One of the more fascinating blogosphere discussions in recent weeks is happening over on the left regarding foreign policy “experts” and their responsibility for our current situation in Iraq and elsewhere.

It started with a post by Gideon Rose over at the Economist Blog that skewered the netroots for bashing the “foreign policy community” for their perceived failures in getting us into Iraq. Rose compared the netroots attacks on these “experts” with those carried out by neo-conservatives in the late 1990’s:

The lefty blogosphere, meanwhile, has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the “foreign policy community.” The funny thing is…hell, I’ll just come out and say it: the netroots’ attitude toward professionals isn’t that different from the neocons’, both being convinced that the very concept of a foreign-policy clerisy is unjustified, anti-democratic and pernicious, and that the remedy is much tighter and more direct control by the principals over their supposed professional agents.

The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don’t deserve to be listened to in the future. (Take a look at pretty much any old Jim Hoagland column and you’ll see what I mean.) Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies—freedom-hating mediocrities at the CIA, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers’ attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world.

This piece drew a response from Mathew Yglesias where he tried to change the parameters of the discussion from “expertise and professionalism” to whether many of these so-called “wise men” are in fact, experts in the first place:

And there’s the rub. Rose would, I think, like to make this a conversation about expertise and professionalism. But I’m not, and I don’t think anyone in the blogosphere is, against expertise and professionalism. The question is whether some of our country’s self-proclaimed experts—and media proclaimed experts—really deserve to be considered experts. What, for example, is the nature of Michael O’Hanlon’s expertise on the broad range of subjects (his official bio lists him as an expert on “Arms treaties; Asian security issues; Homeland security; Iraq policy; Military technology; Missile defense; North Korea policy; Peacekeeping operations; Taiwan policy, military analysis; U.S. defense strategy and budget”) upon which he comments? Obviously, it would be foolish to just let me speak ex cathedra as an “expert” on the dizzying array of subjects on which I comment, but it seems equally foolish to let O’Hanlon do so, especially since his judgment seems so poor. I made a stab at a systemic difference between think tank people and professionals in the public sector, but Rose raises some convincing points to the effect that this dichotomy isn’t as sharp as I wanted it to be. Still, we can certainly talk about specific individuals—particularly individuals who seem to be unusually prominent or influential—and whether or not they really deserve to be held in high esteem.

Kevin Drum weighs in with some considered thoughts about group think as it relates to why so many “experts” were in favor of the invasion while some in the intel community (not as many as many on the left would have us believe) opposed the Iraq adventure:

My own view is a little different, though. Sure, the war skeptics might have been afraid to go against the herd, but I think that was just an outgrowth of something more concrete: a fear of being provably wrong. After all, everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and unpredictable thug and almost everyone agreed that he had an active WMD program. (Note: Please do some research first if you want to disagree with this. The plain fact is that nearly everyone — liberal and conservative, American and European, George Bush and Al Gore — believed Saddam was developing WMDs. This unanimity started to break down when the UN inspections failed to turn up anything, but before that you could count the number of genuine WMD doubters on one hand.) This meant that war skeptics had to go way out on a limb: if they opposed the war, and it subsequently turned out that Saddam had an advanced WMD program, their credibility would have been completely shot. Their only recourse would have been to argue that Saddam never would have used his WMD, an argument that, given Saddam’s temperament, would have sounded like special pleading even to most liberals. In the end, then, they chickened out, but it had more to do with fear of being wrong than with fear of being shunned by the foreign policy community.

At any rate, it would be instructive to find out who these closet doves were and invite them to a Foreign Affairs roundtable to talk about why they knuckled under to the hawks prior to the war. To the extent they were willing to be honest, it would be a pretty interesting conversation. I won’t be holding my breath, though.

Finally, Ilan Goldenberg makes some interesting points about the difference between true “experts” and the self proclaimed variety who show up on TV constantly:

It’s not that the entire VSP community is bad. The question is how do you tell the difference between a hack and someone who is a genuine expert? This actually isn’t too hard to figure out. First, regional experts generally tend to be more well informed than functional experts because of their narrower focus. There is a long list of foreign policy experts who specialize in the Middle East (And did so before 9/11 came around). Jon Alterman, Brian Katulis, Mark Lynch, Ray Takeyh, Steven Simon, Flynt Levrett, Vali Nasr, Steven Cook, Rob Malley to name just a few. Most of these people speak Arabic or Farsi. Most have spent sigificant time in the region or spent a great deal of time studying the history of the region and the intimate details. They know much more than you, me, Matt Yglesias or Gideon Rose do about the Middle East. Not surprisingly a large majority of these regional experts were opposed to the Iraq War. The problem is no one listened. The issue became so main stream that many functional experts who knew very little about the region stepped in and start calling themselves Middle East experts and make assertions as “experts” on what the U.S. should be doing. During the Cold War everyone was a Soviet “expert.” Today everyone is a Middle East “expert”. (Ken Pollack is the clear exception to the rule. He has rigorously studied the Middle East, but was just flat out wrong about Iraq).

What fascinates me about this entire discussion is the confluence of politics and policy and how the media, academia, and political parties play a dominant role in making, shaping, and promoting our foreign policy.

A couple of caveats are in order. First, I make no claims to being an “expert” in anything save distilling and writing about the ideas and policy prescriptions of others. That’s what most of us bloggers do on a daily basis. There are probably times when my enthusiasm gets the better of me and I attempt some independent analysis – with mixed results I’m sure. The point is, I am perfectly happy to feed off the knowledge and expertise of others as long as what they are proposing or their analysis makes sense to me in the context of what I already know about the subject.

Secondly, by its very nature, blogging is hazardous to elites. Therefore, one would expect the loudest yelps of indignation about “know-nothing bloggers” to come from those whose work is constantly criticized by people not recognized as “peers” by the foreign policy establishment. And while they may have a point about some writers not having the breadth or depth of knowledge about a particular subject when compared to an “expert,” to dismiss their critiques out of hand smacks of an intellectual elitism not uncommon in academia or politics for that matter.

That said, I find fault in the general critique being advanced by these lefty bloggers about “experts” and why they perceive an institutional failure in resisting the war tocsins prior to our invasion of Iraq.

Their problem (and I agree with Rose about a similar attitude presented by the Neocons in the past) is in misunderstanding how foreign policy is made. For a good contemporary look at the sausage making, I recommend Ole Holsti’s fine group of essays on the subject. For a little more depth and historical background, one could do no better than reading Richard Russell’s excellent critique of George Keenan’s “strategic thought” and the evolution of our policy toward the Soviet Union.

Both books reveal how various “experts” impact policy making. Looking at the left’s critique of who gets to give input into the process and whose opinions receive more weight than others fails to take into account the real role of politics in this process as well as the small but significant part played by the media and public opinion in formulating, shaping, and implementing our policies.

Clearly, a distinction must be made between purely academic experts whose writings are well respected in their tiny corner of academia and their counterparts who fill the ranks of various “think tanks” (I hate that term!). A place like Brookings brings together those who shuttle between the academy and government as well as those who may have an academic background but who serve as in house experts for political campaigns or involve themselves in politics in other ways. In this respect, “think tanks” are clearinghouses for ideas and analyses that bubble up and make their way from the academy to politics.

The criticism by the leftosphere of “experts” like Michael O’Hanlon and, to a lesser extent Kenneth Pollack, the two Brookings Fellows whose Op-Ed in the New York Times was offered as “proof” by many on the right that things were going better in Iraq and that it was still “winnable,” points up this confluence between politics and policy. O’Hanlon/Pollack may have gone to Iraq to analyze the situation based on their knowledge and expertise as academic experts. But clearly, their conclusions immediately entered the realm of politics once they broadcast their findings on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. The only goal one can assume from these actions was a desire to affect the political debate in Congress.

Is this the proper role for “experts?” Clearly, some on the left question this foray into politics by the two Brookings fellows. And the belief by many that it was disingenuous of the two to claim they were “war critics” when they supported the invasion has something to do with the virulence with which they have been skewered by the left. One wonders if they had come back saying the surge was a failure and we should withdraw immediately, would the left be attacking the messengers so strenuously. Perhaps not. But it is a minor point compared to the larger issue of what is an “expert” and who do we believe when trying to form an opinion about any issue.

Goldenberg’s attempt to define a “real” expert is fine as far as it goes. He slips up a bit here:

Another of indicator of expertise is the think tank bio page. As Matt hints at, there is an inverse correlation between the number of areas of expertise listed in your bio and your actual expertise. What also matters is whether the listing of expertise makes any sense and whether the various areas are related. For example, Tony Cordesman, who quite frankly knows more than you, me, or just about anybody else about the Middle East, only lists four areas of expertise on his bio: Energy, Middle East & North Africa, Defense Policy, and Terrorism.

His point being that Michael O’Hanlon is a charlatan because he lists a dozen areas of “expertise” on his bio page at Brookings including unrelated foreign policy subjects like the Middle East and Taiwan. I agree that on the surface, it would seem to be a good yardstick to determine if someone was really an “expert” on a given subject. Does O’Hanlon know more about the Middle East than Cordesman who only lists 4 areas of expertise in his bio? Or does he know more than a scholar/professor like Juan Cole?

Even if he doesn’t, I think adding up the number of areas where a scholar like O’Hanlon claims sufficient knowledge to be considered an “expert” and trying to determine the right or wrong of it is in and of itself a foolhardy venture by definition. O’Hanlon must be judged by his peers. Given that Goldenberg rightly points out that bloggers know less about the Middle East than a Cordesman or a Cole (even though his scholarship has been questioned by his peers), it would seem that Mr. Rose is making a good point about misdirected or poorly formulated criticisms directed against experts.

This doesn’t obviate blog criticisms of O’Hanlon or any other expert. Rather, it points up the problem in determining how much weight we give to an analysis of any issue based on an expert’s opinion. Do we agree with the political implications of an analysis? Do we generally agree with the underlying assumptions in that analysis?

If we see an expert on TV all the time, are we more likely to agree with him when he publishes a paper? And finally, what role does the opinions of the political class play in all of this?

The left uses as a basic assumption in their critique of these experts that there was a “consensus” among them (even a lockstep mindset according to Drum) that the war was right, necessary, and would be a cakewalk. Only a precious few experts crying out from the wilderness were opposed to the adventure. I don’t recall it quite that way although in sheer volume, the Neocon view outshouted the more cautious analysts who urged waiting a few months. The problem there was more a tactical military problem in that delaying the invasion two or three months to give the inspectors more time would have meant our forces attacking during the summer and the additional problems of brutal heat and sun.

But how persuasive were the experts in getting the bulk of the American people to go along with the President in attacking Iraq? Not very, I daresay. If it is true that the political class was affected by “expert” opinions on whether to invade then it was equally true that politicians saw the huge numbers in support of the invasion and felt going against the grain would be political suicide. In this way, there is little doubt that public opinion, only tangentially affected by the pronouncements of experts, led the way to war.

One might more readily ask how influenced the Bush Administration was by these experts. The fact that most of the Neocons who came into power with the Administration were already in support of taking out Saddam should disabuse anyone of the idea that outside experts at think tanks or academia held much sway with that crew. If not 9/11, some other causus belli would have been used as an excuse to get rid of the tyrant.

In general then, I tend to come down on Mr. Rose’s side in this debate. The way foreign policy is made in America utilizes the strengths of academia and scholars with experience in government along with political and media elites who turn ideas into policy. The fact that there so few involved in the process may, as Mr. Rose intimates, be undemocratic. But there really isn’t much of an alternative.

UPDATE

Michael van der Galiën also weighs in:

Now, certain bloggers know a lot about certain subjects. Therefore, it would be wise to listen to them. However, bloggers too should not have the ultimate say (thank God we don’t). Some bloggers know far more than Joe Doe does, albeit less than the superexperts do, at least in theory. This means that, on the one hand people should listen to those bloggers (I will not name the ‘good’ bloggers), while on the other hand those bloggers should listen to experts in order to learn and to make up their minds. In a way, one could say, that in my world a blogger has quite some in common with a politician or a leader: in the end, bloggers (the bigger ones) are opinion makers – thus opinion leaders.

The mistake many netroot bloggers make, however, is that they do not look at experts as much as they look at John Doe: as if John Doe knows all. The result is that – although they should be able to come up with good ideas – they more often than not come up with utter nonsense. The result of that, in its turn, is that they lose credibility (resulting in articles as the one by Gideon).

I think Michael makes an excellent point. As I say above, the vast majority of Americans were not swayed by “experts” who were urging war with Saddam (or agreeing that it was necessary). It was politicians who made the case – using arguments advanced by some experts – that swayed public opinion.

UPDATE II

Daniel Drezner echoes some of my points about the establishment and the Iraq War while adding this:

The moment George W. Bush decided he wanted to oust Saddam Hussein, the debate was effectively over. Nothing the foreign policy community did or could have done affected the outcome (Pollack is a possible exception—his book The Threatening Storm did play the role of “useful cover” for many Democrats, but if it wasn’t Pollack’s book it would have been something else). The members of the “foreign policy community” were not the enablers of Iraq, because no enabling was necessary.

The good news is that conditions a-f no longer apply. So, contra the netroots, I don’t think what happened in the fall of 2002 will happen again.

And I also appreciate how he deconstructed Lambchop’s nonsense that the establishment is predisposed to war mongering.

There didn’t seem to be a link to any kind of a form to register. At least, I can’t figure out where it is.

Therefore, we’re back to where we were comments wise. NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

When I open my new site next month, I will definitely have comment registration. Until then, enjoy.

Amidst whispers that his campaign has stalled, that he has waited to long to announce, and that there is disarray at the top staff levels of his operation, Fred Thompson made a pilgrimage of sorts to visit one of Washington’s old wise men.

David S. Broder is the dean of Washington political columnists. Beyond that, Broder has been a sounding board, father confessor, straight man, and sometimes the fool for politicians from both parties for nearly three decades. When the high and mighty find themselves in trouble or in need of an honest broker in the press, they frequently seek Broder out (or Broder, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in him sensing a good story seeks them out) to have their ideas exposed in a forum that gives them instant credibility.

Thompson recently sat down for coffee with Broder and in a column in Thursday’s Washington Post, the candidate made it clear that he was going to “go bold” in his presidential campaign by addressing issues that none of the candidates from either party were talking about.

Specifically, he wants his campaign to talk about the two 800 pound gorillas in America’s living room; entitlement reform and the underlying deficit which threaten the fiscal health and economic well being of the next generation. And his desire to be president, he says, goes beyond personal ambition:

“There’s no reason for me to run just to be president,” he said. I don’t desire the emoluments of the office. I don’t want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there—different, more far-reaching ideas—that is worth doing.

It is those ideas that will almost certainly set him apart from other candidates running. Whether they will bring him the victory he desires is, as Broder points out, “a gamble:”

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain today, Thompson said, and increasingly “threaten national security.” His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Governmental Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable,” and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government’s fiscal ledger—spending and revenues—the next generation will suffer.

“Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it,” Thompson said. “So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges.”

High risk, indeed. There is a reason no one is talking about these issues. They tend to divide the voters. A presidential race is all about uniting as many people under your banner as possible without making too many others mad at you. Angry people vote. And fiddling with entitlements, the tax code, and restoring fiscal sanity (which will almost surely touch many programs favored by the middle class), is a recipe to get a lot of people very, very mad at you.

But for Thompson, no guts, no glory might just be the bywords of his coming campaign. And looking at the political landscape as August begins to turn into September and his expected formal announcement to enter the race around Labor Day, Thompson is seeing a very steep hill to climb in order to overtake his rivals for the nomination.

Governor Mitt Romney, fresh off his expected straw poll victory in Ames last weekend, is comfortably ahead in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His impressive organization raised $20 million in the last quarter reported to the FEC. He also loaned his own campaign more than $2 million which highlights the very deep pockets Governor Romney will have going into the caucuses and primaries next January.

Thompson’s other main rival, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani didn’t compete in Ames, finishing a distant 6th. But he is comfortably ahead in most of the primary states including Florida and California where he is beating Thompson and Romney by almost a 2-1 margin. Giuliani also has an top notch organization and has raised almost as much as Romney – $15 million in the last quarter reported to the FEC.

Thompson has been hampered in his fund raising by an FEC rule that prohibits him from asking for more money than he can reasonably be expected to use on his exploratory committee. His $3.5 million raised last month was slightly below the $5 million he expected to raise. The real questions will be answered once he begins to campaign and raise money in earnest after he announces. Can he keep pace with the Giuliani/Romney juggernauts?

Probably not. This is why his gamble in taking on divisive issues may be his only chance at success. In effect, he will be running almost outside the party establishment, trying to appeal to conservative Republicans and right-leaning independents to stitch together a winning coalition. The odds are long but at this point, Thompson must feel he has little choice.

Fred Thompson’s “front porch” internet campaign is now over. It accomplished as much as could be expected – taking him from relative obscurity and placing him in the top tier of Republican presidential contenders. It laid the groundwork for his coming campaign by exciting some on line activists and bloggers who will prove valuable once he announces next month.

But the next stage of the Thompson campaign will prove to be a much different proposition. It will be an ideological high wire act where he will seek to outline a very different vision for America than his opponents while trusting that the American people will be able to see beyond their own narrow interests and vote for an uncertain future.

A tall order, that. If he is able to pull it off, it just might change the face of American politics. If not, he’ll be remembered as just another political Cassandra, destined to fail in his quest to sound the alarm about the fundamental direction in which the country is headed.

I’ve finally given in and enabled comment registration. I’m sick of moderating comments just to keep one or two juvenile delinquents off the site so once you register (and your first comment is moderated) you should be able to post comments without any problem.

Sometimes, IE goofs up in registering. If so, click on the contact form in the upper right sidebar and let me know. Make sure you leave a legitimate email address and a preferred username so I can email you back a temporary password that you will be able to change once you are in the system.

Friday afternoon and not much shaking in the world – nothing that really grabs me by the short hairs and starts to pull anyway.

How about a nice little diversion – one guaranteed to start the contrarian juices in all my lefty trolls running hot and heavy. And one that’s a certified winner with my conservative readers because most of these quotes will highlight good old fashioned American values (well, most of them anyway).

How about everyone list a few of their favoite one liners from movies?

No speeches. Gotta be one line (okay – we’ll make allowances if the two lines are inseparable.) And we like to be accurate here so here’s a link to the Internet Movie Database where I’m sure you can find the exact quote.

The very fact that these lines are favorites probably means they are already cliches. But in the context of watching the movie, they are still special and deserve to be honored. If you are going to be obscure about it, that’s fine but I hope you get in the spirit of the game and allow everyone the pleasure of fondly recalling the line in question.

As much as I’d like to claim authorship of this idea, Andrew Sullivan beat me to it. Sully weighs in with his favorite:

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”
(Dolores Claiborne)

Well done. I know women like that. And as Sully says in his post, this will not be Hillary’s campaign slogan!

10. “I hope this doesn’t make my cold any worse.”
(Jane Fonda before having sex with Donald Sutherland in Klute)

9. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
(The Great and Powerful Oz in The Wizard of Oz)

8. “Welcome to Sherwood!”
(Errol Flynn in Robin Hood)

7. “One God, that I can understand, but one wife, that is not civilized.”
(Hugh Griffith in Ben-Hur)

6. “It’s entirely innocent, I am!”
(Errol Flynn in Captain Blood)

5. “Republic. I like the sound of the word.”
(John Wayne in The Alamo)

4. “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
(Charlton Heston in A Touch of Evil)

3. “Say allo to mah litta frient!”
(Al Pacino in Scarface)

2. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
(Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind)

1. “Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.”
(Richard S. Castellano in The Godfather)

Have fun! Comment moderation is off.

No debate in Congress. No rules published in The Federal Register. Not a whisper of any opposition from the intelligence agencies, DHS, or any domestic law enforcement departments. They simply went ahead and did it:

The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.

A program approved by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security will allow broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery beginning as early as this fall, with the expectation that state and local law enforcement officials will eventually be able to tap into technology once largely restricted to foreign surveillance.

Administration officials say the program will give domestic security and emergency preparedness agencies new capabilities in dealing with a range of threats, from illegal immigration and terrorism to hurricanes and forest fires.

I guess that part in the Constitution which says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” is just too old fashioned for some people. Not when we have all these marvelous little toys in space that can see through walls, eavesdrop on our conversations, and take pictures of our backyard barbecues.

Those of you familiar with this space know that I am far from being a civil liberties absolutist. I have recognized in the past that programs like the Terrorist Surveillance Program – if it is properly administered – is a distasteful but necessary price to pay to fight al-Qaeda and its offshoots in this country. I have supported these programs because for the most part, a citizen’s right to privacy is maintained by the fact that the overwhelming amount of information gathered in these digital dragnets is never seen by human eyes. It is digested by supercomputers, examined by algorithmic computer programs for relevancy, and then discarded back into the ether from which it came.

But this is different. This is real time imagery scanned by snoops looking for illegal activity. At the present time, they anticipate using it against (they say) drug smugglers and terrorists. But make no mistake, gentle readers. We are in true slippery slope territory here. Ed Morrissey spells out the consequences:

While some conservatives undoubtedly would argue that they see nothing wrong with giving law-enforcement agencies access to existing technology, others will rightly object on two grounds. First, the obvious application for the sneak-peek technology would be to avoid search warrants. If probable cause existed for a warrant, law enforcement wouldn’t need the satellite technology; they’d simply enter. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, and has worked well for over 200 years. Civil liberty is based in part on judicial oversight of law enforcement encroachment on private property, which the sneak-peek technology would obliterate.

Second and perhaps more importantly, American legal tradition has separated military and foreign-intel collection from domestic law enforcement, and for good reasons. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the military (except the Coast Guard, for certain purposes) from acting in a law-enforcement role, except under emergencies specifically requiring martial law. This law keeps the federal government from usurping power from local and state authorities. Since these satellites were launched with strictly military and foreign-intel missions in mind, using them as tools for law enforcement may not entirely cross the PCA, but it gets too close for comfort.

“Some conservatives” who might support this program aren’t very conservative at all. Militarizing law enforcement, however well intentioned, smacks of fascism. Mr. Morrissey is too much the Christian gentleman to say so but I challenge any conservative to defend this anti-democratic, anti-privacy program in terms of classic conservative dogma. It cannot be done. And the reason is quite simple; conservatives invented the right to privacy.

It is a shame that the debate over privacy rights has been tied to the debate over abortion and gay rights. Prior to Roe V. Wade, Justice Harlan, a conservative through and through, foresaw a time when an implied right to privacy would have to be accepted:

Justice Harlan took a view of privacy that rested on a general and expansive reading of American traditions. He did not expect people claiming rights to point to some specific tradition or some specific body of law. He understood that the questions were more difficult than that. The right of privacy now, if anything, is more important, indeed much more important than it was when Justice Harlan wrote, “With changes in reproductive technology and end of life technologies that make these questions all the more acute.”

The question whether we will have a Justice Harlan-like approach to the right of privacy or a skeptical approach to the right of privacy that questions whether it even exists and evinces a desire to confine it as narrowly as possible, that question it seems to me is very much on the table, and will be a question that will be with us for the next generation.

The consequences of traditional conservatives allowing social conservatives to hijack the debate over privacy can now be seen in the context that this implied right to be safe and secure in our private spaces is under attack largely because the social cons have rejected the entire argument in favor of privacy in order to fight abortion, gay marriage, and other social concerns. This is more than “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” It simply cannot be defended on the basis that we can trade off one constitutional right in order to support another.

My respect for those who advocate a right to life – at least those who believe such a right exists from the moment of conception – has always been tempered by their advocacy to overturn Roe V. Wade. This is because I recognize that the privacy rights granted by Roe have now been expanded far beyond that envisioned by Justice Blackmun when he penned the decision in 1973. Roe has become a cornerstone of privacy law. Remove it, and the entire edifice of protections against unreasonable invasions of our privacy by government, our employers, our next door neighbors, or even total strangers would be affected. It is decidedly un-conservative to deny that basic fact – regardless of whether you believe abortion should be legal or gays prevented from marrying.

I have no desire to start a war with social conservatives over this issue. After all, there are some parts of the social con agenda I can support – end of life issues and their standing alone against the coarsening of our culture are two areas we can agree on. But my friends, without privacy, we have no true liberty. Destroy the right of privacy and you invite all sorts of mischief from those who would use modern technology like satellites as well as stuff you can buy at any Radio Shack to intrude in places they have no business going in a free society.

And I also want to make it clear that I do not believe in the “one more step on the road to dictatorship” meme being advanced by the left. Their paranoia regarding the Bush Administration disqualifies them from engaging in any kind of rational debate on the subject. The Bush Administration has sought from the beginning to redefine executive power more robustly than their predecessors, seeing (many believe quite rightly) that some powers of the executive had been appropriated or weakened by Congress since Watergate. The courts have always adjudicated these inter-branch arguments and I trust such will always be the case. But to posit the notion that we are slipping into some kind of anti-democratic nightmare is just plain silly.

Withdrawing this dangerous proposal will not affect our ability to fight terrorism in any significant way. I would hope Congress will take this issue in hand quickly and prevent this stupid idea from advancing very far.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is yours truly for my post “My Excellent Adventure At Yearlykos.” Finishing second was “Tancredo and Tonic” by Done With Mirrors.

Finishing first in the non-Council category was “Bread and a Circus, Part II of II” by Michael Yon.

If you would like to participate in the Watchers Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

Don’t ask me. I don’t have a clue. But Larry Kudlow does:

An extraordinary money-market development has occurred in recent days. The safest liquid credit instrument — the gilt-edged 91-day Treasury bill — has seen its yield plunge.

Here’s the story: Last Wednesday, August 8, T-bills traded at 4.49 percent. On Monday they dropped to 4.74. On Tuesday, 4.63. And yesterday they fell to 4 percent. This morning they dropped another 50 basis points to 3.52 percent. What’s this mean? It means the entire banking system has turned completely risk averse and is fleeing into the safest haven possible.

It is fear. It is hording cash. It is a mountainous tremor that has seized financial markets.

In terms of funding requirements — for big mortgage banks like Countrywide, or perhaps the major money-center banks and various hedge funds — it shows financial dysfunction.

Um…okay. I sorta understand that. What should we do about it?

The Federal Reserve must lower its target rate and pour new cash into the banking system. It should float the federal funds rate and let reserve and money-market forces determine the right rate level as it injects new liquidity into the system. A T-bill rate around 3.5 percent suggests a fed funds target rate of perhaps 3.75 percent, or somewhere thereabouts.

Right now, because of the fear and hording, cash demands inside the banking system are rising faster than cash reserve supplies injected by the Fed. So the central bank should keep adding new money until the fed funds rate stabilizes in the open market. In other words, the key target variable right now should not be the Fed’s interest-rate target, but the large amount of new cash it is injecting into these markets.

Put simply, Ben Bernanke & Co. should let the money market set the new target rate. Their job is to create enough new cash to stabilize and accommodate the fear-based rush of liquidity demands.

I’m no Milton Friedman, but won’t that goose inflation?

So far, the economy looks fine. This is good. But the Fed must be the lender of last resort for the banking system. For my inflation-worrying friends out there, I say we can deal with that issue if it remerges sometime in the future. After financial stabilization, the new cash can be withdrawn and the fed funds target can be readjusted.

All I’m saying is first things first. That means stabilizing the banking system and accommodating the huge cash demands that have arisen. Right now, the system is virtually frozen.

Whenever the stock market plunges as it has in recent days, Americans get very nervous. Especially these days when more than half of us either invest directly in individual stocks or have shares in mutual funds. Our pensions are heavily invested in the market as well.

And most of us are like me; almost completely ignorant about the forces at work that make stocks rise or fall. This crisis, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is all about the sub-prime mortgage outfits who took advantage of the market when housing was booming by offering loans to marginal (“sub prime”) credit risks. Most of those people will work out fine, paying on time and staying current. But a large enough percentage of those mortgages will be a lost cause, thus precipitating a credit crunch as sub prime lender after lender goes belly up.

With the credit crunch, cash dries up. Even I know that much. Now Kudlow wants the Fed to intervene by dumping massive amounts of dollars in the banking system hoping it will reduce the panic and get everyone’s feet under them.

Whatever Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke does, I sure hope he acts quickly and that whatever his prescription is, works.

Has it really been 30 years today since the death of Elvis Presley?

I was a year and some out of college and found his death sad but hardly a reason for the kind of outpouring of grief we witnessed around the world. After all, I was a Rolling Stones/Jimmy Hendrix/Led Zeppelin Rock ‘n Roll disciple who, along with most of my generation, viewed “The King” with a combination of contempt for selling out to Hollywood and bemusement at his on-stage antics in Las Vegas. I have since come to appreciate Elvis a little more, especially those Vegas shows where he proved himself a pretty good entertainer. But his music never did much for me, nor his voice, nor his early stage theatrics which even back in the ‘70’s appeared stilted and forced.

I had a similar reaction to the death of Diana. Nice looking girl who fell in with the wrong crowd; the cutthroats who run the British monarchy – people who will do anything and go to any lengths to maintain their privileges and wealth. But what exactly had she done to warrant the massive, even hysterical manifestations of grief we saw not only in Great Britain but here in America as well? She was photographed holding AIDS babies. Very nice but beside the point. Standing next to her in the photographs were the real heroes – people who held and cared for those babies not just when a gazillion cameras were going off but every single day.

People who comforted those babies as the life oozed out of them. People whose contributions to humanity so far exceeded this mop topped blond rich girl that for me, it became an insult to those health care workers who held AIDS babies as well as others whose causes were adopted by Diana in an effort to either assuage her feelings of guilt at being born into privilege and wealth or out of a calculated effort to create a public personae that was guaranteed to keep her name in the media.

Elvis wasn’t quite the publicity hound that Diana became only because the media in the 1950’s and 60’s was just starting to suffocate us. The moguls hadn’t yet figured out that what the American people craved more than news from the world’s hot spots, more than information on the struggle for civil rights, more than coverage of American politics was dishing the dirt on the private lives of the world’s rich and famous.

I was barely 6 months old when Elvis recorded his first song for Sun records, That’s Alright, Mama, which was perhaps the first example of a viral recording making a huge impact on the cultural consciousness of America. Before the acetate was transferred to vinyl, it had been played on several radio stations in Memphis, generating a buzz that carried it to the top of the charts once the record was released (along with the other side of the single, an old bluegrass waltz called Blue Moon of Kentucky).

The Elvis phenomena in the 1950’s either reflected or began a cultural revolution, depending on your point of view. The cart and the horse in this case might be indistinguishable. For all the nostalgia for the 1950’s and its supposedly tranquil, somnolent nature, there were undercurrents of revolution boiling beneath the surface. Peyton Place, the novel of sex and secrets about small town America was published the same year – 1954 – that saw the emergence of Elvis Presley. The book was a cultural atomic bomb, 59 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and eventually selling a phenomenal 8 million copies in hard cover. That book paved the way for other novels critical of American society and especially, its cultural mores like Sloan Wilson’s searing The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and later, Updike’s seminal Rabbit Run.

While TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver were seen as more than the ideal of an American family but actually as a true representation of family life in America, the real American family was undergoing incredible changes. In the midst of the baby boom, Elvis burst upon a cultural landscape that was ready for an iconic ringmaster, someone who would parlay the fusion of black R & B riffs and rhythms with what was known at the time as “Hillbilly” music into a brand new art form geared to a young audience and using the new medium of television to sell it.

When Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, 60 million Americans tuned in to see him. His status as a marketing king and preeminent showman rose to new heights. The recording industry had never seen anything like him. Americans had never experienced the kind of music he played either. The influence of black R & B and blues performers was obvious. And while it was fairly common for white musicians to take songs written by black performers and record them, Elvis was the first to actually keep the raw rhythms of the blues performer, grafting it on to other forms of white music like Western Swing and bluegrass. No one had ever heard anything like it and young people devoured it.

They also swooned at the rank sexuality of his public performances. Watching Madonna or Michael Jackson grabbing their crotch during a concert today isn’t half as shocking as the gyrating, grinding, thrusting movement of Presley’s hips was to 1950’s audiences. Bringing sex overtly (if unintentionally if you believe Presley) into the public consciousness, taking it out of the bedroom and putting it on the TV screen proved too much for some.

Until the 1960’s, Presley’s appearances on TV were invariably shot from the waist up lest the youth of America be corrupted. What seems quaint to us today was truly frightening to parents in the 1950’s. They didn’t understand the sex. They didn’t understand the “race music” Presley was making. And they didn’t understand how powerful the message of rebellion Presley was communicating – a message that would be taken to heart less than a decade after that Ed Sullivan appearance with the arrival in the US of the Beatles. Then, with the baby boom generation bursting for change, the Beatles and others would happily oblige them by promoting music and a lifestyle that satisfied the pent up urges of what would become known as the Viet Nam generation.

Can we “blame” Presley for the negative aspects in all this – the whole 1960’s mish mash of dashed hopes and unrealized dreams? Can we blame him for the media’s obsession with celebrity, gotten so out of control that it has trivialized our culture and society to the point that even our politics is now driven by it?

Elvis Presley is proof that history’s forces are more powerful than any single individual (usually). If not Elvis, it would have been another who would have popularized rock music. Presley wasn’t the only one experimenting with such fused forms of musical expression and someone else was bound to have hit it big. And I suspect that those undercurrents of rebellion in American society would have found a voice elsewhere if Elvis had not lived, so powerful and meaningful they were.

For better or worse, Elvis was there to invent, exploit, and capture all of these threads of history and culture, turning them to his personal advantage while inspiring others who came after him to push the envelope even farther. Elvis may be blameless as far as being the father of many modern ills in our society. But his status as one of the originators of our pop culture shouldn’t be forgotten as we examine what is best and worst about the revolution he started.

My latest PJ Media sports article is up and I take a look at the Chicago Cubs and their chances of winning it all this year – thus ending by far the longest title drought in professional sports.

A sample:

If you live in Chicago or one of the many Midwestern enclaves where baseball fans live and die with the fortunes of their Cubs every year, you are probably getting a little nervous right about now.

Then again, I know better.