A Leaky Environment September 30, 2003February 23, 2017 CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT? Click here. You’ll want to leave sound ‘on’ so you can hear the little sound effect when your cursor passes the decoder that come with each statement. THERE WILL BE A QUIZ When you read Al Franken’s book – fact-checked by 14 Harvard Kennedy School, students – I believe you will really be surprised. The truth is worse than you imagined. Karl Rove planting a bug in his own office and then ‘discovering it’ to draw media attention away from the issues his candidate (this is pre-Bush) was losing on? The true Paul Wellstone Memorial Service story? You gotta read this book. I have now bought 23 of them. LEAKS There’s this allegation that the Bush administration – maybe even Karl Rove – ‘outed’ a CIA agent to punish her husband’s political disloyalty and, thereby, send a message to others who dare to speak out. Outing this agent could endanger her life – certainly her career – and also the lives of her contacts. Senator Schumer, among others, is calling for an Independent Council to investigate. (It could be even more important, goes the thinking, than a long-ago $40,000 land investment.) Here are some snippets I was sent that you might keep in mind as the drama unfolds. Don’t miss the last one. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH ON LEAKS: ‘The president does have very deep concerns about anything that would be inappropriately leaked that could in any way endanger America’s ability to gather intelligence information, and even that could harm our ability to maintain sources and methods and anything that could interfere with America’s ability to fight the war on terrorism.’ – White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 6/21/02 PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH ON LEAKS: ‘I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.’ – President George H.W. Bush, 4/26/99 SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD ON LEAKS: ‘Leaks put people’s lives at risk. And I think that the people in any branch of government have an obligation to manage their mouths in a way that does not put people’s lives at risk. Folks that leak and put people’s lives at risk ought to be in jail.’ – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2/13/03 PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN ON LEAKS: ‘The Congress has carefully drafted this bill so that it focuses only on those who would transgress the bounds of decency; not those who would exercise their legitimate right of dissent. This carefully drawn act recognizes that the revelation of the names of secret agents adds nothing to legitimate public debate over intelligence policy.’ – President Ronald Reagan, 6/23/82, upon signing legislation criminalizing the exposing of undercover intelligence agents ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT ON LEAKS: ‘Leaks of classified information do substantial damage to the security interests of the nation.’ – Attorney General John Ashcroft, 12/11/01, upon creating a task force to investigate government leaks THE NEED FOR A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR: ‘You know, a single allegation can be most worthy of a special prosecutor. If you’re abusing government property, if you’re abusing your status in office, it can be a single fact that makes the difference on that.’ – John Ashcroft, 10/4/97, CNN Evans and NOVAK YESTERDAY’S PAPER: ‘President George W. Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover CIA officer.’ – Washington Post, 9/29/03
Whose Math Do You Trust – Allan Sloan’s or W’s? September 29, 2003February 23, 2017 Newsweek‘s Allan Sloan wrote a column earlier this month about the deficit. The deficit, he said, is much, much worse than stated. ‘No,’ it’s not, you can hear the Bushies retorting. ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Is not!’ ‘Is, too!’ So the question arises, whose math do you trust: Bush’s or Sloan’s? Let me give you a hint: It was George W. Bush who, speaking of his planned tax cut, said, repeatedly . . . ‘by far, the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.’ That was a trillion-dollar lie. By far the vast majority of the help went to people at the top end of the economic ladder. And Bush simply had to have known it. Even if – to be extraordinarily charitable – the President didn’t know he was lying when he first made this preposterous claim, would he not have asked one of his aides for clarification once he heard so many people respond that, in fact, more than half the benefit would go to the top 2%? Even the dimmest of Harvard MBA’s – of whom I happily count myself one – know that if more than half of something goes to the top 2%, then ‘by far, the vast majority’ could not possibly, conceivably, mathematically or even hyperbolically, go to ‘the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.’ I just don’t know how Bush supporters justify that lie. (Well, I do know. They justify it like this: ‘Well, what about the blue dress!’ But do you know what? In the first place, any first-grader knows that two wrongs don’t make a right. In the second place, lying about a consensual affair is different from lying about a trillion dollars to improve the lot of the already best off.* And in the third place, President Clinton apologized.) So in evaluating the budget deficit, how much should we trust President Bush’s assurance that everything will be just fine? Sloan writes, in part (emphasis added): By law, the budget office has to assume that existing laws expire as planned, and that no new programs are added or subtracted. But [its] report includes numbers that you can use to adjust for political reality. Which I did. First, I counted the $2.4 trillion Social Security surplus, which the Treasury uses to offset its cash shortfall. Then I figured that the last three years of tax cuts will become permanent; that Congress will pass a Medicare prescription-drug package and will also stop the dreaded alternative minimum tax from hitting 30 million taxpayers. These changes add $3.6 trillion to the deficit. So by the time you’re done, the total projected deficit is more than five times the aforementioned $1.4 trillion. Call it $7.4 trillion. And I’m being generous, assuming we spend nothing in Iraq starting Oct. 1, 2005. . . . Normally, it’s easy to dismiss long-term budget projections because the biggest projected deficits (or surpluses) come in the last years, when the projections are the most unreliable. But here, the scariest numbers are the closest ones-the ones most likely to be reasonably accurate. For fiscal 2004, which starts in about 4 weeks, the budget office projects a $644 billion deficit. This would be 5.8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, which approaches the 6 percent record set by Ronald Reagan’s 1983 budget deficit. Reagan’s deficits set off alarm bells in Washington, he signed onto a huge tax increase and fiscal sanity made a comeback in Washington. Nothing of the sort seems likely these days, given the current administration and Congress. . . . One savvy investor who shares Sloan’s concern is PIMCO’s Bill Gross. His September (‘What, WE Worry?’) and October (‘Clueless’) columns are scary – and well worth the read. ______________________________________ *Please don’t read this footnote if you are easily offended. But I cannot stop thinking of the Southern woman – it was particularly effective being delivered in a drawl by an attractive Neiman Marcus type – who had been thinking about the famous 16 words in the State of the Union address and, now, as she was discussing it with friends, purported to be perplexed as she tried to weigh their relative importance. She tilted her head in a question as she weighed two alternatives on her outstretched palms. ‘Blow job,’ she said slowly, pondering the significance as its weight caused her right palm to drop . . . ‘nuclear war.’ On ‘nuclear war’ her left palm dropped some as her right palm came back up. ‘Lying about a blow job . . .’ she repeated, dropping her right palm again . . . ‘lying about’ – well, you get the idea. And for ‘for nuclear war’ she might just as well have substituted ‘trillions of dollars.’
#1 Best Seller September 26, 2003February 23, 2017 I don’t want to live in a country where we need machine guns to guard our gated communities. But that’s the direction we’re headed when we cut taxes for the rich and after-school programs for our kids. I don’t want to live in a country where we lose the separation of church and state . . . or that the rest of the world doesn’t trust . . . or in a country where my partner Charles and I are second class citizens . . . or in a country where our “checks and balances” on Trent Lott and Rick Santorum and Bill Frist — who votes the same way as Trent Lott — are Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft and Antonin Scalia. We have to win this next presidential election — and we are going to. 1. Our candidates are better 2. Our policies are better 3. Our party infrastructure is light-years ahead of where it was 4. We have Al Franken. How many of you have read Al’s new book, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At The Right? You must! You must! I’ve bought 13 copies so far – I kid you not – and I’m just getting started. I particularly love leaving it out on my tray table when I’m on airplanes. I always get an aisle seat, as close to the front as I can, so everybody passes by and sees it. I get a lot of thumbs up. The language in the book can be pretty raw – warn your Mom before you give it to her. But this book is filled with facts. Actual, verified facts. And some of them are, like – to put it in the language of up-speak – really, really important? And you’ll wonder why you didn’t already know them? And why the so-called liberal media hasn’t been pounding them home day after day? Well, Al pounds them. And he pounds Ann Coulter and Karl Rove and Richard Mellon-Scaife, and you really, really need to get this book. Salon’s David Talbert put it this way: The instant, runaway success of Franken’s new book is not just a result of Fox News’ inexplicable decision to shoot itself in the foot by launching an idiotic trademark-infringement lawsuit, but also the author’s bold — and roaringly funny — knack for confronting the Bush presidency and its prevaricating apologists . . . Again and again, Franken finds that the bullies of the right quickly fold when confronted, or are unable to back up their big talk when challenged on their facts . . . They can’t take the heat when it finally comes their way. Al is bringing it their way. His book is #1 on the New York Times best-seller list for the fifth week. Read it!
Constitutional Amendments September 25, 2003February 23, 2017 “Our families and most states are required to balance their budgets. It is reasonable to assume the federal government should do the same.” — Republican National Platform, 2000 The document continues . . . ‘Therefore, we reaffirm our support for a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget.’ This plan seems to have been abandoned in favor of huge, gigantic tax cuts for those who least need them. But for those hankering for some improvement to the Constitution, the Senate Republican leadership offers this consolation prize: an amendment to guarantee that America’s gay and lesbian citizens never be granted equal economic benefits and civil rights. Both amendments are bad ideas (although at least the concept of balanced budgets, where possible, is commendable). Here is what former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson had to say on the anti-gay marriage amendment. The Washington Post September 05, 2003, Friday, Final Edition Missing the Point on Gays By Alan Simpson For several weeks now a storm has been brewing in the Senate over just how homosexuals fit into the mainstream of American life. First, an honest debate on the criminalization of gay sex in Texas somehow gave rise to baseless fears about permitting bestiality and incest. Then, after the Supreme Court’s reasonable ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the government had no business policing people in their bedrooms [a ruling decried by the Republican Senate leadership and by President Bush’s favorite Supreme Court Justice – A.T.], a panic developed. Some worried that the decision would lead to gay marriage, thus posing a threat to the survival of the American family. In the view of this old Senate hand, it’s time for everyone to take a deep breath, calm down and wait for this storm to head out to sea. But no such luck: Several Senate members want to create more anguish by pushing a proposal to amend the Constitution. It would set a federal definition of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman. Like most Americans, and most Republicans, I think it’s important to do all we can to defend and strengthen the institution of marriage. And I also believe it is critically important to defend the integrity of the Constitution. But a federal amendment to define marriage would do nothing to strengthen families — just the opposite. And it would unnecessarily undermine one of the core principles I have always believed the GOP stood for: federalism. In our system of government, laws affecting family life are under the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government. This is as it should be. After all, Republicans have always believed that government actions that affect someone’s personal life, property and liberty — including, if not especially, marriage — should be made at the level of government closest to the people. Indeed, states already actively regulate marriage. For example, 37 states have passed their own version of the Defense of Marriage Act. I do not argue in any way that we should now sanction gay marriage. Reasonable people can have disagreements about it. That people of goodwill would disagree was something our Founders fully understood when they created our federal system. They saw that contentious social issues would best be handled in the legislatures of the states, where debates could be held closest to home. That’s why we should let the states decide how best to define and recognize any legally sanctioned unions — marriage or otherwise. As someone who is basically a conservative, I see not an argument about banning marriage or “defending” families but rather a power grab. Conservatives argue vehemently about federal usurpation of other issues best left to the states, such as abortion or gun control. Why would they elevate this one to the federal level? What’s more, it is surely not the tradition in this country to try to amend the Constitution in ways that constrict liberty. All of our amendments have been designed to expand the sphere of freedom, with one notorious exception: prohibition. We all know how that absurd federal power grab turned out. My old and dear friend Dick Cheney put it best when he said during the last presidential campaign: “The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. . . . And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one else’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. . . . I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.” Dick sees clearly the other reason why federalizing marriage is troublesome. The Republican Party I call home is one that purports to respect “freedom for everybody,” respecting the rights and dignity of the individual. And that dignity must be respected by both the letter and spirit of our laws. My views were formed back in my days as a kid in high school in Cody, Wyo. There was one classmate everyone would whisper about: “Jimmy, he’s one of those.” And we all knew what “one of those” was. Then, one horrible day, Jimmy committed suicide. It was the worst thing, a terrible waste, a sickening tragedy. Jimmy was one who felt isolated and hounded. He deserved a helluva lot better, from those of us in Cody, and from American society as a whole. As our country has gained honest and steady knowledge about homosexuality, we have learned that it is not a mental illness or a disease or a threat to our families. The real threats to family values are divorce, out-of-wedlock births and infidelity. We all know someone who is gay, and like all of us, gay men and women need to have their relationships recognized in some way. How are gay men and women to be expected to build stable, loving relationships as all of us try to do, when American society refuses to recognize the relationships? Not long ago the daughter of an old family friend of mine came home for a Thanksgiving dinner with her lesbian partner — and my friend is one of those “old cowboy” dads, too! He and his wife gently took their daughter’s hand, and her partner’s hand, and said grace together just as millions of American families do every year. To reach the best understanding, the debate over gay men and women in America should focus not on what drives us apart but on how to make all of our children — straight or gay — feel welcome in this land, their own American home. Or, as Human Rights Campaign spokesman David Smith recently pointed out, ‘Gay families are living in every corner of every county in every state of this country. Many of these families are raising children and they simply want the same rights, benefits and security granted to other families.’ Churches could still discriminate, if they chose to; just not the state. A radical notion indeed.
Champagne and Chickens September 24, 2003February 23, 2017 Here’s an interesting thing I just learned: even uncorked, champagne stays fizzy for weeks in the refrigerator. No wonder it costs more than Dr. Pepper! How do they do that? (Like so many great discoveries, this one came entirely by accident. I don’t even like champagne — but I don’t like throwing things out, either, so when we had half a bottle left over from something and no convenient cork, I just put it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator door and forgot about it. Just now, I needed something to swig down a pill – and the discovery was made. I feel a new chapter coming on. Corking Like a Guy™.) And here’s a question I have. We are clearly putting the pedal to the metal, with huge tax cuts and deficit spending to stimulate the economy . . . and magnificently accommodative monetary policy (read: low-low interest rates) to stimulate it further (anybody want a 0% interest-rate credit card for nine months?) . . . So what happens if it doesn’t work? Or, to be less gloom-and-doom about it, what happens if it does work long enough to get the administration past the 2004 election, as it well may, but . . . well, what happens then? Are there any chickens involved here? Will they come home to roost? Usually, when you go many hundreds of billions of dollars into debt, there are chickens. Our budget and trade deficits are both so large, a lot of smart people are betting the dollar will weaken, which makes investors less eager to hold US-dollar-denominated bonds, which makes interest rates rise. (The higher interest rate is needed to tempt investors into buying bonds issued in currencies they think may depreciate.) And if long-term interest rates do rise, what does that do to the real estate market, and to all the housing-related industries? And to the spending power people have been getting from refinancing their homes? And their general feeling of wealth? If we were borrowing so massively to make fundamental investments in our infrastructure or our kids, I would be less concerned. Instead, we’re like a company that’s losing money but borrows to pay its richest shareholders a dividend. I think there could be chickens.
You’re Richer Than You Thought September 23, 2003January 22, 2017 THURSDAY’S CONUNDRUM Jim Skinnell: ‘Well, sure, this year is the only year that particular formula would work. Next year, just add 1754 (or 1753 if your birthday hasn’t happened) instead and it will work.’ FIVE VOWELS, MAYBE SIX – BUT SEVEN? Eric Pollack: ‘FACETIOUSLY is the only English word that has all six vowels contained alphabetically.’ ☞ Half-seriously, what about abstemiously, arseniously, aeriously, and abstentiously? Greg Buliavac: ‘You wrote << And what about ultrarevolutionaries? You got it – each of the seven vowels is used twice. >> What – did L and T become vowels without my hearing about it?’ ☞ Ah, yes. Been meaning to apologize for that slip for some time now. There are seven sisters, seven dwarfs, seven Santini Brothers, seven swans a swimming, seven days in your average week – but only five vowels in the English language. Six, when Y is acting as a vowel. Seven, rarely, if you count the W in cwm and crwth. YOU’RE RICHER THAN YOU THOUGHT Dan: ‘You’re probably familiar with the Kevin Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy, which documents the history of wealth inequality in this country. An excellent capsule of the current status of the problem was published in the September 6th edition of the Economist, page 28. The share of wealth of the top 1% in 2000 was 38%. The share of the bottom 20% has gone from 0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 2000. You yourself have a higher net worth than the bottom 20% of the population! And that’s before the repeal of the estate tax and Bush’s tax break give-away for the upper class.’ ☞ Assuming Dan and the Economist have these numbers right, the idea must be that the bottom 20% have more debt than assets, and thus a collective negative net worth. Thus, you, too, if you’re solvent, have a greater net worth than collective net worth of 20-odd million American households. THEY’RE POORER THAN YOU THOUGHT It’s hard to read Bob Herbert’s column in yesterday’s New York Times and not wince for the working poor – and seethe at the credit card companies. They collect more than $7 billion a year in late fees? When, truth to tell, they actually want you to be late? To the quiet desperation so many of this country’s hard-working working poor must feel – just read Herbert and imagine yourself faced with these problems – the administration has a solution: borrow trillions of dollars to fund a massive tax cut for the rich.
John Adams Re-reconsidered September 21, 2003February 23, 2017 How can so many Americans think Bill Clinton was a bad president when in fact he was such a good president. Which was he? ‘History will decide,’ goes the standard line. But will it? I was fascinated to read David McCullough’s best-selling John Adams, which shows what an underappreciated hero Adams was . . . but then to read Richard Rosenfeld’s take. Rosenfeld is the author of the widely acclaimed American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation’s Beginnings and The Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. In granting permission to share the essay that follows, Richard writes, ‘No Democrat or democrat should be supporting a Washington memorial for John Adams, especially in the absence of any for the nation’s two actual colossi of independence and our greatest democratic founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.’ [For those short on time, I have taken the liberty of highlighting a few lines, so you at least get the gist.] This essay was written at the invitation of The Thomas Paine National Historical Association and appeared in the September 2001 Education Issue of Harper’s Magazine. THE ADAMS TYRANNY Lost Lessons from the Early Republic By Richard N. Rosenfeld If we knew nothing more of John Adams than that his alternative life plan was to preach from the pulpit of Massachusetts’ established puritan church, that two of his three sons, Thomas and Charles, were alcoholics (one died of it), that the third, John Quincy, who dogged his father’s footsteps to the presidency, was, by all accounts, ‘a cold, austere, and foreboding character’ (J.Q.’s words), and that leading politicians of his day saw John Adams as emotionally, shall we say, unbalanced (Benjamin Franklin: ‘in some things absolutely out of his senses;’ Thomas Jefferson: ‘sometimes absolutely mad;’ Madison: ‘sometimes wholly out of his senses;’ Hamilton: ‘liable to paroxysms of anger, which deprive him of self command’), we might speculate that John Adams was an overbearing and hypercritical pedant, distant from friends and enemies alike. But the truth is far worse. From the time Adams served, during the Revolution, as an ambassador to America’s only ally, France (French Foreign Minister Vergennes asked Congress to remove Adams ‘on account of a stubbornness, a pedantry, a self-sufficiency, and a self-conceit which render him incapable of handling political questions’) to his waning days as a one-term president (many party leaders then found that such character defects, as Hamilton charged, ‘unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate’), John Adams’ pathological narcissism repeatedly put his country’s interests at risk and ultimately doomed his Federalist party to extinction. In his own mind, he was never at fault. For his abortive diplomacy in France and thereafter in the Netherlands, where he failed to obtain Dutch help or recognition until America’s independence had been won, Adams blamed his fellow ambassador Benjamin Franklin and French Foreign Minister Vergennes: ‘I was pursued into Holland by the intrigues of Vergennes and Franklin at least as much as I ever had been in France, and was embarrassed and thwarted, both in my negotiations for a loan and in those of a political nature, by their friends, Agents, and Spies.’ For his problems as President, he blamed Hamilton (‘a bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar’ is how Adams described him) and disloyal cabinet members. To himself, John Adams was always a hero. The historian David McCullough, in his most recent book, John Adams, has taken a similar view. From the first sentence of McCullough’s beautifully written biography (‘In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.’), we are off on a dramatic and heroic ride with the founding father he aims to glorify, most effectively through the worshipful phrase ‘the colossus of independence,’ which he employs as a chapter title and then falsely attributes to Thomas Jefferson. (This nonexistent quotation has been perpetuated in reviews and even appeared as the cover line on an issue of The New York Times Book Review.) To McCullough, Adams’ pursuit of French aid was ‘one of his own proudest efforts,’ his final receipt of a Dutch loan ‘simply extraordinary,’ his unsuccessful tenure as ambassador to Britain (where he failed to negotiate a single commercial agreement) understandable: ‘Nor could it be imagined that another of his countryman … could have done better.” Etc. McCullough is hardly alone in this approach. In the last half century, as the Massachusetts Historical Society has published mile after mile of microfilm containing thousands upon thousands of Adams’ writings in justification and exposition of his life, the sheer volume of this material has shifted the scale of historical judgment ponderously in his favor. This cornucopia, so rich in the particulars of what Adams saw, thought, and felt, has allowed David McCullough and other historians to detail Adams’ trips across the sea, his relationships with family members, and his arguments with friends and enemies alike. As a result, McCullough’s biography of Adams partakes of the aura of autobiography and, in doing so, raises important questions of identity and verity. Who was John Adams? “John Adams, it was said, was a ‘good husband, a good father, a good citizen, and a good man,’“ McCullough reports. This is generally how Adams saw himself, but one wonders whether his alcoholic sons Charles (“I renounce him,” declared Adams on learning of his son’s condition) or Thomas (“a brute in manners and a bully in his family,” is how a nephew described him) would characterize Adams this way. Or whether Congressman Matthew Lyons, whom Adams jailed for calling his presidency “a continual grasp for power,” would affirm Adams’ good citizenship. Or whether any of the other democratic newspaper editors whom Adams imprisoned for criticizing his presidency (a “reign of witches” is how Jefferson described the period) would find him admirable. Or whether the fifteen boatloads of would-be Americans, who fled the country in fear of Adams’ arbitrary powers, would agree that he was a good man. “Who was John Adams?” becomes, therefore, a matter of whom one asks and what one values, and it is here that David McCullough’s John Adams fails in a most regrettable way. For McCullough evidently accepts John Adams’ perspective that Americans define themselves more by their separation from England (which Adams certainly advocated) than they do by their devotion to popular democracy and the Bill of Rights (which Adams tried to suppress). Only by accepting this inverted system of American priorities could McCullough justify, for example, devoting more than twenty pages to Adams’ ocean voyages (“brave”) during the Revolution and fewer than six pages (most of them exculpatory) to his Alien and Sedition Acts. Only by so doing could McCullough completely disregard the violence and intimidation which Adams’s federal army and private militias dealt his political enemies, driving some into shelters for their self-protection. Had McCullough chosen, unlike Adams, to attach a higher value to popular democracy and to the Bill of Rights than to the nation’s separation from England, he might have described John Adams the way many of the nation’s democrats, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin’s grandson and protégé, Benjamin Franklin Bache, judged him, that is, as an admirer of monarchy who, in fact, opposed popular democracy and trampled on the Bill of Rights. In the spring of 1776, shortly before the colonies declared independence, Paine visited John Adams, reporting that Adams “was for independence, because he expected to be made great by it; but,” Paine added, “his head was as full of kings, queens, and knaves as a pack of cards.” Paine met with Adams to discuss Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense,” which had electrified the country into support for independence by arguing, inter alia, that monarchy was unholy and that power should lie with the democratic majority, expressing itself through simple representative assemblies whose members would be elected without regard to wealth or property. Adams saw Paine’s pamphlet as flowing from “a mere desire to please the democratic party” (and later wrote, “What a poor ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass, is Tom Paine’s Common Sense”). To counter the pamphlet’s democratic tendencies, Adams published his own pamphlet, “Thoughts on Government,” which argued that society’s various “interests,” rather than its people, should be equally represented in government and that legislative power should depend on three concurring entities: a house, a senate, and a chief executive. Adams put his “interests” concept into practice three years later, when he drafted Massachusetts’ first state constitution, dividing legislative power among a house of representatives (members were required to possess at least 100 pounds in property), a senate (senators at least 300 pounds in property), and a governor (at least 1,000 pounds in property), each with the right to veto the other and each to be elected by voters meeting specified qualifications for wealth or property. (In striking contrast, America’s two leading democrats, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, had superintended the writing of the nation’s most democratic state constitution – that of Pennsylvania in 1776 – adopting Paine’s model of a simple legislative assembly without wealth or property qualifications for voters or representatives.) The upshot of John Adams’ Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was the Shays Rebellion of 1786, in which poor farmers from western Massachusetts took up arms to demand, among other things, the elimination of the wealthy Massachusetts senate (through which their wealthy creditors had blocked badly needed debt relief) and the adoption of a more democratic state government, with liberalized representation. Hearing of this, and knowing that the United States would shortly be designing a federal constitution for the entire country, Adams worked feverishly in England (where he was then ambassador) to complete the first of three volumes of his “Defence of The [State] Constitutions of Government of The United States,” arguing that the best form of government was that of England, where legislative power was shared and balanced among the one (the king or chief executive), the few (a property-based aristocracy represented in a House of Lords or Senate), and the many (the people, represented in a House of Commons of House of Representatives). As Thomas Jefferson was to ask, “Can any one read Mr. Adams’ defence of the American constitutions without seeing he was a monarchist?” Certainly, many Americans saw Adams this way, including his old and intimate friend Mercy Otis Warren, who opined, “He became so enamoured with the British constitution, and the government, manners, and laws of the nation, that a partiality for monarchy appeared.” Evidence of that partiality appeared again at the start of the federal government in the spring of 1789, when Adams shocked his senate colleagues with a proposal for George Washington to be called “His Highness, The President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” Shortly thereafter, Adams’ friend Benjamin Rush cautioned Adams that monarchical pageantry was unseemly for a republic, to which Adams caustically replied on June 19th, “You seen determined not to allow a limited monarchy to be a republican system, which it certainly is, and the best that has ever been tried.” It is beyond the scope of this review to recite the numerous individuals who, from 1776 on, testified to Adams’ belief in monarchy. Suffice it to say that, at least to this reviewer’s knowledge, not a single person who knew John Adams defended him against the many charges of monarchism. As Congressman Gabriel Duvall observed when he informed James Madison of Adams’ loss of Maryland in the election of 1800, “A good deal of the opposition which has been made to the re-election of Mr. Adams has proceeded from a belief in many that he is a Monarchist.” Yet for David McCullough, that belief was mistaken. What allows McCullough and many other historians to reject the judgment of so many of Adams’ own generation is, in large part, a body of exculpatory pleadings that Adams prepared when he was in his seventies and eighties – this in conjunction with the absence of any personal diary entries, and a paucity of personal correspondence for the time Adams was president. In all events, when Adams’ most important detractors – Paine, Hamilton, Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin Bache – had departed this realm, when Adams’ old adversary, the now elderly and retired Thomas Jefferson, nostalgically agreed to indulge his fellow former president in an exchange of self-serving correspondence for the sake of posterity, and when Adams had fully digested the revulsion so many Americans felt for his anti-democratic theory and practice of government, Adams denied he had ever believed in monarchyand claimed he had saved the country from war. “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone,” wrote Adams, “than: ‘Here lies John Adams who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’“ David McCullough adds this to the chorus: “To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career, reputation and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run.” But here, once again, the picture is less flattering than Adams and McCullough would have us believe. The president who delivered those messages was not, as Adams later sought to color himself, a moderate and pacific man resisting the bellicosity of Hamilton and the so-called “High Federalists.” Adams was then, as always, a “High Federalist.” Indeed, it was Adams’ cabinet and Hamilton who urged moderation on a bellicose Adams, whose first three drafts of the March 19th message called for a Declaration of War against France (though his final message was simply a call to arms). It was Adams who inflamed the country, declaring days of prayer and fasting, signing measure after measure of war preparations, exhorting communities throughout the country to assume a “warlike character,” jailing newspaper editors who criticized his war measures, ordering his navy to attack French ships wherever they might be found, encouraging private volunteer militias (which formed in his name and terrorized his critics), and even donning a military uniform to receive and address those militias in the president’s house. So why, then, did Adams make peace with France in 1800? The reasons are far less heroic than McCullough (and Adams) would have us believe. When Adams proposed, on February 18th of 1799, to send a final peace mission to France, there was reason to regard his proposal as an insincere and empty gesture, at odds with his consistently bellicose personal, professional, and ideological attitude toward France (and the French Revolution), and as merely a conciliatory response to the many diplomats and other important citizens who testified to pacific French intentions, to the private exhortations of even his own children, and to petitions against his war preparations from 90 percent of Pennsylvanians who had voted in the prior presidential election. Soon after the announcement, Adams restructured the mission so that it was less likely to depart in the foreseeable future and thus would, as Jefferson wrote Madison, “leave more time for new projects of provocation.” For the next eight months, Adams did absolutely nothing to see that a peace mission departed. But then, in October, Adams ordered the peace mission to depart, against the wishes of Hamilton and some in his cabinet. By this action, Adams earned the admiration of McCullough and many other historians of the Early Republic who have concluded that Adams was a moderate who defied High-Federalists in his party. There is, however, much more to the story than that A few weeks after the February announcement and only three days before Adams left Philadelphia for a seven-month retreat to his home state of Massachusetts (Adams still holds the worst record for absenteeism of any American president), Adams ordered his brand new federal army into Pennsylvania’s rural Northampton, Bucks, and Montgomery counties to suppress “misrepresentations” and other “subversive” anti-war activities of Pennsylvania farmers, who were then protesting Adams’ war taxes and his Alien and Sedition Acts. To lead this mission, Adams chose William Macpherson, commander of the private and infamous Macpherson Blues militia legions, which had, for more than a year, been terrorizing Adams’ political opponents in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Once in the country, troops of the federal army invaded the private homes of Pennsylvania farm families, terrorized men, women, and children alike, tore down symbols of political opposition to Adams (such as “liberty poles”), and publicly whipped newspaper editors who reported their misconduct. When the army returned to Philadelphia in the middle of May, a group of thirty army officers paid a visit to the city’s leading Jeffersonian newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, whose editor, William Duane, had published charges that certain troops had lived “at free quarters” (i.e., in people’s homes, without their permission, in contravention of the Third Amendment). These army officers dragged Duane into the middle of Philadelphia’s Market Street and beat him and his sixteen-year-old son mercilessly until both lay unconscious on the ground. For the next two weeks, according to the press, “the streets of Philadelphia were filled with crowds of people who wanted nothing but the firing of the first musket to precipitate Pennsylvania, and perhaps the continent, into the horrors of civil war.” Pennsylvanians were outraged. As Adams conceded, “That army was as unpopular, as if it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it.” So, in October, just as Adams was arriving back at the seat of government (which had been temporarily moved upriver from Philadelphia to Trenton, New Jersey), bonfires were burning across the Delaware in celebration of the first major state-wide victory for Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in the critical Middle Atlantic states (i.e., Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), whose electoral votes would – in everyone’s calculation – decide the upcoming presidential election. It was a sign of things to come. As the administration’s quasi-official Gazette of the United States had forewarned – and, more importantly, as John Adams’ favorite publisher, William Cobbett of Porcupine’s Gazette, explained to the world, as he abruptly closed the nation’s foremost High-Federalist newspaper on October 19th: “The election of my Democratick Judge Thomas McKean as Governor of Pennsylvania, undeniably the most influential state in the union, has in my opinion, decided the fate of what has been called Federalism…” The day before Adams arrived in Trenton, a Philadelphia paper editorialized that if Adams’ party hoped to retain the presidency, it would have to abandon John Adams and turn again to George Washington. When Adams returned to the government in October of 1799, he may have been ready to cancel his proposed peace mission to France (as his army’s Inspector General, Alexander Hamilton, and some cabinet members were urging). But Pennsylvania showed him, on his arrival, what his war measures and bellicosity were costing his re-election prospects. Should he cancel the mission, his Attorney General, Charles Lee, warned, “Such a measure would exceedingly disappoint the general expectations of America, and . . . afford your enemies the opportunity of indulging their evil dispositions . . .” So Adams let the peace mission sail in November, and a peace treaty was signed in France the following year. Adams had not, as McCullough would have us believe, chosen peace “at the risk of his career, reputation and his hold on the presidency.” To the contrary, he chose peace to save his career, his reputation, and his hold on the presidency, all of which his nation repudiated when it replaced him with the democrat Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800. When Adams left the presidency, he did so in disgrace. He was the founding father who had opposed popular democracy, subverted the Bill of Rights, and brought his nation to the brink of civil war. He had visited on his political opponents an American reign of terror, which, even in old age, Jefferson could never let Adams forget. “Whether the character of the times is justly portrayed or not,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1813, “posterity will decide. But on one feature of them they can never decide, the sensations excited in free yet firm minds by the terrorism of the day. None can conceive who did not witness them, and they were felt by one party only.” When news of Adams’ defeat reached Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Aurora (whose founding editor, none other than Benjamin Franklin Bache, died awaiting trial for sedition) pronounced the nation “rescued from the Talons of Monarchists. In spite of intrigue. In spite of terror. In spite of unconstitutional laws. In spite of British influence. In spite of the Standing Army. In spite of the Sedition Law.” Jefferson’s victory, the paper forecast, “will become as celebrated in history as the 4th of July 1776 for the emancipation of the American states from British influence and tyranny.” A monarch, it seemed, had been dethroned. It would take a mighty hagiographer to place John Adams on a pedestal, and for two hundred years, no one has been equal to the task. But now, in the eloquent David McCullough, Adams may finally have found his man. McCullough’s finely crafted and eminently readable John Adams would doubtless please the founder whom democrats dubbed “His Rotundity.” But in pandering to the highly remunerative national yearning for heroes, David McCullough denies Americans the critical lessons in liberty and democracy that every history of the Early Republic should teach. # ☞ So there you have it. An important counterpoint to the McCullough book, as best I can make out – although the only thing I’m reasonably sure of is that Benjamin Franklin does deserve a monument. To save money, maybe just rename the airport after him?
Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead September 19, 2003March 25, 2012 And so is John Adams (my apologies to those of you too young to remember the early years of Saturday Night Live), so — guilty though I feel putting off this fascinating essay from Richard Rosenfeld — I guess Adams isn’t going anywhere. Come back tomorrow.
How Often Does a 38-Year-Old Go Out? September 18, 2003January 22, 2017 Gennady Shmukler: ‘Here’s a short wonderful ‘conundrum’: Take the number of times you go out a week. Double it. Add 5. Multiply by 50. If your birthday this year has passed, add 1753. If not, add 1752. Subtract from this result your year of birth (1953, 1964, etc.). You should end up with a 3-digit number. The 1st digit is the number of times you go out a week! The last 2 digits is your age!!!!! (NOTE: This year – 2003 – is the only year when it will work.)” John Seiffer: “Don missed the point when he said he was ‘not very sympathetic with the idea that every tweak to the tax system has to give more to the poor. They’re already getting a lot.’ Aside from any moral or humanistic view, Don’s life will be better if the poor are helped. If he would visit cities and villages where there are many poor, he will find them less pleasant that ones with a greater standard of living. He will find services he enjoys – from roads, to banking, to courts, to cultural and business activities much more enjoyable (not to mention available) in places where more people have health care and education. He’ll find less stench and less crime. Less possibility of personal harm, disease, accident or kidnapping. I would say to Don that if he gives up some of what he has in order to help the poor his life will be better for it. He doesn’t have to feel the poor ‘deserve’ it.” Caleb Canning: “My favorite use for Google is to find the source and context of great quotes. Try ‘the night we stormed Valhalla,’ ‘black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,’ ‘Palmers long to seek the stranger strands’ and ‘Pray that the road is long.’ Fun stuff!” ☞ And, hey – lest Google gain a total monopoly, check out Teoma, which some like even better. Donna Bell: “I’m glad you wrote about BOREF today. I have it set up on my home page and almost fell over yesterday when I saw it at $9 per share! You, however, have me to thank for the price increase since I did not buy any. I have a great track record for sending a stock spiraling downward as soon as I make a purchase.” ☞ Me, too! That’s probably what kept it down the past 4 years. But my buying was so long ago, maybe the effect is wearing off. It traded yesterday at 11.
Give It Up for Matt Miller September 17, 2003February 23, 2017 When I first wrote about Borealis, November 16, 1999, it was trading around $3 a share and the stock market bubble was about to burst. Those of you who bought it must thus be rubbing your eyes, as I am, to see that – while Cisco and Microsoft (say) are maybe half their former selves, and a great many issues have just disappeared – Borealis has tripled. It closed at $9 or so last night (valuing the entire company at $45 million, or about the cost of nice new 10-seater corporate jet). This run-up in price does not mean Borealis won’t sooner or later go to zero. The only sane way to own it, I think, is to assume that it will. But now that it’s nearly tripled, should we sell? One sensible answer might be: sell enough to get your original investment back and keep the rest. From then on, you’ll be playing with the house’s money. That’s fine with me. I will sleep better knowing that, no matter what, I can’t have lost you money on this thing. But it’s not necessarily logical, because you promised you would only put money into this that you would not much miss if you lost it. So what’s the big deal about recouping it? I’m holding the ton of it I own because I made the same deal with myself: I expect to lose it. But in case Borealis proves real . . . well, won’t that be fun? Anyway, enough of that. You don’t come to this site to make money, you come for recipes (Cooking Like a Guy™) and for macroeconomics. To wit, Matt Miller’s recent column: BUSH’S RADICAL FISCAL IMMORALITY By Matthew Miller You can ask Americans to spend $166 billion to get the job done in Iraq and in Afghanistan (that’s $79 billion so far, plus the president’s new request for $87 billion). You can ask us to tolerate modest budget deficits while spending what’s needed to meet a major national challenge. But President Bush can’t ask us for $166 billion for Iraq while he runs record $500 billion budget deficits and doubles the national debt — all in order to give $300 billion a year in tax cuts over the next decade mostly to the best-off people in America. And Bush certainly can’t do this when he’s also saying there’s no money for huge unmet domestic needs in health care, education and more. No, this is the moment when President Bush’s radical fiscal irresponsibility has veered into radical fiscal immorality. Consider the magnitude of the hoax: The outer limit of President Bush’s phony “compassion” is a health plan that would reach 6 million of today’s 42 million uninsured. By my math, 42 minus 6 equals Bush’s “compassion gap.” But that’s only one of the countless Bush gaps under which America now suffers. There’s the Bush jobs gap (more than 3 million lost). The Bush growth gap (too little). The Bush budget gap (record $500 billion-plus deficits). The Bush ally gap (which leaves us footing the full bill abroad). The Bush poverty gap (the poverty rate is up, though few have noticed). And, of course, the growing Bush honesty gap — which involves denial of all of the above (Remember: White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey was fired partly for daring to say Iraq would cost $100 billion to $200 billion). The president and those advising him must think we’re as dumb as they are cynical. That if Bush goes on TV one night and invokes the memory of Sept. 11, we’ll suspend all powers of reasoning and fork over another $87 billion, no questions asked. But as my colleagues at the Center for American Progress point out, $87 billion is seven times what the federal government spends on low-income schools. It’s eight times what the nation spends on Pell grants for college aid — at a time when the states are hiking tuitions at state colleges to cope with their own budget deficits, which in total come to less than (you guessed it) $87 billion. Eighty-seven billion dollars is 10 times what the federal government spends on environmental protection and 87 times what it spends on after-school programs. This is not to say America can’t pay for what needs to be done in Iraq — though it’s clearer every day that this arrogant White House either grossly bungled the postwar planning or concealed what it knew to be its likely dimensions; it will be interesting to see whether Bushies prefer to defend themselves as incompetent or dishonest. But the key point — now finding its way into John Kerry’s rhetoric, as it should into the critique of other Democrats — is that since this war was conducted at a time of our choosing, there is no excuse for not having properly planned for the postwar scenario and for not having managed our international relationships to assure that the burden of Iraq’s renewal is shared, along with its benefits. Which brings us back to Bush’s fiscal immorality. Bush says that our effort in Iraq will “require sacrifice.” Please tell us, Mr. Bush, what sacrifice is being asked of the most fortunate Americans? In ordinary times, claiming that tax cuts mostly for the rich are needed to boost economic growth would merely be garden-variety political fraud. When Bush makes this case in the context of financing a war on our kids’ credit card while shortchanging critical needs at home, it is morally obscene. Democrats need to make a stand here. They must insist that new spending for Iraq be paid for dollar for dollar by repealing tax cuts going to the wealthiest. They should be prepared to filibuster in the Senate to draw national attention to Bush’s fiscal immorality. It’s a defining showdown they can win. If Democrats frame this debate properly and speak with one voice, Bush won’t be able to sell the con that Democrats “don’t support our troops.” The issue is how you pay for it. The contrast couldn’t be starker. We’ve reached a tipping point in public opinion with Bush’s $87 billion speech, in which the president’s radical fiscal immorality can be easily explained and understood. It shocks average Americans. And it should. ********* © 2003 MATTHEW MILLER (Matthew Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love. Reach him at www.mattmilleronline.com.)