The Great Debate

President Barack Obama, making a statement at the White House, announced that the Internal Revenue Service acting commissioner had been ousted, May 15, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The tempest about the Tea Parties and the Internal Revenue Service is a gift for the Republican Party — and one that obscures the real issues.

Why, for example, has the IRS been so indulgent of far bigger, flagrantly partisan tax-exempt groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and Charles and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity?  Such groups spent hundreds of millions of tax-exempt dollars to influence the last two elections, in clear violation of IRS rules.

If the IRS is supposedly so zealous about tax enforcement, why has it left on the table hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore tax evasion by the wealthiest — money owed to the Treasury that could reduce the budget deficit?

As Republicans mount hearings to pillory the IRS, beginning Friday when the House Ways and Means Committee officially reviews the Treasury Inspector General’s Report on the Tea Party affair, these crucial issues will likely be sidelined. And the Republicans don’t have entirely clean hands.

President Barack Obama at a news conference in the White House press briefing room in Washington, March 6, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

O.K., you know the one about the old guys sitting in the diner:

“When I was a boy, I had to walk five miles to school in the snow.”

“Snow?  I had to walk five miles in the snow with just newspapers on my feet.”

“Feet?  You had feet?”

That’s what it feels like when you lived through Watergate and the scandal decades that followed it. I was in Washington — sentient, glued to the tube, writing about it all. And Leonard Garment, my husband and the special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, was often the one in the center of the press mob, looking as if he wasn’t going to escape with his life. Then you read last weekend’s news reports about scandal politics “sweeping Washington.” Come on, people. Get a grip.

Voters at a polling station on the outskirts of Islamabad May 11, 2013. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra Pakistan’s national and regional elections Saturday marked the first peaceful transition from one civilian government to another since the country’s founding in 1947.

As expected, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N) party, which held power several times in the 1990s, won a plurality of the National Assembly seats, and is likely to form a government.

But the winners and losers matter less than the historic process. For the first time, the entire nation was galvanized by election fever. A stunning 36 million new voters registered, especially women and young people. Voter turnout was 60 percent compared to 44 percent in 2008. An unprecedented 15,600 people ran for national or regional political office. Many from outside the ranks of Pakistan’s traditional leaders.

It has been a bad couple of weeks for conservative social scientists. First a doctoral student ran the numbers on the study by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that underpins austerity and deep public spending cuts as a cure for the Great Recession and found it full of errors. Then a policy analyst, Jason Richwine, who angered Senate Republicans trying to pass immigration reform with a one-sided estimate of the cost of making undocumented workers citizens, was obliged to clear his desk at the Heritage Foundation when it became known his Harvard dissertation suggested Hispanics had lower intelligence than “the white native population.”

It makes you wonder what Friedrich Hayek would have to say about such aberrant research. Hayek has become the patron saint of conservative intellectuals – and with good reason. He went head to head with John Maynard Keynes in 1931 in an effort to stop Keynesianism in its tracks. Hayek failed, but his attempt gave him mythical status among thinkers who deplore big government and central management of the economy.

Hayek became a conservative hero a second time with publication of his Road to Serfdom  (1944) that suggested the larger the state sector, the more there was a tendency to tyranny. Many of today’s Hayekians harden up Hayek’s carefully expressed thoughts to declare that all government is potentially despotic, while also ignoring his arguments in favor of governments providing a generous safety net for the less advantaged, including a home for every citizen and universal health care – perhaps because Americans were first introduced to Serfdom in a much truncated Reader’s Digest edition. They would do well to re-read the original.

Israel’s recent attacks on military targets in Syria have made clear the widening regional dimensions of Syria’s civil war. They have also fueled debate about whether the United States should intervene. Look, some say, Israel acts when it sets red lines, and Syria’s air defenses are easy to breach. Israel’s involvement has energized those, like Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who argue for U.S. military intervention in Syria. Unfortunately, the interventionists are drawing the wrong lessons from the Israeli actions.

The first misconception is that the Israeli strikes showed how Israel stands by its red lines in ways that bolster its credibility – a sharp contrast to the perceived equivocation of President Barack Obama’s stated red line that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game changer.”

Israel has stated that it views any transfer of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime to Hezbollah as unacceptable. So its targeting of missile arsenals believed to be capable of delivering such weapons appears to be making good on the threat. But while such Israeli action against Hezbollah within Syria is an escalation, it is not new. Israel targeted such missiles earlier in the year and has been targeting Hezbollah arsenals in Lebanon for years. It also fought a costly war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 largely to degrade (unsuccessfully, it turns out) the group’s missile capabilities. Israel was thus not acting in Syria to maintain the credibility of its red lines, but acting on specific perceived threats to its national security.

An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator is towed into the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), May 13, 2013. CREDIT: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Timothy Walter

If all goes according to plan, sometime on Tuesday the military balance of power in the Pacific Ocean could tilt to America’s advantage. The U.S. Navy’s main warships, whose firepower now cannot match the range of Chinese missiles, could gain a new weapon that more than levels the playing field.

It all boils down to a 62-foot-wide, hook-nosed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle built by Northrop Grumman. This new drone is set to launch off the 1,092-foot-long flight deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, known in Navy parlance as CVN-77 and until Tuesday morning docked at the sprawling naval base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, April 11, 2013 REUTERS/Aleksey Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Pool

Terrorism always complicates diplomatic relations.

Since the Boston Marathon bombing, the suspected handiwork of two brothers of Chechen background, Russian and American security officials have focused on a blame game.

Could better cooperation between the FBI and the FSB (successor to the KGB) have averted this bombing? Which country is responsible for the carnage? The United States, which Russia warned in 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother who was killed in the police shootout a few days after the bombing? Or Moscow, which gave Washington scant evidence to pursue in that query?

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 14, 2009. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s stunning decision this week to strike down a National Labor Relations Board rule requiring employers to post signs reminding workers of their right to organize, is a clear indication of why this D.C. court has become an ideological battleground.

Senate Republicans, in particular, are going to great lengths to preserve their partisan advantage on a court widely regarded as second to the Supreme Court in importance.

A natural gas well is drilled onto the Marcellus shale in Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 8, 2012.  REUTERS/Les Stone

Artie White, a squarely built young man of about 30, is a driller with Helmerich & Payne, an international oil drilling specialist based in Tulsa. He works 12-hour shifts, seven days on, seven days off. It’s dirty, fast and occasionally dangerous work, but White’s pay is within shouting distance of $100,000 a year. All six men on the rig team are on a similarly lofty pay scale; none has a college degree.

This is the world of shale gas and oil — which has revolutionized the U.S. energy position. These particular wells are in Oklahoma and are owned by Devon Energy Inc., one of the country’s larger independent exploration and production companies. Drills go two miles straight down, then turn to go another mile through shale rock steeped with gas and gas liquids. The shale is “fractured” with a high-pressure burst of water, sand and chemicals to start the product flowing. Once the flow is stabilized, the rig is removed and the well is connected to a permanent gathering pipeline. It should produce hydrocabons for 15 to 20 years.

Starting Friday, masses of Americans will sit with 3-D glasses perched on the ends of their noses, carried away by Baz Luhrmann’s magic carpet ride into the ur-myth of the modern age. The 3-D technology works splendidly to sweep us into the material wonder of the 1920s: Sparkling objects whiz by, seemingly close enough to snatch from the air. The dizzying pace of the era’s change comes alive in the kaleidoscopic rush of party sequences; a hypnotic hip-hop beat propelling us through opulent rooms that display Jay Gatsby’s capitalist triumph in all its eye-popping splendor.

That we’re asked to view the Land of Baz through a pair of mass-produced cardboard spectacles ‑ our heads aching slightly as our eyes struggle to reconcile two separate projections of the same image ‑ makes an uncanny kind of sense.

The Great Gatsby, after all, is a novel of double vision. Gatsby is a man who wishes to be seen, and not seen; an exhibitionist eager to show off every aspect of his magnificent wealth but bent on hiding the hustling it took to acquire. Fitzgerald reveals the power dynamics in who gets to look at whom, and the tension between what’s in front of us and what’s moving just beyond our field of vision. The observant author filled his slim book with references to eyes: floating eyes, tragic eyes, aggressive eyes, impersonal eyes. One character is known simply as “Owl Eyes.” There are eyes that approve and eyes that scorn. The motif is so prominent that artist Francis Cugat chose to feature a pair of hypnotic eyes that hover over the carnival lights of a city for the novel’s iconic cover.