Constitutional Process Matters, Except When Digby Knows Better

Digby:

People keep asking me if I support Dennis Kucinich's call to impeach Obama for failing to get congressional authorization for the operation in Libya. Actually no, and not because Obama swears [sic] my team jersey. It's because I know that if he had gone to the congress to get authorization he would have gotten it, so the whole question seems a little bit irrelevant. They always do. Sometimes it's by acclamation as it was with Afghanistan or it's a little bit tougher as it was in Gulf War I. But the congress is not going to deny the president his prerogative to make war. Certainly, the Senate isn't going to do it --- they all look in the mirror every morning and see a future president and they want to be able to make their own wars when the time comes.

All this talk about process obscures the real question of whether or not we should have intervened in Libya and I have little doubt that if the great debate everyone thinks should have happened had happened, it wouldn't have changed the outcome one bit except to give the imprimatur of congress to the administration's decision. So, that's a big whatever. Process matters, but in this case, it's only barely relevant to the real question before us.

Regardless of Digby's prophetic powers,  I would have preferred that my congressman have his say on the floor.  I think he might well have spoken against it.  And I'd like to have given any senator a chance to do a "Bernie Sanders" for a few hours on CSPAN.   Who knows?   Some grandstanding Senator might have pushed the hour late enough that France Sarkozy would have jumped into Libya without us.  In spite of Digby's impressive claim to be able to foretell the future, I'd rather have played that particular game out.   You just never know.  A little time in debate might make a big difference.

Fareed Zakaria's Call for US Intervention in Libya

"If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years" Fareed Zakaria recently wrote, "it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences."

Zakaria's article, "The Libyan Conundrum" appears to take precious little time to consider those possible consequences.   Instead, he uses the essay to urge Obama to take aggressive action. Left on its own, Zakaria argued, the Libyan opposition might well turn into an al Qaeda "area of strength."  His reasoning behind why Libya would be more or less vulnerable to al Qaeda influence than a host of other relevant countries including Tunisia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen or Bahrain is not provided.

Zakaria should be familiar with unintended consequences. Here he is in 2003, just prior to the Iraq War, in an article sometimes cited as evidence of his journalistic "willingness to call out our government's missteps in Iraq:"

"In one respect, I believe that the Bush administration is right: this war will look better when it is over. The military campaign will probably be less difficult than many of Washington's opponents think. Most important, it will reveal the nature of Saddam's barbarous regime. Prisoners and political dissidents will tell stories of atrocities. Horrific documents will come to light. Weapons of mass destruction will be found. If done right, years from now people will remember above all that America helped rid Iraq of a totalitarian dictator."

All the above indeed did come to light, except for the WMDs of course.  But Zakaria expected those revelations to stem from Sadam's abuses.  Instead, they were our own, and are now too numerous, persistent and diverse to quantify.  Indeed, Nir Rosen recently guessed that the mountains of dead from our Iraq "missteps" will likely never be adequately documented.

But how about Zakaria's  missteps?  If the US government can be fairly accused of  screwing up Iraq beyond all recognition (which few would dispute), how can we possibly decouple that same damning assessment from journalists like Fareed Zakaria, who justified and approved that war?  And above all else, how can the American public and American policymakers continue to listen to pundits like Zakaria without remembering how badly wrong they were last time, just a few short years ago?

Requiem for Japan

Requiem, by Eliza Gilkyson 

(written following the deadly Pacific/Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004)

mother mary, full of grace, awaken

all our homes are gone, our loved ones taken

taken by the sea

mother mary, calm our fears, have mercy

drowning in a sea of tears, have mercy

hear our mournful plea

our world has been shaken

we wander our homelands forsaken

in the dark night of the soul 

bring some comfort to us all

oh mother mary come and carry us in your embrace

that our sorrows may be faced

mary, fill the glass to overflowing

illuminate the path where we are going

have mercy on us all

in funeral fires burning

each flame to your mystery returning

in the dark night of the soul

your shattered dreamers, make them whole,

oh mother mary find us where we've fallen out of grace

lead us to a higher place

in the dark night of the soul

our broken hearts you can make whole

oh mother mary come and carry us in your embrace

let us see your gentle face, mary

Unemployment: Don't Uncork the Champagne Just Yet

Unemployment, we're told, just dropped below the 9 percent rate for the first time since...forever.  I think the drop nationwide was one tenth of one percent.  Good news, for sure:

From BusinessWeek:

Factories added 33,000 jobs. Education and health care added 40,000 positions. Professional and businesses services added 47,000. Leisure and hospitality added 21,000 jobs. Construction companies, 33,000 jobs -- although a good chunk of those reflected people coming back on payrolls after January's harsh winter weather; Transportation and warehousing added 22,000 jobs.

But don't put your party hats on quite yet.  The actual unemployment rate, including those out of work for over six months or more, those who have given up hope, those who may have taken part-time work while trying to get back in the workforce--when one includes these workers--the true unemployment rate has been in the vicinity of 17%.

It's unclear to me what the trend will be going forward.  The private sector appears to be showing some willingness to hire, but we're also facing a wave of public-sector job losses in coming months--with states like Wisconsin and Ohio simply being the poster children.  The losses are going to be nationwide, and they will be painful.  As state and local governments finalize budgets and shed workers, the fallout may well swamp this very weak private-sector growth we're beginning to see.

To get a better view of what US unemployment actually looks like, the graph below (click on graph for full interactive view) tracks both the commonly used short-term unemployment figure (the 'rose-tinted glasses' view) vs. true, total unemployment/underemployment, from 1995 through 2010, including two officially-recognized recessions.  To repeat--I don't see anything worth celebrating here, expecially given what we're already seeing on the public employment front.