After the Future

Prolonged/Preventive Detention: Questions (Updated)

There are lots of unanswered questions.  I'm just trying to think this through as it evolves. I hear what the civil libertarians are saying, and I understand their concerns, but I'm willing to cut Obama some slack until these questions get answered.

The problem, as I understand it, is to define what a combatant is as contrasted with a terrorist. The second is a criminal who can be tried; the first when captured is a POW who can be detained without trial until the end of hostilities. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are real wars with clearly defined combatants.  The War on Terror is not a real war; it's more like an operation designed to destroy a criminal mob, like the drug cartels. But are members of al Qaeda, for instance, clearly criminals and not combatants? Does it depend on where and how you capture them?  And what about Talibanis?  Do they wear uniforms or dog tags? What are we doing with POWs captured in Iraq and Afghanistan now? Why are these Guantanamo detainees any different? They seem not to fit into any easy-to-define category, and that' where the problem lies for the Obama administration.

If this special class of captive in Guantanamo comprises people we know to be trained al Qaeda operatives, even if they have not been captured on the battlefield, my inclination is to treat them as POWs and detain them with other POWs in Iraq and Afghanistan following Geneva rules wherever we are detaining them now. You could ask, "How do we know that they are al Qaeda operatives? Maybe in some cases it's clear.  Maybe in some cases they willingly admit it. Is that reason enough to detain them even if they haven't been caught in the act? I'm not sure. The gray area is in defining the criteria of certainty about a captive's hostile commitment toward the U.S. or other nations. I'm willing to let Obama make his case and then judge.

Obama's Gitmo/Torture Speech (Updated)

Some quick thoughts before reading anybody else's take.  My concern all along has been that what happened during the last eight years be repudiated and that the quasi-authoritarian infrastructure Bush/Cheney put in place be dismantled.  Obama's speech was directed toward people with my concerns, and it was a very strong indicator that he shares those concerns.  He clearly repudiated the policies of the last eight years, and has said that he is committed to creating a new framework that is constitutional, transparent, and accountable by its reliance on checks and balances among the co-equal branches of government.  I applaud that goal. Let the debate begin about whether his plans to achieve that goal will be effective.

He also said that he does not want to re-litigate the last eight years, and neither do I if I can be convinced that future administrations will know that they cannot break the law the way this crew has done the last eight years and get away with it. I'm not interested in a media circus along the lines of the Clinton impeachment, but I'm not sure how future lawbreakers and war criminals will know they will be held accountable if current lawbreakers and criminals are not. This is not a matter of vengeance or political payback; it's about precedent and doing what has to be done to insure this kind of thing never happens again.

He defended the refusal to release the photos and his plans for using the military commissions, and I'm willing to be persuaded that those decisions were justified, but I suspect more is going on here than meets the eye or that was admitted to in this speech.  I don't personally care about the photos themselves, but what the real message of his reversing himself on their release means is in light of several other decisions that he has made, which are troubling.  So we'll see how that plays out.

But the main takeaway from this speech is that Obama gets it. We're not dealing with an ideological idiot or a paranoid delusional. That's a refreshing change.  He's using his bully pulpit not as a propaganda platform but as a place to explain and educate.  He's treating us like adults who, whether we agree with him or not, don't have to hold our nose at the raw stench of b.s that we have been exposed to every time an administration official gets in front of a camera.

More later.

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UPDATE: I'm going to wait for more details on the "pre-emptive detention" idea. It doesn't sound good.  But without knowing more about how these particular prisoners differ from those who can be accused and tried, I'll wait before getting all bent out of shape about it. I could be wrong, but it sounds like they are more in the POW category from the Afghan war than in the terrorist category. Terrorists are criminals who can be indicted and tried and imprisoned.  POWs you just keep incarcerated until the war is over because you want to prevent them from resuming their hostile behavior in support of their cause.

POW camps are preventive detention camps, are they not?  Soldiers are guilty of nothing except having a commitment to defeat their enemies by violent means. POWs are not criminals, and they cannot be charged with crimes.  All you can do is keep them off the battle field until hostilities cease. So is the nature of Obama's dilemma that since they cannot be convicted of crimes, they can't be tried, but neither can they be released because they are known to have hostile intent, and as such it would be irresponsible to release them? I could see that as a legitimate problem for which there is no easy solution, if that's in fact what's going on.

I'm willing to cut Obama slack on these issues if it can be clearly shown that he is working to develop a new framework that remains within the constitutional system.  A lot of the civil liberties groups say that some of these ideas are worse than Bush's.  It could be, but I'm not convinced yet about that.

Cheney Assessed

Josh Marshall:

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure -- and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain't Shakespearean.

But what does it say about a political class that still affords him an ounce of credibility?

Obama @ Notre Dame II

Ivan Kenneally @ Postmodern Conservative:

As I argue in my essay, America is particularly emblematic both of modernity’s debts to Christianity and its frequent attempts to resist any acknowledgment of these debts—the historical disputes over the Lockean or Thomistic nature of the American founding expresses itself in our theoretical disputes regarding the relationship between morality and law. This struck me the other day watching Obama’s address to Notre Dame—he makes some superficial concessions to the deep disagreements Americans have over abortion but marginalizes those who object to abortion by reducing their sentiments to a purely religious (and there not rationally defensible) impulse that only has legitimacy as a matter of private conscience (versus in the public square).

Of course, this compartmentalization of private conscience and law is a caricature of both and depends upon a Straussian dualism that  has become the modern conceit. Unfortunately, Obama’s position of moral neutrality is a pretense designed to usher in his own preferred ideological commitments. It might be the case that one of our most pressing problems today is the way our own odd American Straussianism has a tendency to prevent public debate as a matter of principle, or to diminish those debates as politically irrelevant, and to transfer whatever debate is deemed legitimate from the prudence and consent of common citizens to the expertise of bureaucratic elites.

I think there's a lot of projection going on here regarding what Kenneally thinks Obama was intending as contrasted with what he actually said, but more on that in a minute. I'm largely in agreement with what Kenneally is saying here, but I have a few nits to pick.

I think conservative intellectuals frequently make a category mistake in that they conflate the cultural and political, and evaluate statements about a public figure's political positions as if they were identical with his cultural commitments. I welcome Obama's speech as one appropriate and constructive in the political sphere, but I don't know what his real thinking about abortion is outside his role as politician.  It would seem he doesn't have a strong position one way or the other as a Christian. To describe this speech as marginalizing principled anti-abortionists or to say that Obama has strong ideological commitments just seems to me to be conservative cant. If anything, Obama seems to be wishy-washy about what abortion really means for prenatal life.

A Moderate Defined

Someone who finally understands what's going on when it's at least a year too late.

A moderate, because he is always trying to split the difference, because he has no real point of view except as it has been defined reactively by others, the extremists (those who have a consistent, thought-out point of view), is someone incapable of seeing what's right in front of his nose. There is no right or wrong for the moderate there is only left, right, and the passive neither here nor there where he sits.

Quote of the Day

The most conservative critique of Obama is coming from the “left” of his party - from those concerned to uphold the constitution and the rule of law who are alarmed with his partial adherence to Cheneyesque notions of executive power and secrecy.

By commenter AlanDownunder @ Eunomia talking about how conservatives are not really conservatives anymore.  I couldn't agree more. This debate is not about the left vs. the moderates in the Dem party. It's between people who care about precedent and long-term consequences and those who care only about what's going to happen in the next week.

The difference between principled conservatives and the right wingers who call themselves conservatives when it comes to law-and-order lies in that for the latter the law is only to keep the losers--the underclass--in line.  If you're successful in gaming the system, you are by definition a winner.  Winners are the powerful, numinous people right wingers idolize, and they hardly ever deserve go to jail.  Only losers do.

Liberals don't think anybody should go to jail.  It's mean. Between liberals of this ilk who don't want to hold torturers and war criminals accountable and the right wingers who watch Fox, there's a good chance the country will never recover a deeply principled commitment to ther rule of law.

Obama @ Notre Dame

I may have more to say about it when I have more time, but I just wanted to connect it to the insider/outsider theme I've been developing recently. Here's the thing: Obama is great when he's talking to us outsiders. He doesn't seem to be that great when dealing with insiders. Talking about a controversial issue to mostly receptive people whom he will never have to deal with again is easy.  Dealing with entrenched insider power which shapes his day-to-day life is not.  The test of Obama's administration, or any administration, in the long run is not how well he deals with us outsiders, but with the insiders.

Or another way of putting is is how well he uses his broad popular support as leverage to promote a reform agenda on resistant insider factions. We heard a lot of talk about how he was going to harness the people power released by his campaign to change the way things are done in Washington. We're all still waiting for some sign he intends to follow up on that. There's no question in my mind that this guy has the capability to do it. But will he?

State of the Union

In Frank Capra's 1948 Tracy/Hepburn film, "State of the Union", the charismatic, straight-talking political phenom Grant Matthews, played by Tracy, at the end of a campaign swing comes back to his home town and he's confronted with the fact that those who know him don't recognize him anymore. He was no longer the person they knew, and they see him now as a fraud. In the beginning he was embraced by the nation because he spoke hard truths to those who didn't want to hear them. He spoke sense. He found ways to get adversaries to find common ground. He understood the greatness of the country and its ideals, and believed he could bring it back to its best self.

But there came a point in the campaign when it was made clear to him that he had to tone down this truth and good sense stuff, because while the people might love it, the insiders didn't. He was told that if he kept talking like that the "professionals" wouldn't support him, that it's one thing to have a high popularity rating, and it's another thing to get insider support needed to obtain the necessary votes at the convention. So he made his decision, and started babbling prepared talking points and sounding like the empty suit everybody loved him for not being. He justified it by telling himself that once elected, he would become himself again. But he was kidding himself and he knew it.

Listening to Obama for the last couple of weeks, I'm feeling about him a lot like the home folks felt about Grant Matthews. Here's a guy who wanted to go to Washington to change its culture, he wanted to talk sense to the American people, to return the country to its best self--but instead is co-opted by precisely the forces he wants to defeat.  He makes compromises for the greater good, and by the time he's in position to do all those wonderful things he got into politics to do, he has become so deeply complicit in the sytem's fundamental corruption that he cannot do them. He's a constitutional lawyer who has become someone who now is either unwilling or incapable of defending the constitution and the rule of law.

Pelosi & Torture

Josh Marshall:

The whole point of this storm about Pelosi is that her critics want her to be embarrassed and stop supporting a Truth Commission or any sort of examination of what happened. But she's not. She still says there should be an investigation. Her critics still want the book closed. That says it all. She'll have to stand or fall with the results of an actual investigation. Her opponents on this are simply risible hypocrites.

I don't care if Pelosi is clean on this or not.  I just want transparency, and if a food fight between Pelosi and the CIA is going to force the issue, so be it.  But give Pelosi credit for at least asking for the Truth Commission.  Let's see if she really pushes it.

The Torture Pictures (Updated)

If it's inevitable that they'll come out, and it is, why would Obama do this one-eighty in refusing to release them knowing that his doing so would alienate almost everybody who really want to get this sordid torture chapter behind us? I don't believe for a moment that the real calculus here is that it will inflame negative world opinion. Not releasing them will have a worse effect on world opinion.

If world opinion is the issue, the release of the pictures would add very little to what the world already knows. Not to release them is far more damaging because it makes Obama look as though he's involved in a cover up and he's continuing in the Bush mold--precisely the message you don't want to be sending to the world. The most important message Obama needs to send the world is that Americans repudiate torture and that we will hold accountable anyone who broke torture laws, especially those who were behind the design and the sham legal justification of torture policy. 

So if I can figure that out, so can the Obama people. So not to beat a dead horse or anything, but how is it possible to believe otherwise than that Obama and his people don't care about popular opinion; they care only about insider opinion.  They don't need popular opinion to govern; they need insider opinion. When you're campaigning it's all about popular opinion; whey you're governing, it's all about insider opinion. When you're governing, you start making nonsense public statements like his justification for not releasing the photos today that any sane person paying attention finds laughable.

The point is that Obama is clearly feeling the heat from insiders in ways that he's not feeling it from us outsiders or from world opinion. He's aware of it, but he doesn't have to worry about it until 2012. And I think it's fairly safe to assume that some of the most important insiders applying this heat are Dem leaders whose main goal in all of this is to cover their butts. 

But in this instance, the issues are too big, and they won't be able to squelch this. Everyone in the long run will be exposed, and Obama better figure out with whom he needs to align himself. Because right now he's in serious danger of colluding in an illegal coverup, not to mention that his lame, Orwellian nonsense is just plain embarrassing, and if he's doing this to protect complicit Dem leaders, that's a losing game in the long run.

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UPDATE: Sullivan states the obvious, about the typical MSM take on this.  Not that it matters.  The MSM will continue to do what the MSM does.  They have no motive to do otherwise:

David Ignatius describes the president's about-face on torture photos as a "Sister Souljah" moment. The MSM cannot see the question of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions as a matter of right and wrong, of law and lawlessness. They see it as a matter of right and left. And so an attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the war crimes they proudly admit to committing is "left-wing." And those of us who actually want to uphold the rule of law ... are now the equivalent of rappers urging the murder of white people. And the authorization of torture is reduced, in David's words, to "controversial Bush-era issues such as interrogation."

The elites will do what they have to do to circle the wagons to protect their own.

The Way It Is

Greenwald this morning:

The Senate that is refusing to confirm Dawn Johnsen is the same Senate that confirmed Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director -- with overwhelming Democratic support -- even after it was revealed that he oversaw Bush's illegal NSA spying program.  It's the same Senate that confirmed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General -- with substantial Democratic support -- even once everyone knew that he had played a key role in Bush's torture program.  It's the same Senate that -- thanks to Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer -- confirmed Michael Mukasey as Attorney General even after he refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and endorsed some of the most extremist presidential powers ever asserted in the U.S. . . .

I have one question for the great fighter-leader, Harry Reid:  during Reid's tenure as Majority Leader, Michael Mukasey was confirmed as Bush's Attorney General with a grand total of 53 Senate votes.  How come Dawn Johnsen is unable to be confirmed until she has 60 votes?

That's what a Dem majority and a lizard like Reid buys you. Apparently being a vociferous advocate for the rule of law is disqualifying.

"Manufacturing Consent" and Obama's X-Factor (Updates 1 & 2)

Walter Lippmann coined the term  "manufacture of consent" back in the WWI era, and Chomsky wrote a book about it. Lippmann thought that the mass electorate had to be governed by experts or elites who understood the issues in a way that ordinary citizens could not. And he thought that the mass public, because it was incapable of understanding the complexity of the issues, had to be propagandized into consent. American democracy at least since then has been all about the insiders spinning the outsiders--all about elites inside a bubble deciding among themselves what is good for the country and the rest of us being told whatever we were thought to want to hear to justify what we otherwise could not understand.

So that's how things work, and it's been the same with Dems in power as much as with the GOP. Vietnam, for instance, was the brainchild of Kennedy's elites who convinced themselves they were doing the right thing. Among the elites there are factions, and there is an inside game in which these factions maneuver for advantage, and those of us outside the insider bubble hear rumors about these maneuvers, but we are never told straight what is really going on. All we get is the most highly spinned stories filtered through the mainstream media, which are quite willing vehicles for those factions which they perceive to support their interests. 

So public opinion, while not completely irrelevant, is not something elites care about or respect. It's simply a problem to be managed. And management tools for that end are the use of fear, jingoism, greed, financial anxiety, moral-norm confusion. Elites need the support of the general public because of these pesky rituals called elections (which in the last two cycles the GOP elites had no compunction about subverting), but elites among the Dems and the GOP are both in agreement that the general public must understand as little as possible about what's really going on, so they can be left to pursue their interests otherwise undisturbed.

Is there no one in the media who tells a story different than the one approved of by these elite factions?  Sure there are a few, and you can find them on the web or on obscure cable channels. But what percentage of Americans watch Democracy Now! or have even heard of it?  Moyers has been good, but what's his Friday night share? There are guys like Charlie Savage who did the grunt work to expose the whole business of Bush's abuse of signing statements, but such stories are rare and we can be sure that for every one published there are a dozen squelched as the NYTimes squelched the Risen/Lichtblau warrantless wiretap story until it was forced to run it. But even when such stories stories get out, they have a minimum impact in shaping mainstream opinion. They don't usually get on Good Morning America or the Today show, or the major networks' nightly news. If they do, it's only when the story has become to big to ignore. And they'll give plenty of airtime to those who would defend the indefensible.

Spectering On II

I just came across Arlen Specter's  article in the New York Review of Books in which he lays out how he's going reign in executive power and restore checks and balances.  Apparently the article came out the day before he announced his switch to the Democratic Party, and it seems to have got lost in the shuffle. Here's his agenda:

First, I intend to introduce legislation that will mandate Supreme Court review of lower court decisions in suits brought by the ACLU and others that challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping program authorized by President Bush after September 11. While the Supreme Court generally exercises discretion on whether it will review a case, there are precedents for Congress to direct Supreme Court review on constitutional issues—including the statutes forbidding flag burning and requiring Congress to abide by federal employment laws—and I will follow those.

Second, I will reintroduce legislation to keep the courts open to suits filed against several major telephone companies that allegedly facilitated the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Although Congress granted immunity to the telephone companies in July 2008, this issue may yet be successfully revisited since the courts have not yet ruled on the legality of the immunity provision. My legislation would substitute the government as defendant in place of the telephone companies. This would allow the cases to go forward, with the government footing the bill for any damages awarded.

Further, I will reintroduce my legislation from 2006 and 2007 (the "Presidential Signing Statements Act") to prohibit courts from relying on, or deferring to, presidential signing statements when determining the meaning of any Act of Congress. These statements, sometimes issued when the president signs a bill into law, have too often been used to undermine congressional intent. Earlier versions of my legislation went nowhere because of the obvious impossibility of obtaining two-thirds majorities in each house to override an expected veto by President Bush. Nevertheless, in the new Congress, my legislation has a better chance of mustering a majority vote and being signed into law by President Obama.

I'll take back every nasty thing I have ever said about Specter if he sticks to his guns and makes this happen. But as I said in my post last week about Specter, he often says the right thing but doesn't follow through. He talks about some of that in the article that follows the material excerpted above. Now there might be something going on here I'm not savvy enough to see, but I'll assume the best for the time being. Maybe now he's a Democrat he won't have to cave to the pressure he was feeling while a Republican. We'll see. But he deserves credit for at the very least keeping these issues on the legislative table.  I'll be monitoring where this goes in the coming months.

Danner and Fein on Moyers

But that's the difference between a system that's working correctly, Bill. You don't hide things. The people can decide. And if they ratify it, and Congress authorizes it, say, "We don't want the law to be enforced." That's one thing. We don't-- this is the earmark of a tyranny. It's: "Hell with the law. We just do it on our own and in secret." That isn't the United States.  --Bruce Fein

Bruce Fein served as an associate deputy attorney general from 1981 to 1982 in the Reagan administration. He's no Democrat out for venageance.  He's committed to the rule of law, and if you want an eloquent, clearheaded articulation of what's at stake here, and how nauseating it is that the Obama administration is even hesitating on this, watch this show or read the transcript here.  Suggest to anyone you know who's on the fence about this to watch this show; it destroys any counterargument about pursuing investigations and prosecutions.

To those who fear such investigations and prosecutions will lead to a politicized media circus like that which surrounded the Clinton impeachment, Fein's idea that Obama should grant pardons to Cheney and Bush might be worth thinking about. It would at least recognize that they broke the law.  And then it would be important to move ahead with investigations and prosecutionsa of other key officials who were essential to the design and implementation of this policy.  Once again, this isn't about vengeance or even about some rigid application of the absolute justice; it's about making sure it doesn't happen again. I don't care if Bush or Cheney does jail time--Nixon didn't.  I just want Bush and Cheney to go down in history as publicly acknowledged criminals who dishonored our country and the constitution the swore to protect.  They should be thought of in the future as worse than Nixon, whose crimes didn't even come close in seriousness to those of this current lot.

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UPDATE: Larison on the same subject:

I would add that the recourse to past crimes to evade accountability for new crimes is a good argument in favor of enforcing strict accountability for crimes recently committed. If such crimes are permitted to go unpunished, their apologists will continue to work overtime to shape the debate in later years and decades in favor of the decisions leading up to those crimes, and the more time goes by the apologist will be able to fall back on one unassailable retort: “If this was a crime, why didn’t anyone in the government investigate and prosecute it as such?” Having warned against witch hunts and “criminalizing policy differences” in the beginning to intimidate the responsible institutions into inaction, the apologists will then remind the public that no charges were ever filed and no convictions were secured.

So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted.

Refusing to Party

(h/t TPM)

Twenty percent or one in five Americans identify as Republicans.  One in three identify as Democrats, which isn't that great either.  But the point is that both parties were at 30 percent in 2004, and even if you want to discount the three point uptick for Dems as inconsequential (it will probably stabilize around 30 percent again), the eight-point drop is consequential for Republicans. Is there a floor for them?  Not if they keep drumming out their moderates.

So here's the takeaway.  The movement conservative wing of the Republican Party got what it wanted since the seventies--complete control of the Party and its agenda.  The movement has had its opportunity to govern.  It failed miserably and four out of five Americans now recognize it. In 2004, even after Abu Ghraib more Americans voted for Bush than they did in 2000. This was for me as depressing as it was astonishing.  2008 was closer than it should have been because the Dems had a black candidate with a Muslim-sounding name.

But 2008 meant that around twenty percent of the electorate over and above the then thirty percent self-identified Republican core group still did not understand what the Bush administration was. The 2000 election was outright theft, but 2004 was the American electorate's shameful ratification of that theft. I know Kerry was bad news, but it was already clear to anyone who was not ideologically intoxicated and half paying attention by then that Bush/Cheney was a disaster and that four more years with this administration was going to make even a bigger mess of things, and that's exactly what happened.

Ok, so the chart above indicates that the American electorate has learned its lesson--only the hardest core of the movement conservatism still self-identify as Republicans. Nevertheless many in the media and the Beltway courtier class still afford credibility to the Republican Party that in no way correlates with its standing in the rest of the country.

Now one of the basic arguments I've been making here over the years is that American public opinion doesn't matter--ok, it matters, but it's secondary to elite opinion within the Beltway. The country has realigned, but the Beltway has not. And in the end the real question is whether a substantive shift can be effected among Beltway power elites, and it's not at all clear to me that it can.

I understand and respect principled, small-government conservatives, but I don't think they make any sense. Reducing the size of government just isn't going to happen, and it can't happen, and it's just silly to work for it.  It's not realistic, and even if it was realistic, it would create other worse, if unintended by them, problems. But I understand their concerns, and would argue that their small-government solution is wrong because they misdiagnose the problem.

The problem is not big government; it's entrenched, unelected power, which essentially dictates to elected officials and their appointees what it wants done to effect its agenda.  Unelected power doesn't need the GOP; it will do what it needs to do now to coopt the Ben Nelsons and other very corruptible Dems to get what it wants.  Pretty soon we'll be seeing those Dem numbers dropping into the twenties, and Americans will forget once again how awful the GOP is and turn to it out of disgust with Dems for want of an alternative.

So the question remains whether something else besides this see-sawing between one group of puppets to the other is possible. Can the American electorate can be educated to understand that the challenge is not to reduce the size of government, but to demand that their government and it officials be held accountable. Like the torture issue, this isn't a matter of party affiliation; it's a matter of basic principle rooted in a commitment to the rule of law. This torture issue is a test case, because if we Americans can't get it done here where the egregiousness of these crimes is so obvious, we'll never be able to get it done on issues that are slipperier.