Bush's War, Pelosi's Purse

Not to wrangle with anybody whose feathers might get ruffled and then the ruffling get blamed on me, I'll pick on Michael Kinsley and the Wall Street Jingos instead:


A confused Wall Street Journal editorial last week seemed to be addressing this question of how an elected representative might legitimately oppose a war in our democracy. It began by accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of cowardice. They "claim to oppose the war and want it to end, yet they refused to use their power of the purse to end it."

How that automatically adds up to "cowardice," I dunno, although of course that's the kind of charge the WSJ crew like to bring. Nothing if not macho are they.

So there is a "power of the purse," you see. Congress can cut off funds for a war that people don't like. In this connection, older readers might recall the Iran-contra affair, in which sources of money were found to keep the contra war going in Nicaragua without Congress's even knowing about it. This met with the enthusiastic approval of the Wall Street Journal, even though funds you do not know about are hard to cut off.

That's a palpable hit, I'd say. By the way, have the Bushies perhaps flirted a little with the idea that they might get money out of Sa‘údiyya and the Gulfie dwarfs easier than out of the Congress of the United States? The Party of Ollie North ought to be willing to look at such a plan, it seems to me. But back to Kinsley:

But what happens if you, as a member of Congress, do attempt to use the power of the purse? Sens. Clinton, Obama and Chris Dodd (also running for president) voted against the final Iraq funding bill because all meaningful deadlines and timetables had been stripped out so that President Bush would sign it. That Wall Street Journal editorial accuses these three Democratic senators of "vot[ing] to undermine U.S. troops in the middle of a difficult mission." If this is true of last week's vote, it will always be true of any attempt to cut off a war by cutting off funds. Unless the Journal is in favor of undermining U.S. troops, this makes the alleged "power of the purse" unusable.

Not quite. It really only means you can't use purse power without annoying the WSJ gentry and positively inviting them to swiftboat you. Our pols are not all paragons of fortitude, but under certain circumstances they might brave that danger, at least. Though if they had to take on Murdoch too . . . .

Advocates of the current war who enjoy the spectacle of war opponents caught in this trap of laws and logic had better hope that every military action a president chooses to engage in from here on out is as wonderful to them as is the war in Iraq. Because there is nothing war-specific about this line of argument. It would work just as well on an invasion of Canada or an aerial bombardment of Portugal. The president can do it if he wants to, and no one can legitimately stop him.

Logic and law are perhaps not quite the essence of the matter from the jingo perspective. They certainly are not going to swiftboat themselves next time some contemptible Democrat wants to muck about in the Balkans or wherever, but they'd rather not.


Of course, the president is elected, and in that sense he is acting as proxy for the citizens when he decides to take our country into a war. Right? Well, not quite. Let's leave aside the voting anomalies of the 2000 election. When this president first ran for national office, he campaigned on a platform of criticizing his predecessor for engaging in military action (in Kosovo and Somalia) without an exit strategy. He mocked the notion of trying to establish democracy in distant lands. He denounced the use of American soldiers for 'nation-building.' In 2000, if you were looking for a way to express your disapproval of the policies and prejudices that later got us into Iraq, your obvious answer would have been to vote for George W. Bush.

Check and mate.

Mr. Kinsley of course wants everybody to carefully remember all about the GOP's Floridagate 2000 before we set it all aside -- which looks a bit like trying to have things both ways.

More seriously, Mr. Kinsley has not really quite altogether checkmated George XLIII with his professional rhetoric and dialectic and logic, plus a bit of amateur lawyering. I'm not even too sure about Mr. Kinsley's facts: I recall the candidate's Philistine sneers at "nation building," but his insistence on exit strategies? (How could anybody criticize Secretary Albright's War about "exit strategies" when the whole Kosova shebang was conducted from 30,000 feet without even any proper entrance strategy?)

But the main reason Kinsley misses his mate is that defendant Dubya never claimed that if only Congressional purse power had been properly deployed, Bill and Madeleine would have been restrained from committing all their exitless abominations. Even Mr. George Walker Bush of Andover and Yale and HBS and TX is not quite that dumb.

That's MY main reason. At Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh they'll have a different main reason why Kinsley is wrong, one in which the blessèd and mysterious expression "9/11" figures prominently. "We live in a whole new world, the world of M. Bin Ládin, a world in which the former Colin Powell wimpisms about exit strategies is obsolete and out of place altogether. What we need now is quagmirization strategies, plans for plunging always deeper and deeper into our own doo-doo. And curst be she that first shall cry, 'Withdraw!'"

(Not altogether a joke, unfortunately.)

The present Crisis -- the crisis that stars Dr. Gen. Petrolaeus of Princeton and the Surge of '07™, not to mention the supportin' cast of tens of thousands of units of IED fodder -- puts the extremism of the extremist GOP to the test. Wall Street Jingoes are, as Mr. Kinsley accurately warns us, prepared to go very, very far indeed, but will the Party base and vile follow such leadership as that reliably? These WSJ editorial folks are, after all, not even the official Boy-'n'-Party leadership. By high-and-dry AEIdeological standards, they perhaps ought to be the "conservative" leadership, for if private sectorianism always beats the Public Trough, WSJ (plus or minus AEI) really ought to trump GOP. However in practice, that's only so much baloney.

Mr. Kinsley fails to see the baloney aspect, I'm afraid. He takes the hyperextreme journalistic jingoes at their own estimation without waiting to learn exactly what Rupert Pressbaron Murdoch thinks such cattle are worth in pounds and shillin's and pence. MK even supposes that these crafty spiders have woven a "trap of laws and logic." Oh, what a silly fly is Mr. Michael Kinsley, to be trapped or trappable as easily as that!

"[T]his question of how an elected representative might legitimately oppose a war in our democracy" must be about the easiest question ever asked. What you should do, as a decent political grown-up, not to mention an elected representative, is say "I'm against this war! It's a dumb idea! Stop it RIGHT NOW!" To suppose that there could be any possible LEGITIMACY problem about that approach in the USA is politically and structurally absurd. Morally, it is worse than absurd, insofar as it reveals one as a dimwit fly very easily to be trapped, or at least intimidated, by crafty right-wing spiders themselves actin' ultra vires.

If that advice does not resolve Mr. Kinsley's perplexities -- although it certainly ought to -- how about "Jesuitism for Dummies," so to call it, featurin' the SJs' renowned and ever formidable Double Effect Principle: "I don't dissupport the GOP's 'war' because I want to hurt our troops, I only dissupport this Party 'war' of theirs because I happen to think it detestably wrong in principle and in practice disastrous."

A really scrupulous adult decency might worry about this approach because "collateral damage" has become such a monopoly of the Boy-'n'-Party crew that even to touch it with an eleven-foot-pole or an SJ-warranted Double Effect Principle infringes and encroaches and touches pitch and gets defiled.

'Tis a matter of conscience at bottom, and if Mr. Kinsley's tender conscience and alert conscientiouness can't put up with "Jesuitism for Dummies" and Double Effectiveness, well, that's that. If I slink away privately thinking Mr. Michael Kinsley a bit too high-minded for THIS world, well, that's my problem, not his.