wrongdoing and to prevent the American people from finding out about future government aggression against their privacy rights. How did this happen here, I wonder? I mean, the government and the telecoms get caught breaking the law, and the response is to change the law retroactively to make their activities not illegal, and prevent people from finding out about the next time they choose to go all Stasi on us? Is this really America?

As a note, I find that I like William Kristol as a NYT featured conservative columnist a lot more than David Brooks, because he has some manner of intellectual gravity and can write in the English language. It's hard to get a good head of steam up talking about David Brooks, first because his writing is intellectually impoverished and has no depth to examine, and second because I simply find his lack of facility with writing bewildering.

Fanboy

Today I saw "There Will be Blood" with some friends, and I have to say that I enjoyed the film a great deal, but on further examination of my reasons for liking the film, I have to question my response to it. It is effectively a tour de force from Daniel Day-Lewis. He comes on the screen, dominates each scene, casts a tall and dark shadow over the rest of the cast (which the manic efforts of Paul Dano just barely manage to keep up with), and generally wows the hell out of the audience. At my viewing the audience gasped in unison at DDL's performance.

I also respect the movie for its rejection of the traditional narrative structure. There is not really rising action to climax followed by a falling action to epilogue. The plot actually manages to resemble a human being's life, with a series of significant events, horror, victory, ignominy, and a lesson that can be accepted or rejected as one pleases. I would call it a very good movie.

However, I have to admit that a certain amount of my enjoyment of this film derived directly from my love for Daniel Day-Lewis. I have seen him in multiple movies and he is among the ranks of the performers who I always enjoy. Daniel Day-Lewis, Edward Norton, Christopher Walken, and Johnny Depp are all actors who I can watch no matter what role they are playing. I am a fanboy for these Hollywood personalities. I would probably watch any movie they made. Edward Norton recently made a film, "The Painted Vail," which was given poor reviews and called a vanity project. I will see this movie eventually, purely on the basis of his involvement in it. I saw "The Score", starring Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Edward Norton--purely on the basis of Norton's appearance. I couldn't have cared less about the two giants of cinema being present on the screen. He was all I came for.

Day-Lewis is the single actor whom I most respect for the force of performance and his craft. He is a powerhouse. The Tom Hanks vehicle "Castaway" struck me as an unforgivably stupid concept--much as I like Tom Hanks, my interest in two hours of nothing but him and a volleyball is slight. But I would watch three hours of nothing but Daniel Day-Lewis. Thinking on "The Gangs of New York" I realized that Scorsese had made something that was not actually a good film. The plot is a little contrived; I feel that it leads inexorably, rather than logically to the climax. Some of the key performances are stale (Cameron Diaz and DiCaprio are both miscast). But all of this is made up for, and more, by DDL as Bill the Butcher. He grabs both of your eyes every time he appears. His every movement dominates your attention. You can scarcely see anything but him.

So what does this say about me, with regard to films? I would like even a terrible movie on the basis of one my favorites appearing in it. This is provable by example--I greatly enjoy "The Rundown", a rather odious Dwayne Johnson vehicle which happens to feature Christopher Walken. So is "There Will be Blood" actually a good movie? Probably. I think it is. So does the Academy, but hell, what do they know about anything? These people gave Halle Berry an Oscar the year before she was the Bond Girl in one of the worst films in the series. They stole Denzel's Oscar for "Malcolm X" and gave it over to Al Pacino's scenery-chewing blind-man romp, and didn't make up the error for nine whole years. So you can't trust them.

As a side note, I am hotly anticipating the coming "Incredible Hulk" movie, featuring Edward Norton in the starring role with a screenplay credit to boot. I would eat any poison pill if it had the right kind of sugar on it!