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THE REAL NEWS ABOUT KARL ROVE

I feel compelled to comment on the Rove-Wilson-Plame-Novak-Miller ad infinitum saga because it struck me that there is an angle no one has mentioned, or at least no one I have read lately. That is to say thirty, twenty or even ten years ago, Karl Rove would have been left for political dead by now, his corpse would be cold and he’d have become an unperson, forgotten even by Jay Leno in his nightly monologue.

The once dreaded power of the Left’s Iron Triangle – the implicit partnership of Congressional Democrats, the liberal MSM and top tier bureaucrats in the Cabinet to destroy Republicans- is a spent force.

Karl Rove is a brilliant bare-knuckle political operator and no saint but the likeliest legal outcome of this charade is that he did not, at least technically speaking, break the law by ” outing” a CIA clandestine officer engaged in covert operations, which Ms. Plame was not in any event. Given the unlikelihood of Judith Miller doing hard time for Mr. Rove, he’s obviously not ” the” source, though I can imagine he walked right up to any legal line in speaking to reporters. That’s how hardball is played in Washington and hardball is what the incredibly arrogant Joseph Wilson chose to play when the senior staff at Foggy Bottom and at Langely cooked up this gambit in order to torpedo the President’s foreign policy and, if they were really lucky, the President along with it.

In some countries, when the unelected insiders engage in secret machinations to oust their elected leaders it is called a coup.

Too strong a word ? Admiral Stansfield Turner, the Left’s favorite CIA director and no fan of the Bush administration, felt compelled to speak out in support of housecleaning at Langely:

“The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics,” said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. “And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem.”

The coup failed because the old oligopoly on public discourse of three major TV networks and two newspapers is broken. Would-be drumbeats orchestrated by elite powerbrokers through their media friends now dissolve into a cacophony of fact-checking, fisking, ridicule and a devastating counterattack if any chicanery is exposed. Chicanery that once would never have been detected, much less thwarted.

At one time the ” appearance of impropriety” or if none existed, outright slander ( provided Ted Kennedy was sober enough to reach a microphone) was enough to sink a Republican officeholder or nominee regardless if there was any substance to the charge. Remember Ray Donovan ? Of course not, he was Reagan’s Secretary of Labor who was investigated out of office and into the poorhouse. He was cleared of wrongdoing once he had been destroyed. How about that nominee for SCOTUS who may have smoked a joint – he disappeared into the memory hole so fast I doubt anyone reading this blog can remember his name.

Of course this death by media culture boomeranged on the Democrats in a big way in the 1990’s when President Clinton who was a walking, talking, scandal-machine came into office. The GOP, which had ample real things to complain about in terms of Clinton’s policies, threw everything at the Clintons but the kitchen sink, including quite a few things that sounded clinically insane to anyone not drunk on personal hatred for the man. The Republican Party was saved from self-destruction only because the Clintons inevitably kept getting caught doing something shady that re-ignited controversy. Between old Bill, Hillary, Newt and that assistant principal looking special prosecutor, the country burned out its capacity for political indignation for a generation.

I’m highly doubtful Rove did anything illegal but if Karl Rove really and truly broke the law he should go. What the Left lacks, for the first time in forty years, is the power to make him.

FOLLOW-UP

Marc Shulman posed a tough question for me in the comment section of the post below, which I have tried to answer. Additionally, Jeff at Caerdroia has also posted a long analytical piece on America’s strategic choices in the war to end Jihadi terrorism that bears reflection:

“To begin, how do you identify the potential terrorists? If you look at the known information on the London terrorists, and the 9/11 terrorists, and the numerous other terrorists that have operated outside of predominantly-Muslim countries, you find that they are by and large middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant, young Muslim men, entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. There happen to be a large fraction of the immigrants to Western nations (particularly Europe) who are middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant young Muslim men who are not entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. So how do you separate out people whose only distinguishing characteristic is what they believe and whom they follow?”

Read the whole thing.

DEMOCRACIES THAT FIGHT FOR THEIR SURVIVAL DO NOT CEASE TO BE DEMOCRATIC BECAUSE THEY FIGHT

“There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
– Justice Robert Jackson, 1949.

Marc Schulman and Dave Schuler, two bloggers for whom I have the greatest respect for the thoughtful and serious way they approach the momentous issues of our time, have jointly zeroed in on the most troublesome issue facing the United States, Britain and the West: How does a Democracy effectively fight an enemy who can recruit our own citizens to commit atrocities and still remain a democracy ?

At the American Future, Marc Shulman has had many fine posts on this quandry since the London bombing but one that touched a nerve with Dave was entitled ” The Enemy Within“( I also strongly recommend reading Marc’s latest-“Three British Op-Eds” and “A Deadly Double-Standard” ). A post that dealt with the left-wing British newspaper, The Guardian, coming to the belated realization that the War on Terror might be someting more than a public relations exercise by ambitious Straussian neocons. An excerpt:

“The realisation that Britons are ready to bomb their fellow citizens is a challenge to the whole of our society. One security source I spoke to yesterday, before the police revealed their findings, presciently guessed that the culprits were “a UK group, home-grown, having bypassed al-Qaida training camps”. He reckoned they would have drawn on the pool of young Muslims so disconnected and disenfranchised that they are easy prey to the extremist sermons heard in some mosques, to the wild, conspiracy-theory packed tapes sold outside and to the most fire-breathing websites. The proliferation of that material represents a deep challenge to British Islam; that disconnection and disenfranchisement is a challenge to Britain itself.”

This in turn provoked a response from Dave at The Glittering Eye that he characterized to me as a ” lament”, a post entitled “The limits of diversity; the end of ” E plurbus unum”?”. I am loathe to excerpt Dave’s post for fear of distorting his point about our own internal divisions over the nature of the enemy we face (hint- go read it all) but here is the crux of his response to Marc:

““We hold these truths to be self-evident…” These words are from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and demonstrate that our republic was founded on a consensus. Or, as Chesterton put it, it was founded on a creed. This consensus included the notions of unalienable rights, popular sovereignty, consent, constitutionalism, separation of powers, morality, and limited government. But the consensus also included the concept of natural law and a belief in the role of reason in human affairs.

…The recent terrorist attacks in London raise yet another challenge to our society. As more is learned about the nature of the perpetrators of the attack a picture emerges of young men in such profound disagreement with the fundamental values of the society in which they found themselves that all they asked of it was its destruction. And their own.

…Can we reasonably doubt that this kind of anger exists here as well?

I don’t honestly know if our society can survive the rising level of anger that I’m seeing from all sides: left and right, Christian and Muslim. But I equally don’t know if our society can survive the abandoning of the notional diversity that’s been a key factor in our society for all of my lifetime, at least. Can we accept in our midst people who simply don’t want the things that the American consensus requires? But what kind of society will be left if we abandon “E pluribus
unum”? “

What is to be done ?

Is the choice to treat an army of apocalyptic sociopaths and fanatics hell-bent on our destruction as misunderstood criminal defendents ( ACLU, Amnesty International) or to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in camps ( Daniel Pipes, Michelle Malkin) in some reprise of Japanese Internment ? Or to surrender to Islamist terrorism by withdrawing from Iraq and breaking our alliance with Israel ( antiwar Left and Right) and let the totalitarian New Caliphate rise if it can ?

No.

The choice is to fight with the realization that war is not the same state of affairs under the Constitution as is peace and that any reluctant concessions to *common-sense* requirements for victory and security must be, as with the Civil War, WWI and WWII, temporary measures. It means abandoning only hubris and paranoia alike. We can, in fact, lose this war and there is an Islamist fifth column among us but their numbers are very, very few and they are here largely due to our own laxity, foreign radicals who should have been kicked the hell out of the consular office the moment they scribbled on their VISA application.

The vast majority of Muslims in the United States of America are loyal and patriotic citizens or resident aliens hoping someday to join us. A tiny number of violent Islamists swim among them like Mao’s fish in the sea, much like Soviet bloc spies once swam amongst millions of Eastern European immigrants. The CPUSA once had hundreds of thousands of members who worked fanatically for the interests of the Soviet Union, infiltrated Communist spies into Cabinet Departments, the White House and even stole the secret of the Atomic Bomb.

And we survived.

We survived by adopting intelligent Counterintelligence and COCOM technology control policies even when fellow-travellers shrieked ” McCarthyism” from the pages of The Nation or The New York Times. We survived because we neither lost our heads over Berlin or Cuba nor gave in to the voices counseling and later, demanding, appeasement of Soviet aggression. We survived because we triangulated our main enemy and peeled away his most powerful potential allies. We survived because we didn’t shrink from fighting fire with fire and subverting the enemy’s own empire by plaguing his puppets with anticommunist guerillas and insurgents. Finally we survived because all the weaknesses of an Open Society still leave us with far, far greater dynamism and resilience than the most militant ideological-nightmare states.

If we keep our nerve, the most likely result of the war is that History will write that the Mullahs accomplished nothing with their jihad but to tread the same path as the Commissars and the Gauleiters to their doom.

RECOMMENDED READING

“Is there such a thing as Cyberterror ?” IT security expert Stuart Berman cautions us not to get caught up with semantics.

“The Memory Hole” Jeff at Caerdroia comments on the BBC’s avoidance of the word ” terrorist”.

” The THIS Index“ Nadezhda of Chez Nadezhda and LAT describes what seems to me to be the degree of fatalism in a given society.

“Shifting Strategy: When is the time right ?” Rob at BusinessPundit looks at whether strategic changes are discontinuous.

That’s it.

DAN OF TDAXP CORNERS ZENPUNDIT


Dan, in the comments section, reiterated his question:

“So what would have been the path to a “rule-set reset,” from early Diocletian concentrated economic power and diffuse economic power to diffuse economic and political power?

Or is this a case where the rule-sets could neither be developed internally nor imported?”

This looks like a job for….Donald Kagan ! Unfortunately, he’s not available so I’m going to have do my best. Dan asks the best kind of questions – fundamental ones.

In fairness to Diocletian, of whom I’m somewhat critical, he did face truly immense problems and he can be credited with stabilizing the Empire enough to prevent a premature collapse into anarchy. There is also a weird parallel between Diocletian’s attempt to create a normal system of succession and retire and Deng Xiaoping’s attempt to do the same in Communist China. Ultimately, I think they are both great transitioners who realized that their systems failed and needed to change into to something else.

Diocletian was correct in realizing that the Augustan Principate system was unworkable in and unstable and his Tetrarchy attempted to minimize those defects by increasing the number of decision-making ” hubs” with the Augustii and Cesarii. He also attempted to further stabilize the government by making his position an object of veneration by the increasingly barbarized populace by taking a despotic title – in a sense an import of an Eastern Rule-set. From this seed you get Byzantium’s adoration of their Basileus and later, the Russians of their Tsar.

A better solution might have been to look to a mixed Constitution, like that of old Sparta, for inspiration to remake the Rule-set of the Empire. It had lasted over 700 years with only minor modifications from the original one devised by Lycurgus until Sparta fell under Macedonian and then later, Roman rule. This would have entailed constructing some true institutional checks on the imperial power and transforming it into a Constitutional monarchy. An equally important problem was restoring Rome’s monetary system to health, something Diocletian attempted to bypass but if successful, would have greatly increased the chances for political reform to work as well.

Counterfactuals though, are argument unending. Polybius had a simpler answer for Roman decline, at some point a society begins to die.