Category Archives: Readings

Call it schadenfreude if you must, but I was immensely cheered by Brian Leiter's recent post on the sloath and incompetence of the University of Texas academic bureaucracy. It is so, so nice to know that we are not the only place where this sort of thing happens all the time.

Spotted via Making Light — Mike's Link Blog – Very Scary Shit About John Ashcroft, which is the copyright-violating full text of Judy Bacharach's Vanity Fair profile of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

I wanted to pick out one bit and suggest it's the weirdest part, but they're all like that.

This editorial, Injustice Unchallenged, in the Washington Post has a great beginning.

THE CONSTITUTION guarantees a right to counsel for criminal defendants and obligates states to provide lawyers to those who cannot pay for them. Virginia, as a recent report prepared for the American Bar Association documents, woefully fails to meet this constitutional duty. The state's failure is so extreme that it cannot be constitutional. Yet it goes unchallenged. To understand why, consider the tale of the last lawyer who tried to raise a challenge.

Unfortunately, it gets a bit odd after that.

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Shorter Peggy Noonan, The Democrats Have Had Their Fun. Now It's Time to Rumble:

Economy? What economy? Look over there: A War!

It started with a pretty silly post by David Bernstein about why he thinks liberals should love G.W. Bush (because he spends lots of money). It's an argument that can only be made by applying a caricatured, no, a cartoon version of liberalism, in which spending is good per se, regardless of what you spend the money on, balanced budgets are irrelevant at all times in the business cycle, long run economic planning is of no importance, and, oh yes, whatever you do don't mention the war. Oh those silly liberals, caring about our troops, about the damage to our Army and Reserves, worrying about paying back the deficit, the looming pensions crisis, health care, not to mention equity and progressive taxation, the environment, the hinting about amending the Constitution to prevent same-sex marriage (or is it domestic partnerships, it's vague), the crony capitalism, the attack on the rights of labor, Guantanamo Bay, John Ashcroft, and I could go on.

I mean, the post was so silly that I wasn't even going to blog it. Even though I suppose it's possible that some knee-jerk Republicans might not take the trouble to work out what was wrong with it, I think most of them are smarter than that.

But the dang thing has legs.

Matthew Yglesias, who is usually pretty sharp, swallowed it whole.

And Brad DeLong, who is always sharp, swatted back in Matthew Yglesias Misses the Point, but too gently.

There is absolutely no reason a liberal should like GW Bush, and it has very little to do with the atmospherics. (As for the ranch, it would be fine if it weren't so faux.) It's about civil liberties, the environment, the war, the budget, and the continual campaign of routinely lying to the American people (see, e.g. under “Cheney”). The argument is infinitely weaker than when it was applied, only somewhat plausibly, to Nixon.