KRAUTHAMMER ON PELOSI

We now know that House Speaker Nancy Perlosi lied in her assertions that she “knew nothing” about waterboarding.

Charles Krauthammer comments:

The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time ... is not because she ... suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which [she has] just now awoken. It is because at that time [she was] aware of the existing conditions ... and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

You can believe that Pelosi ... underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that [her] personality and moral compass has remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.

But if you do, Krauthammer was, in fact, a psychiatrist.

VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE

Along the edge of the Shenandoah National Forest, May 16, 2009.

A PRAGMATIC CONSERVATIVE?

Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times:

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Thus wrote the Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in The Leopard. This seems to me the guiding principle of the Obama presidency. To many Americans, he seems a flaming radical. To me, he is a pragmatic conservative, albeit one responding to extraordinary times.

Professor Steven M. Bainbridge at the UCLA College of Law takes him down. “In what meaningful sense of the word have any of the following been ‘conservative’?”

Eviscerating the rule of law in the Chrysler bankruptcy so as to protect favored constituencies (mainly labor) at the expense of those to whom the law gave priority

Becoming a headhunter hiring and firing corporate directors and CEOs

De facto nationalization of the leading financial institutions

Federalizing executive compensation in the financial sector

Preempting state corporate law on issues like selection of boards of directors and compensation of executives

Refusing to let healthy institutions exit TARP

Bullying Chrysler's creditors

Playing shell games with the stress tests

An enormous expansion of the budget and huge budget deficits for as far as the eye can see

Raising the size of the government as a percent of GDP from about 20 to 22 on what seems to be a permanent basis

Planning a de facto federal takeover of health care, which amounts to 17% of the US economy (the public plan will almost certainly squeeze most private insurance out of the market, creating de facto a single payer plan)

“That's a conservative agenda?”

Well, in the sense that Obama hasn’t (yet) taken everything, I guess it could be considered “conservative”.