What's a Counter-revolution?

Egypt's Mohamed Morsi threatened the other day to crack down even more seriously on violent protests in Port Said. Calling the protesters "counter-revolutionaries," he insisted that he would maintain public order at the cost of civil liberties if necessary.

The word "counter-revolutionary" sounds dangerous to me. It implies that the revolution, whatever that is, comes first. Not the rule of law, not liberty, not democracy, not equality, not prosperity, not even order come before the revolution.

Check out his exact words:

The revolution was a turning point in Egypt's history. Egyptians have achieved unlimited freedoms and a constitution that reduced the president's powers.A structural reform is taking place in the state's institutions to fulfill the revolution's demands. I'm also working with the government to solve the problems of slum areas in Egypt.

Note the reification of the revolution here: it has demands, desires. Not only that, but it provided "unlimited freedoms." Such language does not bode well.

Stable democracy requires moderation. It requires compromise. I understand the pressure on President Morsi here, because no government can function, and few liberties can survive, in an atmosphere of chaos. People need to feel -- and to be -- secure in their personal safety before they ca engage is reasoned debate about touchy subjects. To this end, Morsi may need to make strongly-worded statements and to authorize coercion. The problem should be familiar to any 11th-grade US history student who as studied Abraham Lincoln. But language matters, too, and Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood need to learn to talk the talk.

Fame and Consequences

I don't generally take halls of fame seriously -- they're just museums. All the hubbub and dispute about who belongs in what hall of fame is the most base mental masturbation.

This week, however, the baseball writers made a statement. They refused to vote anyone into the Baseball Hall of Fame, even though some of the best players in history were candidates. Statistically, Barry Bonds is the best hitter of all time, Roger Clemens is among the best pitchers, and Mike Piazza is the best hitting catcher. None came even close to the 75% of voters they needed to be inducted.

As a museum, the Hall should include all three of these players, and probably also Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell (against whom I played in high school). And I have a hard time taking the morality of this kind of thing seriously. After all, Ty Cobb was a racist jerk, and Gaylord Perry only cheated through his whole career.

But I read one comment that rings most true to me: these guys made themselves rich by cheating and got to play the game at the highest level by cheating, but they did not earn honor. They'll have to live with that consequence, if none other.

"An approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound "

The Brookings Institution recently published some brief comments and illustrations on a Washington Post series on the Obama Administration's drone policy. Whether US law is ready for it or not, the Obama team has established a formal review process for the decision to kill a foreign national.

Brookings published a flow chart for the process, found here:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2012/wittes-byman-terrorist-threat-flowchart

On the surface, the thing seems eminently reasonable and legal. The government only kills "operational" targets who can not easily be captured and prosecuted in the United States. The rationale goes like this: if there is a really bad guy out there, we would like to capture him and try him for crimes, but if we can't we just have to kill him, right?

Maybe. But I just don't think it's as easy as all that.

As the Post article put it, "Obama administration officials at times have sought to trigger debate over how long the nation might employ the kill lists, but officials said the discussions became dead ends." In other words, they are no longer doing the deep thinking here about the moral, legal and diplomatic consequences of what they are doing. Officials admit that the targets they hit these days just are not as important or as dangerous as the targets from five years ago, but the bureaucratic momentum driving the existence of a "top 20" list makes it difficult to complete it once and for all. There will always be a "most dangerous" person, even if he's not nearly so dangerous as people we killed or imprisoned already.

Here's a thought-provoking exchange from the Post: "In one instance, Mullen, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, returned from Pakistan and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a “top 20” list?"

We still have not conducted a clear and open debate about the legality and utility of these assassinations. Too many people don't know about them or can't be bothered to think about them carefully enough. It's not so much that I worry about a slippery slope -- what will we do if we are willing to blow people up -- though that's not as silly as most slippery slope problems are. Rather, I am concerned that we as a people are changing who we are. We are now the ones who target and kill people because we can do it. I don't think that's a good idea.

Do Drones Fit Under Current Law?

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- drone aircraft -- grow more sophisticated and cheaper every day. The Obama Administration has amply proved their effectiveness as weapons, and drones continue to kill people in Yemen and Pakistan almost every week. The political and social impact of those strikes is changing the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, with consequences military officials can not foresee with any accuracy.

As always, such developments have spread beyond their original use. Law enforcement and counterintelligence types now look forward to the day when they can fly drones in US skies to keep  an eye on what's happening in this country. This blog has discussed this possibility before, but the Times considered it again this week.

It's not obvious how drone surveillance fits into current American law. The US Supreme Court recently heard arguments about the use of drug-sniffing dogs, and the way it rules there may indicate how the current justices think about the concept of privacy. The drafters of the 4th Amendment did not envision the government looking at our "persons, papers and effects," and it';s not clear how drone surveillance would affect how "secure" we are in those things, anyway. Police drive back and forth along city streets all the time, and that is not considered an invasion of privacy;   if they watching from much farther away but with much better cameras, might that not be simply a more effective way of doing the same thing? Still, the idea is creepy.

But the main point is that once again life has outstripped law. Obama wants rules in place, and that's a start, but Congress and the courts need to get to work, too.

No Words

I have said before that I can not understand the position of gun-ownership advocates like the NRA. But no gun control proposal short of banning all guns could have prevented the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut on Friday. The woman who owned the guns would have passed every check. The guns themselves do not, I believe, qualify as assault weapons, so even the proposed limits on certain firearms would not help.

NRA-type arguments that her gun possession could have protected her are nonsense, since she was not going to shoot her son as he drove up to her house. And I hope no one is suggesting that we arm teachers at elementary schools.

This is one we just have to swallow. As a father of young children and an uncle of two girls who were in school 20 minutes from Newtown, the story is beyond painful. But let's not pretend it can be fixed.

Is This a Republican Form of Government?

The United States Constitution guarantees to each state a "republican form of government." Nowhere does it explain exactly what that means, but we can assume a few things and the Supreme Court has announced a few others.

First, government must be chosen through democratic elections. For no good reason, the US Supreme Court has said that state legislatures, unlike the federal one, must include two houses both of which are directly elected. It also has created a series of rules about the way election districts can be drawn. (see Reynolds v. Sims)

Second, there ought to be some level of transparency and the rule of law. People ought to be able to understand what the law says and how it was written

By this second standard, the state of New York is like a bizarrely wealthy and high-developed political backwater. For the last few weeks, Albany insiders have been railing on about the way state senate leadership will affect jobs, the economy, minorities and a bunch of other stuff. But I can not find a single explanation for why the back-room dealings a few members of the smaller house of the state legislature should entirely determine the agenda for the government for the next term. How are these decisions made? Once they are made, how do they coerce the rest of the membership to do what they are told?

I have been trying -- admittedly not that hard -- to figure this stuff out for a while, and I can't. But shouldn't it be obvious?

Perspective: Americans Should be Thankful

The United States is not governed well at the moment. Squabbles over the "fiscal cliff," which real adults would have resolved months ago, reflect a loss of perspective and a lack of true leadership.

But at least we are not Russia.


I recently finished Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face,  a biography of Vladimir Putin, in which Gessen describes the cold-blooded brutality of the Russian president's rise to power. She focuses primarily the effect of this one man's character on Russian political culture, but in the background we see the complicity of many Russians themselves. Gessen and thousands of other Russians try to stand up to the lawlessness of their own government, and those dissenters are to be commended. But too may others -- a critical mass, it would seem -- not only condone the nastiness, but act to support it in quiet but equally callous ways. It takes a nation to allow this stuff.

Putin's new program, typical of tyrants everywhere, and totalitarian leaders especially, is to deny his own failure of governance and to fall back on propaganda to pump up support. He wants Russians to be patriotic, so he's putting together slogans and flags and other nonsense.

At least American leaders accept the basic principle of the rule of law. The GOP accepted defeat in recent elections, and did not attempt to steal the vote in the first place. This is no small thing.