Month: June 2016

The House Benghazi select committee released its five-part 800-page report on the September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, with an “additional views” addendum from Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) that blamed President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, more directly for the various intelligence, security, and communications failures that led to the attack and misinformation in the aftermath about the existence of protests against a YouTube video that sparked the violence.

Democrats, who accused Republicans of “wasting taxpayers money” on an issue that’s been investigated by the executive branch, and Congress, multiple times, released their own report. Democrats insist the select committee was a political ploy to sully Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, ahead of the November elections. “There seems to be only one remaining question,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today. “It’s simply this. Is the RNC going to disclose the in-kind contribution they received from House Republicans today?” They’re probably even after the Democrats’ kabuki sit-in against civil rights, off which they raised money directly.

The partisan argument about Clinton’s culpability in an attack that led to the killing of four Americans by Libyan militants misses the broader argument about aimless interventionism. A spokesperson for the State Department responded to the report by saying the department’s “priority continues to be carrying out our national security mission while mitigating the risks to our employees.” Democrats insist the State Department has boosted security, so the problem is solved. Republicans argue the White House didn’t do enough militarily (in one part of the report referring to Obama’s “no boots on the ground” policy as having informed the immediate response to the Benghazi attack), and often believe the answer is more military spending and “boots on the ground.”

The reality is the U.S. should not have participated in the Libyan civil war in the first place, and certainly the Obama administration should not have committed forces before getting approval from Congress. None of the investigative reports I’ve seen tackled that question. The select committee reports that Ambassador Chris Stevens, among the four killed in Benghazi, had been charged with preparing the mission there to be converted to a permanent consulate, so as to offer a “deliverable” for Clinton’s planned October 2012 visit to Libya. Today Clinton insists the fault with the Libyan intervention lies in the Libyan government, for not permitting foreign security to operate in Libya, on the political fallout from the Benghazi attack itself. President Obama has expressed regret at the aftermath of the Libyan intervention multiple times, calling it the “worst mistake” of his presidency. Clinton insists it’s still an opportunity for more U.S. involvement in affairs around the world.

The report also focused on the misinformation surrounding the role of a trailer for a Mohammed movie on YouTube in sparking protests that terrorists may have taken advantage of. There appear to have been no protests in Benghazi prior to the attack and at least one report was based on an article about planned protests that was published a week before the protests happened. Some officials are quoted as being in shock about national security advisor Susan Rice’s infamous Sunday morning appearances about Benghazi. But the administration’s lies were as plain as day to anyone bothering to follow the news during and after Benghazi. The story started unravelling pretty quickly. There was a clear campaign to deflect what happened in Benghazi as a failure of U.S. policy onto a YouTube video and the practice of free speech. There were protests around the Muslim world on September 11, 2012, some focused on the perceived slight to Mohammed, others on U.S interventionism. The ease with which Clinton appears to be able to avoid substantive criticism of unchecked interventionism (“what difference, at this point, does it make?”) is as frustrating as the failure by many to see her as the foe of free speech that she has reliably been as well.

It says something deeply disturbing about contemporary political discourse that Paul Krugman—who regularly ignores those he disagrees with as “knaves and fools” unworthy of his time and attention—was the voice of calm reason over Brexit. “I’m finding myself less horrified by Brexit than one might have expected,” he wrote about the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union. “The economic consequences will be bad, but not, I’d argue, as bad as many are claiming.”

Such shoulder-shrugging was in short supply, especially from those less versed in economics than the Nobel laureate. Indeed, the irredeemably smug insta-responses on both sides of the Brexit issue underscore is that Americans are as quick to virtue-signal as they are to proclaim that they apocalypse is (yet again!) upon us. Throw in a solipsistic inability to see the world as in any way independent of domestic U.S. politics and you’ve got the making of a media shitstorm that left everybody hip-deep in manure but no clearer about what Brexit really means.

Krugman’s even-more-insufferable colleague at The New York Times, Roger Cohen, made Brexit all about himself. “It’s not just the stupidity of the decision,” he fumed. “It’s not even the betrayal of British youth. It’s far more: a personal loss. Europa, however flawed, was the dream of my generation.” In perhaps the most-ridiculous commentary on the surprisingly lopsided “Leave” win, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow delivered a 15-minute history lecture that argued Great Britain’s action would soon give rise to World War III because the only thing standing between a European war of all against all was a political union that dates all the way back to 1993 and a common currency that most members have used since 2002. Given that the clock has not even yet started ticking on Britain’s official exit and that NATO, which binds together a couple dozen European countries plus the United States and Canada, is still going strong, fears of a sixth Battle of Ypres seem, well, a tad exaggerated.

And let’s not pretend that the EU is some vague, toothless entity against which there are no legitimate reasons for resentment. Recently, for instance, the EU’s “commissioner for justice, consumers, and gender equality” issued strict rules for banning “hate speech” on the internet, and has secured the participation of Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in enforcing disturbingly vague and illiberal rules. Even EU defenders, such as the Times‘ Cohen, grants that it needs serious changes. To categorically assert that 17.5 million Leave voters (against 16 million Remain voters) are simply racist and anti-immigrant is to ignore pro-Leave voices such as libertarian, cosmopolitan Brits such as science writer and House of Lords member Matt Ridley and member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan, both of whom support opening borders to more goods and people. The EU, notes Ridley, “still has no trade deals with America, China, Japan, Brazil, India, Canada, Australia and Indonesia.”

Comedians ranging from Full Frontal‘s Samantha Bee to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump showcased another unseemly, widespread element of Brexit “analysis”: It’s really all about domestic U.S. politics, don’t you know? Bee, a former Daily Show reporter who now heads up her own TBS show, attributed the Leave win to “xenophobia” and anger and argued that “Even a brain-damaged baboon couldn’t miss the parallels between the U.S. and Britain.” To be sure, Trump himself was tweeting up a storm drawing such connections. “Just arrived in Scotland,” he tweeted immediately after the vote. “Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!” (The Donald was also taken to task by commenters who noted that not only did Scotland vote against independence in 2014, a majority last week voted to remain in the EU.) Soon enough, he retweeted comments such as this one: “What has happened in the UK in the last 12 hours is exactly what will happen in November…vote TRUMP 2016.”

Well, maybe.

Whatever legitimate similarities obtain, the differences between the United Kingdom and the United States on issues such as immigration, free trade, and however you want to define xenophobia are greater still. While 77 percent of Brits want to see immigration reduced, for instance, about three-quarters of Americans—and 56 percent of Republicans—think illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain requirements. To the extent that there is anger in the United States at “the establishment,” it’s a trans-partisan sensibility that motivates liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and everyone else in the country. How else to explain Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly strong showing against the fully-anointed-by-party-elders Hillary Clinton? And what does it say that Americans disapprove of both Clinton and Trump in record numbers (but we hate the anti-establishment Trump more)? Or that Clinton and Trump currently hold the same positions on the NAFTA and TPP trade deals? And that party identification levels are at or near historic lows? This all may signal voter anger, frustration, and even desperation, but it’s not simply coming from a single group of voters in the States.

But people such as Bee and Trump are less about getting to the heart of the matter and more about signaling to their respective tribes. One of the biggest misperceptions that Americans have long held is that everything in the wider world is a direct result of American action (or inaction). We wholeheartedly believe that when the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold. This sort of deeply rooted, reflexive solipsism is the main driver of a foreign policy that insists that America is “the indispensable nation” that must be involved everywhere and always. It undergirds an outsize sensibility of U.S. responsibility for every good, bad, and indifferent economic and cultural outcome on the globe. Such thoughts actually pander to the one fear we’re afraid to countenance: That America just might no longer be the beating heart of a global order that is nonetheless getting richer and more free as power decentralizes all over the planet. The only thing worse than being responsible for everything is to not matter as much as we think we should.

• Donald Trump gave a major speech on jobs today, directly criticizing Hillary Clinton’s support for free trade deals.
• Benghazi panel’s report vindicates Clinton.
• “Edward Snowden’s life as a robot.”
• 10 killed, 20 wounded in explosion at Istanbul airport.
• Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn loses no-confidence vote.
• Faculty want Yale to drop the name “Calhoun College.”

Former Reason editor and current Bloomberg View columnist Virginia Postrel has a terrific new column laying out in damning detail the latest revelations in California’s high-speed rail boondoggle. The Los Angeles Times, Postrel notes, published an investigative piece earlier this month showing that (in her paraphrasing), “When the Spanish construction company Ferrovial submitted its winning bid for a 22-mile segment, the proposal included a clear and inconvenient warning: ‘More than likely, the California high speed rail will require large government subsidies for years to come.'” Worse yet—the state scrubbed that we’re-gonna-need-a-bigger-subsidy warning from the project’s website, almost certainly because the California High-Speed Rail Authority is heavily invested in the provable fiction that (in its own shouty words), “HIGH-SPEED RAIL IN CALIFORNIA WILL NOT REQUIRE OPERATING SUBSIDIES.”   

That thievery-level mendacity of the vested pro-rail interests within government, you can be sure, will not be the target of suggested fraud prosecutions in the Democratic Party’s national platform. (Indeed, if they were being even-handed about suggesting law enforcement crackdowns against intentionally misleading forward statements, Democrats would be investigating why their own “five million green jobs” stubbornly failed to materialize.)

But California’s broader political class also has blood on its hands, as this Postrel passage illustrates:

[A] closer look even back [in 2008] would have made it clear that, barring a miracle, the rail project wouldn’t keep its promises. To do so, it would have to be the fastest, most popular bullet train in the world, with many more riders per mile and a much greater percentage of seats occupied than the French and Japanese systems—a highly unlikely prospect. Yet only the most determined wonk would have discovered these comparisons.

Some of those who knew better still succumbed to the glamour of the idea. “There’s something undeniably alluring about a bullet train—the technology is so powerful, the speed so breathtaking, it makes quotidian trips seem exotic,” opined the Times’s editorial board in October 2008. Admitting that “it seems close to a lead-pipe cinch that the California High-Speed Rail Authority will ask for many billions more in the coming decades, and the Legislature will have to scrape up many millions of dollars in operating subsidies,” it nonetheless concluded that “we still think voters should give in to the measure’s gleaming promise.”

The two hyperlinks in that excerpt are, respectively, to my current employer and my former employer. In fact, the L.A. Times editorial in question linked back to the Reason Foundation’s study, and pronounced it “more persuasive” than that of rail project’s backers. Here’s a longer passage:

[P]roponents of Proposition 1a, which would authorize $9.95 billion in bonds for a high-speed rail line connecting Northern and Southern California, think it would be wildly successful. They predict the line could draw 117 million riders a year by 2030, compared with 3 million now taking the high-speed Amtrak train in the densely populated Boston-Washington corridor. And they say it will turn a billion-dollar profit by then even as it keeps ticket prices remarkably low.

The projections by the measure’s opponents, led by the libertarian Reason Foundation in Los Angeles, are much less sanguine and more persuasive.

In other words, screw cost-benefit analysis; we like shiny trains! (And we dislike consumers making the same yucky choices as most members of the L.A. Times editorial board: “Weaning travelers from gas-powered, road-choking cars is critical to the state’s health and competitiveness.”)

Three years later—I kid you not—the L.A. Times reacted to the cost overruns we predicted by editorializing that “Yes, the price tag has tripled and its completion date is 13 years later. But it’s still a gamble worth taking.” One almost hopes they continue finding enough shovels over on Spring Street, for the pure physical challenge of it all.

I think about this mindset every time libertarians are accused of being pie-in-the-sky-dreamers who don’t understand how the real world works, or conversely when the same mainstream outlets who editorialize for nearly every imaginable bond issue then turn around bemoan how state budgets have been cut to the bone.

To paraphrase Vietnam-era John Kerry, who will be the last California taxpayer to bleed for what people knew at the time was going to be a massive waste of money? And when will the people who should have known better own up to their own embarrassing intellectual mistakes? It must suck being beat to the policy punch by Season Two of True Detective.

Reason TV has been all over this sorry story, including this piece from last year:

President Barack Obama’s administration has just ushered in the first national monument recognizing a significant piece of gay history right as LGBT pride month comes to a close. The Stonewall Inn in New York City and the park and streets surrounding it have been christened Stonewall National Monument. (Check out the speed of government under the right circumstances: It already has a web page with the National Parks Service.)

Stonewall is a famous gay bar and landmark that is widely associated with the angry, frustrated foundations of the modern gay rights movement. Plenty of activism and public protest preceded the police raid on Stonewall in June 1969, but history has a way of wanting to register a tipping point for any social movement. Stonewall’s as good as any, and it certainly set a tone for rebellion against the authority of the government and police (and media!) that presumed to tell gay and transgender people that they were dangerous and perverse, a threat to the social fabric.

And now all Americans of all sexual orientations and identities can visit and celebrate this monument to rebellion, kinship, and just a touch of hedonism.

Oh, also, there’s a bunch of federal rules. The area of the monument includes nearby Christopher Park. Local journalist Matthew Chayes took this snapshot (used with permission) of a sign posted in the park showing all the rules put into place by the National Park Service, similar to those at all national parks:

The rules prohibit drinking alcohol, amplified sound (without a permit), and demonstrations (without a permit). The park also closes at dusk. What better to celebrate a protest that took place in front of a bar?

We checked in with National Parks Services to get a little more information. Acting Site Manager Allan Bailey explained that this sign is applicable only to the literal park section, not the entire monument. Stonewall Inn is privately owned and still in operation as a gay bar. The Inn’s drag bingo and strip shows are not in any danger due to the designation as a monument. Bailey also noted that the park was hardly a free-for-all before the feds came around. It was operating under New York City’s very extensive regulations.

Still, given that the Stonewall Riots were a massive, loud rejection of laws that punished certain kinds of disliked behaviors, a memorial that includes a park only open during the day that forbids alcohol and severely restricts protests is an unexpectedly amusing touch.