La La La La La

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Last night I linked to the newly discovered pre-Katrina video that shows President Bush beng told Katrina could be bad. The Associated Press reported:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

Bob Geiger wrote,

Referring multiple times to Katrina as “the big one,” Brown also told Bush that the Louisiana Superdome, sitting 12 feet below sea level, might also fall apart and create, in the ex-FEMA chief’s words, “a catastrophe within a catastrophe.”

Bush asked no questions during the briefing – can you imagine Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter sitting silently with something of this scope about to happen in our country? – and showed no evidence of grasping the magnitude of the hit New Orleans was about to take.

Then, four days after Katrina struck, Bush appeared on television and acted as if the hurricane’s potential for severe damage was a surprise to everyone. “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” Bush said in an interview with ABC News.

Via Steve Soto at the Left Coaster:

Listen, here’s the problem that happened in Katrina. There was no situational awareness, and that means that we weren’t getting good, solid information from people who were on the ground, and we need to do a better job.

–Bush, Tuesday, to ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas

Translation: Nobody told me nothin’, so it ain’t my fault. And that was a lie.

As the tragedy of Katrina unfolded we heard a number of excuses for the President’s odd behavior, including the argument that disaster response isn’t really the federal government’s job. Whatever bad happened was entirely the fault of state and local governments. But here we see Bush telling those state and local government officials that the feds were “fully prepared” to respond and would send every resource at their disposal.

Jane Hamsher writes,

Hoping to counteract the damage of the story, the White House leaked Newsweek transcripts from daily noon FEMA conference calls during and after Katrina to show how engaged and concerned Dubya was. Trouble is, these are transcripts that they had initially refused to provide to congressional investigators.

Once again, we see that the Bushies are helplessly inept at responding to a crisis, but nobody can beat ’em at political damage control. Does this, perhaps, tell us something about Bushie priorities?

I’ll have more to say later today about the ongoing struggle between Bush and Reality. But let’s think a minute about the struggle between Bush and Competence. I’ve said before that I’ve had the misfortune of working for a lot of incompetent bosses, but even the dumbest among those understood that if some Big Bleeping Deal was going in they had to at least look as if they were busily engaged with it. Yet while corpses rotted on the streets of New Orleans, Bush was merrily traipsing around the country cutting cakes and playing rock star.

Another excuse is that his staff wasn’t keeping him informed. Even if that’s true, this says to me that the President feels absolutely no sense of responsibility for keeping himself informed. Before the hurricane he sat in a room with a bunch of experts who told him there could be devastating damage and loss of life. Yet he was so disinterested in the aftermath that it took him days to catch up to what everyone else in the country was watching on television.

According to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, the transcripts the White House had initially refused to provide congressional investigators are supposed to show that the President really was engaged in the Katrina disaster but had been given conflicting information about the levee breach.

So instead of demanding better information, Bush traipses around the country cutting cakes and playing rock star. Yeah, I’m real reassured.

If the confusion had lasted only a few hours one might blame bureaucratic incompetence, which I’ll come back to in a second. But the hurricane struck on Monday and Bush didn’t grasp how bad the situation was until Friday (if then). And that was only because his staff put together a DVD of news reports and urged him to watch it.

Regarding the bureaucratic incompetence — the White House continues to have these little communications glitches, as the recent gun accident episode revealed (once again). Is Bush rattling the cages in the White House and demanding better performance from his staff? Has he ever? If so, it ain’t workin’.

Without knowing the man personally it is hard to know why the President is so disturbingly warped. Theories I’ve heard include brain damage from substance abuse and personality disorder resulting from emotionally unavailable parents. We might also reflect on the fact that in his whole life Bush has rarely if ever been in a position to have to work for someone else. Maybe on paper, on some Harken Oil organizational chart, Bush “reported” to somebody. But in reality whatever positions he was given came to him because of his family connections. He was never expected to perform any function except grace the boardroom with his presence. The work of the company just kind of happened without his participation. Maybe he doesn’t know that normally executives are supposed to do stuff.

Whatever. Bottom line, the boy ain’t right.

Maybe the Constitution needs a “twit” clause — a provision for removing a President who is pathologically out to lunch.

Goin’ South

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The Ministry of Truth is working overtime to keep the True Believers in line. Victor Davis Hanson writes that we are winning the war in Iraq and will prevail as long as we believe.

“What seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war–not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home,” he says. What seems to me most inexplicable is that Victor Davis Hanson is, I assume, bright enough to dress himself. (Fortunately, Mr. Hanson does not require further snarking; Robert Farley has snarked for us all.)

At the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, Ralph Peters writes that the reporting from Baghdad is all wrong — no civil war here —

The reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.

Terrorism, yes. Civil war, no. Clear enough?

Yesterday, I crisscrossed Baghdad, visiting communities on both banks of the Tigris and logging at least 25 miles on the streets. With the weekend curfew lifted, I saw traffic jams, booming business — and everyday life in abundance.

“Baghdad isn’t London during the Blitz, and certainly not New York on 9/11,” he continues. Possibly not, but those weren’t civil wars, either. And as someone who traveled nearly the length of Manhattan in a slow-moving car on 9/11 trying to get off the island, I can promise you that if you were anywhere north of about 14th Street there was no sign of anything amiss on that day, except for smoke in the sky. From midtown on north you couldn’t even see the smoke in the sky. One could see shoppers, people dining in sidewalk cafes, people walking dogs, all perfectly normal. Yet it was 9/11.

The moral is, sometimes one pair of eyes isn’t seeing the whole picture.

Ellen Knickmeyer reports for the Washington Post that in parts of Iraq Shiites are being told to leave their homes or be killed. That sounds rather … uncivil.

I don’t claim to know what’s going on in Iraq. It is possible that the current round of violence will settle down. But, truly, “reporting” like Mr. Peters’s sends a bigger chill down my spine than the stories of violence in Iraq. It makes me realize what dangers we are in here.

Brilliant quote du jour: “If the president actually believes that he has never wavered from his course, it makes you remember that all motion is relative.” Snort.

Update: Scott Ritter, “Iraq: A Solution to Nothing”

A Matter of Trust

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Peter Baker writes in today’s Washington Post that Republicans in Congress are rebelling against the “Bush Policy Decision Process.”

“We simply want to participate and aren’t going to be PR flacks when they need us,” [Rep. Mark] Foley said. “We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can’t answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions . . . we can’t simply do it on trust.”

In the Bush Policy Decision Process, policy decisions are made within a tightly sealed bubble, and the only people allowed inside the bubble are those who can be trusted to support the President’s policy. (Exactly how decisions are made within an ensemble of sycophants is a mystery, but the few who have witnessed this stage of the process and talked about it to outsiders say that politics is the driving consideration.) Republicans in Congress play a purely supporting role (as PR flacks), unless it’s decided the policy will be kept secret. In that case, it appears they play no role at all.

On at least one occasion I can think of, congressional Republicans loyally flacked a White House policy even as the White House planned in secret to scuttle it. You’ll remember that in 2001 and early 2002, the Bush Administration fought against the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. This opposition pre-dated 9/11; various proposals for realigning national security bureaucracies, in particular the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission, had been kneecapped by the Bush Administration as soon as it took over the White House.

After 9/11 the Bushies slapped together an Office of Homeland Security. This was preferred by the Bubble People because, as it was not cabinet level, its administrators would not be compelled to report to Congress. Republican legislators vigorously flacked for the Office and derided a bill sponsored by Dem Senator Joe Lieberman that would have created a cabinet-level DHS.

But in 2002 the White House began to worry the Democrats’ idea was getting traction with the public. Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald wrote in the Washington Post (December 22, 2005),

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in both parties were upset by Bush’s refusal to let Ridge testify as a presidential aide, and Lieberman’s bill to create a new department was gaining momentum. While many Republicans were leery about a vast new bureaucracy, they did not want to cede the homeland security issue to the Democrats.

“That was driving decisions,” one senior Ridge aide said.

In March 2002 White House chief of staff Andy Card and five other loyal and trusted White House aides, most of whom had no experience whatsoever with managing big bureaucracies or national security, began to meet secretly in the White House basement to draw up plans for the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans in Congress were kept in the dark; as far as they knew, the assignment to fight any DHS proposals was still operative.

Glasser and Grunwald wrote that when President Bush announced the new DHS proposal in June 2002,

On Capitol Hill, Bush’s allies were left tongue-tied by his abrupt shift. In late May the White House had pushed Republicans on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to oppose Lieberman’s bill. Now, Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) told Lieberman: “I’ve been having a great time explaining my enthusiastic support for a proposition I voted against two weeks ago.”

But the driving consideration had been to take the DHS issue away from Democrats, not to join them. To achieve this end Karl Rove inserted a “poison pill” into the White House DHS plan — a provision that DHS employees be non-union. The Democrats, naturally, opposed the DHS plan because of the anti-union provision. The White House was then able to go to voters and say that Dems opposed the DHS proposal because were obstructionists who played politics with national security.

Mission accomplished. And the brilliant results were on display after Katrina — the DHS, which the Bush White House never took seriously, is such a convoluted mess it can’t find its own butt with both hands and a flashlight.

I bring up this story because it’s such a beautiful example of how the White House operates. The Bushies have a pathological distrust of anyone outside their very exclusive bubble. This distrust extends even to prominent Republicans who don’t happen to be long-time Bush family cronies. Congressional Republicans are jerked around, even played for fools. The Bushies got away with it because of Bush’s political power. As R.J. Eskow explained, “They’ve got the candy.”

But now that Bush’s once-untouchable popularity is tanking — maybe not. WaPo‘s Peter Baker writes,

The signs of GOP discontent have been building in the past few months. Dissident Republicans in Congress forced Bush to sign a measure banning torture of detainees despite his initial veto threat, blocked renewal of the USA Patriot Act until their civil liberties concerns were addressed and pressured the White House into accepting legislation on its secret eavesdropping program. By the time the port deal came to light, the uprising was no longer limited to dissidents. …

… The breakdown of the Republican consensus on national security both reflects and exacerbates Bush’s political weakness heading toward the midterm elections, according to party strategists. Even as Republicans abandoned him last year on domestic issues such as Social Security, Hurricane Katrina relief and Harriet Miers’s Supreme Court nomination, they had largely stuck by him on terrorism and other security issues.

Karl Rove, the president’s political guru and deputy chief of staff, has already signaled that he intends to use national security as the defining issue for the fall congressional campaigns, just as he did to great effect in 2002 and 2004. But with Bush’s numbers still falling, the Republicans who will be on the ballot have decided to define the security issue in their own way rather than defer to the president’s interpretation.

President Bush is taking a serious hit on the UAE port deal. I said yesterday that the way the deal was handled shows a breakdown in the Bush Policy Decision Process. As usual, congressional Republicans were kept in the dark. As with the DHS flipflop, congressional Republicans only learned about the port deal when it became news. But this time, for some reason, the standard packaging/marketing/smear campaign (see the flow chart) was not already prepared and ready to put into place. The Bushies came up with an on-the-fly smear (opponents to the deal are just racists), but they had no apparent packaging and marketing plan. This meant that when citizen opposition to the plan hit Congress, Republicans had no media cover from the VRWC echo chamber. Initially they were left naked and exposed, without so much as a fig leaf of a talking point to cover themselves. The attempts at packaging and marketing that have been made since have been ineffectual.

Of course, had our federal government been working the way it was supposed to, congressional leaders would have been kept in the loop as the deal was being negotiated. And they would have had a chance to ask questions and investigate possible security problems before the deal was made public. Then, assuming the deal is not risky, they would have been prepared to defend it. Back to Peter Baker:

James B. Steinberg, who was President Bill Clinton’s deputy national security adviser, said Bush “just overstepped” and alienated allies by not involving Congress in the matter.

“Even if you’re a Republican member of Congress, you don’t buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II,” on presidential power, said Steinberg, now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff.”

Syndicated columnist Marianne Means writes,

The Pentagon says the UAE is a strong military ally and can be relied on not to jeopardize U.S. interests.

But as a nation we are growing weary of the constant refrain by this administration’s leaders that no matter what they do, we should simply trust them. Once again, no congressional consultation or public discussion took place before a secret panel sealed the UAE-port deal. This familiar clandestine approach drives members of Congress crazy.

But the Bushies don’t trust anyone outside the bubble. Yesterday we got one more story (how many have there been so far? I’ve lost count) about foreign policy experts warning the Bush Administration of what could go wrong in Iraq, and the Bush Administration ignoring them. There’s an assumption in the White House that anything that didn’t originate in the heads of Dick, Condi, and Karl isn’t worth knowing. And after all that’s gone wrong, the Bush White House still seems to be operating on that assumption.

Further, after all that’s gone wrong, President Bush still seems to think he deserves the nation’s trust. Yesterday his “explanation” of the port deal was “If there was any doubt in my mind or people in my administration’s minds that our ports would be less secure or the American people in danger, this deal wouldn’t go forward.” In other words, trust me.

But he never explains the reasoning behind policies beyond glittering generalities and platitudes. Even his few attempts at “candor” end up being just calculated theatrics. Clearly, he doesn’t trust the American people enough to level with us. We’re just supposed to trust him.

Mr. President: We don’t.

(Cross-posted to The American Street)

Staggering Ineptitude

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Via Josh Marshall — Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay write for Knight Ridder,

U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions – not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

On the “Bush Policy Decision Process” flow chart, this is the familiar step of “Policy Decisions Made” inside a bubble. And no one with expertise or a diverse point of view is allowed inside the bubble.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists – even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.

Most … incompetent … administration … in … U.S. … history …

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

Keep in mind Bush’s only response to any questions about his decisions: Trust me.

Old News

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The situation in Iraq is so volatile that conflicting spin and news cycles are bumping into each other. By way of illustration, here’s a screen capture taken from Memeorandum this afternoon.

Old News: The violence in Iraq is subsiding.

New News: Um, maybe not.

Old News (yesterday):

The US ambassador said the risk of civil war from last week’s crisis was over. …

… “That crisis is over,” US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad declared.

“I think the country came to the brink of a civil war, but the Iraqis decided that they didn’t want to go down that path, and came together,” the ambassador told CNN. “Clearly the terrorists who plotted that attack wanted to provoke a civil war. It looked quite dangerous in the initial 48 hours, but I believe that the Iraqis decided to come together.”

New News (today):

Attacks in Baghdad, including a car bomb near a Shi’ite mosque, killed at least 60 people on Tuesday and U.S. President George W. Bush told Iraqis who fear civil war that they faced a choice between “chaos or unity”.

As deposed leader Saddam Hussein returned to court after the worst week of sectarian violence since the U.S. invasion, three bombs in quick succession killed 32 people. After dark, a car bomb killed at least 23 near the Shi’ite mosque and a market.

New polls reveal that both the American public and the troops in Iraq are heartily sick of the mess Bush made and want out. This suggests to me that people outside the winger base are not listening to what Bush says any more.

As I mentioned in the last post, a whopping majority are skeptical of the UAE ports deal. Today on television I saw a clip of Bush, with his most condescending smirk, saying “If there was any doubt in my mind or people in my administration’s minds that our ports would be less secure or the American people in danger, this deal wouldn’t go forward.”

In other words … trust me.

Tonight on ABC’s World News Tonight Bush will speak to Elizabeth Vargas in an exclusive interview. Viewers will get to hear Bush flat-out deny there will be a civil war in Iraq. They’ll hear him deny that his low poll numbers concern him — “I’ve got ample capital and I’m using it to spread freedom and to protect the American people.” They’ll hear him say that the UAE port deal will be confirmed after review; the only reason Congress and the American people are concerned is that they don’t know the stuff that he knows.

Personally, I think the boy has completely slipped his tether. He could get away with that “trust me” stuff after 9/11. He’s not getting away with it now. Yet he doesn’t know any other way to relate to the American people.

Seems to me the American people ain’t relatin’ back.

The Bush Policy Flow Chart

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Da Big Nooz, from CBS —

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Excuse me while I dance about and pump my fist a few times.

The article goes on to say that Bush took a hit on the UAE port deal (7 in 10 Americans are opposed), and he’s still hurting from Katrina (2 out of 3 Americans say he hasn’t respond adequately). Regarding the port deal, whether the deal compromises national security or not, the way the Bushies handled the deal reveals a lot about what’s wrong with the Bush Administration. Thinking about the port deal inspired me to spend at least three minutes painstakingly and meticulously doodling the following flow chart:

The “Bush Policy Decision Process” works as follows: First, the President and a small group of long-time advisers carefully chosen to agree with each other get together inside the bubble and decide on a policy. This is the easy part, especially since no one with expertise or a diverse point of view is allowed inside the bubble.

Next comes a critical decision: Should the White House make this policy known to Congress and the public, or should they keep it secret?

If they choose to make it public, the next step is packaging the policy. The packaging may or may not (probably not, truth be told) be representative of what the policy actually is; the point of the packaging is purely to maximize sales appeal. For example, the Bushies might decide on a policy of maxmimizing timber production in national forests because it would be good for the logging industry. The policy will be packaged as good for the forests. They’ll call it something like the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

You’ll remember that Andy Card let it slip that the 2002 saber rattling over Iraq was a “marketing campaign.” Later we heard (from where? Maybe someone can remind me.) that the weapons of mass destruction argument was used to build support for invading Iraq because it was the most saleable argument, not because it was the actual reason. In any event, the Bushies have had to repackage the Iraq War at least two or three times, haven’t they?

Now, as part of the marketing campaign, all dissenting opinion must be suppressed. Therefore, anyone who argues against the policy is smeared and ridiculed by the VRWC. The more expertise and logical arguments dissenters might have against the policy, the harder they are smeared. Thanks to a compliant media, this has meant (until recently) most of the public never hears the opposing arguments, just that so-and-so who opposes the policy is an unhinged ultra-liberal Bush-hating Saddam lover who wants to destroy America.

So the policy goes into effect. What if it becomes obvious that the policy is failing? The Bushies go back to the “marketing/smearing” phase, repackage the policy, and issue fresh smears. At the same time, people who had been shut out of the policy-making process except to be allowed to rubber-stamp it (such as “Democrats”) will be blamed for the failure of the policy.

What happens if the policy becomes a resounding success? We haven’t reached that stage with any Bush policy, so anything we say would be speculative. Just thinking about what they might do gives me the willies, though.

If the Bushies choose the “keep it secret” option, and the policy is made public in spite of their best efforts to keep it secret, they switch over to the “marketing/smearing” plan, and the rest of the chart flows along as with the “make it public” option.

In the case of the UAE port deal, they seem to have gotten sloppy. They defaulted to the “keep it secret” procedure even though it wasn’t really secret. When the deal became public and the shit hit the fan, the Bushies hastily switched over to marketing/smearing, but by then they were behind the public opinion curve. And a lot of the people who got caught up in the smear campaign were long-time Bush administration supporters who were astonished at being called unhinged ultra-liberal Bush-hating Saddam lover who wants to destroy America, in so many words.

The Katrina disaster doesn’t fit into the flow chart anywhere, which is why the Bushies don’t know what to do about it. I’ve written before about the many times the Bushies are utterly confounded by problems they hadn’t foreseen, like power blackouts and hurricanes. But responding to an unexpected disaster that cannot be blamed on scarey swarthy foreigners it haaaard. It’s hard to get a good propaganda campaign going before people have already made up their minds the administration is screwing up. And if the disaster is domestic, people will notice fairly quickly that the administration’s efforts aren’t working. Mind-boggling ineptitude is easier to hide if it’s happening in another part of the world; like, say, Iraq.

Unrelated: A gold medal for Wales! Wales beats France in cooking contest! Llongyfarchiadau!

The Mississippi Correlation

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Speaking of South Dakota, I was just wondering if it complied with the Mississippi Correlation. The MC states that where a state’s legislature is obsessed with banning abortions, that state will have a higher than average infant mortality rate.

Yep. It does.

“The good news is that deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome continued to drop. There were eight deaths in 2004, down from 21 in 1995,” said Doneen Hollingsworth, Secretary of Health. “But unfortunately, the infant mortality rate did increase to its highest level since 1999.” …

.. There were 93 infant deaths in South Dakota in 2004, or a rate of 8.2 per 1,000 live births. That’s well above the United States rate of 6.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births for the same year (provisional data).

If you are interested in looking at comparative data on infant mortality rate in the U.S., here’s a report (PDF) from the Center for Disease Control you might like. If anyone can find a similar report more recent than 2002, please add a link in the comments.

Rights, Facts, Comments and Kibble

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Every now and then I get a comment that requires so much time and research to respond to that I decide, what the hell, I might as well write a post. Well, folks, the “Chao-Chou’s Dog Has Puppies” post attracted such comments, beginning with #72:

I could only read the post and about 1/3rd of the comments before getting depressed at the lack of liberal understanding in regards to the pro-life position. Yes, the exact point that a fertilized egg becomes “Fred” is ambiguous, and the morality of destroying that fertilized egg is hazy, and that’s why we had a large myriad of nuanced laws dealing with different aspects of abortion in different parts of the country before Roe v. Wade came along and wiped all of them out and said, in effect, that as long as the baby’s head hasn’t been exposed to air, then vacuuming his or her brains out is fair game. This shouldn’t be an either/or situation, where you either have complete restriction on abortion or no real restrictions at all. Let the states decide.

I answered this comment (#73) but I want to add a bit to the answer. In particular, I want to address the “let the states decide” nonsense.

In the United States, we have these things called “rights” that all levels of government (since the 14th Amendment, anyway) must respect. For example, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. This means Alabama can’t reinstate slavery even if 100 percent of the state legislature votes for it. And the 4th Amendment protects a “right of the people to be secure in their persons,” meaning state governments cannot dictate to a citizen (say, a pregnant woman) what medical procedures she may or may not have (for example, abortion or childbirth) without some kind of court order. The legislature cannot circumvent the 4th by writing a law that says the state can search and seize personal property whenever it wants to, for example. Such matters are off limits no matter how big a majority of the voters might want such laws passed.

I have already posted arguments (here, for example) why I think the Constitution does protect a right of privacy that includes the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion. I am not going to repeat those arguments now. If you want more arguments, head on over to Lawyers, Guns & Money. Scott Lemieux of L, G & M (whom I have met; in person he’s so intensely bright he makes me feel dim) has accumulated a substantial opus of Roe v. Wade posts. See, for example, “Roe Was Right (Part I)” and “Roe Was Right (Part II)“. If you enjoy those, you might also like “Roe Was Right (Part III).”

Now, as for the “myriad of [sic] nuanced laws” about abortion that allegedly graced the states before Roe, I refer you to this Alan Guttmacher report, “Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” In a nutshell, the “nuance” was as follows: In 33 states, abortion was illegal in all circumstances. In 13 states, various provisions had been made for medical necessity. It had been legalized in 4 states.

As I wrote in my comments, “nuanced, my ass.”

As for “This shouldn’t be an either/or situation, where you either have complete restriction on abortion or no real restrictions at all,” in fact Roe v. Wade provides for a number of restrictions, including a complete ban on elective post-viability abortions.

Now, also in my response to the post above, I provided a link to this post, which refers to the Alan Guttmacher report linked above, which says,

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.

(Now, the Guttmacher Institute is affiliated with Planned Parenthood, which I realize to some people is a partisan organization. However, both the American Medical Association and the Center for Disease Control use Guttmacher data in their reports and consider it to be as reliable as anybody else’s data.)

The commenter responded,

I did some googling, and it seems like your stats in the other post are way off. “1.2 million illegal abortions” a year before Roe v. Wade is at the extreme high-end of the possible estimates, and it includes miscarriages. I found an abstract for a paper called “An objective model for estimating criminal abortions and its implications for public policy” here:

http://www.popline.org/docs/0472/007923.html

. . . and, from what I can gather, it seems like a scholarly work that estimates that there were between “a low of 39,000 [illegal abortions] in 1950 to a high of 210,000 in 1961, or an average of 98,000 a year” and that, after Roe v. Wade, the total number of abortions increased six to eleven times, and that, strangely enough, the number of illegal abortions only dipped a little bit.

The “scholarly work” is an abstract of a paper written in 1981 by people I’ve never heard of. Without seeing the entire work I have no idea where they got their numbers, but I suspect they counted only illegal abortions that were actually documented as such at the time they were performed. Meaning, they were only counting a tiny part of the actual abortions going on at the time.

[Update: Alert reader Jeffrey Rowland discovered the “scholarly work” was sponsored by “Americans United for Life.” So much for that.]

Any number anyone comes up with is an estimate. But when you consider that that in 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions — just one hospital, and no doubt those were only a fraction of the women who aborted in the area served by the hospital — then a “high” of 210,000 abortions nationwide seems a tad low. (Women in more affluent neighborhoods got safer abortions and were less likely to turn up in hospital emergency rooms.)

As for, “strangely enough, the number of illegal abortions only dipped a little bit” — strangely enough, after Roe, the number of women who turned up in emergency rooms with complications from back-alley abortions just about stopped. And which abortions were “illegal” after Roe, pray tell? I think someone is confused.

The total number of abortions per year did go up after Roe v. Wade (although not “six to eleven times”). This is a phenomenon that seems to nearly always happen when abortions are legalized; the rate goes up for a time, and then settles back down again in a few years. (See “Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society and Abortion Worldwide [PDF] Report on unplanned pregnancy and abortion around the world” [Alan Guttmacher, June 1999] pp.28-29.) This happened in the U.S.; rates began to come down around 1990 and declined steadily through the 1990s.

The fact remains that making abortion illegal doesn’t stop abortion. We see this in nations throughout the world; there is no correlation between abortion law and abortion rate. I wrote about this at length here. And the fact remains that where abortion is illegal women will, in desperation, abort themselves or submit to back-alley abortions that are enormously dangerous. And some of them will suffer permanent injury. And some of them will die.

Finally, we get this brilliant argument:

Honestly, I have more animosity towards Roe v. Wade than I do towards abortion. And my animosity stems from the fact that it was an authoritarian, anti-democratic decision that has polarized this country in a terrible way.

Look at it this way — Christians probably think abortion and prostitution are about equally bad. I mean, one of the ten commandments is about adultery. However, do you see hundreds of thousands of people marching to Nevada every year to protest legalized prostitution? No. I posit that the reason why is that prostitution hasn’t been forced on the entire country, and that the only areas that have legalized it are those communities that are okay with it.

That’s exactly what people said about Brown v. Board of Education, you know. Are you old enough to remember the years in which school desegregation had the whole nation up in arms? I am. I believe it was a worse conflagration than what was caused by Roe. (See also “The Long Tentacles of Conservative Revisionism” by Scott Lemieux.) By your logic, we should have maintained Jim Crow laws because declaring them unconstitutional got so many people riled up (and hollering about “states’ rights”).

Sometimes liberty and justice get messy. Deal with it.

Update: See also August J. Pollak.

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Today’s Bob Herbert column, courtesy of True Blue Liberal —

Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to a national television and radio audience in January 1961. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said. He recognized that this development was essential to the defense of the nation. But he warned that “we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” he said. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” It was as if this president, who understood war as well or better than any American who ever lived, were somehow able to peer into the future and see the tail of the military-industrial complex wagging the dog of American life, with inevitably disastrous consequences. …

… The way you keep the wars coming is to keep the populace in a state of perpetual fear. That allows you to continue the insane feeding of the military-industrial complex at the expense of the rest of the nation’s needs. “Before long,” said Mr. Jarecki in an interview, “the military ends up so overempowered that the rest of your national life has been allowed to atrophy.”

Be sure to read the whole thing.