The Madness of Barking Dogs

The session has just begun, but the media is already declaring that the Republican congress has failed. After 2 years, the only bad thing they can bring themselves to say is that Obama has not fully and properly communicated his wonderfulness to the ignorant masses. But the Republican congress is already a failure after 2 days. The attacks are as irrational as they are incoherent. The Republicans are accused of adding to the deficit and of wanting to cut the deficit, of wasting time to read the Constitution and refusing to read the whole Constitution. The race card of course parades around on its special float. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post suggested there's a racist Republican conspiracy. On MSNBC Matt Taibi accuses John Boehner of "coded racism", which apparently is racism sent by carrier pigeon.

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Characterizing this as something between hysteria and a witch hunt is being too kind. For everyone who thought that the media and its Democratic allies had experienced their meltdown during ObamaCare, you ain't seen nothing yet. We're going back to the good old days of the Bush Administration. That level of unqualified madness which looks like a pack of dogs barking every time a Republican walks by. The real victim here is not the Republican party, but the inability to address serious issues. And that means once again the American people get the boot, from a media that would rather talk about anything and everything than that the disastrous policies that their party refuses to let go of. Not that the news is all good on the Republican front. This may be a Tea Party influenced congress, but it's not a Tea Party congress. Boehner has started out on the right note, but the reforms can only go so far. And as the inevitable compromises happen, watered down further in a left leaning Senate, they'll be under fire from both sides of the river. With nowhere to go. Meanwhile we're still talking about the 2012 elections with a shortage of candidates who can win. It now seems like Rudy Giuliani may run again. The New York Post, of all papers, is sneering at the idea, but it's worth remembering that Rudy Giuliani was the original Christie, the prosecutor who reformed a liberal system and got much of it working again. It's completely fair for people to decline in favor of a more conservative candidate, but no one who can support Christie can seriously reject Giuliani. The latter has more of a serious record than the former does. Plus it appears that Christie isn't running, but Giuliani is. Last time around, an overly bold strategy and a public that associated him with terrorism, rather than reform, doomed his candidacy. But Giuliani was a reformer for most of his term, long before 9/11 came around. He turned around New York City and cracked the whip over its liberal establishment.

In Wikileaks news, Assange continues to melt down

In Wikileaks news, Assange continues to melt down. This time he's blasting the Guardian for publishing his stolen cables without permission. Assange sounds oddly like one of those evil information hoarding people that Wikileaks was supposed to fight against. Except it's not even his information that he's hoarding. This should surprise no one. Thieves are always the greediest people around. If they weren't, they wouldn't be thieves.

On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. ... In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.

So much for radical transparency.

Assange wasn't a digital Robin Hood, he was a digital robbing hood, looking for his cut

But the entire Assange story demonstrates why radical transparency is unworkable. If information is power, then redistributing it just redistributes the power. For all the hype, Assange is also an information hoarder looking to build a power structure using information. Assange was happy enough to leak information when it got him ahead. But that meant the leaking was not done in the name of radical transparency, but in the name of power. Wikileaks was no more about transparency, than thieves steal to give to the poor. Assange wasn't a digital Robin Hood, he was a digital robbing hood, looking for his cut. It's not just about Assange. It's about the system. Power can't just be tossed around. If you create a power vacuum, people will fill it. If Assange wasn't running Wikileaks, sooner or later someone like him would be. The corruption of countless human rights organizations follows from the same premise. So does the way that civil libertarians turn into tyrants. Freedom exists by the absence of power, not through the exercise of power. Once Assange and Wikileaks gained power, they began monopolizing it. And this happens inevitably because people are people and human nature is human nature. You cannot create transparency through the power of information without decentralizing the means of distributing that information. Contrary to its name, Wikileaks is centralized. Assange has made himself into a star and the center of attention. And doomed the cause that got him there. It's an old story. The revolution has succeeded. The revolution has failed. The people rise up to tear down one tyrant, only to replace him with another. Meet your old boss, same as the new bosses. Because are still people and human nature means that they want power, rather than to give up power. The obvious troubling implications this has for a new Republican congress... are well obvious. They've taken control of a portion of a centralized system. Can they do so only to let go of that power? That was the question that I asked back in March of last year in a piece titled, Can the Republican Party Take Power Only to Give It Up?

Politicians have spent too long paying lip service to the idea of protecting freedoms, when they actually mean expanding government powers. The Democratic party has embraced the notion of liberties as emerging from government powers wholesale. The Republican party has not entirely embraced it in rhetoric, but they have all too often perpetuated it in practice. And therein lies the danger. Because the idea that freedoms are a function of government, rather than a function of limited government, is a very seductive one to politicians. And how many people are prepared to run for office, only not to use the powers that they're given. Is there any member of congress who is truly willing to give up the power and the pork, though we all may have our favorites, in truth there is not a single one. The more a politician hides his earmarks and his favors to well connected figures behind self-righteous rhetoric, the more he makes a mockery of his own principles. Some may do it boldly in the light of day, others may speak boldly against one expenditure or another, but still set down the same earmarks anyway. Because the purpose of power is power, and it is painfully hard to break that cycle. To give up power for the benefit of the people. Who will spend time and money to be elected to higher office, without reaping the benefits of that office? And when a system is corrupted, it corrupts even the decent men who take part in it. The purpose of being elected today is in order to bring back that share of the treasury to one's district and friends and supporters, that one's power and influence has made it possible to drag away. The more the others take, the more each politician must try to seize to keep up with the rest, or risk being tarred as unable to bring home the bacon. And when the spending grows too much, he raises the debt limit so the wealth keeps on flowing. This is the situation before us. The concentration of power in Washington D.C. is expressed through the regulatory concentration of wealth. Taxation moves large sums of money, and the ability to continually raise the size of the debt, means that spending by politicians can be virtually infinite, as long as enough of them agree on how they want to spend the money. All this wealth has attracted special interest groups. It has made the capitol into a beehive filled with all sorts of people who want part of that money, corporations, unions, non-profits and all sorts of groups, both local and national, all want that money. And they want more than is available. The resulting battles often shape what we call politics.

Boehner has made a decent beginning of it, but the question still remains open.

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