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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77365409169134823932016-07-29T12:02:29.097-04:00SophrosyneStephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com/KbyqChttps://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-32504286699010705882016-07-11T09:34:00.002-04:002016-07-11T09:34:42.840-04:00"Code Warriors" in the newsA review and interview on Christos Military and Intelligence site (a leading Web resource on the history of cryptology)

A timeline of NSA's highs and lows in the Cold War drawn from my book, in Random House's newsletter Signature (your author is not responsible for the headline)

A review in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-16397962760737160572016-07-08T11:46:00.000-04:002016-07-08T11:46:33.290-04:00Decency in the face of violenceIn a year that has brought to American society some of the vilest, calculated appeals to the worst instincts of mankind, I suppose it's too much to ask for moral clarity and decency in times of crisis.

Should it even necessary to point out all decent Americans are grieving and horrified by the assassination-like killings of five Dallas police officers last night?

That President Obama expressed his immediate horror at "a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement" and condemned the "twisted motives" of those responsible, reiterating that there can be "no possible justification" for violence against police?

And that not one—not one—leader of the Black Lives Matter movement has ever called for violent action in the course of their campaign against the excessive use of lethal force by police against unarmed African American citizens?

No of course not.

But in the very ugly state of moral depravity that passes for politics in our country these days, it took the usual right-wing bloviators no time at all to make hay while the blood flowed. The winner was Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, who sent out a message to his fans in the midst of the horrific news stating, "10 Cops shot. You did this Obama. You did this liberals. You did this BLM."

No, they did not. They asked that police enforce the laws fairly and with respect for human life, in accordance with our most cherished and noble American values. Not once did they suggest that the solution to excessive force by police was violence by citizens.

Not once did they put out "wanted" posters with pictures of police on them—as has the anti-abortion movement regularly done in its campaign of fomenting wilful violence against doctors who provide abortion services.

Not once did they justify violence in retaliation for the shootings by police of unarmed African Americans—in notable contrast to the unspeakable statement of Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa a few years back after a fine upstanding citizen, galvanized by years of inflammatory anti-government rhetoric from King and his comrades, flew a light plane into an IRS building in Texas, killing a dedicated federal employee and military veteran: King declared he felt "empathy" for the kamikaze taxpayer, saying he too was "frustrated" by the IRS, and opining that if only we replaced the income tax with a national sales tax, these things wouldn't happen.

Not once have they invoked the kind of crude, violent imagery that has become the stock in trade of the "angry" right for years now, legitimized so spectacularly by the rise of the brutal, hate-ridden speech of the Republican Party's nominee-apparent—I've lost count of the number of references from right-wing commentators and politicians I've noted over the last decade advocating "second amendment solutions" if Republicans fail to prevail at the polls, telling supporters they should be "armed and dangerous" to "oppose tyranny" (defined as, among other things, health care, a carbon tax, and other liberal policies), or routinely depicting their opponents in the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle.

Not once have they gloried in the death of a police officer, or made a disgusting joke about the loss of an officer's life—as conservative media star Ann Coulter did over the assassination of an abortion doctor, when she wittily remarked, "I don't really like to think of it as murder. It was terminating [the doctor] in the 203rd trimester."

The same crowd of conservatives ready to wink at or even condone the idea of violence when directed against suitable targets of course howled in fury if there was ever a suggestion made anywhere at any time that they bore even a hint of moral culpability for the actual killings that ensued—of a respected federal judge killed by the gunman who shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, for example, or a policeman slain at a Colorado abortion clinic, or other instances when those they had branded "enemies," or "traitors," or "criminals" were killed by their own twisted followers: no, those were merely "tragedies"; there was apparently no need even to condemn them.

As I noted at the time of the Giffords shooting, political leaders in a democracy have a special moral obligation to speak out against and resist extremism in their own camps: no democracy can survive when violence or incitement is left unchecked on any side. But it's not surprising that those who have shown no shame in inciting extremism and violent talk are always the first to try to reap its benefits.

Violence is a monster that feeds on itself, eventually consuming societies where it has got a foothold.

People with a scrap of moral decency know that at times like these, those who place love of country above hunger for power need to step back quickly.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-32328462394631004422016-06-25T09:34:00.003-04:002016-06-25T09:34:46.270-04:00"If anything, I have big investments over in Europe"Once again demonstrating difficulty with the question of where Donald Trump ends and the rest of the universe begins, the Presumptive GOP Nominee reacted yesterday to the Brexit vote and the immediate plunge of the British pound by declaring that he stood to make money on it.

The setting was a more-than-bizarre news conference at his golf resort in Turnberry on the west coast of Scotland. Apparently unaware than Scotland had overwhelmingly voted against leaving the European Union, Trump extolled the "great news" of the victory of the "leave" side in the UK-wide referendum:

Look, if the pound goes down, they're going to do more business. You know, when the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.

None of the traveling press pool (who had paid $10,000 a head for the ride to Scotland to see Trump promote his "phenomenal" golf properties, which include "greatest course ever built new") apparently thought to ask how a falling pound and Euro were going to be good for American companies and American workers that depend on selling their products to the rest of the world.

But what's good for Donald J. Trump is good for the USA!Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-85208151145037731782016-06-18T14:58:00.001-04:002016-06-19T06:19:59.663-04:00Geoffrey Stone on Snowden

NSA headquarters

Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and well-known champion of civil liberties, was a member of a White House review panel appointed in the wake of the Snowden revelations to examine NSA's communications surveillance programs and offer recommendations on improving oversight.

In a recent published interview, he offered some sharp criticisms of Snowden and described his own surprise in discovering, in the course of the panel's work, that his initial assumption that NSA had "run amok" was "completely wrong":

The more I worked with the NSA, the more respect I had for them as far as staying within the bounds of what they were authorized to do. And they were careful and had a high degree of integrity. My superficial assumption of the NSA being a bad guy was completely wrong.
I think his criticisms of Snowden are well founded and worth reading in full, especially where he scores Snowden for his arrogance in assuming he could singlehandedly confer on himself the right to decide what information should and should not be classified, and for his contention that his actions ought to be above the law since they were in a good cause. (In Stone's words, "I don't doubt that Snowden was courageous and did what he did for what he thought were good reasons. But I think he was unduly arrogant, didn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge and basically decided to usurp the authority of a democracy.")

And I also agree with Stone that most NSA employees I have met are honest, decent people, acting with integrity, and that NSA did in fact develop and implement comprehensive procedures to try to insure that the masses of data vacuumed up in its bulk collection programs were used only to locate and identify legitimate foreign terrorist targets.

Nonetheless, I think Stone is a bit too easy on the agency in two key respects.

First is that NSA almost certainly violated the law, and probably the Constitution, when it first began collecting masses of telephone and internet data without a warrant, acting on a "presidential authorization" in 2001 that flatly contradicted statutory law.

The President's Surveillance Program directed NSA to intercept without court approval communications when one party was believed to be a member of al-Qaeda, even if the other party was a US citizen or resident.

But that is a situation that the law specifically says requires a warrant: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandals (which revealed that NSA, among other things, had targeted for surveillance US citizens on Nixon's "enemies list," including newspaper columnists, political opponents, and domestic antiwar activists), in fact makes it an explicit criminal offense for any government official acting under color of law to conduct surveillance on a US person without a warrant from a special court created by the same law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Likewise, even after NSA's bulk telephone calling data ("metadata") collection program was (possibly) legalized under section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act, the FISC (as we now know) repeatedly chastised the agency for "substantial misrepresentations" to the Court of the extent of its data bulk collection programs and for overstepping court-mandated rules to "minimize" the "incidental" collection of US citizens' data.

These are not trivial points or technical hairsplitting. One of the most fundamental protections in the Constitution is the right of privacy embodied in the Fourth Amendment and its rejection of dragnet-like sweeps by government officials. This was a legacy of English common law and the famous John Wilkes case, long celebrated by champions of liberty at the time of America's founding, in which the Lord Chief Justice held that "a general warrant is no warrant": that a search warrant could not authorize officials to go through every house in an area searching for subversive publications, but had to specify the exact place to be searched and the items being sought, and provide at least some grounds for believing that these items were present there. NSA's bulk collection programs stood directly on its head this fundamental protection of the right to privacy.

Wilkes and Liberty, celebrated on a punchbowl from Colonial Williamsburg

The second real problem with NSA's actions in operating the bulk collection programs is one that comes right out of the agency's Cold War history (the subject of my just-published book Code Warriors). Throughout its existence, NSA has always been intensely driven in its mission by its own technological capabilities: if it can do it, it did do it, and it always was trying to increase what it could do. Some of this is human nature; some of it is unique to the bureaucratic forces acting on military and intelligence agencies, which always have an incentive to maximize technical capabilities regardless of mission needs—just as in the Air Force and Navy the imperative to buy newer, bigger, faster, more expensive planes and ships always came first, while the military justifications for them were often almost an afterthought.

But the point is that the capability was there to carry out unprecedented monitoring, tracking, and spying on American citizens by a government agency, a capability that all known bureaucratic forces were working to expand ever further. And NSA's history offered small comfort to the idea that none of this should worry us because the agency's own internal rules and procedures prevented this capability from being abused. The whole reason for the FISA court's establishment was to provide an outside check and legal oversight of NSA by an independent body.

Recent congressional action to end the NSA bulk telephone data program was a small but important step in addressing both these dangers: of too much reliance on internal self-restraint, and too much technological capability in the hands of government. It's a rare case where the lessons of history I think have been heeded.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-91578789235296847112016-06-16T08:14:00.000-04:002016-06-16T08:14:22.164-04:00"I've run out of adjectives"Actually this is the third or fourth time in recent months that Republican senator Lindsey Graham has used that line regarding his reaction to the things that one Donald J. Trump has to say.

But it underscores the problem that journalists, too, are having in capturing the utter vileness and recklessness of Trump's most recent statements regarding the Orlando massacre, in which he explicitly accused all Muslims in America — and even the president of the United States — of willful complicity in the attack.

Even the New York Times seemed to be at a loss for the words and means to lay out exactly what Trump actually said, taking refuge in standard journalistic shorthand designed for describing the normal evasions of normal politicians: "implied" "suggested" and the like and ran a story with the very nice journalism school headline "Trump and Clinton Differ on Terror Approach."

It's worth assembling a timeline of Trump's astonishing statements of the last 72 hours to grasp the enormity of what he has brought the country to:

• June 13 early morning, on "Fox and Friends":

We're led by a man who is very -- look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind, you know, people can't believe it.... People cannot believe, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and he can't even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism. There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on.... He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It's one or the other

• Later that morning, on the "Today" show:

Well there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn't want to get it

• Later that day, Trump pulls the Washington Post's press credentials for covering his campaign, accusing the newspaper of being "dishonest" and "phony" and "incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting," specifically for a story reporting that Trump had connected Obama to the Orlando attack.

• June 13, afternoon, in a "major foreign policy address":

Now, the Muslim communities so importantly, they have to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. And they know it. And they have to do it and they have to do it forthwith. … They know what is going on. They know that [the Orlando shooter] was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what, they didn't turn them in, and we had death and destruction. … When people know what is going on and they don't tell us and we have an attack and people die, these people have to have consequences. Big consequences.

• June 14, having dismissed as dishonest and phony the Post's report that he had accused Obama of deliberately siding with terrorists, Trump sent the AP a statement accusing Obama of deliberately siding with terrorists:

[Obama] claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people
• June 15, 6:38 am, Trump sends out a tweet with a link to a right-wing conspiratorial hoax — which has been circulating for years on the Internet — claiming that a "memo" proves that Obama is siding with ISIS. Completing the circle of illogical denials, Trump simultaneously accuses the media of being inaccurate for claiming that he had "insinuated" the things he did (actually, he didn't insinuate: he asserted), while also claiming that this "evidence" shows he was "right" all along in claiming the things he is claiming he didn't claim:

Asked how they can continue to support a man who cites conspiracy theories to accuse the president of treachery, who claims that the entire American Muslim community is complicit in terrorism and will face "big consequences," the leaders of the Republican Party have come up with new and even more creative ways of avoiding the subject altogether. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a particularly bold moral stance, telling a reporter, "I'm not going to be commenting on the presidential candidates today."

 Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-32727845457035491832016-06-15T12:11:00.000-04:002016-06-15T12:11:26.948-04:00
 The latest review of my new book, "Code Warriors," from today's Wall Street Journal:

-----

Cracking the Cold War

The NSA knew Brezhnev's waist size, his wife's problems, his opinions about U.S. leaders and whether his negotiating positions were ploys.

 By Jeremy Black

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Well, how would you do it? We all know the theories about intelligence gathering: identify targets clearly, do not be guided by paranoia, ensure that information is analyzed and contextualized so that it can be understood properly, and observe constitutional and legal guidelines, notably in spying on one's own citizens. It is not, of course, so easy in practice and certainly not in the wake of surprise attacks like those of 1941 and 2001, or when working carefully within legal and political restrictions and conventions that, to put it mildly, do not appear fit for the purpose, given the enormity of the threat.

 In "Code Warriors," Stephen Budiansky, who has already written ably on World War II codebreaking, offers an exciting but also challenging account of the National Security Agency's efforts to discover the Soviet Union's secrets—challenging because he does not shun the necessary details in explaining code, codebreaking and how systems in the East and West changed during the years.

 In doing so, he provides an intelligence history of the United States during the Cold War, one that ranges from U.S. "ferret flights" in the 1950s, often off the Baltic coast of the Soviet Union—designed to provide information on air defenses—to some of its more serious failures. These included the Cuban Missile Crisis (the NSA failed to warn the Kennedy administration about the arrival of Soviet SS-4 missiles); intelligence analysis prior to the surprisingly vast Tet offensive against South Vietnam in 1968; and the treatment of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964. It was believed that North Vietnam twice attacked a U.S. ship, and this led Congress to grant the president enhanced war powers. In fact, bad intelligence made Navy officers think they were under attack a second time. "NSA's inexperience in intelligence analysis and frantic efforts to supply the White House with information" led to inaccurate conclusions and "guesswork," Mr. Budiansky concludes.

 Much of the tale is unedifying, with many of the leading figures in the intelligence community paying more attention to bureaucratic turf wars than to fighting the Cold War. If the CIA is held up for particular obloquy, it joins the Army, Navy and Air Force, especially the last two. There is praise for the NSA but also much criticism: "a system ripe for intellectual corruption . . . self-justifying assurance . . . reflexive defensiveness . . . hoarding information . . . vast multilayered bureaucracy . . . blunders, scandals and bureaucratic miscalculations." The NSA is criticized for an extremely cozy relationship with Nixon's White House, one driven by its attempt to promote its standing in the corridors of Washington power. And so on.

 Less emphasis is placed on the NSA's successes, but they are discussed. The role of the NSA's global signals-intelligence network in providing reassurance about the contrast between bold Soviet threats and more modest actions is seen as helping limit the danger of nuclear war and thus allowing the strategy of containment to work. Helped by agents in place as well as technology, the NSA repeatedly intercepted Soviet communications, ensuring that, as one NSA director later noted, "in the mid-1970s, NSA had access to just about everything the Russian leadership said to themselves and about one another. . . . We knew Brezhnev's waist size, his headaches, his wife's problems, his kids' problems, his intentions on the Politburo with regard to positions, his opinion on American leadership, his attitude on negotiating positions." The last, Mr. Budiansky argues, helped Henry Kissinger outmaneuver Soviet negotiations in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 Mr. Budiansky makes no bones about the crimes of communist regimes or, indeed, about the damage done by American press reports on secret operations. But he also claims that "the cryptologic struggle that took place in the shadows behind the shadows was as morally ambiguous as everything about the Cold War." In fact, the NSA performed admirably pursuing confrontation short of conflict and limited war strategies in the face of the prospect of thermonuclear cataclysm. Much of the American public was unable to accept the serious dangers posed by communist expansionism, and the KGB and the Soviet military had far more influence on Soviet policy-making than the intelligence community did in the U.S.

 The faults noted by Mr. Budiansky existed but, alongside the bureaucratic rigidity and mistakes he discusses, there was also a greater willingness to accept internal disagreements than in the Soviet system. In particular, the Soviets proved better at descriptive intelligence gathering than at its analytic intelligence counterpart: They found it difficult to put together the empirical pieces. Although the individual KGB directorates could perform well, they could not integrate the information provided by different sources as well as their American and British counterparts.

 Mr. Budiansky notes the tendency of analysis to buttress a priori assumptions, but this was more pronounced in the Soviet system, notably in the case of Yuri Andropov, the KGB head who became Soviet leader from 1982 to 1984. He believed in the inherent mendacity of Western imperialist leaders and society and their willingness to wage war against the Soviet Union. This was, for instance, the reason he misperceived the 1983 NATO military exercise called Able Archer as a cover for a possible attack.

 Particularly good on the first half of the Cold War, but weaker and far briefer on the 1970s and, even more, the 1980s, Mr. Budiansky's engaging study offers contemporary policy markers much to contemplate. The simultaneous hostility of both China and Russia today ensures that the strategic situation is more challenging now than after the successful exploitation by President Nixon of the Sino-Soviet split. European neutralism and weakness does not help. In these circumstances, it is urgent to consider how best to use intelligence operations to defend national interests. It would of course be helpful if the latter were better understood.

 Mr. Black's books include "The Cold War: A Military History" and "Air Power: A Global History."

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-51081534353820577832016-06-15T11:48:00.001-04:002016-06-15T11:48:37.534-04:00"In my world, when people don't treat you fairly . . ."You take revenge on them, of course! The only trouble with that bit of wisdom offered today by one Donald J. Trump is that if you are a public servant in a democracy, it's your job to be fair to everyone and to enforce the law impartially even when you feel wronged, hurt, misunderstood, or even "misconstrued." That's called placing principle and duty above petty personal vengeance.

There were two points about Trump's appalling statements the other week about the supposed "bias" of the "Mexican" U.S. Federal judge hearing the fraud lawsuit against his fraudulent Trump University that I worry have gotten lost amidst the focus on whether Trump is a "racist" or not.

As Michael Gerson noted last week, who the hell cares if Trump is a racist in his heart, or whatever passes for one in his case: what matters is that he is saying things that legitimize, enable, and foment morally abhorrent views — and actions — that every president in modern times has strived to counter in our pluralistic and democratic society. ("Is Trump himself a racist? Who the bloody hell cares? There is no difference in public influence between a politician who is a racist and one who appeals to racist sentiments with racist arguments. The harm to the country — measured in division and fear — is the same, whatever the inner workings of Trump's heart.")

As bad as Trump's allegation that Judge Gonzalo Curiel has an "absolute conflict of interest" in hearing a private civil action against Trump — for no other reason than (a) Curiel is "Mexican" (which Trump later revised to define, in the case of the Indiana-born Curiel, as "very pro-Mexican") and (b) Trump has said things that I suppose could be defined as very "anti-Mexican" — what is arguably even worse was his not very veiled threat to use the power of the presidency to punish Curiel if he becomes president. Here's exactly what Trump said:

They ought to look into Judge Curiel because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace. Ok? But we will come back in November. Wouldn't that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case? Where everybody likes it.
 Ok. This is called life, folks. . . .

The other point that should not be lost is what this kind of thinking reveals about Trump's sense of morality and humanity.

Trump automatically believes that it is impossible for a Federal judge, or anyone else, to put aside what he assumes to be their personal feelings. The syllogism he literally presented when challenged about his statements was

A "I'm building a wall"
B The judge is "Mexican"
therefore
C The judge has "an inherent conflict of interest"

Only a man utterly devoid of a sense of principle and duty himself — one whose only standard of reference is "winning" and "losing," personal gain, and self-interest — could fail to understand that for decent and civilized people, principles such as truth, duty, an oath of office, the rule of law, and (genuine) patriotism always assume a higher calling on one's conscience than petty vengeance, "what's in it for me," or score-settling.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-64073913361717487472016-06-12T10:39:00.002-04:002016-06-12T10:53:54.704-04:00The worse angels of our natureAs Abraham Lincoln prepared to take charge of a deeply divided nation in March 1861, he asked several of his closest associates, including his secretary of state to be William Seward, to read his planned inaugural address, and give him their thoughts.

Seward sent Lincoln a new ending that considerably softened Lincoln's original conclusion ("Shall it be peace or sword?"), and which instead poetically invoked "the mystic chords" that bind all Americans together in shared destiny:

The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.
 Lincoln accepted Seward's new closing paragraph, but made a small, yet extraordinarily significant, change in his words. Crossing out Seward's phrase "the guardian angel of the nation," Lincoln wrote in the words we now all remember: "the better angels of our nature."

It was to Lincoln a crucial reminder that America's greatness rested not in predestined divine favor or any innate virtue, but rather in the constant struggle of us all to rise above our own all-too-human failings. Lincoln never for a moment forgot the frailty of human nature—nor how much the survival of a democracy depended on whether the mass of men, and their chosen leaders, could overcome their worst, yet all too natural, instincts toward hatred, division, selfishness, and exploitation of others.

PATRIOTISM, n.

Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

There is an eerie echo between the narcissistic personal triumphalism of the man chosen to lead the Party of Lincoln this year and his jingoistic nationalistic triumphalism that his supporters so willingly and thoughtlessly embrace. As Lincoln so memorably reminded us, it was a test for every generation of Americans whether they, like the founders, could summon their better angels and keep alive the ideals that our nation—and indeed Lincoln's own Republican party—was founded upon: equality among men, respect for the law, liberty for all.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-23302726366628729632016-06-07T10:13:00.000-04:002016-06-07T10:13:30.133-04:00Here's oneOn Sunday I wondered what it would take for any Republican official to put their country ahead of their party and draw a moral line after their candidate asserted that it was "an inherent conflict of interest" for an American citizen to serve as a Federal judge while being Hispanic or Muslim at the same time.

At that point, the major reaction from the GOP establishment, to what struck me as the most despicable thing I had heard in my lifetime from an American politician, had been such ringing words of moral principle and American values as Paul Ryan's "I can't relate to that" when asked about Trump's statements. (Conservative columnist George Will made impressive mincemeat of Ryan's "abject capitulation" to Trump in a fierce article yesterday.)

Yesterday Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina showed that there is at least one Republican leader who has not completely lost his moral compass in this time of moral crisis. Graham, who just a few weeks ago said he had had a "cordial" phone call with Trump and reportedly told a private Republican fundraiser that it was time to get behind the party's nominee, told the New York Times that he had had it:

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina . . . urged Republicans who have backed Mr. Trump to rescind their endorsements, citing the remarks about Judge Curiel and Mr. Trump's expression of doubt on Sunday that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the same lawsuit, given Mr. Trump's proposed ban on Muslim noncitizens entering the country.

"This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy," Mr. Graham said. "If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it," he added. "There'll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary."

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-59551329142497978942016-06-05T15:43:00.000-04:002016-06-05T15:43:13.575-04:00And now a word about places in Hell, from the expert"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality."

That line from Dante's "Inferno" was sent to me the other day by my friend Richard Gordon, and it speaks a truth about what is so terribly chilling about the almost unanimous failure of Republican officialdom to take any kind of principled stand on Donald Trump's morally repugnant campaign of reckless conspiracy theory, personal insult, race baiting, and threats to use the power of the presidency to exact personal revenge.

Paul Ryan, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and almost every other prominent GOP official have been acting as if they can pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening to their party, express their formulaic Support for the Party's Nominee—and otherwise just lay very low and hope somehow they'll get through it all.

The degree of laying low is truly extraordinary, as Jim Fallows points out at The Atlantic, where he has been blogging on the Trump campaign: not a single GOP official for example uttered a word in reply to Hilary Clinton's full-bore attack on Trump the other day, a silence that is just mind-boggling by any normal political standards.

McCain has been the most extraordinary. Approaching his 80th birthday, facing a tight reelection contest in his heavily Hispanic state of Arizona, McCain, who once gloried in describing himself a "Maverick," has meekly toed the line of endorsing Trump, refusing to challenge any of the candidate's most toxic observations, blandly suggesting that we need not worry Trump will abuse the powers of the presidency since "we're not Romania," yet at the same time vainly hoping to give a wink-wink indication that his endorsement really doesn't mean anything by making little wan wisecracks every now and then, such as starting a speech to a Hispanic business group in Arizona the other day with a little Trumpesque parody ("We're going to make America great again and it's going to be yuge, OK?").

But as Dante observed, moral hedging and timorous acquiescence in the face of evil is even more opprobrious than open support: it palliates the evil, makes it seem ordinary and acceptable to the mass of men always reluctant to rock the boat; it is precisely why good people remain silent until it is too late to do anything.

Perhaps most of the GOP establishment hedgers are banking on Trump's losing the general election, and thus sparing them the difficulty of having to take any real moral stand or commit themselves in public in any way that might hurt their standing in The Party down the road. They clearly are uncomfortable with the open racism of Trump's recent attacks on Judge Curiel, and yet even on an issue that should leave no room for the least moral ambiguity, what we have heard are little more than "I don't condone the comments" (that from Republican Sen. Bob Corker) kinds of tut-tutting.

Interestingly, it was Newt Gingrich, an enthusiastic Trumpista, who was the most firm, calling "inexcusable" Trump's accusation that Curiel has "an inherent conflict of interest" because he's "a Mexican." But then Gingrich immediately undid any moral force behind that indictment by treating Trump's "inexcusable" statement as merely but a little tactical misstep, which he can correct by becoming more polished as he moves into the general election: "He's got to move his game up." (Corker for his part explained that he was not advising Trump to change his views, but merely expressing the hope that the candidate is "talking to the right people" so his campaign can "evolve.")

What will it take for any of the Republican establishment to draw an actual moral line, and say that their nominee is so at odds with the values of the country that they will put their country first, their party second?

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-39646969242163513142016-06-03T14:48:00.000-04:002016-06-04T14:30:37.137-04:00Trump vs. Orwell? No contestHoping that no one would notice, House Speaker Paul Ryan chose the Janesville (Wisc.) GazetteXtra — a newspaper whose lead story the same day was SHELTER HOLDS FREE CAT ADOPTION DRIVE — to announce his endorsement of Donald J. Trump for president this week.

He thus joins John McCain ("it would be foolish to ignore" the "will of the people"), Mitch McConnell (we shouldn't worry that a President Trump will abuse the power of the presidency and the law because "he'll have a White House counsel [to] point out there's certain things you can do and you can't do"), and the several courageous Republican senators running for re-election in Democratic-leaning states who have boldly declared that they "support, but do not endorse" the party's nominee.

I had actually been holding out a glimmer of hope that a few Republican officials would place principle, patriotism, decency, honor, (true) conservative values, and concern for the survival of the republic ahead of craven political expediency. But then that would have required a microgram of leadership and courage.

In a way even more amusing (if that's the right word) than the excuses given by members of the GOP leadership for their sudden reversal in favor of Trump (the "madman who must be stopped," in the not so former words of recently converted Trump supporter Bobby Jindal), have been the excuses given by members of the GOP leadership for why they just won't be able to be there when Trump receives the nod at the Republican convention in Cleveland next month ("I can watch it on TV," said Lindsey Graham of South Carolina).

It really should not have been that hard to enunciate a few words to explain why they cannot support, for the most important office in the world, a man utterly devoid of moral principle, knowledge, honesty, decency, or respect for democratic values or public service.

Just in case we've forgotten a few of the things the nominee-to-be has done that ought to place him beyond the pale of support by any decent American political leader, he has:

 threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish his critics in the press;

 attacked a federal judge hearing a civil lawsuit brought against him for defrauding students at his now-defunct "Trump University" (Judge Gonzalo Curiel is "a total disgrace," Trump said, adding today that because Curiel is of "Mexican heritage" it is an "absolute conflict of interest" for him to hear the case);

 endorsed and spread fringe, fear-mongering conspiracy theories about government coverups of disease outbreaks and the 9/11 terrorist attacks ("You will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center" when he is president);

 fomented ethnic, religious, and racial hatred, and refused even to disavow a barrage of truly vile anti-Semitic attacks by his supporters against Jewish journalists ("I don't have a message to the fans");

 mocked and belittled political opponents and critics for their physical disabilities and personal appearance;

 declared his impatience and contempt for the law and America's treaty obligations;

 expressed admiration for dictators and brutal authoritarianism (on Kim Jong-un: "He goes in, he takes over, and he's the boss. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one." And North Korea returned the compliment yesterday, calling Trump "a wise politician" and the right choice for president);

 refused to release his income tax returns and offered a patently false reason for doing so;

 been dishonest and unscrupulous in his business dealings;

 made grotesquely boastful claims about his (nonexistent) military expertise ("I know more about ISIS than the generals do") and (unapparent) Christian faith ("I am a great Christian—and I am. I am.")

Trump's total lack of personal principles is probably part and parcel of a true personality disorder. But the consequences are chilling for a democracy when combined with the power of the presidency. Principle and the rule of law are the only things that stand in the way of authoritarianism in government, and brutality in society. To uphold a principle means that at least once in a while one is required to admit that the right thing to do differs from what is in one's own immediate self-interest. Trump has never done so in his entire lifetime.

He has taken it even one Orwellian step further, though, by invoking the language of principles and values just when he is being his most coarse and crudely self-serving: anyone who criticizes him—such as the journalists the other day who asked him why it took him five months to cough up his promised $6 million donation to veterans' groups, and in fact only made good on his personal $1 million pledge after a Washington Post investigation last month discovered he had not yet done so—is "dishonest" or "disgraceful."

Especially when they are pointing out Trump's own dishonest or disgraceful conduct, of course.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-43871333575668165242016-06-01T09:37:00.000-04:002016-06-01T09:37:04.688-04:00Edward Snowden and Klaus FuchsIn researching my book about NSA ("Code Warriors," coming to a fine bookstore near you on June 14), I was struck by how many of the Soviet spies in America during and just after World War II convinced themselves they were answering a higher duty in passing along to the Russians secrets of America's atomic bomb and codebreaking programs.

Fuchs

Klaus Fuchs, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had worked on the British and American atomic programs, was furiously insulted when his contact Harry Gold tried to pass on an envelope stuffed with $1,500 in cash: Fuchs insisted he was motivated by the idealistic aim of insuring world peace and aiding a heroic ally of Britain and America in the fight against Hitler.

There was an aspect of Fuchs's psychological makeup that strikes a very familiar chord in considering the case of Edward Snowden: their political naivete (of trusting the Russians, if nothing else), combined with a remarkable moral arrogance in believing that they could place themselves above the law in pursuit of a supposed higher purpose—and yet escape any moral responsibility for their acts at the same time.

Here is what I write in Code Warriors about a pivotal incident in Fuchs's self-justifications:

 Later a Los Alamos physicist colleague and close friend, Rudolf Peierls, with whom Fuchs had lodged while working in England, asked him how, as a scientist, he could have swallowed the doctrinaire orthodoxies of Marxism. Peierls was stunned by the "arrogance and naivete" of Fuchs's answer. "You must remember what I went through under Nazis," Fuchs replied. "Besides, it was my intention, when I had helped the Russians to take over everything, to get up and tell them what is wrong with their system."

 Peierls's wife Genia, who had been something of a mother figure to their young lodger, wrote him a more personal rebuke. Hadn't he at least thought about the betrayal of his friends he had committed, and the harm he had done them? she asked.

 "I didn't, and that's the greatest horror I had to face when I looked at myself," Fuchs wrote back from prison. "I thought I knew what I was doing, and there was this simple thing, obvious to the simplest decent creature, and I didn't think of it." He told another friend: "Some people grow up at fifteen, some at thirty-eight. It is more painful at thirty-eight."

Snowden

Snowden, however, has yet to show any similar signs of growing up, specifically with regard to his betrayal of some 20 or more co-workers whom he duped into turning over their computer passwords (which he claimed he needed for his duties as a systems administrator), most of whom lost their jobs as a result; nor to the fact that under the Section 798 of the Espionage Act he could have gone to the congressional intelligence committees with his information with absolute immunity from any legal repercussions to himself. Instead, he reacted yesterday on Twitter with his usual immature flipness even to former Attorney General Eric Holder's acknowledgement that some of Snowden's disclosures had indeed performed a public service, even as he had nonetheless clearly violated the law (and his own personal oath to uphold it).Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-2150958746556363442016-05-26T12:40:00.000-04:002016-05-26T12:40:30.238-04:00Whistleblower; traitor; none of the above?An op-ed in today's New York Times argues that because former NSA contractor Edward Snowden acted in the "overriding public interest" in leaking top secret documents revealing NSA surveillance activities, he should be allowed to raise a "public interest defense" were he to return to the United States to face outstanding criminal charges for violating the Espionage Act. The author argues that "the least the law should do is take full account of the whistle-blower's intentions."

 Snowden (not to be confused with Thoreau, Ghandi, or King)

I sometimes think I am the only person I've met who's willing to say that Snowden has done both good and harm. Undeniably, his revelations about NSA's legally dubious bulk collection programs have been of considerable public service; it forced the Obama administration to far greater openness about the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's decisions regarding NSA's secret activities, and indeed the court itself acknowledged that Snowden's unauthorized release of its earlier decisions "engendered considerable public interest and debate" and agreed that further authorized declassification of its rulings would likewise "contribute to an informed debate." The subsequent action by Congress this year to end NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection program would almost certainly never occurred absent Snowden's decision to go public.

But many of Snowden's other leaks have been reckless and gratuitous, failing to make any moral or legal distinction between legitimate and properly secret SIGINT activities—such as intercepting and deciphering the communications of foreign diplomats or terrorist military units such as those of the Taliban in northwest Pakistan—versus the legally suspect and intrusive violations of Americans' own privacy by their government at home.

At the base of all this is the fact that Snowden's intentions—which the Times writer says ought to be taken into account in considering his guilt or innocence—are, like those of all whistleblowers, more complex than they want to present. Snowden is not a traitor in the strict legal meaning of the term, but his decision to place himself under the protection of Vladimir Putin's Russia was a morally disastrous, and morally obtuse, one.

All whistleblowers are egotists, but Snowden is definitely at the far end of the spectrum.

Snowden and his collaborator Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian have sophomorically and self-righteously insisted that any monitoring of any communications by the US government is a threat to "internet freedom" and "intellectual exploration and creativity" everywhere; Greenwald has arrogantly added that anyone who justifies NSA's foreign intelligence-gathering is merely sycophantically "venerating" and meekly obedient to "institutional authority" and the "establishment elite." (Whereas he and Snowden are courageously engaging in "radical dissent" from it.)

And I have been surprised how few of Snowden's champions even feel the need to address the moral questions about his own actions and intentions. Snowden sought out his job as an NSA contractor with the deliberate intention of gaining access to documents he planned from the outset to steal and reveal. He not only violated his oath in so doing but, much worse, duped 20 of his co-workers into giving him their passwords, which he claimed he needed in connection with his duties as a computer systems administrator. Most of those co-workers whom he betrayed were subsequently fired (and presumably also lost their security clearances, thus permanently ending their careers). This personal act of betrayal bespeaks a callousness and superiority that I for one find deeply disturbing.

Civil disobedience is a moral right of all citizens in a democracy, but Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King and other moral giants who understood what was at stake recognized that part of the duty of those who defy the law in the name of what they see as a higher moral calling is a willingness to take the consequences society imposes on those who do disobey the law: indeed it was to point out the evil of the law as it exists that they were prepared to do so.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-70279623503990718892016-05-22T09:02:00.000-04:002016-05-22T09:02:10.602-04:00Trumpian Personality Disorder"I'm not a psychiatrist, but there's something wrong with the guy."

That observation about you-know-who the other day from a former top aide to John McCain prompted me to look up the actual definition of "narcissistic personality disorder."

I'm not a psychiatrist, either, but it's pretty hard to escape the conclusion that it's not just a figure of speech when people refer to him as a narcissist.

According to the Mayo Clinic, here's how to tell if you have it:

If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement — and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.
At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior.
It also notes the characteristic of "grandiosity," i.e. believing in one's greatness without any supporting evidence — an excellent example of which was Trump's remarkable insistence that even though he dodged the draft during the Vietnam War (first by claiming student deferments while serving the nation studying finance at the Wharton School, then by claiming a physical deferment, supposedly because of bone spurs on his heels), "I felt that I was in the military in the true sense," having been packed off to a military-themed prep school as a rowdy teenager.

Yes, except for that small detail about people shooting at you and trying to kill you, attending a private boarding school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, is exactly like serving in the army in Vietnam.

Psychiatrists note that those who suffer from NPD basically have never outgrown the infantile perception that they are at the center of the universe. As Trump himself told his biographer Michael D'Antonio:

 "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

Out of the mouths of babes.Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-41912350253689641962016-05-18T09:49:00.000-04:002016-05-18T09:49:50.360-04:00The squarest spies on earthAnyone who's tried to write about NSA knows that the hard part is not finding out the agency's scandals, failures, and problems: it's finding out the successes and accomplishments.

NSA still labors under the quaint idea that no one will suspect their communications are being intercepted as long as NSA refuses to discuss anything about the process, or even the results, of its activities. I've argued for years that in this day and age NSA would have nothing to lose and much to gain from greater openness, at the very least when it comes to historical material about the contributions of SIGINT to military operations and diplomacy in the post-World War II era. In my forthcoming book Code Warriors — which chronicles codebreaking in the Cold War period — I was able to mine a variety of declassified materials, directly and indirectly, to piece together the story but it was never a straightforward process. NSA continues to be its own worst enemy, refusing to declassify even 70 year old material about its breaking of archaically obsolete Soviet code machines, for example.

I've thus been reading through with much interest the latest collection of leaked NSA documents courtesy of Edward Snowden, posted yesterday on The Intercept. This is the first installment of a large collection of in-house NSA electronic newsletters dating from 2003 and later, called SIDtoday (SID standing for the Signals Intelligence Directorate).

What's most interesting are the regular herograms to the workforce mentioning NSA accomplishments, particularly during the war in Iraq. They notably included the use of real-time intercepts to support special forces operations such as the one on June 17, 2003, that captured the notorious Saddam-regime official Mahmud al-Tikriti.

This is exactly the sort of information the American public never sees, and which would offer perhaps a slightly more balanced view of NSA's purpose, abilities, and value.

It's also clear from many of the newsletter items that the longstanding bureaucratic turf wars between the military services and intel agencies, and NSA's long history of red-tape ossification which dominated the story of the Cold War, have largely given way to streamlined procedures and effective technologies that have finally begun to make things work they way they should, when it comes to getting SIGINT into the hands of the people who need it.

There are many references to National Intelligence Support Teams, which are now routinely embedded in supported forces in the field, and which can directly receive SIGINT from Ft. Meade and help interpret it on the spot for commanders. During the capture of al-Tikriti, NSA linguists were able to provide near-real time "speaker identity information" from intercepted communications, and its "Geospatial Exploitation Office" had deployed web-based servers that allowed NSA's "customers" in the field to access mapping and location data on targeted users of "Personal Communications Systems" as they were being tracked.

A far cry from the dysfunctions, dropped balls, interservice rivalries, and overloaded communications of the Cold War era.

But the newsletters also show some things will never change in NSA's culture. The most banal and innocuous statements in the newsletters are routinely classified Secret or even Top Secret, especially those that even hint that NSA is doing anything well or right.

And one can only marvel at the middle-American insularity of these squarest spies on earth, in the numerous little naive travelogues recounting the wonders encountered by deployed NSAers at foreign postings: ramen shops in Japan, fish and chips in England, rhine wine in Germany, and even the fun recreational opportunities at Guantanamo Bay (where NSA's "Liaison Officers" were supporting prisoner interrogations): "Outside work, fun awaits and opportunities abound. Water sports are outstanding. . . . they've recently added sailboat rentals, too. Surround all this water fun with a Tiki Bar and a Jerk House as well as the Bayview Restaurant. Relaxing is easy."

Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-19681642728510438842016-05-16T10:05:00.000-04:002016-05-16T10:05:18.466-04:00Parade of whoresThrilled to discover that there is absolutely no penalty to pay for logical contradiction, abandonment of all personal integrity, and boundless displays of cupidity in the pursuit of boundless self-interest, Republican politicians who just days earlier were describing their party's fuhrer-presumptive as immoral, dangerous, and a threat to True Conservatism had an epiphany last week: if Trump can do it, so can we!

The prize goes to Bobby Jindal, ex-governor of the great state of Louisiana who back in March wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he unleashed the worst, most damning condemnation of Trump in the entire True Conservative lexicon: Trump's surprising success at the polls, he revealed, was actually the doing of . . . Obama: "Let's be honest," he intoned (even then foreshadowing his coming flexible notions of what that word "honest" means): "There would be no Donald Trump dominating the political scene today were it not for President Obama."

He went on to explain that if only Obama had not been so "cool, weak, and endlessly nuanced," then people would not feel so compelled to embrace the "absurd" Trump, and his "simple" solutions to every problem. (He added that Obama had been "polarizing" by not working with Republicans to achieve Republican policy goals, such as slashing Medicare and Social Security.)

Earlier, Jindal declared that Trump "is a shallow, unserious, substance-free, narcissistic egomaniac"; "a madman who must be stopped"; he warned that "we can be the biggest fools in history and put our faith not in our principles, but in an egomaniac who has no principles."

But last week, Jindal was back on the Journal's opinion pages, boldly declaring himself to be the biggest fool in history. No, he didn't exactly put it that way. While asserting that he was completely, fully, unwaveringly, 100% "standing by his criticisms" of Trump, he said he will nonetheless support the egomaniac who has no principles because, among other things, "Mrs. Clinton will continue hindering affordable domestic energy," an argument that would do his candidate proud by being both a total non sequitur and being factually false, as oil prices are at a 40-year low, imports falling, and domestic production soaring.

But who cares about facts, contradicting one's self, and shrugging off all of the moral values that holier-than-thou social conservatives have been claiming to themselves for years? As I mentioned the other day, George Will, who has the quaint characteristic of thinking that facts and integrity matter, denounced as "quislings" those fellow Republicans of his who have been flocking to Trump's standard. But that's actually giving them far more credit than they deserve. Vidkun Quisling, the Fører of the Norwegian right-wing party that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, was a fascist, anti-Semite, and ideological soul mate of Hitler. The evangelicals, social conservatives, Republican office holders, and party officials who are tripping over themselves to embrace the not precisely Christlike figure of Donald Trump are simply opportunists, happy to sell their birthright for whatever mess of pottage comes their way.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-79983411773862706322016-05-13T10:39:00.000-04:002016-05-13T10:39:00.989-04:00Profiles in cowardiceThere was an interesting piece in the New York Times this week explaining the psychological immunity of Trump's followers to his bewildering series of contradictions. All politicians play this game a bit, denying inconsistency when they hedge or trim their stances, but Trump has taken it to Orwellian heights.

He has repeatedly announced diametrically opposed positions on issues on successive days, sometimes denying he ever said what he said before, but sometimes simply acting as if there is no contradiction in his contradiction.

In late March he said that women who receive abortions should be punished.

A few days later he said that doctors who perform abortions should be punished, not the women who have them.

Then he said that the current laws on abortion had settled the matter of the legality of abortion.

Then he said that as president he would change the law, to ban abortions.

Then he said that his original answer about punishing women was actually "a great answer" to what had been just "a hypothetical question" and that "as a hypothetical question you give a hypothetical answer, and I didn't see the big, big, huge deal."

All clear?

As Michael Lynch noted in his article, Trump's strategy of brazenly thumbing his nose at even being held accountable for what he says lets people hear what they want to:

Walking a comment back says you are taking responsibility for what you've said. Blatant contradiction puts the responsibility back onto the shoulders of the listener. If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really meant. And psychology, as well as common sense, tells us that human beings are prone to "confirmation bias." That is, we tend to interpret evidence so that it conforms to what we already believe.
But there is something more deeply disturbing about the willingness of so many to drink the Kool-Aid —now including the daily growing parade of GOP whores willing to abandon any scruples in jumping on the Trump bandwagon — that can only reflect a profound erosion of once widely held values in American society regarding personal integrity, honor, and mature conduct expected of those in public life.

It is not just Trump's contradictions but the deep personal flaws revealed by them— the cowardly evasions, the shifting of blame to others, the whining about being treated "unfairly" — that would once have disqualified anyone from public office on the grounds of defective moral character.

When caught saying something particularly obscene or horrifying, Trump has repeatedly behaved like a shifty child, claiming he was just repeating what someone else said. When pressed about his absurd lie that he can't release his own tax returns because the IRS is auditing them, he said he would not "overrule his lawyers." How's that for manfully taking responsibility? When it looked like he might be beaten by Ted Cruz in the primaries, all he could do was pout like any five-year-old we all have known about how "unfair" it was that he could not automatically get his way.

To be fair, a few conservative opinion leaders have taken unwavering stands and made it clear that no short-term advantage to their party could ever justify supporting a man so manifestly un-American in his commitment to the values of our country; so crudely thuggish in his attitudes toward women, the disabled and downtrodden, and members of other religions and races; so personally bankrupt in his own private moral character. George Will, who knows enough history to recognize a pivotal moment in the rise of political evils when he sees one, went so far as to say that history will remember which side Republicans were on when faced with the choice between "honorably recoil[ing] from Trump" or becoming "Republican quislings."

And Michael Gerson, who still has a lot to answer for from his time as George W. Bush's White House speechwriter, and whose sanctimoniousness and pomposity I admit I always cordially despised from the time we were briefly colleagues together at U.S. News, gets credit too for perhaps the clearest and most morally forthright condemnation of Trump, and his brutal vision of the world, that I have seen from any writer across the political spectrum.

But as Paul Ryan's smarmy talk about "unity" showed following his meeting with Trump this week, when faced with a real chance to take a stand on the side of American values, morality, and democracy, most Republican leaders will reliably be on the side of the quislings and craven opportunists.Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-68714436471509866852016-05-12T11:46:00.002-04:002016-05-12T11:46:31.261-04:00Japan and the atomic bombOn Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story about President's Obama's planned visit to Hiroshima, revisiting the question of whether the United States was justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan. The article quoted a prominent revisionist historian:

"The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, and — for many — that the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral," Gar Alperovitz, a leader of the movement to revise the United States' own historical accounting, wrote last year in The Nation.

The Times today published my short letter responding to this point:

To the Editor:

The assertion that Japan was about to surrender has been a staple of revisionist criticisms of the atomic bombings. The claim is largely empty.

Even though Hirohito and his military leaders were fully aware by the fall of 1944 that military defeat was inevitable, the emperor exhorted them again and again to fight to the death.

The United States Army chief of staff, George Marshall, later concluded that the bombings' effect was more psychological than military: It allowed Hirohito, fanatically obsessed with honor and imperial destiny, to "surrender without losing face."

STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

Leesburg, Va.

The writer, a military historian, is the author of "Air Power."

Here's some additional context, from my book "Air Power." The most significant point is that Japan's notion of ending the war peacefully was so far removed from anything approaching "surrender" that it was delusional. Japan was simply not on the "verge of surrender," but rather at the behest of their emperor was prepared to commit national suicide rather than ever willingly capitulate. I've highlighted a few key points in boldface:

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It would prove convenient for decades afterwards, convenient to both the defeated Japanese and the victorious Americans, to adhere to the story that Emperor Hirohito had been a remote, passive figurehead who bore no responsibility and no guilt for Japan's military actions during the war. The truth was different. As his biographer Herbert P. Bix found from an exhaustive examination of Japanese documents that became available only after Hirohito's death in 1989, the Emperor asserted strong control over both overall war policy and specific military operations—often with disastrous consequences for Japanese troops and Japanese civilians alike. Far from agonizing over his people's mounting suffering as American forces pressed relentlessly on toward the Japanese homeland, far from advocating surrender once Japan's defeat had become a near certainty in the fall of 1944, the Emperor exhorted his commanders again and again to fight to the death. He saw his people's willingness to sacrifice their lives in the tens or hundreds of thousands, millions even, as proof of what he called "our imperial destiny." As far as the Emperor was concerned, dying for the Emperor was the greatest virtue that his subjects could aspire to.

Many of them agreed. On New Year's Day 1945 the Emperor inspected the special ration packets being prepared as the last meals for the "special attack forces," young men who had volunteered to fly their gasoline- and explosive-laden planes into Allied ships, and troops, and bombers. There was no shortage of enthusiastic volunteers. The name kamikaze given to the suicide forces meant "divine wind," an allusion to the miraculous typhoons that, in Japanese legend, twice in the thirteenth century arose to repel the invading Mongol fleet. . . . To Hirohito they were the supreme manifestation of the superiority of the Japanese spirit of sacrifice and honor. During a briefing on the battles raging near the Philippines in early January, the Emperor astonished his military aide by twice rising and bowing deeply when his aide mentioned one of these "special pilots.". . .

In [1945] April Hirohito, blaming his ministers for the continuing military failures, brought down the Japanese government. A new cabinet agreed to put out feelers to the Russians for mediation to help end the war. But the new cabinet's vision of "peace" was so far from the Allied terms of unconditional surrender that any retrospective criticisms of the supposed unwisdom of that inflexible Allied policy were probably beside the point. The new Army Minister, Korechika Anami, insisted that since Japan was still holding territory it had conquered, Japan had therefore won the war and any peace treaty must acknowledge that fact. "Concurrently," Bix notes, "the controlled press waged a daily die-for-the-emperor campaign.". . .

To Americans, to the world, the atomic bomb was a weapon so powerful that no sane person could possibly continue to believe that further resistance was possible. Yet the atomic bombs killed considerably fewer people than had LeMay's months of conventional firebombing. The new weapons had fallen on two provincial cities far from Tokyo; indeed, the principal reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets was that almost all of Japan's other major cities had been burnt to the ground already, and making charred debris bounce, it was thought, would constitute an inadequate demonstration of the new weapons' awesome destructive power. But the result was rather the same, since most Japanese had not even heard of the atomic bombings by the time of the Japanese surrender, much less were they pressing their government to capitulate because of them. If the Emperor had told them to fight on, the Japanese people would no doubt have fought on.

The Japanese Army certainly still wanted to fight on. A cabinet meeting summoned to discuss the Hiroshima bombing the following day was cancelled because the Army representatives didn't show up: they claimed to have "more pressing business." Hirohito himself vacillated and procrastinated on issuing a surrender statement to the very end, even after the second bomb was dropped on August 9. "Obviously," noted Bix, "Hirohito sought to justify his decision to surrender by citing the dropping of the atomic bombs.…Whether the emperor and his advisers ever really believed that, however, is unlikely."

Years later George Marshall would be one of the first to recognize what had happened: "There is one point that was missed and that frankly we missed in making our plans," Marshall admitted. "And that was the effect the bomb would have in so shocking the Japanese that they could surrender without losing face." Japan's leaders had known at least since spring, and probably for a full year, that, militarily, their situation was hopeless. . . . If destroying an entire major city from the air in a single night were enough to make a country surrender, Japan should have surrendered a couple of dozen times already. The timing of the Japanese surrender in the wake of the atomic bombings said more about the peculiar thrall of the Japanese nation—and its leaders in particular—to a nationalistic ideology of honor and supreme self-sacrifice than it said about the logic of victory through air power.

One other very important point: Alperovitz's assertion that "top American military leaders who fought World War II . . . were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary" is an extraordinarily misleading and out-of-context statement. All three services did indeed try to argue that they each could have won the war without the bomb: the Navy claimed that its blockade of Japan would have starved Japan into submission. The Army confidently asserted that MacArthur's invasion plans would have succeeded in occupying and defeating the home islands. And even the Air Force was wary of giving the bomb too much credit, lest it undermine their broader claim that strategic air power won the war, with or without the new weapon: the Air Force took pains to point out that 210 conventional B-29 raids could have delivered the same explosive force as one atomic bomb.
So yes, they all claimed the bomb was "unnecessary," in the sense that the war could have been won without it. Yet Alperovitz ridiculously fails to go to the next question and ask, At what cost? The naval blockade would have taken months or more and would have killed more Japanese civilians than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did. An invasion would likewise have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and also taken until 1946.
The historical record is in fact manifestly clear that nothing short of months more of fighting — and untold civilian and military deaths — would have led to Japan's defeat absent the atomic bombings. Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-8325373706204327232016-05-11T09:26:00.001-04:002016-05-11T10:03:51.322-04:00SIGINT revisionismMy review in the Wall Street Journal last week of Max Hastings's new book about intelligence in World War II, "The Secret War."

Bottom line: excellent on HUMINT, shaky on SIGINT.

---

by Stephen Budiansky

Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2016

Any historian who hopes to tell the true story of secret intelligence operations, even from the distant past, quickly discovers that he is up against two formidable obstacles.

First is the Kafkaesque system of government classification. Not only do U.S. intelligence agencies routinely refuse to declassify material from 70 or more years ago, they have taken to reclassifying and removing from the National Archives some previously released World War II-era files.

The other problem is that spies are professional, if not congenital, liars.

In the introduction to his sprawling, revisionist-tinged history of espionage, cryptanalysis and partisan warfare in World War II, British historian Max Hastings quotes the cautionary words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for the British secret service during the war. Intelligence work, Muggeridge said, "necessarily involves such cheating, lying, and betraying that it has a deleterious effect on the character. I never met anyone professionally engaged in it whom I should care to trust in any capacity."

The field of intelligence history accordingly "generates a vast, unreliable literature," Mr. Hastings notes. The years after World War II brought a spate of memoirs recounting daring escapades behind enemy lines, many of which existed only in the writers' imaginations but which still shape perceptions about the role of the spies and saboteurs of America's Office of Strategic Services, Britain's MI6 and Special Operations Executive, and the French Resistance.

The ensuing decades did little to correct the balance. "One immensely popular account of Allied intelligence"—the 1975 book "Bodyguard of Lies" by British journalist Anthony Cave Brown—is "largely a work of fiction," Mr. Hastings concludes.

Revelations beginning in the late 1970s of the long-held secret of secret of "Ultra"—the World War II cover name for intelligence derived from the breaking of high-level German and Japanese codes—were likewise riddled with inaccuracies and overstatements. Whenever I give a talk about World War II codebreaking I am invariably asked about the thoroughly debunked but apparently indestructible myth that Churchill deliberately sacrificed Coventry to German bombers in 1940 to safeguard the secret of Britain's success at breaking the German Enigma cipher.

Adding to the difficulties of separating reality from fantasy and legend is that a good many covert schemes that really were hatched by the wartime spy agencies (not to mention their Cold War successors) seem so far-fetched as to defy credulity, leaving one with the feeling that those in charge of intelligence got their inspiration from reading spy novels.

The breathless claims about secret missions that changed the course of World War II have engendered a scholarly backlash of late: Mr. Hastings at the outset makes the provocative suggestion that Allied intelligence may have had no effect at all on the outcome of the war. He quickly adds that "this seems too extreme a verdict." But he goes on to make an insightful argument that, at least when it came to spies on the ground, the treachery and deceit that formed the core of their being usually neutralized any effectiveness they had.

The innate paranoia, lack of accountability and sheer incompetence of spies and spymasters of all nations make for often hilarious reading. Just what was the Russian agent, installed in a tiny firm in Belgium trading in imported trench coats, supposed to glean from his circle of second-rate business contacts? How was a German spy dispatched to Ireland supposed to advance the interests of the Third Reich, armed with a knowledge of the country that consisted in its entirety of a lecture from a fellow German who was a Celtic folklore enthusiast?

Surveying the sorry tales of agents' misadventures and ineptitude, Mr. Hastings concludes that, for most World War II spies of all nationalities, their "only achievement in foreign postings was to stay alive, at hefty cost to their employers, while collecting information of which not a smidgeon assisted the war effort." The Russian spy Anatoli Gourevitch recalled that he received endless training in secret inks, contact procedures and other bits of tradecraft—while being told next to nothing about how to actually gather intelligence. Even the notoriously cheap Russians lavished money on their networks of agents, who not unsurprisingly proved adept at spending it on luxury hotels, fine meals and a seemingly endless stream of inevitably blond mistresses. The 13,000 men and women employed by the Americans had so much cash to throw around that rival secret services complained that they drove prices on the local bribe market through the roof whenever they arrived in town.

The deeper irony that Mr. Hastings points to is that, in a business so filled with suspicion and unreliable agents, those rare spies who did succeed in delivering valuable information were almost always disbelieved. The "Oslo Report," an anonymous document dropped at the British legation in Norway in 1939, detailed practically every German secret weapon program. It was dismissed by Whitehall as an obvious plant. (It was not.) Stalin repeatedly scorned intelligence reports from well-placed agents—and from Ultra, personally relayed by Churchill—that Germany was going to attack the U.S.S.R. in June 1941. "Misinformation," he curtly declared. Stalin's fears of betrayal and intrigue likewise led him to order scores of his own top intelligence officers shot and contact dropped with thousands of foreign informants branded "fascist stool pigeons." After the war, one German source encountered his former NKVD handler in Vienna, and despaired at the thought of all the secrets he could have shared. "Where on earth were you all through the war?" the German asked. "I was General Kesselring's personal orderly!"

The author nonetheless shows that, alone among the belligerent powers, the Soviets succeeded in penetrating the upper echelons of its enemies (and allies), notably with the famous spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo and the atomic spies in the United States, Canada and Britain. The ideological attraction of communism outweighed even Stalin's boundless paranoia.

Mr. Hastings offers an equally sharp and skeptical argument about the value of sabotage and resistance operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. He suggests that Churchill had no illusions that his 1940 mandate to the newly formed Special Operations Executive—to "set Europe ablaze"—was going to accomplish much in the way of tangible military objectives; his aim was rather to boost British morale at a time when there were few other means for striking at Hitler and, rather more cold-bloodedly, to provoke savage Nazi reprisals against the civilian populace in occupied countries that would stoke hatred of the occupiers and deter collaboration. "The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church!" Churchill thundered at one cabinet meeting when the effectiveness of this policy was questioned. While paying tribute to the genuine courage of many Resistance fighters, Mr. Hastings is frank in judging its chief value as establishing "a legend of popular insurrection" that helped revive "the self-respect of Europe's occupied societies after 1945."

The author is less persuasive when he tries to bring this same skeptical sensibility to the story of Ultra. To be sure, in Britain, where his book was first published, there continues to exist a popular belief that "Ultra won the war"—that Hitler and his generals could scarcely make a move on land, sea or air without the codebreakers at Bletchley Park knowing ahead of time. Mr. Hastings is correct in pointing out that the interception and decipherment of enemy traffic was never complete, that Allied cryptanalysts struggled to keep up with changing code systems, and that the Germans in particular scored significant cryptanalytic coups of their own, especially during several periods when the Nazi U-boat commander Karl Dönitz was receiving decoded messages giving the sailing times and routes of Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic.

But Mr. Hastings reveals many gaps in his understanding of the codebreaking process, and this undermines the soundness of his judgments. His explanation of how the Enigma cipher was broken and the role of Alan Turing's electromechanical "bombes" is marred by errors and confusion. Notably, he misses the point of why the bombes were needed in the first place: not because codebreakers had been struggling to achieve results using "raw brainpower," as he asserts, but because the earlier (quite effective) manual system that the Poles had worked out to recover the Enigma's daily key settings was rendered useless in May 1940 by a change in German operating procedures. The bombes were needed to implement the far more elaborate and exhaustive computational search procedure that Turing devised to crack this new complication.

The mistakes Mr. Hastings makes in discussing the codebreakers and their work suggest an impatience with the subject and a cursory reading of secondary sources. He consistently misstates the name of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service; he writes that in 1942 the U.S. Navy's codebreaking headquarters "shifted out of Washington, to Mount Vernon Academy in Virginia," getting both the name of the school and its location wrong (it was in northwest D.C.); he offers such mangled definitions of cryptologic terms like "depth" that knowledgeable readers will quickly conclude he is out of his depth.

This becomes a particular problem when he tries to launch sweeping conclusions off a shaky base. The author belittles the contribution of Ultra to the land campaign, offering as evidence the fact that Bletchley read less than 50% of German army Enigma traffic. What matters, however, is what 50% was being read, and during the North Africa campaign Bletchley was continuously deciphering virtually all of the messages sent over Erwin Rommel's main Enigma network. The decrypted messages allowed the British commander Bernard Montgomery to learn in advance of the planned German offensive at Alam el Halfa in August 1942—and to meet it with a devastating ambush of mines, artillery and air strikes that saved Cairo and allowed British forces to regain the offensive.

Ultra also helped British forces wage an extremely effective interdiction campaign against Rommel's vital supply lines across the Mediterranean. The British knew not only what supplies Rommel was short of but what specific ships were carrying essential stocks of fuel, ammunition and other materiel. From July to October 1942, British bombers and submarines sank 47 Axis supply ships, 44 of them directly as a result of Ultra intelligence. By the end of the campaign, Rommel's tanks were literally running out of fuel. It was one of the most effective uses of Ultra of the entire war.

Mr. Hastings is also dismissive of the U.S. Army's success in reading Japanese army codes. He devotes some 20 pages to the well-known story of the Battle of Midway and the U.S. Navy codebreakers' success in uncovering Adm. Yamamoto's plan of attack, but he gives less than a sentence to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's equally effective use of decoded Japanese army signals to bypass Japanese troop concentrations in eastern New Guinea in April 1944. MacArthur was able to land his forces unopposed at Hollandia Bay, hundreds of miles west of where the Japanese expected the blow. That strategic coup led to the capture of New Guinea six months ahead of schedule, allowing the invasion of the Philippines to begin in October 1944 rather than the following spring, as planned.

Like Montgomery in North Africa, MacArthur used intelligence about Japanese supply convoys—revealed in the Japanese army's Water Transport Code, broken in June 1943—to wage a withering air-interdiction campaign that caught the Japanese ships just as they arrived in port. By 1944, employing IBM punch-card equipment and rooms full of specially built electromechanical memory units and analytic machinery, the U.S. Army's codebreaking center at Arlington Hall outside of Washington was automatically decoding more than 2,500 Japanese army messages a day. Arlington Hall often read Japanese messages hours before their intended Japanese recipients did. This casts doubt on Mr. Hastings's mildly chauvinistic assertion that "the most innovative codebreaking technology of the war was devised at Bletchley Park."

Mr. Hastings gravely overstates his case when he asserts that signals intelligence "was useless, unless sufficient force was available at sea, in the sky, or on the ground." Throughout the war, codebreaking was a source not only of battlefield intelligence but of technical and scientific intelligence (Ultra decrypts identified critical new U-boat technologies and the location of the German rocket facility at Peenemünde) and counterintelligence (Ultra provided the definitive proof in spring 1943 that the Germans were reading the Allied convoy code, leading to the rapid implementation of a replacement system that remained unbroken for the rest of the war). Codebreaking was also essential in deception operations for the Torch landings in North Africa in 1942 and D-Day in Normandy two years later, providing assurance that the enemy was indeed taking the bait.

The truth is that Ultra staved off disasters in the war's first years that might have been fatal—at Midway, at Alam el Halfa, in the Mediterranean and in the Battle of the Atlantic. When the British and Americans could not bring decisive force to bear, Ultra was a force multiplier. While some correction of the "Ultra myth" is still needed, Mr. Hastings takes revisionism far beyond what the evidence bears.

"The Secret War" covers much familiar ground, but the decision to combine what are in fact only tangentially related subjects in one narrative may have been a mistake. There is little that connects codebreaking, spies, sabotage, resistance movements and deception operations in World War II other than the fact that they were all secret. As a result the book reads more like a ramble than a purposeful journey. But there are certainly interesting byways, especially on those excursions where the author is a reliable guide.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-65222077728770009892016-05-10T15:13:00.003-04:002016-05-10T15:13:29.831-04:00This is the guy your Founding Fathers tried to warn you aboutThe only ray of amusement to be found so far in Trump's political ascendancy has been supplied by those conservative thinkers and Republican Party leaders who are now frantically trying to disavow responsibility for the fact that "The Party of Lincoln," as they always reverently call it whenever it has done something particularly awful or embarrassing, is about to nominate for President of the United States a man with no experience in government, diplomacy, or military affairs; a complete disdain for knowledge about foreign or domestic policy; an appalling record of ethical bankruptcy, manipulative narcissism, and the invention of false and character-assassinating accusations in his personal and business dealings; a refusal to ever take responsibility for his errors and failures; and a crude worship of thuggery, intimidation, and even violence in pursuit of his own ends.

I'm still trying to figure out what it means when New Hampshire Republican senator Kelly Ayotte says she will "support" but not "endorse" Trump: does that mean she will vote for him, but does not think anyone else should? It brings back fond memories of comedian David Frye's famous parody of Nixon, explaining his role in Watergate: "As the man in charge, I must accept full responsibility, but not the blame. Let me explain the difference. People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are responsible do not."

Meanwhile, some conservative opinion writers have been busy issuing pseudo–mea culpas in which they confess their failure to have understood or properly appreciated the "anger" and "populism" that drives the phenomenon of "Trumpism," as if it were all some mysterious and spontaneous natural force.

In case we have forgotten, these are the same people who for years have been shamelessly attacking the very foundations of democracy whenever they saw a partisan advantage in so doing: Trump is no more than the inevitable outcome of a culture on the right that has for years been willing to go places that would have horrified the Founding Fathers (whom they so piously profess to revere).

The framers of the Constitution saw one of the greatest threats to the survival of a republic in the rise of demagogues who, playing on the "passions" of the masses, could all too readily amass totalitarian power. The great question they wrestled with was how a government of the people could secure the services of disinterested men of seriousness, learning, wisdom, and experience to lead their nation.

They had no illusions about the fragility of the democratic "experiment," as Americans frequently referred to their young nation in its first century of existence. The framers had all studied the history of Greece and Rome, of monarchies and republics; they knew that there was an inevitable tension between the rough and tumble of democratic politics and the seriousness of governance and policymaking; and while they tried to incorporate into the Constitution mechanisms to dampen down the expression of popular passions and limit the powers of would-be tyrants, they knew that ultimately the success of self-government — especially in a large and diverse society — depended on a tenuous social compact of self-restraint, a free press to provide a check on the truth, a body of leaders and statesmen who made government and diplomacy their sober profession, and a generally agreed respect for the legitimacy of the electoral process and for the rights, views, and common humanity of the other side.

Each one of these cornerstones of democracy has been systematically undermined by the American conservative movement in recent years.

Decency and self-restraint. The issue is not "civility," a kind of namby-pamby word that implies politicians just aren't balancing tea cups on their knees properly. The issue is that earlier generations of American political leaders — and most ordinary Americans, too — never forgot the nearness of the abyss, and the role of society's leaders in steering their own followers away from it; they understood the special duty of Americans as members of the world's greatest democracy to uphold what we used to quaintly call "American values"— which meant fair play, respect for the views of others, and renunciation of the street-brawling tactics of extremism. The only reason Trump can say and do things that would have instantly disqualified any presidential candidate of a generation ago — inciting violence and ugly ethnic hatreds, mocking critics for their physical disabilities or lack of female pulchritude, calling anyone who disagrees with him "morons," "dummies," "sick," or suggesting they should be "fired like dogs" — is that this kind of talk has become absolutely routine in place of serious political argument on the right. To listen to talk radio or conservative bloggers, the other side is not just wrong: they have "taken over" or are "destroying" the country; they are an alien force whose election victories are not just a disappointment, but illegitimate. Huey Long, the next closest thing to a would-be dictator in American political history, knew that you didn't need policies to win elections if you just riled people up. Riling is just about all that the conservative movement has done for the last decades, desensitizing and coarsening the language of politics while undermining the values that are the sine qua non of electoral democracy — including the rather basic requirement to accept the fact that one's side is not going to win 100% of all elections or get 100% of what it always wants.

Qualifications and expertise. The same conservative apparatchiks who are now appalled by Trump brought us Sarah Palin, the most spectacularly uninformed and unqualified candidate for vice president in the nation's history; have spent years deriding as "elitist" anyone who brings any real knowledge or expertise to government; and have succeeded beyond perhaps their wildest expectations in tarnishing government service altogether (while glorifying the making of money in business, not coincidentally). We've seen for years the hypocritical spectacle of Republican career politicians running as "Washington outsiders"; Trump is simply the logical end point of a process that has systematically derided the idea that you need to know anything, possess any relevant experience, or even be competent to serve in government.

Respect for the rule of law and the commonweal. It used to be called patriotism to put the interests of the nation ahead of personal or partisan gain. Harry Truman did not hesitate to incur the wrath of organized labor by calling out the army to seize control of railroads and steel mills shut down by union strikes; Dwight Eisenhower did not hesitate to incur the wrath of social conservatives by calling out the army to quell resistance to the court-ordered end to school segregation. By contrast tea party Republicans in Congress, Ted Cruz most spectacularly, have been willing to risk destroying even the financial credit and global standing of the United States to gain political attention and stir up party zealotry. Several Republican congressmen have expressed support and sympathy for acts of violence against the IRS and federal land managers. They have all been deliberately playing with fire, inciting blind anger above respect for democratic institutions and the working of government, irrationality and impossible goals above realism and compromise. Trump's supporters who express glee at the idea of their candidate's "blowing everything up" in Washington are again just following this line of abysmally irresponsible politics to its logical consequence.

An independent press. I was amused — well not amused; appalled at the combination of historical ignorance and ideological zealotry — seeing recently the advertisement for a Texas gun show that featured a picture of a gun and a Bible and words to the effect that these were the first two things that totalitarian governments come for. In fact, the first two things totalitarian governments come for are absolutely invariable: an independent press, and intellectuals. The reason is simple: you can't succeed in brainwashing the public with nonsensical propaganda if a bunch of smarty-pants journalists and professors are around to point out your foolishness. A generation or two ago, a candidate so full of contradictions, half-baked ideas, and flat-out ridiculous proposals as Trump would have been reduced to a laughing stock by objectively critical reporting in the press. The digital media age has of course done its share of diluting the influence of the serious media, but the conservative movement's cynically calculating vilification of the "mainstream media" would make any dictator proud in the results it has achieved, freeing them from the pesky problem of being held to account for their words and actions. Trump has exploited this to a tee, parading the reporters covering his rallies as veritable perpetrators to be booed and derided by the crowd, ensuring that his followers shrug off anything unfavorable that is reported about him, no matter how true, as simply another instance of media "bias."

The laws of arithmetic. The "establishment" Republican Party has not only largely eliminated the need to worry about the press pointing out the absurdity of its proposals, notably its manifestly false claim that tax cuts do not increase the deficit; it has also largely freed itself from having to take the laws of arithmetic seriously, either. The accounting tricks that have become routine in its budget proposals (such as not even bothering to count tax cuts in calculating officially projected budget figures) have so corroded the integrity of the policymaking process that reality itself has become a fungible political commodity. It's been awfully hard for Paul Ryan to criticize the fantastical unreality of Trump's bald assertion that he will pay off the entire national debt of $14 trillion in ten years while cutting taxes by $10 trillion over the same period and dramatically increasing military spending, when Ryan's own "serious" congressional budgets are full of arithmetical solipsisms of their own.

To date, anti-Trump conservatives have blamed Trump's rise on (I am not making any of these up), Barack Obama's coolness and nuance; a conspiracy by the media; liberal political correctness and elitism; dissolute hillbillies who are addicted to prescription painkillers, for which they have only themselves to blame; "anger" (that's a useful catch all); the erosion of social values that liberals and the 1960s are, of course, responsible for; and the refusal of leftists to use the term "Islamic terrorism." It could not, of course, be Republicans who are responsible for Trump being the Republican nominee, could it? Perish the thought.

Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-7885271141942731292012-02-16T16:58:00.000-05:002012-02-16T16:58:07.673-05:00Who's on first?I know everyone in the known media on seven continents (and possibly on Moonbase Gingrich as well, for all I know) has pointed out the musical-chairs game of Who's the GOP Frontrunner This Week, but a picture is still worth a (few hundred) thousand words:

liberalcurmudgeon.com

Actually, "Don't Know" also had a commanding lead for a while.Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-26655423100051941622012-02-10T10:07:00.000-05:002012-02-10T10:07:47.748-05:00The '60s made us do itPaul Krugman's column today—noting that Charles Murray's new much ballyhooed book on the social divide is merely the latest example of a venerable conservative tactic to attribute all problems in American society to vague, unspecified things that Liberals Did in the Sixties—reminds me of my favorite anecdote from my days at the late and not-too-lamented weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report.
One of the regular columnists for U.S. News at my time there was a superannuated softball buddy of demi-billionaire owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman's named John Leo.

Leo had been a fairly prominent New York Times reporter eons previous but by the '90s devoted his declining years to cranking out column after column for Snooze, every one of which was almost identical; they always began by decrying the decay of American values (generally defined as those upheld by the Catholic Church, particularly its implaccable opposition to abortion) and ended by concluding that this was all a direct and ineluctable consequence of "liberal permissiveness" of the 1960s.

A friend of mine on the magazine staff had the dubious honor of editing these columns. This editor frequently went to gym at the hotel next door where he had a membership and had a nodding acquaintance with another gym member, a lawyer at one of the nearby (and as I recall fairly old-fashioned) law firms.

One day my colleague was wearing his U.S. News T-shirt at the gym, which prompted his nodding acquaintance to speak up.

"Do you work at U.S. News?" he asked.

My colleague admitted the truth of the accusation.

"Really—do you know this guy John Leo?" he continued.

My colleague replied, "As as a matter of fact, I edit his column."

"Really," said the lawyer, growing more interested. "Could you give him a message for me?"

My colleague graciously said he would.

"I GET IT!" said the lawyer, and turned away.Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-28515017994150150272012-02-01T09:47:00.001-05:002012-02-01T09:51:04.998-05:00U.S. News, the root of all evilBack in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report.

Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity. As a lesson in the evils of our times, it is perhaps inevitable that the college guide is now the only thing left of U.S. News.

A story in today's New York Times reports that Claremont McKenna college has now been caught red handed submitting phony data to the college guide to boost its rankings.

But the real scandal, as usual, is not the occasional flagrant instance of outright dishonesty but the routine corruption that is shot through the whole thing.
In fact, there's much to be said for just making up numbers as Claremont McKenna did: because far worse are the things almost all colleges actually do purely to produce favorable statistics that will bump them up in the U.S. News rankings. Lying is bad; living the lie is much worse.

The contortions colleges routinely go through to game the system as decreed by U.S. News almost defy belief.

To increase selectivity (one of the statistics that go into U.S. News's secret mumbo-jumbo formula to produce an overall ranking), many colleges deliberately encourage applications from students who don't have a prayer of getting in. To increase average SAT scores, colleges offer huge scholarships to un-needy but high scoring applicants to lure them to attend their institution. (The Times story mentioned that other colleges have been offering payments to admitted students to retake the test to increase the school average.)

One of my favorite bits of absurdity was what a friend on the faculty at Case Law School told me they were doing a few years ago: because one of the U.S. News data points was the percentage of graduates employed in their field, the law school simply hired any recent graduate who could not get a job at a law firm and put him to work in the library.

Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone!

(I gather the new Case law dean has put an end to these shenanigans.)

As someone who knew a little math, what really drove me bonkers about the college guide was:

(a) the logical absurdity of adding together completely unrelated statistics to produce a single measure of merit—the key point being that you can produce an astonishing range of different results depending on the relative weight each component factor is assigned. And there is simply no logical, a priori basis for establishing such a weighting objectively. Do SAT scores count 30% of the total score? 32.2%? 18.78234%? (How about zero?) It's the classic apples + oranges – bananas/kumquats = fruit salad approach to statistics, and is completely meaningless.

(b) the fact that the entire exercise was designed to emphasize noise over signal: tiny, random fluctuations from year to year would result in regular changes in the final rankings. Even within its own absurd methodology no one ever dared broach the question of the actual statistical significance of the differences between the "No. 1" school and say the No. 5 school. In fact, there was pretty clearly none. It is of course ridiculous to think that when Harvard, Stanford, Yale, whoever changed places from one year to the next in the final rankings this reflected any actual sudden change in the underlying quality of the schools. But the only way to keep selling the damned guide each year was to make sure things kept changing from year to year.

There's a special place in hell for the perpetrators of this, where I hope the gods of mathematics and reason are devising some exquisite tortures for them—perhaps in the form of endlessly reading Introduction to Statistics and doing the same problem sets over and over through eternity . . .Stephen Budianskyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-77437492129717454422012-01-30T08:04:00.002-05:002012-01-30T08:05:06.800-05:00Visionary grandiosityI was willing to let it pass when Newt Gingrich compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, Napoleon, and Mahatma Ghandi, but the Wright Brothers is just a bit too much.

Newt's formula for glib historical analogy seems to run like this: (a) extract a cartoonish caricature of the essential quality of a great figure from history (b) act in a way that vaguely resembles in the most superficial manner this cartoonish caricature (c) conclude that Newt Gingrich is therefore just like this great figure from history in essence and substance.

It is, as I have noted, the apparent key to the strange and still repeated belief that he is a Deep Thinker and a Great Debater—a "real intellectual," as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commision asserted the other day, unlike that phoney "smartypants" Obama. This is a conclusion that can only be reached by someone who has never actually encountered a real intellectual or a real debater in his entire sheltered life, and who mistakes pomposity and egotism for intellectuality and simple bluster, bombast, and petulance for brilliant or nimble debating skills.

But Gingrich is the master of form over substance, perfectly attuned to all of the morally hollow and lazy habits of our culture that he and fellow "cultural" conservatives pretend to deplore, above all the standardless credulity that mistakes celebrity for accomplishment. It is perfect irony, which goes right by Gingrich and his starry-eyed believers, that he thinks that calling himself "visionary" and "grandiose" is good.

But to return to the Wright Brothers, whom Gingrich evoked in connection with his grandiose and visionary proposal to establish a permanent "moon colony" by the end of his second term. You can call the Wright Brothers a lot of things, but visionary was not one of them. They were intensely practical men, who had a remarkable command of basic engineering concepts, and who never uttered a single word about man's "destiny" or reaching for new frontiers or all the other sci-fi hogwash that Gingrich thinks makes him sound brilliant. The Wrights wanted to be the first to fly, and no sooner had they done so than they were drafting a proposal to sell their invention, lock, stock, and barrel, for $100,000 cash to the United States (or any other "great government," in their words) that was willing to pony up.

Needless to say, with the Wright Brothers, the substance came first. Of all the ways to spend money on space exploration, having a bunch of bozos boring themselves out of their gourds living on the moon is just about the most absurd. NASA by the end of the Apollo program was desperately trying to think of more things for astronauts to do on the moon to keep busy for a few days there and it was already getting pathetic then. (More moon rocks, anyone?) The moon is a desert. The moon has no resources. The moon has no air.

This a monumentally dumb idea, masquerading as a smart idea.

Now, who does that remind us of???Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7736540916913482393.post-10230141338450746042012-01-20T10:10:00.002-05:002012-01-20T18:54:09.430-05:00The moral race to the bottomMorally bankrupt ideologies go through three stages before reaching their full offensive maturity in our political culture.

What begin as recognized evils become justifiable or necessary evils before at last transmuting into positive virtues that brook no argument.
Thus, in the early decades of the republic, slavery was widely acknowledged as a corrupting evil and an affront to the principles of individual rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence; this was recognized by none more clearly than prominent slaveholders themselves (Washington, Jefferson). By the 1850s the defenders of slavery were braying that slavery was a divinely ordered institution and the bulwark of liberty itself ("the association of the white and black races in the relation of master and slave is the appointed order of God, as set forth in the Bible, and constitutes the best social condition of both races, and the only principle of true republicanism," declared a Southern clergyman in a widely circulated pamphlet published in 1851).

Likewise, there was no controversy for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries about the fact that large numbers of guns in the hands of urban saloon denizens, rowdies, wife beaters, and other assorted petty criminals and half-wits was a dangerous condition for civilized society. The NRA gun nuts evolved from saying "yes, but . . ." whenever a gun outrage or mass murder took place to their current uncompromising and sweeping assertion that guns are a positive good everywhere under every circumstance.

Accompanying this evolution to virtue is a portrayal of one's opponents as the true evil; abolitionists were cast as defying God's will and as moral hypocrites, even the mildest gun regulation proponents (those who dare to suggest that a license be required to carry a concealed weapon, or who want to keep schools and bars gun-free zones) are today denounced as un-American and enemies of liberty.

The best way to maintain a morally reprehensible position, it turns out, is with absolute moral certainty.

So it used to be that even ardent defenders of capitalism admitted routinely that it has costs and takes a human toll; and, moreover, that not all ways of making money were good for society.

Good Republican Theodore Roosevelt spoke passionately about the evils of great concentration of wealth in a republican society and the economic toll taken by financial maneuvering and machinations that produce private gain with no corresponding public good. Even the most Darwinian turn-of-the-20th-century capitalist recognized that progress leaves a trail of destruction along the way, in jobs lost with the advent of new technology and innovation, in lives displaced, in savings destroyed.

To listen to the Latest GOP Frontrunners, apparently the defenders of capitalism have now completed the evolution to smug certainty. This was most despicably displayed by Newt's not very subtle race-baiting to a cheering white Southern audience in South Carolina the other day, in which he explained that the reason poor people are out of work and on food stamps is not because the economy went into a tailspin as a result of financial speculation in the loan industry, but because they lack a work ethic and proper respect for the wonders of capitalism. Capitalism can do no wrong today in GOPland.

Romney's defense of his great business success at Bain Capital—which made hundreds of millions for him and his fellow takeover artists by stripping assets and firing people—has followed similar lines; to criticize him for what even Rick Perry aptly termed "vulture capitalism," Romney angrily retorted, was to attack "free enterprise" itself.

Of course so much of the GOP hot air about "job creators" is really referring to the worst aspects of competitive capitalism; what is being labeled as job "creation" in such measures as lowering tax rates on capital gains and dividends, providing tax breaks for offshoring assets, undermining the National Labor Relations Board's power, racing to break unions and pass "right to work" laws, and doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in state money and tax breaks to lure industries is not creating jobs at all, nor fostering innovation that benefits the greater good, but merely stealing jobs from one state to another (along with a race to the bottom in worker protection and decent wages), encouraging financial maneuvers and the merging and acquiring of companies that eliminate jobs and competition, and diverting wages to profits.

I've quoted Herbert Hoover before, but it's worth repeating what he once said: "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned greedy."Stephen Budianskyhttp://email@example.com