As published for The National Review on March 9th, 2010:

Karl Rove — the George W. Bush confidante who needs no introduction — has written a memoir of his life in politics, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, which is released today. It includes an intimate look at Rove, his family — which has come under attacks from his political opponents — and his formation as a conservative. Rove took questions from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the book — including on the roots of Rove’s William F. Buckley– and Barry Goldwater–influenced conservatism, and Rove’s regrets on weapons of mass destruction and Trent Lott. And read on to learn the topic on which Rove feels the need to expose the “sorry excuse[s]” of Pres. George W. Bush.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Early copies of your book got out, and the media, understandably, is mostly interested in what you have to say about Iraq. Well, that and Colin Powell getting push-ups out of you. From your vantage point, what’s the most important news in this book?

KARL ROVE: What I tried to do in the book is to step back, pull back the curtain, give people a clear look about what I’ve learned about politics, and share what I was privileged to see, especially during my White House years. I write about the myths that have grown up around me and those years and set the record straight in a way I hope the reader sees as well-researched, durable, and interesting.

Writing a book was an arduous, challenging process that I enjoyed more than I expected, and it left me with even more respect for people who do this for a living.

LOPEZ: You have some regrets. One of them I was surprised by: You wish you had helped Trent Lott keep his spot as Senate Republican leader. Why? Would that have been the better outcome for the Republican party? For the country?

ROVE: My point was somewhat different: Lott blames me for forcing him out as Senate majority leader following his comments suggesting America would have been better off if a segregationist had been elected president in 1948. But there was a moment when I could have offered advice that might have kept him from losing public support and forfeiting the trust of his GOP senatorial colleagues. I didn’t take the moment to disagree with his rosy (and incorrect) assessment that the issue was going away. Pressing him to do an immediate and full apology that showed he understood how badly he had offended many Americans might have kept him in the majority-leader post.

Read the full interview here

As published for The Washington Post on March 9th, 2010:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information. In November, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Holder a letter requesting that he identify officials who represented terrorists or worked for organizations advocating on their behalf, the cases and projects they worked on before coming to the Justice Department, the cases and projects they’ve worked on since joining the administration, and a list of officials who have recused themselves because of prior work on behalf of terrorist detainees.

Holder stonewalled for nearly three months. Finally, two weeks ago, he admitted that nine political appointees in the Justice Department had represented or advocated for terrorist detainees, but he failed to identify seven whose names were not publicly known or to directly answer other questions the senators posed. So Keep America Safe, a group headed by Liz Cheney, posted a Web ad demanding that Holder identify the “al-Qaeda seven,” and a subsequent Fox News investigation unearthed the names. Only under this public pressure did the Justice Department confirm their identities — but Holder still refuses to disclose their roles in detention policy.

Americans have a right to this information. One lawyer in the national security division of Holder’s Justice Department, Jennifer Daskal, has written that any terrorist not charged with a crime “should be released from Guantanamo’s system of indefinite detention” even though “at least some of these men may . . . join the battlefield to fight U.S. soldiers and our allies another day.” Should a lawyer who advocates setting terrorists free, knowing they may go on to kill Americans, have any role in setting U.S. detention policy? My hunch is that most Americans would say no.

Read the full article here

Aired March 9th, 2010:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Aired March 8th, 2010:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Team Obama says the President’s budget would reduce the deficit.  CBO says the President’s budget would increase the deficit.  What the heck is going on?  Who is right?

Let’s use Budget Bubble Graphs to see if we can understand what’s going on.

We begin by reminding ourselves that federal spending, taxes, and budget deficits have remained surprisingly stable over time.  Over the past fifty years the federal government has, on average:

• taken 18.0% of GDP in taxes;
• spent 20.3% of GDP; and
• run a deficit of 2.3% of GDP.

While there are annual fluctuations and short-term trends, these long-term averages are incredibly stable.  I believe they represent a sort of implicit political consensus about the appropriate role of government in American society, or at least a roughly stable political balancing point.

One lonely bubble

Here is that 50-year average on a simple Budget Bubble Graph.  As always, you can click on any graph to see a larger version.

As a reminder, the 20.3% of spending is plotted on the x-axis.  This 20.3% of spending must be apportioned between current taxes and deficits (= future taxes).  On average, we have collected 18.0% in current taxes, which we graph on the y-axis.  The 2.3% average annual budget deficit over the past fifty years is represented by the size of the bubble.  That size won’t mean much until we have another bubble for comparison.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 9th, 2010:

How the president debates health care.

‘When I use a word,’” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

Like the famously cracked egg in the Lewis Carroll fantasy, Barack Obama refuses to be bound by conventional English. Words like “choice” and “competition” are thrown around in ways that mean the opposite of how most Americans understand them. Once Americans do understand how he’s been using a word, moreover, it changes—in the way that a second “stimulus” suddenly becomes a “jobs bill.” Other words simply disappear.

The Dumpty dynamic is especially pronounced in the home stretch of the health-care debate. During a boisterous rally yesterday at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, the president thumped that the time for “an up-or-down vote on health care” has come, and today he follows up with remarks in St. Louis.

In the interests of furthering understanding of this debate, here are five words Mr. Obama now avoids unless forced to comment by some reporter or Republican lawmaker:

• Reconciliation. Last Wednesday the president called for Senate Democrats to use reconciliation to ram a health-care bill through Congress. In the same way he called for a second stimulus back in November without ever saying it, however, “reconciliation” did not cross Mr. Obama’s lips as he endorsed it. Instead, he spoke of a vote that is “nothing more than a simple majority.”

The White House Web page suggests the last time the president uttered the word “reconciliation” in the context of health care was a dismissive answer to a question from John McCain during the bipartisan summit. “I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate,” he told the Arizona Republican—notwithstanding that Americans seem very much interested in the procedures that led to the Cornhusker Kickback or a federal judgeship for a wavering House Democrat’s brother. Not to mention Mr. Obama’s own statement in October 2007 that “we are not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-one strategy.”

Read the full article here

As published for The Washington Post on March 7th, 2010:

I still remember shuttling all night between my office at the National Security Council and the State Department’s Election Watch Task Force. It was Jan. 30, 2005, Iraq was holding its first meaningful elections in decades, and I was supposed to brief President George W. Bush in a few hours. When morning came, I made my way to the library in his residence and described to the president how our early anxieties in watching then-Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar cast his ballot in an eerily empty Baghdad polling booth had transformed into exhilaration as more and more Iraqis poured onto the streets and into the voting stations.

The exhilaration soon gave way to exasperation. Few of us had anticipated how protracted and fractious the post-election process of forming an Iraqi government would be. With both that vote and the one that followed in December of that year, an immediate lull in violence gave way to intense wrangling between and within parties over the nature and composition of the government. In 2006, the political vacuum produced a security vacuum, and when the new government was sworn in, it faced a situation that was significantly more violent and volatile than before.

Iraq is on much sounder footing today than it was in 2005 or 2006. Yet once again, after Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the country is probably in store for long negotiations over who will share power in the new government — a battle that could strain Iraq’s fledgling political institutions and complicate the planned drawdown of U.S. forces. Although forming a government is an Iraqi affair, the United States has clear interests in the character of that government. It will preside over the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011 and determine the nature of the bilateral relationship in the years ahead. And, for better or worse, the new government may have to navigate Iraq’s role in a possible confrontation between the international community and its neighbor Iran.

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Tevi Troy on the Bill Bennett Show – March 8th, 2010

As published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com on March 8th, 2010:

“There’s no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it,” according to NBC’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd. Really? No worse crime? Not Dan Rather’s use of forged documents in a one-sided 60 Minutes hit piece intended to cost President Bush re-election? Not the plagiarism and fabrications of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and the New Republic’s Stephen Glass?

There are, in fact, an endless number of “crimes” in journalism that are worse than deciding something is a story because Matt Drudge links to it.

And while we’re on this topic: exactly who should decide what qualifies as a news story? Chuck Todd believes Chuck Todd should. Mr. Todd, of course, works for NBC and MSNBC – the latter being the most partisan and reckless cable news network in America, home to such magisterial journalists as Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow. So why should we trust Todd’s judgment over Matt Drudge’s? Because Todd is part of the “old” media, of course. Because he’s an “objective journalist” who is able to sort through all the news of the day and determine what merits attention and what does not.

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