The End of Days…

We should not, I think, underestimate how utterly disastrous it would be for the Executive Branch to get its way with its newest outrageous claims of executive privilege.  Most terrifying of all is the following paragraph:

David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel’s office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a “unitary executive.” In practical terms, he said, “U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president’s will.” And in constitutional terms, he said, “the president has decided, by virtue of invoking executive privilege, that is the correct policy for the entire executive branch.”

There is not any concrete reason to think that this view of the executive branch can in any way coexist with either a working republic or with free government in general.  Any doubts that the so-called “theory of the unitary executive” is anything other than a code word for tyranny has now been completely removed once those who support it label the bureaucratic offices of the executive “emanations of a President’s will.”

Forget the many obvious legal arguments for why this isn’t true, such as the fact that Congress has bureaucratic oversight power, confirmation power of Presidential nominees, the power of the purse over executive programs, etc.  Instead consider the potential fallout if the position of the White House was to win.  The President would no longer be subject to any oversight within any activity pertinent to the domain of the executive branch, and, by the way, it is the executive branch that gets final say on what is and is not its business.  If that is not tyrannical enough, there is also the fact that this step, if it were to succeed, would render any possibility for an as neutral as possible federal bureaucracy utterly impossible.  The distinction between Justice having USA attorneys, that represent the protection of the people of the United States, a plural and diverse group of free and equal people bound to each other by laws they agree to, and Justice having an army of attorneys that are “emanations of the President’s will” is a gap that the President now claims does not exist, which, in short, means that the President is claiming, like Napoleon, like Robespierre, like Mao, and like Stalin, that  he is the state and the embodiment of the will of the people, and therefore his will is the will of the state.

Never mind the history of great nations that have gone off the rails in the modern era by pursuing such a terrible view of governance, consider that the naked ambition of this regime has been revealed in full in the course of trying to strike the votes of those likely to be against them from the rolls, firing members of the executive branch who made life difficult for the Republican Party in the course of doing their job, and replacing them with personal advisors of the party’s chief political strategist.

Perhaps this administration has always been committed to a version of autocratic sovereignty one finds in Thomas Hobbes, perhaps they truly do not get how important it is that the power of the state is generated by the fact that “power checks power without arresting it,” or perhaps they are so anti-big government that they know this all too well and fantasize about pushing the Federal government until it goes critical and melts down.  While there are many lovely theories about “wills of sovereigns” and “ultraminimalist states,” without the concept of self limitiation, which, being unable to actually enforce upon ourselves requires us to set up an elaborate set of institutions and relationships o that other’s interests will force us to comply with it, these fantasies lead to the worst kinds of states, run by the worst kind of people.

If this view of the executive wins, we ought to mark it on the calendar as the day in which the American revolutionary tradition, which has been unraveling ever since the French Revolution turned freedom and law into the religious iconography of the state rather than practical governing principles and turned politics into a juggling by elites between the great opinions and great indifferences of the masses, will be dead and buried.  The modern problems of unfreedom, “The Party” and the autocrat with his lock-step bureaucracy will once again have been free government’s conspiratorial enemies along with the people, their Brutus.

“I Told You So” (For Educational Purposes)

From On Revolution

“the interrelationship between war and revolution, their reciprocation and mutual dependence, has steadily grown, and that emphasis in the relationship has shifted more and more from war to revolution.”

“In the contest that divides the world today and in which so much is at stake, those will probably win who understand revolution, while those who still put their faith in power politics in the traditional sense of the term and, therefore, in war as the last resort of all foreign policy may well discover in a not too distant future that they have become masters in a rather useless and obsolete trade.”

From a story entitled “Exit Strategies” in The Washington Post:

If U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future, three developments would be likely to unfold. Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.

That was the conclusion reached in recent “war games” exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. “I honestly don’t think it will be apocalyptic,” said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But “it will be ugly.”

I think we ought to take VERY seriously, that Arendt’s argument On Revolution, one we still have not taken to heart, is at the very heart of our struggle in Iraq, where we are almost undeniably dealing with a preponderance of poor judgment.  We have not thought seriously about the questions of revolution and foundation, and what they seem to require.  The words of Montesquieu, Madison, Jefferson, Harrington, and in recent times, Sheldon Wolin, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Michael Sandel have all been either forgotten and ignored by the very nation who were constituted by the former group, and provided a home for the latter.  The answer to the question “why did we fail in Iraq?” is one which any honest retrospection will not say “because we did not know any better,” but instead, “because we blinded ourselves to the answers that were there to be found.”  For a nation that prides itself so much on its practical nature, we will be searching back, not for the answers to the “Iraq puzzle” but to find answers to the mystery of how we could have so pervasively attempted such a major operation without bothering to be sure that we had some understanding of why things work the way that they do.  We have no answers as to how to found a stable regime in Iraq in large part, because we never looked for a rational approach to doing so, we were contented with a rationale for doing so instead.  If rational thought contradicted or complicated our rationale, we were perfectly content to let them come and go without acting upon it.  This sorry state of affairs has now brought us to the place where the only calculations left about founding a new regime in Iraq is counting the number of bodies we will leave in our wake as we leave the stage.  Like a person who sits at a poker table and is not familiar with the rules, we have decided that when it come to revolutions, it might be best if we just watch a few hands.

Retrospective Series: OK Computer at Ten Years

If one were to ask me what I think the best rock band album of all time is, I would not even give it a moment’s hesitation to come back with OK Computer by Radiohead (and I’m not alone).   The music means so much to me, for so many different reasons, and in so many different ways… and now it’s ten years old.  It is hard to believe that it was ten years ago, and I still remember the first time I heard “Karma Police” on the radio, or that I can still remember the first time I put the CD into my dorm-room computer and waited to hear if the their other tracks were going to be anywhere near as interesting… and then on came “Airbag.”  And then “Paranoid Android,” and they just kept coming.  It was love instantly.

Over the course of this next year, I pan on occasionally writing some posts about my reflections on OK Computer, it’s songs, what I see as its importance, and what I think still seems meaningful ten year’s out.  I know of other friends out in the blog universe who have similar feelings about the album, so I will link anything they put up as well.

Tune in next time when Wojciehowski attacks physics…

Most sports writers strike me us utterly lacking in the intelligence department, but I cannot think of one who would find himself so utterly unprepared to defend why he draws a paycheck than Gene Wojciechowski.  Oh, he’d sputter out responses along the lines of, “I’m a real american sports fan, and I’m too really, people cannot handle me” and the like.  However, the fact of the matter is that he has written multiple columns on Beckham and the MLS… and they have been terrible.

His latest masterpiece contains the following arguments:

• someone said no MLS team could make it through the Premiership.  Of course, that person is Stephen Cohen of World Soccer Daily, and he has said repeatedly that he thinks football has a “bright future” in America.  Furthermore, you add the guarenteed 60 million pounds sterling tv money to DC Unite’s payroll for making the Premiership, I’m thinking they’d find a way to at least be a relegation battler.
• People don’t go to MLS games.  FALSE.  In terms of overall soccer attendance, MLS is ALREADY an average league in terms of tickets sold.  Oh, and by the way, the CONCACAF Gold Cup final pulled in a higher rating than the Stanley Cup finals.  The most watched ESPN2 program EVER was a World Cup match last year.
• World Cup’s cool, but how many people watch MLS on a weekly basis?    First, see above.  Second, how many people watch ESPN’s crap Big East Monday college basketball game?  I can’t imagine that the annual Maryland-Georgia Tech Thursday college football game has lit up the ratings either.  I guess Americans hate College Basketball and College Football.
• Beckham can’t save soccer.  I’m sorry, was soccer dying before Beckham got here just because the guys who work at ESPN don’t watch it?  If this truly was our standard, than I shudder to think of the fate of things such as reading and mathematics.

My larger sense of anger with this, and columns like this, is that the writer is very critical of a sport he knows nothing about.  He has formed a conclusion in his mind before he has learned anything, and he has sought out only the data that confirms his prejudice.  In return, he receives a pat on the back, a place on ESPN.com’s front page and a lot of money.  ESPN has soccer writers, and they are decent ones at that.  If you want to get a reaction on the Beckham story that’s honest, read Andrea Canales, or listen to Stephen Cohen, or read Ives Galarcep, or Fank Della Alpa.  But American journalists writing about MLS and citing comments in British tabloid papers, who also know nothing about MLS, is not going to create any value.

Unless Mr. Wojciechowski is operating under the “takes one to know one” school of identifying worthless things, he ought to refrain from considering himself a qualified judge of MLS.

“Her Green Plastic Watering Can…”

“In America there are no boundaries, only mazes.  No one knows how to draw them, though they are indeed drawn, whether randomly or conspiratorially into binary systems of mutual exclusion or permissive inclusion that deflates all differences and distinction.  Here no one seems sure of the border between fact and fiction, animate and inanimate, the projected and the perceived.”

-Peter Euben on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49  (in The Tragedy of Political Theory)

U20 WC: USA 2 Uruguay 1

The US did not play great soccer last night.  But down a goal with five minutes left, with Zizzo, Seitz, and Altidore injured, and a history of losing in the Round of 16 in disappointing fashion, the USA came back off the strength of two goals off of corner kicks that were both won by, and sent in by Freddy Adu.  Goal one is in the book as an own goal, but had the defender not sent the ball into the net by clipping the legs of a US player on the goal line, it would have been a goal for the USA anyway.  What was impressive about this team is that they have courage, and even when they are being outplayed, they have a lot going for them.  They have a lot of fortitude, and they have the technical ability to put their opponents under a lot of pressure.  This is why they have stayed in games where they haven’t looked the better side.  They are forcing their opponents to crack.  And boy did Uruguay crack.

This video shows that Uruguay have gone to the Mexico school of team USA post-match sportsmanship.  There’s no room in the game for this type of behavior, that being said, I love Michael Bradley’s flashing the score to Cardaccio, who apparently, was upset by something enough to feel justified to punch Danny Szetela in the head during the match (and not even get whistled) end the to kung-fu kick Michael Bradley after the match.  Stay classy, Uruguay.

Lying to Congress

If it was a big deal that President Clinton lied under oath to an independent counsel, which it was, should we not also consider it a big deal that the current head of the Justice Department has been lying to Congress?

The two officials spoke in a telephone call arranged by press officials at the Justice Department after The Washington Post disclosed yesterday that the FBI sent reports to Gonzales of legal and procedural violations shortly before he told senators in April 2005: “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse” after 2001.

We have a White House that has commuted the sentence of a man convicted of obstructing justice, one the refuses to respond to subpoenas for multiple investigations of deliberately misleading Congress, and continues to support an Attorney General who is at the center of one such investigation while he gets caught lying to Congress on an entirely separate subject.  While we would not want to prejudge the White House too strongly in either the USA Firings or the Wiretapping investigations, one would have to be considered loyal to well beyond a fault if one did not want Congress to pursue these investigations unimpeded.

Fracture in the Parties

The Republican Party is floundering in trying to find a policy for Iraq.   Democrats continue to scramble to find bipartisan friends across the aisle for a variety of different initiatives.  some may see this version of Congress as panicked and chaotic, but I have to say that it warms my heart to see that there are, in fact, still consequences when the state loses public faith in its abilities… no matter how much power one political party gathers inside of the governing apparatus, it is never enough to withstand elections.  Despite Sandy Levinson’s objections, this remains the majorities government… and politicians as a class of people, regardless of their privileges, are never more than vizier’s in the majorities court.  Once their flattery wears off, they quickly lose relevance.

The Solution to the Barry Bonds Issue?

  Alex Rodriguez is 6 Home Runs shy of 500, and he is 31 years old.  The current youngest person to 500 home runs is Jimmie Foxx, at 32 years and 337 days old.  Does he make the Barry Bonds issue irrelevant?   I’d love nothing more than to see the Barry Bonds home run issue be nothing more than a a temporary moment of controversey erased by someone else’s achievement rather than settled by a commissioner or the media, but A-Rod would likely need a another 6 healthy seasons to make the chase of the all-time home run record within reach, either that, or a couple of monster seasons, either of which, one would have to say, are sure made easier by the use of performance enhancing drugs. 

U20 World Cup Stunner: USA 2 Brazil 1

Most likely, this was the greatest game ever played by a USA Men squad of any type.  Freddy Adu, Chris Seitz, and Jozy Altidore have had a famous night.  They played against a Brazil team that features players who have 10 million euro transfer speculations hanging over them, and these three in particular, were up to their level in terms of skill, style, flair, and most importantly, they were their betters in leading their side to get the job done.  The USA wins their group, guarantees a game against a 3rd place side to start the knockouts, and the leading scorers of the tournament reads as follows.

3 goals

• Sergio Agüero
• Freddy Adu
• Josmer Altidore
• Danny Szetela

This youtube link will give you an idea of the absolute drama of this match.  Watch for Freddy Adu juggling between two defenders at the corner flag, dribbling past  couple more and setting up Altidore’s second goal… outrageous stuff.  Nice to see players in red, white, and blue responsible for it.

Given how many scouts come with big checkbooks to the U20’s, I think the MLS transfer fee record is about to be broken.