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From the Top: City of Rats

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety. I knew that before moving here—you’d always see them scampering around sidewalks and alleys when walking around town—but it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot.

On my very first trip to the supermarket as a bona fide Beltway resident, a little black rat darted between the feet of everyone in the checkout line. While the customers eeked, the Safeway employees just laughed and laughed. At my new rowhouse, I noticed packs of the critters clattering through the neighborhood’s front yards, including my own. There were scores of gaping rat-holes in the dirt, and the trees were full of day-rats (otherwise known as squirrels) during sunlight hours. Some time soon after the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rat, my pregnant wife walked downstairs and reached for her bag on the couch, and out jumped a plump young rodent.

I began making inquiries to exterminators, colleagues, and panicky urban websites, and what came back was a Stephen King hellscape. “We can trap what’s inside right now and plug up some holes and establish a perimeter outside,” the first rat-assessor told us. “But there’s no way to keep them out of your house in this neighborhood—they just come right up through the sewers.” Yep, the old rat-in-the-toilet urban legend, only this time it was true. Another exterminator just shrugged and told us to “put pressure on the city,” though he knew it was futile.

My colleague Michael Moynihan had rats build a complicated nest inside the engine of his car, chewing through various wires and hoses. While throwing the contents of a second engine-nest into an open dumpster (D.C.’s trash-management tidiness being just a step or two above that of Naples, Italy) he noticed dozens of beady rat-eyes inside staring up at him disapprovingly. Recently, his wife slammed on her brakes in front of an intersection, and a rat plopped out from under the hood.

Vermin complaints to the city government were up 8 percent in 2007. In October of that year, self-described “rodent experts” Dale Kaukeinen and Bruce Colvin released a nationwide study naming Washington the fifth-most- vulnerable city to a major spike in rat population, a prediction that seems more likely than ever after yet another mild winter. The National Zoo has such a bad infestation that two adult pandas were killed by rat poison a few years back. “Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared war on the rats in the late 1990s,” Washington Times columnist Tom Knott wrote in February, “and the rats won.”

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a $611 million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team. Actually, that figure is much too low: Eminent domain settlements with in-the-way property owners added $43 million to the cost, and a handful of outstanding cases could tack on $24 million more. There were also $32 million in municipal infrastructure improvements.

So how much is $710 million in the scheme of D.C.? More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget. (It receives an additional $4 billion or so from the federal government.) It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools. Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall: postponing a tax cut on commercial property, doubling the cost of a business license, increasing ambulance fees, charging an extra 23 cents for every phone line that can call 911.

Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires—a figure certain to go up during the current credit crunch. Perhaps the paper was too busy with its multiple gushing special sections about the facility, including such headlines as “The City Opens the Ballpark, And the Fans Come Up Winners.”

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. The potholes in the roads would embarrass a Romanian. The neighborhood papers are filled with complaints that violent crimes like carjacking and assault don’t rise to the level of police interest. (In 2000, when I reported being mugged during my first visit to the city, the police told me there was nothing they could do except check the Lost and Found once in a while for my wallet.) Our local library admitted that the online book-reservation system is not tethered to physical reality, and that in fact they have no real idea at any given time whether or not they have a book.
It has taken us four visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles to come even close to registering our car locally.

Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance. In Los Angeles, my former city representative, Tom LaBonge, was tolerated as an eccentric for being the only member of the 15-member City Council to express genuine interest in street repairs (though the road in front of my house still had craters large enough to hide a baby). When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board. Councilmen always talk of “doing deals” and “putting together projects,” by which they mean real estate. Nearly two dozen governmental authorities—city, regional, county, state—have some power of eminent domain over the area, and they use it to build five-star hotels, reward campaign contributors, and erect schools that declining enrollment levels have rendered utterly unnecessary. Civic leaders are always proposing some new property-related “moratorium”—on converting apartments into condominiums, fleabag hotels into attractive rentals, and unused patches of hillside into homes. “Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector. Especially when the private sector has given up the intellectual fight.

One of my last editorial board visits was with Tim Leiweke, who owns the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the largest new real estate development in town, a project called L.A. Live. I expected a guy who works with the famous conservative tycoon Phil Anschutz to be at least halfway skeptical about the intersection of City Hall and private real estate development, but when I asked him about his biggest frustration with public policy downtown, he replied: “The gap between the haves and the have-nots.” If we don’t have more affordable housing and living wage union jobs, Leiweke warned, “There’s gonna be a day of reckoning here that’s not going to be pretty.”

Maybe that’s why local politicians line the pockets of billionaire sports tycoons like Leiweke: Give ’em enough money, and intrude enough into their business, and they’re almost bound to go native. Now if only they could be trained to care a little less about stadiums and a little more about rats.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

When Coalitions Dissolve

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“Victory has 100 fathers,” the Italian proverb goes, but “defeat is an orphan.” It’s an old battlefield saw, trotted out by blame-taking commanders after ignominious defeats, such as President John F. Kennedy following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. But it’s no less true when it comes to politics.

Anxious conservatives this year are evincing a powerful nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, giving the former president credit for fathering the modern era of consistent Republican victories. Reagan, the myth goes, kept together the three “legs” of the GOP “stool”: social conservatives, free marketeers, and national security hawks. As a result, Republicans held the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, broke the Democrats’ stranglehold on the House of Representatives, cut income taxes, and won the Cold War.

But in 2008 the stool seems on the verge of breaking apart. Less than two years after holding the White House and both houses of Congress, the Republican Party is threatening to squander all three. Already down 33 seats in the House of Representatives, Republicans are losing 26 incumbents to retirement compared to the Democrats’ five and as of early March were behind on congressional fund raising by a ratio of 5 to 1, according to The Wall Street Journal. Democrats are widely expected to extend their 51-49 advantage in the Senate, and President George W. Bush is maintaining a dismal approval rating of around 30 percent. The party that once brought forth such tepid poindexters as John Kerry and Michael Dukakis is on the verge of nominating a charismatic fellow preaching change, who, not coincidentally, also happens to be that rare national politician on the public’s side against the trillion-dollar war.

This prospective defeat has 100 fathers, if you listen to the nation’s pundits. During the presidential primary season, the GOP abandoned decades of precedent by failing to coalesce around an Establishment front-runner, leaving each leg of the stool kicking viciously at the others in a contest for the party’s soul.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson attempted to claim the Reagan mantle, attacked big-government evangelical Mike Huckabee for running against the other two legs of the Reagan coalition, and then promptly dropped out. Huckabee strategist Ed Rollins, a former Reagan official himself, declared to The New York Times that the coalition was “gone” and deserved to “go by the wayside” because of its insufficient social conservatism. Conservative talk show giant Rush Limbaugh predicted that either a Huckabee or a McCain nomination would destroy modern Republicanism as we know it.

And the libertarian long shot in the race? “I don’t take Ron Paul’s ideas seriously,” Daniel Casse wrote on the website of Commentary magazine, “but his presence in this debate really is the best proof that…the Reagan coalition is gone.”

Paul’s candidacy—which drew the eye-rolling treatment from McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, and “serious” conservatives nationwide—showed just how marginalized libertarianism has become in the party of Barry Goldwater. Paul’s lonely apostasy on foreign policy was greeted with hoots of derision on one debate stage after another. His calls for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and hacking back the federal bureaucracy rolled right off the standard-bearers of a party that retook the House of Representatives in 1994 on a platform of reducing government.

Yet despite raising $30 million, Paul and his limited-government supporters got their clocks cleaned by Huckabee and the social cons, who were treated with much more deference by eventual nominee McCain and the party establishment. Twenty-seven years after Ronald Reagan famously said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” the GOP’s appetite for rolling back the regulatory state appears as dead as the era of federal budget surpluses. Even former revolutionary Newt Gingrich agrees. “The Republican Party cannot win over time as the permanently angry anti-government party,” he writes in his latest book, Real Change.

In Comeback, one of several new whither-the-party books by traumatized Republicans, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum points out that the very Bush policies that fiscal conservatives like him despise—the prescription drug entitlement, the No Child Left Behind Act, campaign finance reform—were overwhelmingly popular among the American people. “On issues from Social Security to healthcare to environmental protection, conservatives find themselves on the less popular side of the great issues of the day,” Frum writes.

The solution? Surrender: “There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of the government, we must prove that we care about government enough to manage it well.” Republicans should cave on new spending and regulations, says Frum, in exchange for tax cuts. “This is not 1964,” he writes. “The ideal under threat today is not the nation’s liberty, but the nation’s security, its unity, its effectiveness, and…its equality and beauty.”

As Sasha Issenberg wrote in a perceptive Boston Globe story last November, “With Republicans no longer preaching suspicion of Washington, a new consensus has emerged, as both parties have come in their ways to stand today for a more robust, aggressive federal government. As a result, Goldwaterism is without a natural home in the two-party system.”

The remaining libertarians in Reagan’s shrinking big tent aren’t just being ignored or marginalized; they’re being blamed for the Reagan coalition’s crackup. While John McCain was heading toward the nomination in January, The Weekly Standard published an online piece by the political scientists Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey slamming McCain’s critics as “strict free-market” ideologues whose rigidity jeopardized the conservative movement. “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life,” the Storeys wrote. “Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.”

Intentionally or not, the blame-economists argument mirrors a popular critique of George W. Bush from the progressive left: that his presidency is an example of free marketeers run amok. In her best-selling book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein lays the original sin of Bushite misgovernance at the feet of an unlikely source: Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, the “grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary hypermobile global economy.” Never mind that Friedman, in his 10th decade on the planet, exerted little or no influence on the free-spending, government-growing Bush administration.

On some level, there is no use worrying about other people’s economic fantasies. But on another, Klein’s rant points to the downside of joining big-tent coalitions: Even if your ideological bloc-within-a-bloc is dwindling and disrespected, when it supports the party in power it will inevitably be branded with that government’s failings.

Voting and political party membership are deeply personal and arguably bizarre public signaling rituals. There is no right or wrong way to do them. My own bizarreness tends toward single-issue obsessives and third-party long shots, and away from political parties (which I’ve never joined). Meaning, I’m much more likely to write in Ron Paul than let the dog whistle of Supreme Court appointments lure me grudgingly back to a major-party nominee. Not the most responsible approach, I agree.

But I wonder how responsible it is to add libertarian votes to a shrinking coalition whose dominant rhetoric and political standard-bearer stand in increasingly explicit opposition to the party’s libertarian strand. McCain, whose National Greatness conservatism is openly hostile to individualism, has recently hit some encouraging free market notes. Nonetheless, a Republican defeat this November might just leave fiscal conservatives more orphaned than people yet realize.

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason.

Soundbite: Can You Hear the People Sing?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Most people of a certain age remember Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement of the early 1980s and the day the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. Others may recall Czechoslovakia’s inspiring Velvet Revolution a few weeks later, or the bloodier Christmas Day executions of Romania’s odious Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Yet when you tell people that the tiny Baltic country of Estonia engineered a Singing Revolution to cast off their Soviet oppressors, the typical response is a blank stare.

James Tusty, a commercial and corporate filmmaker whose father emigrated from Estonia in 1924, first started hearing about the ways Estonians used nationalist folk songs and modern rock to defy Moscow when he and his wife, Maureen Castle Tusty, taught a film course in the Estonian capital of Tallinn in 1999.

The Tustys realized they were in a unique position to tell the world an inspirational story it did not know. The result, a moving 90-minute documentary called The Singing Revolution, became the highest-grossing documentary in Estonian history and has drawn rave reviews upon its limited release in the United States. The film is scheduled to be shown April 18–19 at the Cleveland Museum of Art and April 18–24 at the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C.

Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with James Tusty in January.

Q: How did songs become an essential part of the Estonian revolution?

A: Music has always been part of Estonian history. For thousands of years the Estonians have been singing folk songs. They have one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, even though they’re a very small country. So it was very natural that music would become part of the weapon that they would use to fight the Soviets. They have this song festival every five years called Laulupidu, which is 30,000 singers coming on stage to sing in harmony. And it’s not any 30,000 people who want to sing; these people audition, so it’s the best 30,000 singers.

Well, in 1947 Stalin had already come in and occupied Estonia. He declared the song festival a “bourgeois tradition,” and he declared the first annual Soviet Song Festival, making the Estonians sing songs in Russian that glorified Lenin and Stalin and Marx. But the Estonians snuck one by. That song became the unofficial national anthem in Estonia, and for the next 50 years they always sang it to close the Song Festivals.

Q: So what happened in the late ’80s?

A: In June of 1988, there was a rock concert with, I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of youth who were there singing into the night. The Soviet authorities got worried, and they shut down the concert. So the people walked three miles to an open field to continue singing, and they sang until five or six in the morning. And it went on for a week. Every night more and more people came until there were maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people singing these rock ’n’ roll songs, as well as some traditional songs. The Soviet police saw this, but they didn’t know what to do. And the Estonians just kept on pushing that envelope, until eventually they contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What broader lesson did you learn from this story?

A: What this film is about is humankind’s indomitable drive for independence. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s to start understanding liberty and freedom at a base level. I reduce freedom to this reality: I don’t want my neighbor telling me what color to paint my living room. Let’s get it down to that, and then let’s move out from that slowly, and talk about what political systems give us all the individual freedom we need.

This is not a political film. This is a story. And you will cry in the beginning and feel uplifted in the end, I promise.

Attention DC-area Reasonoids: The Singing Revolution is coming to Washington, D.C, playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday. Check here for showtimes in other cities.

Nice Shot, J.R.

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Let us now pause in somber tribute to the 30th anniversary of a momentous—and shockingly unremembered—turning point in the long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism. An event every bit as important as the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech and Yakov Smirnoff's defection to the West.

We write, of course, about the debut of "Dallas," the 13-year soap opera that shook the world.

Read the rest of this article in The Washington Post.

McCain's Cheap Dates

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

John McCain has two fundamental and conflicting challenges in the national election: 1) Rally disaffected Republicans to his side, particularly libertarians, social cons, war-skeptics, immigration restrictionists, and those who he has personally pissed off over the years; and 2) maintain his attractiveness to independents, moderate Democrats, and loyalists to whichever of the two Dem candidates gets croaked in the primaries.

Problem #1 will largely take care of itself. Merely by pointing out the Democrats' leftward drift on economics, McCain will win back many disgruntled fiscal conservatives. I'm sure he'll nominate as veep someone sufficiently young and conservative in a way McCain is not. And most importantly, the dwindling ranks of true-blue Republicans don't require that loud of a dog whistle (Supreme Court! George McGovern!) to get back on the bus. To watch that process unfold in real time, keep reading former lead McCain-basher Hugh Hewitt now that his Mormon isn't headed for the White House.

That leaves Door #2 as the main focus of McCain's attention. Here, he has two huge vulnerabilities: 1) Much of his likeability stems from that enduring image as straight-talker, which gives indie-leaning voters seven long months of flip-floppery and absolutist statements to learn that this image is a lie and 2) he wrapped up the Republican nomination largely through by winning with 2-1 ratios among voters who hate the war and hate George W. Bush. Eventually, the majority of Americans who are weary of the Global Cop act are going to realize that McCain is a more enthusiastic interventionist and committed benevolent-imperialist than his predecessor, whose miserable unpopularity is due in no small part to his activist foreign policy. Thus it becomes crucial for McCain to distance himself from Bush on foreign affairs, preferably in a way that changes the subject from his own interventionism.

That was the political backdrop to McCain's Major Address on Foreign Policy last week in Los Angeles, which campaign staff busily telegraphed to a willing press corps as an important distancing-from-Bush moment. Judging by Davids Brooks and Broder, not to mention this remarkably biased news story in the Washington Post...mission accomplished! So how did McCain, in the words of establishmentarian-in-chief Broder, signal "a vastly different approach from President Bush's [...] that might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years"? It's a thin reed, but here ya go:

1) He mouthed the magical three-syllable phrase: "I hate war." Uttered, needless to say, "as only a man who has experienced its horrors can do," according to Broder.

It was due to such pious and pithy protestations—as opposed to, say, McCain's long, specific and never-withdrawn doctrine of "rogue-state rollback"—that the Des Moines Register concluded McCain would be "reluctant to start" war. Unless you are the cheapest of cheap dates, or just so predisposed toward the guy that you can't see straight, it should take more than three words to disprove a totally consistent decade-plus record of hawkish interventionism and dependable boots-on-the-groundism.

2) He said "the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone," and that "when we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them." Cries a relieved Broder, "an implicit rebuke to the mind-set of the current White House"!

Another cheap date. If you really believe that President McCain will be talked out of a decision to go to war by a democratic ally, I invite you to read his comments about the Japanese in the run-up to the Gulf War, or what he said about the French and Kosovo in 1999, or this Sept. 24, 2002 interview with Larry King:

KING: Senator, when Vice President Gore said, after September 11, we had enormous sympathy, goodwill and support. We squandered it, and in one year we've replaced that with fear, anxiety and uncertainty, not at what the terrorists are going to do, but at what we're going to do. In other words, he's saying, in essence, countries now don't like us, that were supporting us a year ago. You create a lot of ill will by doing this. You're going to need the support of everybody to go in. What's wrong with that?

MCCAIN: Well, I think we have the goodwill of most countries in the world, with the notable exception of Germany, which—their candidate for chancellor chose to, in a really obscene fashion, in my view, chose to use Iraq as a way to get reelected.

What about the Uni-power thing? Here's an exchange I had with last July:

Q: Senator on the defense budget—We now spend about roughly the same amount on defense as the rest of the world combined. Is that a healthy ratio, and if it's not, what would be a healthy ratio?

A: Oh, it's healthy. We need a bigger Army, we need a bigger Marine Corps. You look around the world−Iran, North Korea, uh, Afghanistan−it's not going to be over for a long time.

Or let's just roll more tape from the speech itself, to see messianic American exceptionalism — and analogical illiteracy—at its finest:

President Harry Truman once said of America, "God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose." In his time, that purpose was to contain Communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn.

3) He hyped a 'League of Democracies.'

Now, there have been times that I have been intrigued by a League of Democracies, as has Jonathan Rauch, but regardless of whatever Rauch, Welch or McCain might think about a 21st century League of Nations, the main point is that there is no way in hell anything remotely like this is happening any time in the next decade. After eight years of a cranky, go-it-alone White House that won re-election in part by bashing limp-wristed Euro-weenies, the chances of another interventionist Republican winning enough good faith among grumbly allies to create a brand spanking new America-defined Club of Winners are something approaching zero.

4) He wants to close Guantanamo.

That is indeed terrific news, and promises to be one of the virtues of a McCain presidency (along with pro-trade policies, earmark reform and serial uses of the veto pen). But remember—McCain was against torture, too, and that led to ... the eradication of habeas corpus. His reforms tend to break down upon negotiation (when not plain lousy to begin with). But even if President McCain is successful in shutting down Gitmo—as I think he would be—we are talking about an issue that's close to purely symbolic. Meanwhile, in the non-symbolic world, McCain wants to increase troop levels by 150,000, maintain a much more aggressive posture toward Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and Burma (at minimum), and launch a brand-new O.S.S. to help destabilize foreign despots.

5) He wants a "successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner."

Here the cheap dates will be those Europeans who believe that the demon-spawn George W. Bush invented Kyoto opposition in the U.S. (as well as the death penalty). Here, too, a perennial McCain question must be asked—will his "reform" actually, you know, work?

As reason science correspondent Ron Bailey has shown, existing cap-and-trade markets are "not working," because "governments have every incentive to cheat" due to the fact that "the process is inherently political." Aside from any other bad (or good) policy that might result from a Kyoto II, what McCain's cap-and-trade gesture amounts to a rhetorical signal that—if you believe Global Warming is a threat—his Heart Is in the Right Place.

Which might be enough. My former colleagues on the L.A. Times editorial board, for example, endorsed McCain during the primaries in part because "he supported cap-and-trade systems that could reduce greenhouse gases, and he has stayed that course despite criticism from fellow Republicans." Even though, a half-year previous, that same board concluded that cap-and-trade has too many "drawbacks" to be workable. I guess it's the thought that counts!

So in summation: McCain says he hates the wars he'll inevitably launch. He says the U.S. cannot act alone with all the unipolar power he'll continue to amass and flex. He advocates a League of Democracies that will never happen, and an environmental treaty that probably won't work.

As David Brooks noted, "Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention." He's right—McCain will close Gitmo, make a couple of cheap rhetorical promises to play nice with the world, then increase this administration's interventionism in a way befitting a candidate who ran as the neo-conservative favorite against the too-humble foreign policy approach of governor George W. Bush.

The only question is whether his deep reserves of credibility in the Bank of Media is enough to maintain the fiction that he's less an interventionist than his predecessor. Judging by the Washington Post's news pages, he's well on his way:

McCain is often portrayed in the news media as a global John Wayne who would tread on the world stage with a Navy veteran's swagger and talk tough toward unfriendly governments in Iran and North Korea.

But his record on foreign policy during two decades in the Senate is more nuanced.

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of reason and the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

From the Top: Ron Paul's Mistake

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Here’s how far American politics, and libertarian politics in particular, have progressed in two short decades: On January 21, 2008, supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul launched an unofficial “money bomb” for the libertarian congressman on Martin Luther King Day, raising $1.9 million online while exhorting participants to “believe in the dream!” What a difference from just 17 years earlier, when, in between congressional stints, Paul was making good money with monthly newsletters that savaged King as a “lying socialist satyr” who “seduced underage girls and boys” and mocked the very idea of dedicating a holiday to the civil rights leader.

“In 1988, when I ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket,” the Ron Paul Political Report stated in January 1991, “I was berated for hours by LP members because I had refused to vote, while in Congress, for a Martin Luther King national holiday. I didn’t know then about his plagiarism, but the rest of King’s crimes were clear. J. Edgar Hoover once called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ Who would have known the danger would continue after his death and threaten to strangle our culture?”

There aren’t many libertarians left who would choose the freedom-loving bona fides of the serially abusive former FBI chief over those of the man whose name has become synonymous with peaceful resistance to unjust laws. As Paul himself said on CNN in January, while denying authorship or even knowledge of such racially charged early-1990s quotes, “Martin Luther King is a hero, because [he] practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience, nonviolence.”

How to explain that 17-year switcheroo? Paul has done an incomplete job of it over the years. In 1996, when the newsletters first became a political issue during his hotly contested campaign to re-enter Congress, Paul did not deny writing such statements as “95% of the black males in [Washington, D.C.,] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” instead maintaining that his quotes expressed a “clear philosophical difference” with his political opponents and were in any case being taken “out of context” by his “race-baiting” competitor.

The congressman changed his tune in an October 2001 Texas Monthly profile, distancing himself from the sentiments while taking “moral responsibility” for their publication. “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me,” he said. “It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around.” Then this January, after The New Republic unearthed a large cache of obnoxious newsletters published from 1989 to 1994, Paul told CNN he had “never read” some of them before. “I absolutely honestly do not know who wrote those things,” he said.

The newsletter flap never really took off as a national news story, and it probably had little impact on Paul’s presidential campaign. As David Weigel notes a few pages hence, the Paul juggernaut was hobbled before takeoff by a hugely disappointing fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, whose primary was held just hours after the New Republic story was posted online. Aside from the newsletters themselves, no convincing evidence was ever offered that Paul was either racist or obsessed with Martin Luther King’s sex life.

Certainly the inspiring rEVOLution that sprang up around him has had nothing to do with playing on white fears of black criminality.

So why discuss the issue at all? Especially if, like me, you find Paul’s candidacy a refreshing injection of limited-government principle into the flabby carcass of a national GOP that has grown careless with power at home and abroad?

There are, I think, a few good reasons. In a narrow campaign sense, if indeed Paul had no idea about the origins and content of “Ron Paul”-branded newsletters that were bringing in nearly $1 million a year (according to a Weigel/Julian Sanchez report you can read at reason.com/rpnewsletters), that certainly speaks badly of the would-be commander in chief’s managerial competence. The fact that he actually defended the newsletters in 1996 suggests either that he once believed in their content more than he currently lets on or that he was willing to look in the camera and pretend to endorse ideas he didn’t actually believe.

If Paul ever really wanted to find out who was writing bizarre, first-person rants under his own name, all he’d have to do is ask his longtime friend, former employee, and vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, Llewellyn Rockwell Jr. According to more than a half-dozen sources contacted by Sanchez and Weigel, Rockwell, head of the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of the popular LewRockwell.com website, was Paul’s chief ghostwriter during the years in question. (Rockwell has denied responsibility for the statements, to reason and to others, and has decried journalistic interest in the story as amounting to “hysterical smears.”)

But ultimately Paul’s management style and personal relationships don’t interest me much, since, barring the biggest political upset in U.S. history, he won’t become president anytime soon. What’s more intriguing to me is the broader historical context of the self-styled “paleolibertarian” movement of the early 1990s, launched by Rockwell and libertarian movement titan (and former reason columnist) Murray N. Rothbard, who together hoped to rile up the “rednecks” in support of rolling back the welfare state and giving police more power.

“Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment,” Rothbard wrote in a manifesto titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” which appeared in the January 1992 Rockwell-Rothbard Report. The historical model for this new program? Sen. Joe McCarthy, whom Rothbard praised as “fascinating,” “exciting,” and having “a sense of dynamism, of fearlessness.” The modern-day exemplar? “Right-wing radical” David Duke. Rothbard and Rockwell rejected the “upper-middle class yuppie suburbanites” of Beltway-based kowtowing libertarian think tanks, and instead wanted to “lead the charge against the cultural and social decay which agitates the American public.” They were closely aligned with Ron Paul (whose newsletters from this era are nearly indistinguishable from the Report), sounded regular alarms against the coming “race war,” focused constantly on cases of minority violence, and rallied around Pitchfork Pat Buchanan for president in 1992.

I should hasten to add that this whole intramovement squabble was utterly unknown to me until this year. Back when people were assembling new ideologies and political factions in the wake of the Cold War, I was more interested in poking through the rubble of communism abroad. But I’ve always wondered why and how the issue of race relations has hovered uncomfortably around the edges of libertarian politics, in a way that goes far beyond philosophical debates over welfare, affirmative action, and federalism. By now, the “free minds and free markets” strain in American politics and culture should be secure enough in its own place to withstand and even welcome uncomfortable discussions about its less-than-stellar moments.

And it’s clear that, for a short while at least, some of libertarianism’s leading lights let their focus on minority group behavior lead them down decidedly illiberal paths. After the brutal 1991 police beating of Rodney King, for example, Rockwell wrote in the Los Angeles Times that he was “beginning to wonder about [banning] video cameras.” Empowering police to mete out street justice on dark-skinned youth does not square with any notion of limited government I’m familiar with. Indeed, Rockwell himself is no longer hitting those notes in his writings on law enforcement.

Happily enough, these ancient-sounding race debates play no role in the Ron Paul rEVOLution of 2008. Paul was incorrect to say, as he did on CNN, that “libertarians are incapable of being a racist,” but he was right to note that “racism is a collectivist idea.” And like other forms of collectivism, it’s an idea that has less and less resonance among a younger generation that’s growing more and more culturally libertarian. It turns out that spreading a “freedom message” directly is more effective than trying to camouflage it in collective resentment.

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason.

John McCain Wants You

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Behind any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain's is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.

The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public with frank confessions of his failings, from his hard-living flyboy days to his adulterous first marriage to the Keating Five scandal. But in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of "serving a cause greater than self-interest."

Read the rest of this column at the New York Times.

The McCain Mutiny

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

For those of us who have been writing critically about John McCain over the years, keeping tabs on the 2008 presidential campaign through the media is a bit like getting your war news via Saddam Hussein's old information minister: The street names may be right, but the big picture looks funny.

"No other modern politician has received as much favorable press as John McCain has in the past decade," write (plainly irritated) David Brock and Paul Waldman in "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media." "The rules are simply different for McCain."

Boy, are they. Though he flip-flops and prevaricates like any politician, McCain all but has the phrase "straight talker" tattooed on his skull-plate. A lifetime Beltway insider and third-generation naval officer with an heiress wife and an heiress mother is still referred to, without irony, as a "Man of the People." And though his heavily interventionist governing philosophy, both at home and abroad, is spelled out in his five easy-to-find books, he continues to receive mash notes from newspapers like the Des Moines Register for being a man who, because "he knows war," would be "reluctant to start one."

Such funhouse-mirror distortions are more than just giggle-worthy. Partly because of his reliably sympathetic portrayal in the media, McCain - who was advocating pre-emptive war against "rogue states" four years before it ever occurred to George W. Bush - nonetheless won by ratios of two to one among GOP primary voters who described themselves as "anti-war."

So if nothing else, "Free Ride" comes as a necessary corrective. Lefty partisan co-authors Brock and Waldman work for Media Matters for America, a "progressive" nonprofit "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Therein lies the book's strength and weakness. There's nothing like a bit of the old political bile - especially when it pays! - to focus the mind and support staff on cataloguing the sins of the other team while bashing the media for failing to notice.

Thus the authors upbraid Beltway journalists for failing to recognize that "McCain has an act, and not having an act is his act." When the candidate bashed President Bush's Iraq policy in 2007, ageless Washington Post columnist David Broder pronounced that "candor, even belatedly, becomes him." When his campaign stumbled over immigration that spring, Newsweek was there to solemnly proclaim that "it may be because he is not, at heart, a politician. He is a warrior."

How did a Republican end up charming the liberal press? Brock and Waldman rightly point out three reasons: McCain's heroic war record, his "anti-politician" support for campaign finance reform and the copious amounts of access he has consciously given national reporters for the past two decades. "The McCain-Feingold bill in particular," they write, "became a vessel into which the press could pour all of its disgust with the practice of politics."

But media criticism works best when new interpretive light is shined on the subject being mis-covered. And it's here that the authors' partisan agenda and ideology get the worst of them.

They argue, improbably, that McCain has always been a "staunch" and "reliable conservative," in the tradition of Barry Goldwater. In fact, McCain's famous regulatory zeal on the Senate Commerce Committee - meddling into the affairs of amateur athletes, Hollywood marketers and tobacco companies - has been the opposite of Goldwater's principled libertarianism, and indeed the younger maverick never did understand why the man he replaced in the Senate failed to fully embrace him.

And what about McCain's furious tack to the left from 1999 to 2003, when he opposed Bush tax cuts on class warfare grounds, co-sponsored a patients' bill of rights, and voted to federalize airport security, all while trumpeting the career of trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt and flirting openly with defecting to the Democrats? "A few well-chosen breaks," they claim. Well OK then.

Lacking any ability or willingness to analyze McCain's peculiar strain of National Greatness Conservatism, Brock and Waldman fill the pages by exaggerating the extent to which McCain is handled with kid gloves (The New York Times in particular has been disproving that notion almost every day); complaining about journalists referencing his Vietnam imprisonment, and relying on such crude measuring sticks as the voting scorecards of activist groups.

The results correct some myths, but erect new ones in their place.

Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of reason, is the author of "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick." This story originally appeared in The New York Post.

Tuned Out

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In their cover story for Politics, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie assuage nervous libertarian voters by promising them that a more glorious future awaits us all, regardless of who takes control of the White House, the Congress or even the Supreme Court this fall. Cultural libertarianism, after all, is a growing force in America.

The full article, in PDF format, can be read here.

Where the Votes Are

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the Los Angeles Times, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch that the party is over for the Democrats and Republicans, who have been leaking market share since the 1970s like a Chevy Nova leaked oil. The most important voting bloc now are libertarians who "like gays and guns, low taxes and free speech. They are pro-globalization and antiwar. They are at the center of American politics. Win them over and you'll win every national election for the next several decades. Here are some smart—and popular—policies that will appeal not only to libertarians but to other centrist voters fed up with budget-busting compassionate conservatives and nanny-state buttinsky liberals."

Gillespie and Welch offer up no fewer than seven (count 'em) policies that appeal to libertarians—
and large majorities of American voters. Read all about them here.

Avoid presidential 'gotcha' games

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Today, USA Today's editorial board argued that candidates for the White House should disclose almost every bit of information about themselves. Reason Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch argued the opposing view.

News flash: John McCain is an old man who has survived severe war injuries and multiple bouts of melanoma. Bill Clinton wanders the globe raising money for his $360 million foundation and stumping for his wife, Hillary. Barack Obama writes best-selling books and looks smashing with a cigarette dangling from his lips. All three are millionaires.

So why are we in such a frenzy to make them disclose what we already know?

In this era of the Imperial Presidency, so much attention is lavished onto presidential candidates that the focus has strayed from "What do we need to know?" to "What are they hiding?" The former is a matter of citizen self-defense; the latter is a game of gotcha—and one with potentially damaging consequences for the rest of us.

By law, White House contenders are already required to disclose their sources of income. By practice—as a result of public pressure, not a government mandate—all but one major-party nominee since 1984 has released more-detailed income tax returns as well. (In 1992, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton did not.) So far this cycle, only Obama has complied.

What's more significant to the public is a vow by Obama that, if he becomes president, he'll make all federal expenditures searchable on a public database, such as Google.

Want Clinton to come clean? Ask not for her income tax returns but for her husband to allow prompt release of his presidential records. In 2001, President Bush issued an executive order giving living ex-presidents the right to block disclosure of their records long after a 12-year waiting period granted by a 1978 1aw.

Obsessed with McCain's medical records? You should care more about what happened the last time he converted calls for "transparency" into federal law; suddenly, Americans could no longer donate even $200 anonymously to a federal candidate and were faced with heinous restrictions on paying for political ads.

We live in an intrusive age of warrantless wiretaps, feds rifling through your mail and politicians too eager to dictate what you do inside your four walls. What few remaining governmental no-fly zones exist are worth protecting, even if it means shielding the likes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of the libertarian magazine Reason and author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

Everything You Wanted to Know About John McCain's Sex Scandal...

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:30:00 EST

You can forget the sex scandal, though Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has plenty to answer for.

reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, author of the definitive McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, gives the lowdown on what The New York Times got wrong in its expose of the presumptive GOP nominee's seamy relationship to lobbyists.

The Hawk Doves Love

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:52:00 EST

Read this article in the L.A. Times.

How Johnny Got His Groove Back

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:00:00 EST

Read this article at the L.A. Weekly.

Congress Strong-Arming the Steroids Issue

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:45:00 EST

Read this article in the Washington Post.

An Open Letter to Editorial Page Editors

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:00:00 EST

Dear former colleagues,

Look, I'm not here to talk you out of endorsing John McCain. Partly because I'm not in the habit of inflicting my crazy electoral preferences on other people, but mostly because I know you're going to endorse McCain regardless of what anyone else says. (And not merely "endorse" him, either: You'll compare his "firm principles" to "the gyroscopes that keep ships and planes on course," you'll unleash an additional "anti-endorsement" upon his one-state-over rival, and you'll keep endorsing away all season.)

No, I bring you all here on this Michigan primary day to make one last plea on behalf of the dwindling number of us who read or care about newspaper editorials. Before passing on your McEnthusiasms to the Copy Desk, please remember your canonical journalistic responsibility not to make shit up or pass along easily debunkable falsehoods. Particularly when the subject of your affection has provided copious evidence to the contrary of your claims.

For instance, in the most telegraphed endorsement of the campaign season (and perhaps the most fitting, given the masthead) The State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina, would have us believe the following:

John McCain has shown more clearly than anyone on the American political scene today that he loves his country, and would never mislead or dishonor it. He is almost unique in his determination to do what is right, whatever the cost. [italics mine]

Never mislead? Does a "lie" count as misleading in South Carolina? Because that's what McCain repeatedly copped to, after flip-flopping in the Palmetto State during the 2000 campaign on the Confederate flag, calling it a "symbol of racism" one day and a "state's rights" issue the next. "The politician who promises to put patriotism before selfishness, who promises not to lie, and then reneges," he reflected in his 2002 political memoir Worth the Fighting For, "does more harm to the public trust than does the politician who makes no issues of his or her virtue."

Considering that McCain in New Hampshire this month railed against "negative ads" while running them, and then bragged in his victory speech that he "always told you the truth," it seems timelier than ever to double-check, rather than rubber-stamp, the new front-runner's honesty. Particularly since his voluminous writings are filled with warnings like: "the worst decisions I have made, not just in politics but over the course of my entire life, have been those I made to seek an advantage primarily or solely for myself."

Perhaps it's asking for too much to expect due diligence out of an editor who says "if John McCain has no chance, America has no chance," but surely they're not drinking the Kool-Aid in Kalamazoo? Think again:

He has made mistakes, for example, getting too close to the "Keating Five" in the savings and loan scandal of the 1990s. But he has been open about his mistakes and appears to have learned from them.

First of all, the contentious closeness in the Keating Five scandal was not McCain's relationship with his fellow four senators, but with the first great benefactor of his political career: the crook Charles Keating, on whose behalf McCain met with regulators to ask that they expedite investigations into Keating's failing savings & loan business.

But the real howler in the Keating Five context is that McCain "has been open about his mistakes." During the scandal, and as recently as Worth the Fighting For, McCain pleaded guilty only to "poor judgment" in attending a measly two meetings on behalf of a major employer in his state, and expressed great bitterness at being target of what he believed to be a partisan witch-hunt. Remarkably, in his book Hard Call, he finally changed his tune about the meetings, 20 years too late:

I did so for no other reason than I valued [Charles Keating's] support....Had I weighed the question of honor it occasioned and the public interest more than my personal interest to render a small service to an important supporter, I would not have attended the meeting....I lacked humility and an inspiration to some purpose higher than self-interest.

OK, so I don't expect you to read all those books. But other things are more easy to discern (and debunk) from the public record. For instance, Port Huron Times-Herald, there is a fatal flaw in this couplet:

For much of his career, McCain has stood by what he believes, no matter how unpopular. He opposed GOP tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.

I'll say this slowly, since it keeps coming up: You cannot credibly cite McCain's record on tax cuts as evidence of his politics-be-damned straight-talkiness. Why? Because he flip-flopped on the issue once he began clearing the decks for the 2008 campaign. A man who "stood by what he believes" would have been either a consistent tax-cutter or a consistent only-when-we-also-cut-government guy, not both.

But the most boggling (and significant) McCain legend being perpetuated by editorial boards is the following:

McCain is strong on national defense but he's no warmonger.

John McCain was the neoconservatives' great hope in 2000, running as an interventionist against George Bush's purported "humble" realism. He is the third generation in a family whose basic bedrock belief is that U.S. military power alone can and must guarantee world safety. He told me personally that America's percentage of global defense spending—currently more than one-half—is too small. When you ask him about the propriety of having U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, he doesn't even understand the question. He sees imminent threats from North Korea to China to Iran.

And most importantly, he was for pre-emptive war before it was cool. Before signing off on that endorsement, consider your own often contrary views on Iraq and the overstretched U.S. military, and then read this passage:

[T]he proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is the clearest danger we currently confront. Nowhere is the threat more worrisome than in rogue states such as Iraq, North Korea and others. The United States should formulate a policy, in many ways similar to the Reagan Doctrine, of supporting indigenous and outside forces that desire to overthrow the odious regimes that rule these states. Call it rogue state rollback if you will. Such a policy serves both our security and our ideals because, again, they are inseparable from one another.
I offer one caution, however. If you commit to supporting these forces, accept the seriousness of the obligation. Don't abandon them to the mercies of tyrants whenever they meet with reversals as the administration did in the north of Iraq. Character counts, my friends, at home and abroad. [...]
The world's only superpower should never give its word insincerely. We should never make idle threats.

We know you like the guy, already, but please try to tell readers who he actually is, rather than who you'd like him to be.

Yr Pal,
Matt

Matt Welch is Editor in Chief of reason, and author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

2007: The Year in Videos

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:06:00 EST

It's the first day of 2008, and outside of Iowa and Pakistan there's not much news and not much to worry about. Kick back and click the "play" button as reason editors and friends of the magazine remember the most striking, funny, historic, stupid, or impactful videos of 2007.

Update on January 2: Due to an editing error, some video picks were not included in the original posting of the article. Submitted for your viewing pleasure are three new selections:

Radley Balko
reason senior editor

I'm nominating the lot of police brutality and taser videos. The most popular this year were probably the "Don't Tase Me, Bro" video from a John Kerry event in Florida (see below) and a Missouri teenager's recording of an abusive police officer who had pulled him over. The genre as a whole is the result of the mass democratization of technology, and represents an important shift toward transparency and accountability in law enforcement. More than a few abusive police officers have lost their jobs after a video went viral, which likely wouldn't have happened were we still in the pre-Internet age. Mass watching of the watchers is a good thing, and we ought to be encouraging more of it, both to weed out bad cops and to protect the good ones from frivolous claims of abuse.

Ronald Bailey
reason science correspondent

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' weekly television talk show, Alo Presidente, infamously runs on for hours. In September, 2007 viewers were treated to more than eight hours of presidential bloviation. Chavez' hero, the notoriously long-winded Fidel Castro, has never even gotten close to that record.

In November at the Ibero-American Summit, Spain's King Juan Carlos told Chavez, "Why don't you just shut up!" Juan Carlos' words have been turned into a popular ring tone. I nominate it as the "best" video of 2007 because it was way past time that someone told Chavez to just zip it.

Nick Gillespie
reason editor-in-chief

I continue to laugh every time I watch the meeting of minds between singer-songwriter John Mayer and Justin Long (the Apple Computer guy) outside an L.A. nightclub. Mayer--drunk on booze or maybe just strict construction of the Constitution?--goes on a pro-Ron Paul rant that is magical not just for its intensity and heartfeltness but for its very existence in the first place. Years ago in reason, we excerpted Tyler Cowen's What Price Fame?, a study in how contemporary celebrities are impotent puppets we pay astronomical amounts to entertain us (Cowen's piece is not, alas, online). This is true, even when we agree with them. It's a great world where this sort of footage is widely available.

Katherine Mangu-Ward
reason associate editor

This mashup of the classic Apple 1984 ad and Hillary campaign footage ends with Obama's website address but wasn't approved by his campaign. When the maker's identity was feretted out by the Huffington Post, he said: "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed." Ne'er were truer words spoken in 2007.

Jeff Taylor
reason online columnist

A perfect creation of ad hoc media -- found it via Fark.com, builds on a previous YouTube upload of Hubble telescope images set to the Tool song Lateralus -- and adds immense value, meaning, and insight, all because some guy -- philriehl -- decided to do it. The 9:24 vid -- that number is important -- illustrates and explains a Fibonacci number sequence clearly enough for everyone to feel their inner gnostic stir. Beautiful, powerful, and inspiring.

Jesse Walker
reason managing editor

Who is the YouTube candidate? It might be Ron Paul, thanks to his ability to inspire hundreds of homemade videos, some of them gloriously weird. But Mike Gravel is the guy who makes weird videos, or at least sends them out with his stamp of approval. My favorite is this Lennonist rap featuring psychedelic animation and clips from Duck and Cover.

Matt Welch
incoming editor-in-chief of reason

I can never tell whether this surrealist attack on/celebration of John "Walnuts" McCain was based on any particular knowledge or point of view, or whether it was just a one-time burst of inspired guesswork, but I do know that it only gets better -- and creepier -- on the 200th viewing. "I want to help people... in their lives" may yet go down as one of the most chilling predictions of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Tyler Cowen
author of Discover Your Inner Economist

The best video clip I saw this year was John McLaughlin playing "Cherokee."

David Harsanyi
author of Nanny State

My favorite video of the year:

Markos Moulitsas
netroots paterfamilias

The Huckabee parody ad. Nothing captured better the absurdity of the GOP's entire field.

Brendan O'Neill
editor of Spiked Online

Mia Farrow in Second Life talking about Darfur: It's not my favourite video of the year. But in capturing the naked narcissism of celebrity activism, it's one of the most startling. Mia Farrow's young-looking, sexy avatar addresses a virtual audience of students, activists and lizards in Second Life. Like most Save Darfur activists Farrow says precisely nothing about the politics driving the conflict in Sudan; instead she describes horrific occurrences and shows photos of distressed Darfurians. As Mahmood Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books (Essay of the Year), activists like Farrow "obscure the politics of the violence and position [themselves] as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer." It's fitting that Farrow's speech takes place in the cartoon world of Second Life, since the aim of Darfur activists is not to get to grips with the reality on the ground in Sudan but to create a virtual plane of moral superiority that they can occupy. Darfur is a "defining moment for the human family," says Farrow. She's so vain she thinks somebody else's war is about her. Watch this vid to glimpse Kipling's colonialism updated: the Web Surfer's Burden.

Rant: Burn the Rich

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:58:00 EST

When Southern California really burns, as it does every fourth October or so, there can never be enough firefighters. Scorching Santa Ana winds turn parched chaparral canyons into wind tunnels begging for any spark—from lightning, cigarettes, blown-over power lines—to set whole mountain ranges ablaze. At the height of the October 2007 season, 23 separate wildfires from Malibu to the border of Mexico were simultaneously chewing through more than 2,000 homes and a combined land mass two-thirds the size of Rhode Island.

No firefighting force on the planet is equipped to cope with that kind of storm. Doing so would require standing fire squads of at least triple their current size, with nothing much to do until the next far-off catastrophe except draw salaries and qualify for pensions. So in the most recent conflagration the state of California bolstered its ranks of roughly 9,000 firefighters by deputizing more than 3,000 prison inmates to go on the front lines and recruiting an equal number of reinforcements from other Western states.

That much was uncontroversial. Then the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News revealed the shocking news that the American International Group (AIG), an insurance company, had been adding a very modest supplement to the firefighting effort—six trucks—on behalf of its clients. For premiums averaging a hefty $19,000 a year, AIG policyholders in the fire-vulnerable “wildland-urban interface” have their homes assessed for vulnerability, kitted with sprinkler systems, and doused with fire retardant. When wildfires rage within three miles of a covered house, AIG-contracted teams come out to lay down a fresh perimeter of retardant and check the roof and nearby brush for stray embers (the cause of most housing tract losses during an inferno). According to Bloomberg, AIG firefighters saved at least six houses, including one lucky enough to be next door to an AIG client.

You would think that the creation of supplementary firefighting capability—the costs of which are borne entirely by the homeowners who choose to live in fire zones, instead of taxpayers—would be a cause for at least mild enthusiasm. Instead, it was greeted with howls of class warfare.

The leftist critic Naomi Klein called it “disaster apartheid,” proof that “the country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax—the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses” (the “masses,” in this case, being millionaire homeowners who live near the millionaire homeowners who bought supplemental fire insurance).

The liberal historian Rick Perlstein called it “a sickening indication about how the conservative mania for privatization is beginning to create two Americas: One that is protected from fires, and one that is not,” and then delivered this economically illiterate policy lecture: “Firefighting is a public good. Privatize it—provide a higher level of fire protection for those who can afford it, and a lower level for those who cannot—and you…insulate certain individuals from the consequences of crises that wrack
everyone else.”

Leaving aside Perlstein’s bizarre definition of privatization, what’s noteworthy about his critique is that it’s almost the exact inverse of what L.A.’s influential socialist/apocalyptic critic Mike Davis argued in his famous 1996 essay “Let Malibu Burn,” which complained bitterly about “public subsidization of firebelt suburbs,” “cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief and an expansive public commitment to ‘defend Malibu.’ ” Davis resented—and rightfully so—a system of government incentives that rewards development in fire zones that no private companies would insure while transferring tax money from the poor to the rich.

This year’s critics, by contrast, balk at letting the wealthiest Californians finally pay their fair share. Since the Naomi Kleins of the world don’t want the rich to get more public protection, and they don’t want the rich to get more private protection, what options are left? Burn, Malibu, burn.

Matt Welch is assistant editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Barry U.S. Bonds

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:11:00 EST

The thing to realize about the BALCO steroids scandal, which lurches into its most headline-grabbing phase yet today when baseball home run king Barry Bonds is arraigned on five counts of perjury and obstruction in a San Francisco courtroom, is that the federal government's underlying criminal case has been closed for more than 28 months.

On July 29, 2005, Ukrainian-born track coach Remi Korchemny pleaded guilty to a lone misdemeanor charge of distributing the legal stimulant modafinil without a prescription, a crime that netted him not a single day behind bars. Two weeks prior, Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) founder Victor Conte and Barry Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson (also affiliated with BALCO) each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to illegally distribute anabolic steroids and one count of money laundering, for which they served four months and three months in prison, respectively.

A fourth defendant, BALCO Vice President James Valente, copped to a single count of conspiracy and was sentenced to probation, meaning that in the most publicized steroids investigation in U.S. history, 40 of the original 42 charges—which were announced with great fanfare by then-top cop John Ashcroft in February 2004—were dropped faster than a Tim Wakefield knuckleball, resulting in a combined seven months of prison for the criminals. As the steroid prohibitionists at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote at the time, with palpable disappointment, the criminal case "seemed to end with a whimper."

But there's plenty of evidence that the prosecutorial "bang" in this interminable case (of five-plus years and counting) has always been more about publicly shaming elite athletes and punishing witnesses who don't cooperate with the feds than rooting out any vast criminal conspiracy.

Take sentencing, for example. Bonds' trainer Anderson did his three months behind bars, but was then twice hauled back to prison on civil contempt charges for refusing to testify in front of grand juries investigating his boss for perjury. Total time of incarceration for non-cooperation? Fourteen months. He was released the day of Bonds' indictment [PDF], leaving his defense team, led by high-profile lawyer Mark Geragos, sputtering with fury.

"It's infuriating, when you read the indictment," Geragos told the Chronicle. "Is there anything in that indictment that wasn't known a year ago? If that is the case, clearly, putting Greg in for a year was not only punitive, but was misleading the court in that [federal prosecutors] said his testimony was indispensable for the investigation. [...] The whole thing is a crock of shit. He's never said word one."

Anderson is hardly the only bug on the windshield of what has now been a three-grand jury process. Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, co-authors of the best-selling Bonds/BALCO expose Game of Shadows (soon to be an HBO movie), were sentenced to 18 months for contempt in refusing to divulge the source of the grand jury leaks they published to spectacular effect within hours of the most famous witnesses' testimony. They would likely be in prison right now had not Troy Ellerman, the lawyer for fourth defendant James Valente, admitted at the last minute to being the leaker. Ellerman is currently serving out a 30-month sentence for obstruction of justice—by far the longest prison term in the BALCO case.

It's no wonder that the original four BALCO co-defendants are spooked about a Sept. 11, 2007 court order that they return or destroy all court-provided documents relating to their cases. In a scandal that has long since passed into the tail-chasing phase, every interaction with the punitive-minded courtroom is a potential charge of perjury, obstruction or contempt. "Given this history," their motion reads, "Mr. Conte, Mr. Anderson and the other moving parties have more than a speculative fear that the Court's order will expose them to renewed threat of prosecution."

The government's priorities were on stark display in October when lead Internal Revenue Service BALCO investigator Jeff Novitzky—a man who, according to a damning May 2004 Playboy magazine profile, had lobbied various federal agencies for years to launch a steroids sting, "always with Bonds as the lure"—squeezed a plea deal out of track and field superstar Marion Jones. "To extract her confession," the New York Times wrote in a mostly flattering profile of Novitzky last month, "he used the leverage of a more serious charge from an unrelated check-fraud scheme." Getting Jones to weepily admit in public that she'd been lying all along about steroids, it seems, was more important than ferreting out her role in "a scheme to defraud numerous banks out of millions of dollars by laundering stolen, altered and counterfeit checks."

Barry Bonds was investigated—by two grand juries—on a more serious charge as well: tax evasion. But all that's left now is a case in which, as Columbia Law School professor John C. Coffee Jr. recently put it in the New York Times, "Bonds's prosecution seems likely to rely to a greater degree on circumstantial evidence, making it harder for the government than in its recent prosecutions of Martha Stewart and I. Lewis Libby. Those cases involved factual disputes. Bonds, however, is contesting not whether he consumed steroids, but only what he believed he was doing."

To build that case, the government will likely subpoena yet another Murderer's Row of professional ballplayers, put Greg Anderson on the dock once more (exposing him this time to criminal contempt, instead of just civil contempt), and leverage the soon-to-be released findings from a blue-ribbon steroids panel chaired by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell (with the charitable assistance of one Jeff Novitzky). Perjury traps will spring up like mushrooms, not just in Bonds' proceedings, but in the forthcoming trials of Jones' former coach Trevor Graham (for lying to a federal agent) and Olympic cyclist Tammy Thomas (perjury).

The results of this publicity blitz are 100% predictable—Barry Lamar Bonds will be declared guilty with prejudice in the court of public opinion long before his case ever reaches a verdict. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball will continue toughening its testing and punishment standards for banned substances, and Congress will continue adding penalties to the illegal distribution of legal substances. It may not be justice, but from the federal government's point of view it will be Mission Accomplished.

Matt Welch is an editor at reason.

McCain: No Surrender!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:11:00 EST

libertar*ian

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 08:13:00 EST

Here's a Sunday triple play:

In The Washington Post, reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch spell out the deep meaning of the Ron Paul Revolution and astonishing bull market in being a libertarian. Snippet:

More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism. And with the dreary prospect of a Giuliani vs. Clinton death match in 2008, that hunger is likely to grow even faster than the size of the federal government or the casualty toll in Iraq.

Read all about it here.

In The Los Angeles Times, Matt Welch details how John McCain fudged the facts of his own fact-finding mission about the causes of the Vietnam War. Snippet:

If there is any truly contemporary echo in [McCain's nearly impossible-to-find] War College paper, it's that U.S. troops cannot fight to the best of their abilities if they do not personally support the policies they're enforcing and if they do not have the support of the American people.