This week, Bloomberg reported that the 2005 consumer bankruptcy amendments are a resounding success. It is indeed now harder for consumers to discharge their credit card debt in bankruptcy. So why are some major credit card companies concerned? The problem for some credit card companies is that they also are banks that hold consumer mortgages. By making it more difficult to get rid of credit card debt through bankruptcy, consumers are having a harder time keeping up with their mortgage payments - or are for some other reason choosing to pay their credit card bills ahead of their mortgages. Capital One's CEO reports in the article:

Of customers who are at least three months late on their mortgage payments, 70 percent are current on their credit cards

This is an astonishing figure. So the credit card department wins, but the mortgage department loses much more.  How is this happening? Is this all the bankruptcy amendment? Are credit card debt collectors really that persuasive?

Thank you to Stephen Ducat for his smart and sane rejoinder. If the last several exchanges demonstrate anything, it is the truth of the statement in Stephen’s excellent and enlightening book, The Wimp Factor: “Observers of contemporary politics, especially those who follow the high drama of presidential campaigns, are plagued by many questions. Most vexing, perhaps, are those concerned with the role of gender in public life.”

I found especially useful in Stephen’s post—and applicable to both the recent back-and-forth on this site and to comprehending the post-9/11 climate as a whole--his observation that, “As Freud understood it, the unconscious does not just refer to that part of ourselves we don't know, but concerns those things we don't want to know.”

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I end my contribution to this conversation where it began, with appreciation. Thank you, Andrew and Ned, for creating space for me at the table. I want the contributors, both fellow discussants and bloggers, to whom I have been unable to respond to know that their important insights have not been overlooked. Rather it has been the constraints of time and the exigencies of my brick and mortar day jobs that have limited my ability to reply.

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Something terribly ugly is happening in Israel. It started during Yitzhak Rabin's term as prime minister when right-wing extremists and religious fanatics joined in calling for his death and it would seem to have culminated with his assassination.

But the ugliness continues. Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin, turned out to have been no "lone lunatic," no Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan who acted for reasons that were perhaps psychological and not political.

Not Amir. Yigal Amir was inspired to kill the prime minister by a community which believed that taking Rabin's life was a necessity ordained by God. Rabin was preparing to give up land promised to the Jews, and so it was necessary to kill him. Amir has always been proud of what he accomplished. In his mind, he did it for Israel. A joyous, triumphant smirk can be seen on Amir's face in every photograph for twelve years.

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Robert Kagan’s argument that “Free Elections come First” (Washington Post, Oct 28) is based on an elementary logical fallacy: that two negatives make one positive. Kagan shows that sheer economic development does not pave the way to democratization (see China). Furthermore, he demonstrates that the rule of law—by which he means a fair, even handed law, not the one that protects people from violence, terror, and anarchy (see China)—cannot be established in non-democratic nations. However, it does not follow, as he suggests, that free elections per se can produce a liberal democracy.

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On the one hand, I appreciate it when critics take my ideas seriously enough to dispute them. On the other hand, I have grown weary of having to begin so many debates by stating what I am not arguing. Clearing the discursive battlefield of the bodies of straw men (as well as straw feminists) mowed down by Matt Zeitlin is a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. (Thank you, Susan for beginning this onerous task. I’ll try not to be too redundant of your cogent retort.) Neither Susan nor I hold any of the reductionist positions he duels with. Nothing in either of our posts, in my book, or her book (I have read it) could be construed as an assertion that any social, political, or military event was inevitable. There has been no claim that individual leaders can have no influence in the outcome of those events or on the probability that they would come about at all. Neither of us has argued that certain traumas from our collective past, hypermasculinity, sexism, gendered narratives, and unconscious conflicts are the sole determinants of political behavior. On the latter point, you might want to reread the last sentence of my post: “…an invasion of Iraq becomes the preferred strategy of counter-humiliation (in addition to satisfying imperial and economic motives)…”

That it is even necessary to say these things does raise some interesting questions. What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish its significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

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On the one hand, I appreciate it when critics take my ideas seriously enough to dispute them. On the other hand, I have grown weary of having to begin so many debates by stating what I am not arguing. Clearing the discursive battlefield of the bodies of straw men (as well as straw feminists) mowed down by Matt Zeitlin is a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. (Thank you, Susan for beginning this onerous task. I’ll try not to be too redundant of your cogent retort.) Neither Susan nor I hold any of the reductionist positions he duels with. Nothing in either of our posts, in my book, or her book (I have read it) could be construed as an assertion that any social, political, or military event was inevitable. There has been no claim that individual leaders can have no influence in the outcome of those events or on the probability that they would come about at all. Neither of us have argued that certain traumas from our collective past, hypermasculinity, sexism, gendered narratives, and unconscious conflicts are the sole determinants of political behavior. On the latter point, you might want to reread the last sentence of my post: “…an invasion of Iraq becomes the preferred strategy of counter-humiliation (in addition to satisfying imperial and economic motives)…”

That it is even necessary to say these things does raise some interesting questions. What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish their significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

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First, thank you, Matt, for now having read the book—which puts you way ahead of those reviewers who made me “cranky”--and your continued effort to express what bothers you about my thesis.

I also want to thank Amanda for her perceptive observations in her post this morning, and especially for bringing into the discussion the intriguing findings from the field of terror management theory. I particularly appreciated her point that this is historical analysis, not quantifiable science, and that there’s a place for that.

Matt, it seems to me that you have not responded to my particular objections to your first post (are you conceding that the fact that Bush/Cheney wished to invade Iraq even pre-9/11 does not devalue my thesis?) while reiterating an overall “scientific” disqualifier.

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Matt's initial post and reply to Susan's book seem to be based on an unwillingness to take a big picture stance. He writes:

Call me simple minded, but it looks to me that she is trying to weave in our reactionary cultural response to 9/11 with our militaristic foreign response.

Call me simple-minded, but I do recall that our foreign "response" to the attacks on 9/11, particularly the Iraq War, can only be considered a "response" in light of the fact that there was a full-blown, Goebbels-level amount of propaganda aimed squarely at an American public still shattered by 9/11 in order to get public support for the war. It's true that the Iraq War was planned long before 9/11, but the Bush administration opportunistically pounced on American anxieties to get support for the war. It's the both/and way of looking at things. The Iraq War was the result both of a long term neocon scam and the propaganda blitz after 9/11 to garner support for the war.

It's also true that Faludi's book isn't about the plans to invade Iraq, but about the formation of the anxieties that fed the propaganda effort. There are books about the plans to invade Iraq; I don't see why insisting that all books be on that. The anxieties that made us easy to propagandize to is a pefectly legitimate thesis for a book.

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Thank God for Paul Krugman. Reading his absolutely superb "The Conscience of a Liberal" while making my daily commute between Maryland and Capitol Hill, I almost failed to notice that every single train ride over the last two weeks has been a nightmare.

They have been so bad that I actually managed to read an entire 240+ page book in about five round trips (not bad, considering each trip is supposed to take less than a half hour).

But I've had plenty of time on stalled trains, waiting on the platform for trains that didn't come and even leaving the station and joining the walking exodus to the next stop (I am one of those guys who reads even when I'm walking).

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For my last post, I asked intelligence officials to share their thoughts about the state of intelligence reform today. This response came from an FBI analyst. It left me both heartened and depressed, and reminded me why I spent the past six years researching intelligence adaptation failures.

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I should have mentioned this in my first post, but thanks so much to the fine folks at TPM Café who saw my initial post on the book club and invited me to join in. And, of course, thank you Susan Faludi for so graciously and promptly responding to my piece. As I was nervously checking the book club throughout the day, I was worried that my post would be ignored. But thankfully, Faludi herself weighed in.

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Yesterday I ranked the intelligence reform plans of six presidential candidates (3 Dems, 3 Republicans) based on their essays in Foreign Affairs. John Edwards didn’t do so well.

This morning, I got a phone call and email from the Edwards campaign asking me to take a look at a recent speech and a newly unveiled counterterrorism plan. At first, I thought I wouldn’t, since it would screw up my nice, fair, apples-to-apples comparison (if the counterterrorism plan were so important, why weren’t any seeds of it planted in Edwards’ Foreign Affairs piece?) Considering extra campaign material for only one candidate would give Edwards an unfair advantage. Kind of like allowing extensions for some students but not others.

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General Pervez Musharraf's crackdown on lawyers, judges, and democracy and human rights activists has spawned a flurry of "yes, but . . ." commentary. Yes, we're against what he has done, BUT we need him in the fight against Al Qaeda. Yes, we're against what he has done, but the military is the only force that can hold the country together, and we can't afford to let a nuclear armed state with a significant jihadist element implode. And so forth. Lee Smith's recent article in Slate makes some of these points in defense of Musharraf, among others.

It all reminds me a bit of the statement attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt with respect to the first Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua: "he's an S.O.B., but at least he's our S.O.B." The enemy of the moment is terrorism, not communism, but one part of the equation is the same: the notion that dictatorships are somehow better equipped than democracies to promote U.S. interests.

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Matt, it’s not an enviable position to be in, going after a 17 year old for the error of his ways. But I’ve decided to do just that--for two reasons. One, you’re smart and genuinely trying to grapple. And two, you’re wrong.

And, well, three, how would you feel if my post about you said: “I should note initially that I haven’t actually read Matt Zeitlin’s post. But before you stop reading, I have read every other entry in the book club, numerous comments about his post, and a lot of random stuff I encountered while surfing the net, like a rant defending Matt against another rant in which he’s called an antifeminist, but I don’t have time to read them, so I’ll just go ahead and repeat that canard as if it’s true.....”

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Nader debating Bob Scheer in July:

If I don't run for president on a third-party line, the Democrats wouldn’t be pulled to the left.  But the Democrats keep moving to the right.  So I should threaten to run again. 

Our reaction to 9/11 has surely been bewildering. After being attacked by reactionary religious zealots, we turned inward as a nation, cracked down on civil liberties and invaded a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. Our leaders were engaging in the worst sort of Manichean rhetoric, dividing the world into “with us” and “against us”, all the while squandering the widespread goodwill granted to us following the attacks. Our culture became less tolerant, and by 2004 gays had become a new scapegoat for social and religious conservatives, with many on the Right seriously arguing over what was a bigger threat to our nation: gay marriage or Islamofascism.

Why did we react this way? Susan Faludi tells us that this sort of inward reaction, whereby we punish difference and assert a hypermasculine, retributive and protective identity to cover up for the shame of being penetrated by foreign Others is unique to America and dates back to Puritan times. But surely there is more going on. Is our reaction to terrorist attacks already narrated for us? Faludi’s thesis seems to leave little room for our own collective agency, as members of a polity, to change the direction of our culture and our politics, even when faced by the threat of terrorist attack.

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It's getting too far down and too dirty. On Fox News, of all venues, Barack Obama says:

I’m happy to talk about my record in fighting on these issues compared to Senator Clinton. In fact, she’s directly on record as having supported a bankruptcy bill that was precisely the kind of thing we’re fighting against....

She does seem to have voted wrong on a 2001 bankruptcy bill, though her stated reason for doing so was not self-evidently heinous:

Women can now be assured that they can continue to collect child 
support payments after the child's father has declared bankruptcy. The 
legislation makes child support the first priority during bankruptcy 
proceedings.  The Senate agreed to include a revised version of Senator Schumer's amendment to ensure that any debts resulting from any act of violence, intimidation, or threat would be non-dischargeable. Earlier today, this body agreed to include a cap on the homestead exemption to ensure that wealthy debtors could not shield their wealth by purchasing a mansion in a state with no cap on homestead exemption. And finally, today I worked hard to make sure that once a person has been declared bankrupt, single mothers can still collect the child support they depend upon.

Arguably on balance her vote was mistaken, but is it a hanging offense when her overall record on domestic reforms is so strong? (Cf. this shrewd, calm piece,"Is Hillary Clinton a 'Corporate Democrat'?")

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Philip Weiss is a terrific writer. A long-time columnist for the New York Observer, he now specializes in non-fiction books (he has one best-seller under his belt) and on his blog.

The blog is called Mondoweiss and it is mostly an exploration of his relationship with Israel, Jews, Zionism, secularism, etc. He's an old-fashioned Jew, always wrestling with God (not that Phil believes in Him).

Anyway, a few weeks ago Phil went to the New York conference of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting. It's a far-right group, which has been fairly successful in putting fear into the hearts of journalists who try to write objectively about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It complains to employers, organizes advertising boycotts, etc, to ensure that journalists don't stray into truth-telling that might make the occupation look bad. It is well known for putting the financial squeeze on NPR and PBS to keep them in line. Both organizations pull their punches on Mideast stories, ever fearful that CAMERA will get donors to withhold their gifts (that happened to WGBH in Boston, big time).

For you oldsters out there, CAMERA is kind of the successor to Elizabeth Dilling's RED NETWORK, a listing of "radicals" working in the media and Hollywood. It was Red Network that was consulted by producers to ensure that they weren't hiring liberals. The Red Network kept hundreds of writers from working, most notably the Hollywood Ten, who were first named by Dilling.

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Flynt Leverett previously served as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs on President George W. Bush's National Security Council and is now the Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation.

At 2 pm today, he offered this testimony, "All or Nothing: The Case for a US-Iranian 'Grand Bargain'" at a hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.

As usual, Leverett is mesmerizing in his sober, serious, analytical take on what needs to be done with Iran and how to correct our course.

From his intro that advocates abandoning incrementalism, with which I fully concur:

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Thank you so much for these insightful posts. It’s a privilege.

Susan Gardner raises a fascinating and important observation about land in America. The vastness of the continent was, indeed, a powerful force in shaping the national zeitgeist, and one I wish I had had a chance to talk about more in the book. To the Puritan mind, the “howling wilderness” was as much an evocation of Satan as the Indian “savages.” (And also a major threat to the Puritan patriarchal establishment by the late 17th century, as the second generation of sons began throwing over the traces of father rule and headed west for free land.) And yet, the Puritans—at least at first—did not respond by retreating to a simplistic mindset.

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In a discussion of yesterday’s electoral wins for Democrats in Virginia, this AM’s Washington Post, suggests an uplifting possibility:

Yesterday's initial results showed that a more long-term structural realignment may be occurring and that voters are increasingly drawn by Democrats' promises to improve schools and ease traffic and away from Republican conservatism on such issues as taxes and social policy, particularly in fast-growing Northern Virginia.

The piece stresses the point that those who played the anti-immigration card fared worse than those who stressed better provision of the services people want and need.

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NPR’s Morning Edition ran a revealing (if unsurprising) story yesterday on credit cards that consumer advocates call “fee-harvesters.” The companies give the cards to consumers without good credit and make money on fees. Capital One charged a seventy-two-year-old woman living on Social Security over $1100 for $400 in purchases. And the debt collectors sought $1500 more. (The story was based on a study by the National Consumer Law Center.) The companies will advertise that a card has a $2000 limit, but the nominal limit is actually $200-$300. That limit is actually a lie, though, because the company will then deduct (i.e., the consumer will incur instantly as debt) over $150 in fees, which leave the consumer with about $50-$70 in credit. Once a customer exceeds that limit, it’s more fees! The industry defends the practice as offering credit to consumers who otherwise wouldn’t get credit and argues that federal regulations would---you got it---hurt lower-income consumers by denying them credit.

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I don’t get it.

National security issues are huge this election cycle. So how come the major presidential candidates have paid almost no attention to fixing the most important national security weapon we have in a post-9/11 world—intelligence?

All those Democratic and Republican candidates can’t say enough about terrorism or Iraq on the campaign trail. And yet they aren’t saying much of anything about the intelligence agencies that helped lead us into Iraq in the first place and couldn’t stop the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

I know, I know. Most voters don’t stay up nights worrying about whether we need an MI5 or how many CIA clandestine case officers speak Pashto. So I went directly to Wonk Central, Foreign Affairs magazine. If serious discussion of intelligence reform would be anywhere, I figured, it would be here. Six of the candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain—have all published essays there. (Fred Thompson hasn’t written one yet, so he’s not included). Here’s how they stack up, best to worst:

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My first response is gratitude toward TPM Cafe for inviting me to be part of this conversation, and for regarding the gender subtext of our current national nightmare of sufficient importance to convene such a discussion. I am particularly grateful to Susan Faludi, whose work I have long admired, for adding her thoughtful voice to the analysis of the histrionic performances of political and cultural hypermasculinity to which we have all borne witness since 9/11. I have also been aware of some of the reductionist critiques and willful misreadings her work has been subject to by a few uncomfortable reviewers.

My own efforts to call attention to these dynamics have been met with considerable resistance as well, in some cases from surprising quarters, since my book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, was released in 2004. There were the expectable denunciations from the right – that I was a terrorist-loving, America-hating gender traitor whose aim was to create a nation of sensitive-guy castrati beholden to the nanny-state, and ruled by feminist Amazons with strap-ons. (It must be noted that not all conservative responses were so temperate.)

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Hmm, the fact that the first long string of comments entirely diverted into the finer points and plot descriptions of ‘50s Westerns wouldn’t at all support the notion that we’re a nation that retreats into a celluloid bubble at the first hint of danger, now would it? As “KAR” put it smartly in a subsequent comment, meditating on our post-9/11 cultural recoil: “I still want to know what happened to America's soul that day but I fear we're moving too far afield of the truth.”

I also want to make a few clarifications to some of the other comments:

1. To the commentator who contended that nothing seems to have really changed after 9/11:
I don’t disagree. That is, in fact, my point. The attacks on Sept. 11 revealed a cultural belief system deeply embedded in the American mindset. It existed before; it exists now; for a moment it was visible.

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The announcement of the 34-member Open Handset Alliance Nov. 5 combined elements of Sherlock Holmes, Microsoft and, of course, Google. All had various lessons to teach observers of the cell phone industry as the partnership embarks on an ambitions program of developing new software for wireless devices.

All of us could be winners -- if the biggest hold-outs would get with the program. But that's not likely.

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One day in 2004, I got a telephone call from a senior intelligence official. “You’ll never guess what I did yesterday,” he began. “I spent four hours hooked up to a polygraph. The security guys wanted to know why I was talking to you.”

I thought he was kidding.

Three years later, I have a first amendment lawyer and a renewed appreciation for tenure.

I used to wonder why more academics didn’t study U.S. intelligence agencies. Not anymore. Getting data about spies and G-men is extraordinarily difficult. And sometimes it’s very very creepy.

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One measure of a powerful book is its ability to linger and trigger lines of thought long after you’ve set it aside, and by this standard, Susan’s The Terror Dream is powerful indeed. I reviewed the work this past Sunday at Daily Kos and it turned out to be one of the most difficult reviews I’ve written; every time I’d think I’d followed implications to the end, another would raise its head, demanding to be addressed. In the end, I finally hit “publish” on the post feeling the review was seriously inadequate, that so very much more needed to be said.

Thus, I welcome the invitation to further discuss with the author and a stellar group of smart people some of the thoughts that didn’t make it into the review at the time--and some additional tentative observations triggered by Susan’s opening post in this conversation and Amanda’s essay presented yesterday.

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Sure, you make the monthly mortgage payments, but what about when you sell the house?  How much do you really owe?  Or if you miss a payment, what are you supposed to pay?  And, God forbid, if you had to file for bankruptcy, what would it cost to get current on your mortgage?  If you don't know, but you assume your mortgage company will send you an accurate bill, the lead story in today's New York Times might make you think again.

Mona Lewendowski started us on this one, but I hope she'll indulge me as I raise another point about the implications of the Porter study.

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In this New York Times article, Gretchen Morgenson reports on the bankruptcy courts’ increasing scrutiny of mortgage terms, in particular of improper fees and mathematical errors by which lenders can skim millions from America’s homeowners. According to the article, the problem is significant enough that the Chapter 13 trustee in Pittsburgh has requested that the Bankruptcy Court sanction Countrywide, a large loan servicer, for losing or destroying homeowners’ mortgage payments. Additionally, the Department of Justice’s bankruptcy office, the Office of the United States Trustee, has announced that it plans to become involved with lenders that file false claims in bankruptcy, require unreasonable fees, or fail to recognize debtors’ right to handle the debt through bankruptcy.

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Earlier this year, China’s national legislature passed a highly controversial “Employment Contract Law” (ECL). The law is the first major piece of legislation governing labor standards in China since 1994 and significantly expands the rights of many Chinese workers. While drafts of the law were being debated, multi-national companies actively opposed many provisions that would benefit workers – and were criticized for this opposition. (See here, for instance). As the date on which the law is to take effect (January 1, 2008) rapidly approaches, Chinese and foreign-owned companies, including Wal-Mart, are reported to be taking steps to evade some of the worker-friendly provisions that made it into the legislation.

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As Congress debates a new set of trade pacts there is an effort to expand trade adjustment assistance as a political quid pro quo. The logic is that new trade deals may cause some number of workers to lose their jobs, but additional adjustment assistance will offset much of the pain. This reasoning seriously misrepresents the economic impact of trade and is likely to divert the country from trade policies that benefit the bulk of the population.

The key point – which every economist knows – is that the vast majority of workers who are harmed by trade do not lose their jobs. The main impact of trade is on wages, not jobs.

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On June 17, Ahmed Rashid wrote in the WP:

Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

Who's minding the store, then?

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I picked The Terror Dream for Pandagon's next book club selection on November 19th, but even though that's a bit away, I devoured the book when it came in the mail. Faludi's painstakingly detailed examination of the gender politics after 9/11 really gave shape to the uneasy sense of growing sexist sentiments in this country. It's a sense that in order to rally round the flag, we have to puff men up with this romance of masculinity and in doing so, we have to put women down.

As Susan says in her post, the book is mostly about fantasy and images, media stories about masculine heroism (even when none exists or women are just as heroic) and subsequent stories praising women who stay on the farm. We may only now be waking up from the dream she describes, the fantasy of heroes and villains, of victims (always female) and rescuers (always male) that rushed in to fill the void when 9/11 left our nation in confusion. The nation might be waking up, but the DC punditry will not let go of their easy framing device of men=strong/women=weak or masculine=good/feminine=bad so easily. Chris Matthews seems to spend all his time lately swinging back and forth between swooning in raptures over the supposed masculine charms of the male Republican candidates and having hissy fits over the very existence of a strong female candidate in the Presidential race. The pundits love it for the same reason that old-fashioned Western stories of good cowboys, bad Indians, and cowering women have so much charm, which is that it's simple to tell and simple to understand. Come into work, cram everything that happens into politics into this sexist paradigm, and you're done with all your thinking in time for a martini lunch.

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A month ago, President Bush reluctantly signed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act despite having threatened to veto the legislation. The legislation included a new bidding requirement for student loans that could significantly change how the government subsidizes education loans--for the better.

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Maybe a TPMCafe blogger or two will slip into the American Enterprise Institute this evening (Monday, November 5) at 5:30 to hear New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus opine on “George W. Bush and the Future of Conservatism.” I’d go, but I’m far away. The political implications of the lecture are important, as I explain in The Guardian, not least because it may show how the ground is shifting under neo-conservatives’ feet.

It’s well known by now that Tanenhaus and other intellectual war hawks are writhing under the burden of their responsibility for that still-unfolding disaster and are trying to shift the blame. I’ve surveyed their efforts here at TPM and in The Nation, and more than a year ago Tony Judt stung the war’s liberal cheerleaders and apologists in the London Review of Books.

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PREFACE:

A group of distinguished intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals delivered an urgent message this morning to the chairman and the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling on them to hold the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey until he takes a clear position on the legality of waterboarding.

Their message strongly endorses the view of former judge advocates general that waterboarding "is inhumane, is torture, is illegal.” The intelligence veterans added it is also a notoriously unreliable way to acquire accurate information.

They noted that the factors cited by the president and Mukasey as obstacles to his giving an opinion on waterboarding can be easily solved by briefing Mukasey on waterboarding and on C.I.A. interrogation methods.

The intelligence veterans noted that during their careers they frequently had to walk a thin line between morality and expediency, all the while doing their best to abide by the values the majority of Americans have held in common over the years. They appealed to Senators Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter to rise to the occasion and discharge their responsibility to defend those same values.

THE MEMORANDUM FOLLOWS.

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It's a long Esquire piece, 8 pages, but it is worth laying aside your web-surfing to read this.

In 2002-2003, the Bush administration had the opportunity to settle our differences with the Iranians and, almost simultaneously, to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rice and Powell were interested (why wouldn't they be?). But then the neocons got wind of what was happening and prevailed on Bush to rebuff both peace overtures.

It's an incredible story.

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So you have professional writers union on strike, fighting over a quintisential new economy issue: digital residual rights.  A lot of folks argue that unions are well and good for unskilled workers, but professional skilled workers really don't benefit from unions.

Obviously. Hollywood unions, teachers, nurses, Boeing engineers and other professional refute that argument.  Sports unions are also some of the strongest unions out there.  Oddly, until the New Deal, the assumption was that unions were really ONLY for skilled workers, that only they had unique enough skills to make collectively withholding their labor effective.  It's actually a modern conceit that sees skilled work and unions as incompatible, since the historic assumption was the exact reverse.

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I've reviewed Susan Faludi's fine new book over at Truthdig. Here's a sample:

There was the trauma of Sept. 11 and there was the trauma that began that day. The first was the murderous work of 19 hijackers. The second began as a work of repair—I mean cultural repair, the sort that any society needs to make sense of breaches of decency—and turned into a cultural hijacking. This second hijacking began with a profound and unacknowledged sense of humiliation—precisely what was supposed to be a distinctly Muslim trait. Alongside a lot of grown-up resolve and plain decency in action, ancestral myths were reinvented—action heroes, “security moms.” There emerged a whole raft of artifacts that enshrined a certain image of the approved American way to respond—like a Hollywood montage called “The Spirit of America” that began and ended with images of John Wayne rescuing his little niece in John Ford’s 1956 Western “The Searchers.” Eventually, too, the trauma spawned a catastrophic war fought in the name of a hodgepodge of deceit and delusion.

My mother recently asked, “Honey, what exactly makes your book different than any other 9/11 book?” Nothing like a zinger from your own mother to get you thinking.

So here are my five most important findings.

Finding #1: Organizations, not individuals, were the root cause of failure
Most 9/11 books have focused on the personal drama of failure. It’s all about individuals, whose hair was one fire, who was sitting “at the center of the storm,” and the political battles they won and lost. But I’ve come to believe this emphasis is misplaced. And it’s dangerous because it suggests that a few pink slips can fix what’s broken in U.S. intelligence.

The real problem is worse. It’s called bureaucracy. Why were 19 terrorists able to kill 3,000 Americans? Because U.S. intelligence agencies never adapted to the end of the Cold War and the rise of a new enemy. In particular, the CIA and FBI were —and still are—hobbled by organizational structures, cultures, and professional incentive systems that didn’t give them a fighting chance against al Qaeda.

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Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by Professor Amy Zegart, the recent author of Spying Blind, an examination of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. An associate professor of public policy at UCLA, she also wrote Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jacob Soboroff, Sam Quinones, Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion of Susan Faludi's new book, The Terror Dream.

In the book, Faludi argues that since 9/11 the new national narrative has become one of jingoism, chest-beating and hyper-masculine posturing. This disconnect from reality, she argues, has led to some fatally ill-informed policy disasters.

Joining her in the discussion will be blogger Amanda Marcotte, The Wimp Factor author Professor Stephen Ducat and Learning to Drive author Katha Pollitt.

Previous Book Club discussions have covered the work of Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, Jonathan Chait, Greg Anrig, Jr., Matt Bai, Katha Pollitt, and Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Daniel Brook and Paul Krugman.

Thank you to TPMCafe, my co-conversationalists, and TPM book club readers for this opportunity to talk about the ideas in The Terror Dream, and, with luck, have a discussion that escapes that sound-bite media strait jacket. I thought for the first post I’d lay out my thesis and, in the course of that, take a swat or two at some of the ways it’s been misapprehended.

Six years out, for all the endlessly recycled mantras about 9/11 (how it “changed everything,” spelled “the death of irony,” et. al.), we are in many respects just getting around to talking about the deeper meaning of what’s happened in America since that awful day. As much as individual Americans reacted sanely and courageously that morning, the nation at large responded in the weeks and months and years that followed in ways that, on reflection, were truly strange and disturbing, and beg for explanation.

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Consider this:

The last two quarters of economic growth clocked in at just below 4%, the best consecutive quarters of inflation-adjusted growth in gross domestic product in four years.

Yet…about two-thirds of respondents (64%) to an ABC News/Washington Post poll out today say the state of the nation’s economy is “not so good” or “poor,” the highest negative rating in two years. Large majorities (69% in the Post poll; 65% in a different poll) believe a recession is imminent.

But…the nation added 166,000 jobs last month, many more than were expected, and the best jobs showing since May.

Yet…the share of respondents (to a different survey) reporting that jobs are “hard to get” is also at a two year high, while the share saying “jobs are plentiful” is at a two-year low. Overall, consumer confidence has been falling sharply since the summer and it too sits at a two-year low.

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Don't blame Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for all of the problems in Pakistan.

The fact is that governance in a region that is ambivalent about America, Europe and the West in general is becoming more complicated everywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. And it is America's failure in Iraq, its unwillingness to deliver on Palestine, and its bellicosity and hubris that are motivating the Muslim street against those perceived to be aligned with American interests.

If America wants to help stabilize Pakistan, then President Bush and Condoleezza Rice have an opportunity to "shock the market" and deliver on Palestine.

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At 8 pm last night, Newsweek answered the only question that matters after all the sturm and drang, Russert v. Clinton. Clinton support unchanged. Support among women unchanged. Lead over next candidate, Barack Obama, twenty points.

Maybe something other than drivers licenses is driving this election. I will have more soon on TNR.

As always it is important for D's not to misconceive the important issues in elections. Our party has a knack for gnashing its teeth about the failure of the other side to be "rational," when elections are about trust and character, and policy is only the language of these virtues in political discourse.

The Iran debate, if you can call it a debate, brings this time-honored Democratic Party way to drop the ball on the goal line into contemplation once again.

We need to be stating home truths, and ethical stances. After all, complicated thinking is necessary for designing a microprocessor or a search engine, but it is not by any means a guarantee of the right answer in world affairs. And even very subtle thinking, a la Kissinger or Nixon, is hardly a guarantee of virtue or even common sense. Nor does proof of elite education count for much; we see in the Iraq embroglio that Harvard, Stanford and Yale degrees don't assure practical or even consistent judgment, much less execution.

So let's try the simple approach for Democrats speaking

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Barnett Rubin of NYU, who knows his way around Afghanistan and Pakistan, blogs that Musharraf's motive for seizing power yesterday is to repair "the rock-bottom morale in the army, which has seen hundreds of desertions by soldiers in the field." And why's that? According to the BBC,

Pakistan's army, deployed throughout the country's tribal regions to combat pro-Taleban militants, was losing ground to them. The last straw, in this regard, came when at least 300 army troops surrendered to militants in South Waziristan. Since then, the government and its security troops have all but lost control to the militants in the tribal areas.

In other words, Bush's failure to crush the Taliban & Co. at Tora Bora has had this knock-on effect.

Talk about dominos.

How about this for a Democratic slogan: Who Lost Pakistan?