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My Really Snarky Comment

There were a couple of reasons why blogging was so light the past couple of weeks. One of which was health related, which I won’t get into here (perhaps later on my LiveJournal account), beyond to say that everything’s okay now. The other reason being that I’ve been pretty active commenting on other blogs. I don’t get a whole lot of commenters here, and sometimes I have the itch for some more interaction. Or maybe I’m sometimes itching for a fight, who knows?

Anyway, I generally don’t get too snarky (in both comments and this blog), but I’d like to highlight one notable exception. The discussion revolved around Rumsfeld, troop levels, and how to pay for more troops. But the reason I’m reposting it here is cuz I got in a real zinger (and, of course, being a blogger, I have a really high opinion of myself and want everybody else to share that opinion).

It was on Gregory Djerejian’s blog, The Belgravia Dispatch. It’s an excellent blog that I only discovered several weeks ago. Indeed, I think he has the most articulate and well-thought-through case for Bush that I’ve ever seen. I wish I had seen it before the election… not that it would have changed my mind (as I disagree strongly and still do), but so I could’ve linked to it in this post, as it’s much better than the pro-Bush posts from Jane Galt or Armed Liberal that I linked (with no disrespect to them). No matter what you think of Bush, it’s important to remember that there are intelligent voices on both sides of the debate. As I say, resist confirmation bias and keep an open mind.

Anyhow, Djerejian, despite supporting Bush, has been a vocal critic of Donald Rumsfeld for some time. Indeed, there’ve been quite a few critics of Rumsfeld from the right lately, including Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, which is not that new, nor surprising. But now it’s also coming from the likes of Senator Trent Lott, Senator Norm Coleman, Senator Susan Collins, Norman Schwarzkopf, Joe Scarborough, Thomas Donnelly, and the editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol (links via Djerejian here and here and also via Dan Drezner, another long-time conservative critic of Rumsfeld).

Djerejian’s criticism is centered mostly on troop levels, and on this post, a commenter asked:

Can someone point me to an argument in favor of the lesser number of troops in Iraq? … From what I gather on this site and others, increasing #troops from 150k to 250k is such a no-brainer that a 2 year old kid would be doing it. But so then what exactly is Rumsfeld’s motivation for not wanting to do so? …

Anyhow, if you’ve read my long-ass piece on Bush (and if you haven’t, I do highly recommend it), you can guess how I responded to him. Now I’m not qualified to comment on whether or not the troop level criticism is valid (I’ll leave that to folks like Djerejian), but assuming increasing troop levels is a “such a no-brainer that a 2 year old kid would be doing it,” my explanation for Rumsfeld and Bush’s behavior is that they simply don’t care all that much what actually happens in Iraq. I’m being serious. After all, this administration has been one of the least pragmatic ones in our history. As I later commented to him:

And the lack of pragmatism, to me, seems to be indicative of the mindset that it is easier to do whatever the hell it is you want to do and claim you’ve fixed something than to actually fix it. The lack-of-pragmatism explanation also fits quite a few examples…

Examples such as passing a supply-side tax cut to address a cap-ex recession, that huge increase in Medicare that nobody seems to like, the protectionist steel tariffs, the subsidy-laden farm bill, and the utter lack of fiscal responsibility. Not to mention why Bush has devoted more resources towards dealing with Iraq than he has with Iran, North Korea, or Al Qaeda. I discuss some of this in more detail in my Bush post.

Another issue that came up is where to get the troops. And after that overly lengthy intro, let me finally show the discussion thread that I wanted to highlight. His comments are italicized to separate them from my responses:

We’re not putting more boots on the ground because WE CAN’T. There are practical reasons why we can’t.

You’re the only one who says that we can’t. The rest of us are saying that it will be costly. But there’s a way to pay for that cost: roll back the tax cuts. We’re out of the recession now, after all, and they weren’t really Keynesian tax cuts in the first place anyway.

By “can’t” of course I mean “can’t, without incurring a cost which is too great”. … Is the lessened economic growth and perhaps loss of morale incurred by RAISING TAXES (I refuse to speak like a nincompoop and refer to RAISING TAXES as “rolling back tax cuts”) offset by the gains to be gotten by adding the N marginal BootsOnTheGround which could in principle be paid for by raising those taxes? I have no idea. And neither do you.

As the tax cut was not designed to stimulate economic growth in the first place, I doubt it will affect our economy that much at all, especially since Greenspan has been raising interest rates lately. If anything, a tax increase would merely allow Greenspan to leave rates where they are. Fiscal policy doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

Ok so you’re on the record stating that raising taxes will have no significant effect on the economy. I disagree. Now I have a better idea where you stand and where your cost-benefit analysis is coming from.

(He’d quoted me out of context to exclude my Greenspan comment, and I point that out) … The point being that fiscal policy can be easily balanced by monetary policy. Especially when it wasn’t strong fiscal policy in the first place.

Again, so you’re saying that raising these taxes won’t have a significant effect on the economy, right?…

I’m saying the effect can be easily neutralized by monetary policy. …

Does “can be” = “will be”? …

I suppose it’s remotely possible Greenspan could keel over and be replaced by an incompetent Bush loyalist.

After which he abruptly dropped that thread from the discussion.

You can read the whole thing, but I’ll have to warn you that it’s very, very long, and we weren’t the only two commenters. But I think it’s still pretty interesting before it gets nasty at the end (which was probably mostly my fault, as I kept getting snarkier, having enjoyed the above way too much for my own good).

Update 1/19/05

Donna has an excellent comment below, and I later wrote up a blog post in response.