Brian Beutler

Best reporters in the business?

Yochi Dreazen of the Wall Street Journal:

Sensing that his argument might fall on deaf ears, Cheney got creative in the interviews as he searched for the best image for conveying his simultaneous membership in the two branches of government.

“The fact is, the vice president is sort of a weird duck in the sense that you do have some duties that are executive and some are legislative,” he told King.

In the CBS interview, Cheney opted for a different image. “The vice president is kind of a unique creature, if you will, in that you’ve got a foot in both branches,” he said.

Dick Cheney, creative wordsmith. We do learn though that, say what you will about Dick Cheney's declining influence, he still sits on the National Security Council.

More eugenics, Pelosi edition

It turns out, Nancy Pelosi is also a eugenicist. Why? Because she sees science  as a generally (not universally, of course) great guide to policy making--even though she actually used the word "thingamabob" at breakfast today. She wants to use it to enhance our military (quibbles with which see below), to improve family life and health care and as the main bulwark against global warming.

Some of her ideas were a bit more substantive than others. The idea that in expanding access to health care, we should also be encouraging personalized health services--incorporating medical advancements and care in such a way that treatments are administered less routinely and in a more individually tailored way--is exactly the sort of policy we should be advancing based upon scientific findings about patient specific treatments.

The idea that we need to be a mighty nation with an incredibly powerful and technologically honed military in order to be a model to the world on other issues seemed pretty half-baked and platitudinous to me, but I guess it's still not exactly popular to suggest that we in any way shrink our defense spending. And inasmuch as we're going to have a huge military, I see relatively few problems with directing its funds towards implementing better and better technologies.

The two most interesting answers came to questions from Adele Stan and Harold Meyerson. Addie asked Pelosi about preserving the Constitution through impeachment and where Pelosi stands on the Democrats' various ways forward. Pelosi's answer is, I think, telling of just how pragmatic she is in her progressivism. She admitted, fairly forthrightly, that if she were not a member of the House she'd be agitating for impeachment herself, but seems at the same time to believe that too few people in the country are so riled by what's going on to make impeachment feasible. That may be the case, but her reaction does in fact clash with the oath she took (as she reminded us all today) to uphold the Constitution. Obviously there's no easy way forward here, but hers is either way a fairly cautious pragmatism.

Harold asked her about climate change and tensions with John Dingell. On this point, she was fairly candid. She came about as close as possible to saying that if Dingell blocks climate change legislation, it will be another example of money corrupting politics. She's right, of course. Fortunately she seemed convincingly resolved not to let that happened.

My question...got timed out. I did pass it along, though, and have been told I'll get an answer. At one point, while discussing the public's and her own disapproval with the Congress, Pelosi touched on the issue Republican obstructionism, noting that the Senate only offered the people one shot at a withdrawal bill. The president, of course, vetoed that. Obviously the bulk of the problem here is... Republican obstructionism. But she did seem to think that more could have been done by Senate leadership. I somewhat agree. My question: How would you handle/have handled Iraq/general obstructionism if you were Senate Majority Leader instead of House Speaker? Answers (hopefully) forthcoming.

Down syndrome

My first post on this--though more specifically about the "eugenics" rap--has sparked an important and somewhat heated discussion about Down Syndrome. I want to address a few things and cede a few others. First, when I described Down Syndrome as "medically disastrous" I was quoting language from a different blog post, written by somebody else. Nonetheless I did endorse that description (and still to some extent do), and I want to put some of the criticism front and center:

• Kathy G: The fact is, most people with Down Syndrome have IQs in the mild to moderately retarded range -- very few are in the severe or profound range. People with Down Syndrome are at higher risk for a range of physical problems, but proper physical therapy, medical care, and education at an early age has dramatically improved their health, life span, and cognitive functioning....[T]hrowing around terms like "medically disastrous" and "tragic" is highly stigmatizing and helps spread damaging misinformation about Down syndrome kids. The fact is that most people with Down syndrome are only mildly or moderately retarded and most have no serious physical problems (although they're at greater risk for a variety of physical problems). And unfortunately when you describe Down syndrome in such a negative, highly charged, and misleading way, you only add to people's fears and prejudices about this subject.
• Dave White: I just want to emphasize that so much is now known about the condition that parents can very easily anticipate complications, be they thyroid related, hearing or gastrointestinal, or even something as serious as CHD. We've (happily) progressed to a stage where raising a child with Down syndrome is not as difficult or heartbreaking as it was even just a generation or two ago. My fear is that, due to ignorance of the condition itself, we now have too many parents choosing to terminate a potential gift out of a misguided fear.
• Michael Bérubé: Roughly one in six babies with Down syndrome are born with heart anomalies. But mostly they're the kind of heart anomalies that don't kill infants anymore in the industrialized world. As for "extreme" mental retardation . . . sigh. "Severe and profound" is the term given to people with IQs below 20. Most people with Down syndrome, as Kathy points out, have mild to moderate retardation....Raising a kid with Down syndrome is tough work, no doubt about it.  A little tougher, on balance, than raising a kid.

In light of this, I want to concede that--though I used the word "extreme" and not "severe and profound"--my description was a bit overheated. Likewise, I want to refine here the language I used in my description of Down Syndrome death age. I wrote unclearly. My understanding had been (correctly) that people with Down Syndrome have, in the last 20 years or so, enjoyed an increased life expectancy of about 30 years (now about age 50). Still a very early age to die. But my original language could have been read to imply that DS life expectancy was much lower yet. It's not. What is true, though, is that infant mortality is still rather higher in babies with Down Syndrome than in babies without.

Obviously, any normative claims about how "disastrous" a disorder like Down Syndrome is don't really solidify all that much. To somebody like me--somebody extremely unprepared to raise even an unusually healthy baby--adding Down Syndrome to the mix would constitute a serious, serious complication. To somebody who has successfully raised a child with Down Syndrome--and cherished the experience--it wouldn't seem nearly as bad. What's always been plain is that Down Syndrome is nothing like Tay Sachs.

What still seems plain (at least to me) is that, though most parents-to-be expect their lives to change drastically in many different ways, they do not expect an in utero diagnosis of Down Syndrome. When the diagnosis does come, some I'm sure handle the bad news better than others, but all I imagine are aware that they are no longer going to get what they had been expecting out of parenthood and that their child's life will be beset by any in a wide range of associated maladies. That fact is enough to, I think perfectly reasonably, drive some parents to choose abortion. I get the sense that among my commenters (including the estimable Michale Berube) there is wide agreement on that point. I've tried to treat the actual disorder more clearly in this post, but it still seems to me that the maladies that, to Michael, make raising a child with Down Syndrome "a little tougher, on balance" might constitute a real catastrophe for others. And that severe Down Syndrome really does rise to the level of medical disaster.

More Douthat eugenics

This actually demonstrates a rather significant factual ignorance:

First of all, Down's Syndrome is not a "medically disastrous" genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term "disastrous." Second, while the means of "traditional eugenics" were obviously very different from what's emerging now - involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion - the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process.

The idea that this is about "genetic improvement of the human species" is really, really off the mark. Start with Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome is a non-specific mutation. Its incidence is not predicated upon parents' heritable traits. Abort every Down Syndrome fetus on the planet, set things in fast forward, and you'll see--in proportion--an equal number of incidents of Down Syndrome in the next generation.

As for inherited diseases that result--I would imagine--in a lot of abortions (Tay Sachs comes to mind), we're almost never talking about an infant that will mature to adulthood and pass along his or her genetic disease to offspring. Whether because of death or sterility or incompatibility, there are just very, very few cases wherein the ultimate impact of the abortion is to improve the overall stock of the human genetic lode. One of the main reasons these fetuses are being aborted is that they have tragic illnesses that happen to all but destroy their reproductive fitnesses. Frankly, for somebody who waves off the idea that the right ignores science, Ross seems to be doing exactly that. I'd suggest he stick to arguments about the humanity of fetuses and steer clear of the eugenics charges if he wants to be compelling on the point of reproductive choice.

Peaches, cream, and Down Syndrome

In making the case that aborting babies with genetic disorders amounts to eugenics, Ross Douthat writes:

Ezra writes that it's "very unfair" to apply the word "eugenics" to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down's Syndrome by selective abortion, because "traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch."

First of all, Down's Syndrome is not a "medically disastrous" genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term "disastrous."

Between the amount of money spent on supervisory care for a baby with Down Syndrome, the amount of money spent on associated medical ailments for a baby with Down Syndrome, the extreme mental retardation and physical disabilities of a baby with Down syndrome, and the very early deaths of a very large percentage of people with Down syndrome, I'd say that Down Syndrome is extraordinarily medically disastrous unless you're very heavily invested in the idea that aborting a baby with Down Syndrome constitutes a type of eugenics.

WSJ RIP?

Kevin reports sadly on the Murdoch takeover.

My counterintuitive thought is that this will be either neutral or net positive for the media world. My actual hope is that Murdoch screws both hemispheres of the paper up so badly that the good reporters find great jobs elsewhere (McClatchy? I dunno, somebody create a big WSJ recovery endowment) and what's left behind has such low credibility that its op-ed writers can no longer stand shamelessly on the shoulders of their reporters. 

Not war. Just some violence

Ok, one more time and then I'm just going to sit back and wait for my celebratory beer: I do not think it's very likely that we'll soon go to war with Iran. I've never contended this. What I have contended is that there's a high likelihood (or at least I believe there is a high likelihood) that in the next 16 months tensions with Iran will escalate to a point at which there is some exchange of violence between the U.S. (or U.S.-backed persons) and Iran and that this will occur inside Iran. If that happens, and happens soon, then I might revise my thinking on the issue of full-scale war. But right now I am (and have been) talking about a narrow exchange of violence only.

I think the stimulus for such an exchange has relatively little to do with the balance of power between neo-cons and realists in the Executive Branch. If Cheney and his team were on the ascent, then yes, it would obviously increase the chances that Iran and the U.S. exchange direct violence. But the fact that they're on the decline in no way precludes the possibility that violence happens--as a consequence of the greater conflagration in the region, almost as if by accident. Suppose we discover some crucial link in the chain that connects Tehran with the Shiite insurgents. Suppose an American soldier is taken prisoner. Suppose there's a border skirmish. I could go on. The fact is that if anything like this comes to pass (and, remember, these are the sorts of things that just happen in a war) whose philosophies will be on George Bush's mind, Condoleezza Rice's? Or Dick Cheney's?

Meanwhile, on that other issue (the foreign policy balance of power within the administration), Ezra's not wrong. But I fear he's been overly chastened by the reports we've all read by now. Remember, it's not as if on the one hand you have the entire State Department leaning in a new direction, and on the other you have Dick Cheney holding fast to hawkishness. It's that on the one hand you have many new (much more welcome) faces in a couple executive branch agencies, and on the other you have OVP and a significant segment of the Defense Department. In the end, Bush will be swayed by one or the other of these poles, and I'm relatively confident that in the event of some sort of Iranian provocation--real or imagined--Bush will default to Cheney. And I think the chances of that provocation--or the perception thereof--are fairly high.

Pelosi, me, and Dupree

I, along with Adele and several others, attended a breakfast hosted by Nancy Pelosi today. I'll write more about it later today, but if you were wondering to yourself, "Gee, where's Brian?" well that's where I was.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

One more note on Ezra's response to my thoughts on Iran. I was the tiniest bit chastened a couple months ago when this (the article he linked to) came out. One thing that escaped notice, though, came out a few days after the piece appeared, when they appended the article with this note:

Editor's Note: After this story appeared in print, John Bolton contacted Newsweek to further address the circumstances under which he left the Bush administration. According to Bolton, he left when his recess appointment ended; Bush asked him to stay at the UN "without Senate confirmation, using a second recess appointment and the Vacancies Act," but Bolton says he declined. Bolton added that White House lawyers had used this approach in another case at an earlier juncture in the administration.

Where again is Bush's center of gravity? Basically, I disagree that this administration is, as Ezra put it, "a deeply ideological group, with a set of fairly coherent goals, who approach the world in an almost surprisingly predictable way." In fact, I think this administration is almost exactly the opposite of this. There are plenty of ideologues there, yes, but they don't necessarily believe the same thing. There are "neo-cons" with a variety of reasons for wanting to advance American hegemony, there are (or were) Christian rightists and there are Athiests, each promoting the same social agenda for the sake of advancing the political power of the administration and the party. That's why we've seen cronies--Bolton, Cheney, Rice--as opposed to intellectual comrades, running the show. Predictably, maybe, the results of the policies this group has come up with have been disastrous. Sadly, though, they still have much more power than such a defeated bunch should ever be allowed.

Ezra writes, "None of this is to say that we couldn't yet bomb Iran. But literally no foreign policy type I've spoken to -- which includes establishment folks who wouldn't be unhappy with that outcome -- thinks there's much of a chance that we will." I've had the chance to interact with many of the same people, actually. And while it's not untrue, it's neither the full story, nor, as I see it, particularly germane. That's because, for one, there's a palpable desire (call it the "anti-Sy Hersh impulse") on the part of a lot of people--foreign policy experts included--to not want to believe that any sort of attack against Iran will happen under Bush. At the same time, though, the people who actually have that impulse--foreign policy experts perhaps especially--feel that way at least in part because they understand how utterly terrible that course of events would be (or at least worry about it a little). I sympathize with that, but at the same time, for the above reasons, I don't think the administration really acts the way liberal or establishmentarian foreign policy experts might. The two relevant questions are, first, Is this administration capable of doing something so insane? And, if it is, how likely is it (and what might be nudging them in either direction)?

Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Obama

Kevin again:

Clinton and Obama themselves didn't exactly take the chance to elevate this into a scholarly colloquium themselves, did they? Instead we got Clinton calling Obama "naive" and "irresponsible," and Obama hitting back by accusing Clinton of endorsing a "Bush/Cheney lite" foreign policy. Enlightening stuff, no? Is it any wonder the press covered this as a food fight rather than a serious debate?

Well first of all, I think that "naive and irresponsible" and "Bush/Cheney lite" are actually fairly good distillations of the two candidates beliefs about their opponent's policy ideas. 

But what's more, here's what Hillary Clinton said. In context, she provides a significant rationale for her position that, in fact, a year might not provide her with enough time to get the right diplomatic concessions from Chavez, Castro, et al, before she'd agree to meet in person to get yet more diplomatic concessions from them.

And here's what Barack Obama said, "I don't want more Bush-Cheney. I don't want Bush-Cheney lite. The times are over when talking tough or refusing to talk to your enemies is an emblem of toughness. We will meet and talk and discuss our values and our ideals, because our values and our ideals, when we're true to them, are ideas and values the entire world looks to."

What happened next is that, instead of reporting that the two leading Democratic candidates were actually having a rather important policy disagreement, the media reported that they were trading barbs with each other for political points. Moreover, they were wrong about the question of who "won" the barb trading. My hope is that, now that it looks as if Obama's point proved to be fairly popular with the public, the media will refocus its reporting--away from what the media incorrectly believed the political ramifications of Obama's position would be, and on to the merits of the dispute itself. Now, commence laughter.