The Trig Truther Theory: Why I'm Giving Up on Andrew Sullivan

Here's what we've always known about Andrew Sullivan, blogger: He's smart, but he's also passionate, contrarian, paranoid and reckless. On his best days, that's made him an entertaining -- if sometimes annoying -- read. (And important: His work on the Bush Administration's torture policies was crucial.) On his worst days as a blogger (we'll put aside his career as an editor) it's led him down the path of outright calumny.

But I've kept reading. Why? In part because he's just about the biggest thing going in the political blogosphere. His traffic, it's well known, forms the cornerstone that keeps other very smart blogs alive at The Atlantic's website. He's a one-man industry. In recent years, he's added staff that allowed him to function as a kind of meta-blogger -- he didn't necessarily comment on every story or debate out there, but at the very least he would point you to the most important debates happening elsewhere on the web.

I think, though, that it is finally time for me to stop reading Andrew Sullivan. His pursuit of the "truth" about Trig Palin's parentage has gone from weird to boring to, now, simply embarrassing.

It was Sullivan's self-righteous reply to guest-blogger Dave Weigel, I think, that finally broke me of the Sullivan habit. Here's the critical bit.

We journalists are and should remain the lowest of the low life forms in a political democracy. We should not be hobnobbing with the powerful, let alone bragging about it, and begging for scooplets to get Politico-style pageview moolah. We should not be garnering our reputations and angling to get on cable or playing water-slides with the people we cover.

We should be asking the most uncomfortable questions of the many frauds and phonies and charlatans who are in public office - and enjoy being despised by the legions of true-believers who actually credit the endless bullshit shoveled out into the public by frauds like Palin.

Broadly speaking, there's nothing to quibble with here. More narrowly, though, Sullivan is adopting the pose of disingenuous conspiracy mongers everywhere -- from 9/11 truthers on back through the decades -- and it goes something like this: "I'm not saying (preposterous statement here). I'm just asking questions!"

There is, however, asking questions and asking questions. I get that Sullivan believes his questions about whether Trig Palin is really Sarah Palin's son could, supposedly, be easily answered if she'd just release her medical records. I get that she's not done that. And I get that Sullivan believes there are enough inconsistencies about Palin's birth story -- how her water broke in Texas, and how she flew back to Alaska to give birth -- that warrant questioning.

At this point, though, it is fairly obvious that final answers won't be forthcoming. That doesn't necessarily mean that Sullivan should stop asking -- but in the manner of conspiracy theorists everywhere, his constant repetition of questions without obtaining new or satisfactory has crossed the line from mere question-asking into outright advocacy of a theory. The questions become, themselves, the evidence. Sullivan obviously doesn't believe this -- he's doing journalism, after all! -- but that doesn't change the reality of it.

This wouldn't be so troublesome, I suppose, except that Sullivan's characteristic self-righteousness causes him to castigate other journalists who believe their energies are better spent elsewhere. Journalists don't want to look like fools for pursuing a line of questioning that they (rightly) suspect they'll never prove, and he treats them with contempt. It's all a little embarrassing and painful to read Sullivan assault them. It feels, in fact, like following a distant relative's descent into madness -- in real time.

And to what end? If Sullivan is right and Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy to raise her grandchild as her own -- well, so what? Though some of the story might've played out in public, it's essentially a private affair. The things that Sarah Palin believes and wants to do this country are bad enough. Focus on them, instead of unprovable theories that raise more doubt in the public mind about the questioner than the object of the questions.

Andrew Sullivan has every right to keep pursuing this story. But I can't imagine it's worth my time as a reader to follow his futile pursuit. I'm removing his feed from my RSS feeder. I can find crazy elsewhere.

Yes to birthright citizenship

That's the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk. My take:

What does the 14th Amendment really mean with regard to "birthright citizenship?" Tough to say. Even the men who wrote and passed the amendment in 1868 weren't in full agreement on that point.

The amendment says that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are citizens." But the legislative debate over that language was fierce - some senators argued it surely didn't mean that children of American Indians or gypsies or Chinese would be granted the same citizenship as white people.

Other senators - notably John Conness of California - believed otherwise.

"The children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens," Conness said.

The debate continues today. But birthright citizenship - a long American tradition - should continue.

Why? For one thing, it's a matter of simple humanity. Denying citizenship to a child born here would inevitably mean that millions of young people - after having lived here their entire lives, and thus American to the bone - would someday be deported to "home" countries and cultures alien to them. They would be paying a penalty for their parents' crimes. That's just cruel.

What's more, ending birthright citizenship could prove burdensome to all Americans. Other than your birth certificate-assuming you were born here-what proof do you possess that you're an American citizen? Until now, that is all that's been needed. The potential for bureaucratic mischief is enormous.

The people who want to end birthright citizenship would be in the business of telling many Americans they aren't really Americans after all. That would be ugly, divisive and unnecessary. There are better ways to address the issue of illegal immigration.

What I didn't say (for space reasons) is that for more than a century, Americans have lived under the common understanding that -- generally speaking -- to be born here is to be a citizen here. Anti-immigration crusaders who want to challenge that understanding of the 14th Amendment, it seems, are trying to remake American custom without remaking the American law it springs from. (There's no movement afoot, really, to amend the amendment -- only to reinterpret it.) Given continuing complaints from conservatives about "judicial activism," this seems a wee hypocritical.

In any case, the column brought me this e-mail from a Florida reader:

Since the squabble over Passports for the Iroquois LACROSSE TEAM. Would they be a separate nation, the Iroquois Nation and NOT US citizens (by birth) since they consider themselves NOT under the jurisdiction of the United States?

It would seem that since they feel they are not under the jurisdiction of the US according to treaty, they must APPLY for US citizenship.

Without going into details of the Iroquois passport dispute, I'll just note that the 14th Amendment was actually constructed to exclude American Indians from automatic citizenship -- if you delve into the debate that took place at the time, it's apparent that the arguments then against birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment were explicitly racist -- but that the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 means that American Indians do have that citizenship. If they want it.

In any case, I can imagine that the Iroquois and other native tribes might also be against a policy that lets the children and further descendants of European immigrants claim citizenship here. I can't say I'd blame them.

WikiLeaks and Afghanistan: Why were civilian casualties kept secret?

Quite coincidentally, I posted earlier today on why it's important to keep civilian casualties low in the Afghanistan conflict -- even if the result is that American troops sometimes find themselves more endangered than their weaponry suggests they need to be.

Now The Guardian goes into some detail about how the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan has been more widespread than reported:

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Horrifying stuff. But the question it raises for me is: Why were these civilian deaths kept secret? And who were they kept secret from?

Well, they're obviously documented in military memoranda, so -- broadly speaking -- it doesn't sound like these were snafus committed by lower-ranking personnel and concealed from superiors. And one assumes -- again, generally speaking -- that Afghans understood their wives and sons and cousins had died as the result of coalition military action.

Who does that leave in the dark? You and me.

There's 90,000 documents in this dump. That means it is inevitable that there's stuff in there that many, maybe most of us, will wish had not seen the light of day because of its potential for use against U.S. and coalition troops. But I suspect -- as is often the case -- we'll find that lots of stuff that was classified from public view was done so more out of convenience (at best) or out of a desire to keep the public in the dark about the details of the war (at worst). The government's tendency is to make information secret far beyond the bounds of necessity. The citizenry, I suspect, will be better served because it is allowed to know the stuff that was formerly secret.

WikiLeaks and the Afghanistan War: First Thoughts

I obviously haven't had time to go through the 90,000 Afghan war documents that WikiLeaks dumped on the public today, so I'll have to rely for now on the New York Times' overview:

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

Let's take that piece-by-piece. The war, the Times says, is hamstrung by...

* The Afghan government. We knew that.

* The Afghan police force. We knew that.

* The Afghan army "of questionable loyalty and competence." We knew that.

* And a Pakistani military that might be an "unspoken ally" of the anti-American insurgent forces. We knew that.

Again, these are initial impressions, but at first glance the "revelations" seem mostly marginal. The mass of documents -- along with the showy way they came to light -- might refocus the public's attention into asking a good question: Why the hell are we still there? The Obama Administration's blustery response -- along with other notable problems in the war effort -- aren't doing much to engender confidence in staying the course.

Civilian deaths, rules of engagement and the war in Afghanistan

It's become something of a meme among portions of the right (and in the military) in recent months that American troops in Afghanistan aren't really allowed to defend themselves, and that those troops are thus more exposed to danger than they should have to. It's an argument that ignores, completely, one of the central points of counterinsurgency doctrine: The people of a country are the "battlefield" that is to be won -- and if you kill innocent civilians, you're probably losing that battlefield.

Via BBC, proof of the concept:

The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April.

They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), there were on average an extra six violent incidents between insurgents and US-led troops in the following six weeks.

The report concludes that civilian deaths frequently motivate villagers to join the ranks of insurgents.

"In Afghanistan, when Isaf units kill civilians, this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks."

Now you could argue that counterinsurgency doctrine is predicated on American adventurism abroad, that it involves us remaking nations that we shouldn't be spending blood and treasure trying to remake. I might not give you much of an argument back.

But: If you're going to fight a "long war" like Iraq or Afghanistan, counterinsurgency warfware probably gives you your best chance to succeed in some fashion. But that requires doing just about everything to minimize civilian casualties. Short-term, that definitely means your troops will expose themselves to more danger in order to save the civilians. Long-term, though, your chances of winning succeed -- and your odds of survival also increase. It's counterintuitive, sure, but it's not rocket science.

Andy McCarthy: War is peace, up is down, Islam is no religion

Andy McCarthy has a beaut at The Corner today:

The Ground Zero mosque project is not about religious tolerance. We permit thousands of mosques in our country, and Islam is not a religion. Islam is an ideology that has some spiritual elements, but strives for authoritarian control of every aspect of human life — social, political, and economic.

Get that? Islam is not a religion. That's probably a surprise to the people who pray five times a day.

But you know what? Even if you grant McCarthy his outlook -- even if you believe that Islam is an ideology -- guess what? Still protected by the First Amendment.

Marc Thiessen lies about defense spending "cuts"

This is a theme that gets repeated a lot, but I'll pick on Marc Thiessen for repeating it. Here he is at The Corner today:

The New York Times has a front-page story today on the growing momentum on Capitol Hill to cut defense spending. It is not surprising that in an age when the Democrats are showering money on almost every domestic initiative known to man, the one area they would seek spending cuts is the defense budget.

But Thiessen is lying. Let's look at the New York Times story for an explaination:

Mr. Gates is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the costs of the war. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion — 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration.

Get that: The Pentagon budget isn't going down. It's just not going to go up much, much faster than the rate of inflation. Instead, if the president and Robert Gates have their way, the budget will grow only slightly faster than the rate of inflation. That's still growth. And given that the United States is still spending as much as the rest of the world, combined, on its military -- well, that hardly represents a shirking of the "common defense" that Thiessen makes it out to be.