Rational Philosophy

Congress And The Bailout

I just deleted several hundred “spam” comments from my comment moderation queue. The mysterious originators of these comments, which are then automatically generated in huge numbers around the Internet, aim to attract or influence commercial traffic in their direction. I don’t really care whether the operation works. I presume it does, since otherwise why would they keep doing it? But I care about having to delete all of those messages when I have better things to do with my time.

A couple of weeks ago I was on the phone with my friend in Australia just after the AIG bailout and he mentioned that had AIG gone under he would have been left in the hole for several hundred thousand dollars. Many clients of his medical business have insurance with AIG. The fingers of this particular invisible hand spread far.

But why did AIG, with its trillion dollar balance sheet and stalwart history of conservative risk management need to be bailed out?

Joseph P. Cassano AIG Financial Products

Well, if the NY Times has its story straight, AIG’s problems were catalyzed by the overreaching overconfident overpowerful work of one man — Joseph J. Cassano, a former executive with Drexel Burnham Lambert — Michael “the-junk-bond-king” Milken’s old investment bank. Cassano helped found AIG Financial Products in London and built it into a very profitable, very independent entity within AIG that leveraged AIG’s tremendous financial strength and standing to sell ever more speculative products. AIG Financial Products, being drastically overleveraged, eventually imploded. Cassano left and now lives quietly in a Knightsbridge town-house. (I love this picture from the NY Times; Cassano peering around the corner in his bright red shirt like a con at the perimeter of the prison yard.)

When McCain debated Obama last week after supposedly spending several days in intense economy-recovery sessions he didn’t seem to have much of a grasp on what had happened to cause the problems in the first place, nor on what needed to be done to avoid them happening again. It was as if invoking the specter of regulation caused him such shudders that it wobbled his brain off-kilter.

John McCain at a loss

Ideally, regulation is what we do when we don’t want something bad to happen. Avoiding regulation is something we do when we care more about a belief or concept than real-world consequences.

The Bush administration has been bad for America and the world for many reasons, but there has been one overriding and all-pervasive reason for its badness — the arrogance of favoring faith over fact. The administration has consistently argued for, lied for, evaded for, invaded for, and bullied for its ideologies in the face of the evidence against them. They have set the bar very low for what a government can do to manipulate and subvert in the name of ideology and get away with it.

All that being said, when the congress began beating up on Paulsen and his three page proposal I felt for the first time in a long time that we were seeing government in action. Rusty, creaking, inept as it may have been, the house gave us the hint of an idea of what it should be doing for us — working in our best interests. For once we got a glimpse of the invisible hand.

The Invisible Hand Part 1

Related posts from around the web:

Walter Williams and Bryan D. Jones: The Most Important Election … - Choose McCain and likely opt for a third term of the governing philosophy that has pushed the United States back toward the economy of the Great Depression. Select McCain and keep the governing approach of unregulated free market …

McCain Touts Plan to Privatize Bailout [3rd attempt] - “The problem with the earlier plan,” McCain explains, “is that it relies on big government to save the banks. My plan puts the bailout in the hands of the free market, which is the only solution that works in times like these.” …

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.

On the rise in America’s prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US’s penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn’t a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration’s disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration’s blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn’t limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration’s conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we’ve seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.

(OK, that’s one of my four lies for today.)

On lying and its uses: Rudy, McCain, Bush, and your average guy.

After Giuliani’s thankfully dismal showing in Florida, the rush to spout fibs found Giuliani and McCain vying for who could tell the biggest whopper. First Giuliani suggested that he had failed in Florida because his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries, whereas, in fact, Giuliani spent a lot of money and time in New Hampshire before retreating from that state. McCain countered with the gracious and fallacious compliment that Giuliani had “invested his heart and soul” in the race, which of course was exactly what Giuliani hadn’t done, otherwise he would have performed much better. McCain followed this up swiftly with an upper-cut of an untruth declaring that Giuliani had “conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.” Giuliani tried to recover with a transparent falsehood of his own; that he had run “a campaign of ideas.” But McCain, again, clearly had him beat.

On a less happy and more serious note, the editorial board of the NY Times brings our attention to the latest lies from George W. Bush. If you’re going to tell lies, I suppose that delivering them in a state of the union address endows them with a deep and lasting sense of moment and history. The Bush legacy will be in large part one of mass deception – about weapons of mass destruction, the illegal activities of the government and its agencies, and the intent and actions of Bush himself. As The Times points out, Bush’s reconciliatory rhetoric conflicts with his deeds, yet again, as he refuses to respect certain new legal provisions that would increase oversight of military contractors, their actions, and the acts of government agencies by asserting in his signing statement that these provisions step on his constitutional powers.

Bush is an inveterate and habitual liar. One can presume, by studying his behavior and his words, that he feels no remorse about his lies and that he believes the ends justify the means.

Which brings me to a recent study that finds that people admit to telling about four untruths per day and that two-thirds of those polled don’t feel guilty about lying. Now, statistics can be misleading, but in this case, as one commentor wryly observed, asking people to admit to how many lies they tell will probably result in under-reporting rather than over-reporting. (Another study lends support to this theory by finding that people underreport the number of their sexual partners unless they’re told that they’re hooked up to a lie-detector.)

The actual numbers concern me less than the philosophy of lying.

We lie, it seems, to avoid unwanted repercussions, to sway the course of events by untruth. This applies to the fib “no, you don’t sound bitter” as well as to the deception of a nation so that you can fill your cronies’ coffers. 

Essayist Harold Nicolson defined a person who tells the truth as ’someone who, when they tell a lie, is careful not to forget they have done so, and who takes infinite precautions to prevent being found out.’ This is humorous, of course, but hints at the “humanness” of lying. Surely very few people habitually tell the truth, and those that do would be considered odd and unnecessarily blunt. One generally likes to be lied to if one looks lousy or has made a fool of onesself, for instance.

Is this a distinction that helps us? Lies are OK if the person wants to be lied to.

And what about lies that avoid unreasonable conflict? If we know that someone will react unreasonably to the truth, does that justify a lie?

It seems that we get much more worked up about the lies people tell to get away with something, to avoid being held accountable for their actions, unless the accountability is unreasonable or irrational. (We like the idea of Robin Hood. And we support the concept of the resistance fighter who lies to the oppressing power.)

The intent of the lie and the legitimacy of the repercussions of the truth then seems to be far more important, rationally speaking, than the act of lying itself.

Which brings us to the concept of honesty. When we speak of honesty as a virtue, we are really speaking of the bravery that comes with telling a difficult truth, of risking the consequences. What seems to be lacking in politics today is the bravery to tell difficult truths. One by one the candidates shift positions in order to sound more appealing to the voters, or to cast shadow on an opponent. McCain has done it, Romney has done it, Clinton has done it, Obama has been accused of doing it (did he snub Hillary Clinton deliberately or unintentionally before the state of the union address?)

And I wonder if we were to be served up an honest politician, would we elect them, truth and all, or would we prefer to be lied to?

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My apologies for being off the air for the past 4 days. The servers at the data center that hosts my site had technical problems, in the course of fixing which my site was inadvertently deleted… (Of course, I was highly irrational while my site was down, fearing that it would never be back.)

I have a post to load up from Friday and will resume my regular Monday through Friday daily posting schedule tomorrow.

But, over the weekend, I did find time to load up three YouTube videos of new songs, one of which reprises my feelings about the Bush presidency.

The Ballad of George W. Bush

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On the FDAs approval of cloned animal products, Bush’s approval of Mubarak, and the NY Times’ disapproval of electronic voting.

A few days ago I wrote about the danger of messing with nature. Nature has taken millions upon millions of years to produce the world we live in, and its only guiding principle has been to constantly winnow out loose ends and poor choices. Evolution ensures that nature’s mistakes either become successes or are self-healing. When humans get involved in rejiggering nature we risk unforseen consequences.

It’s hard to blame the FDA for approving the sale of food products from the progeny of cloned livestock. The FDA’s job is not to play moral judge, nor to philosophize over the rightness of second-guessing nature. Instead it had to judge whether the food seemed safe. Whether the food industry leaps to sell the products and whether consumers want to buy them will play a part in how quickly and pervasively products derived from cloned animals make it to our tables, but it can only be a matter of time. One thing seems clear: We can’t rely on the FDA, nor farmers, nor food suppliers to prevent the inevitable. Which leaves us with consumers and, nature forbid, regulators.

While evidence of the administration’s destruction of evidence piles up at home, the inscrutable George Bush has been making an unprecedented (for him) tour of the middle east. We’re so worn down after suffering seven years of his bewildering ability to ignore the obvious that even his gravest acts of ethical side-stepping don’t surprise us any more. In Egypt Bush had this to say to the ruthless Mubarak: “I appreciate the example that your nation is setting.” Now, if he meant that with Egypt’s terrible record on free elections and human rights Mubarak has been making even the Bush Administration look good, that would be one thing, but I don’t think that’s what Bush had in mind. What he did have in mind, I believe, was Egypt’s support in the Bush administration’s war on terror; a dubiously relative merit if ever there was one.

The NY Times today called for an upgrade to electronic voting systems across the land… by entering a plea for jurisdictions to maintain parallel paper ballots. Quite rightly, the editorial focuses on what needs to be done to improve the chances that we’ll have a fair and reliable election result this year. What it doesn’t focus on is how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. When in doubt, blame Bush. In large part fault does lie with Bush. The administration’s zeal for free markets and state independence has led to the current electronic voting fiasco. Surely when we’re dealing with the election of a president of the nation the federal government should shape and vet the introduction of a consistent and reliable electronic voting system. The demand for quality far outweighs the demand for the process to rest on free market forces. And surely since the election of a president demands consistency in process and accuracy from state to state, the matter of voting mechanisms shouldn’t be left to state control.

As in so many areas, these three examples demonstrate in very different ways that our process of government is very far from rational. To leave to the FDA the task of stemming the tide of animal cloning for food makes no rational sense. To twice elect a president of such passive incompetence and active contempt for what’s right and good makes even less rational sense. As does the reliance on decentralized muddle in devising a good scheme for capturing votes.

 

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On ideas that don’t meet at the ends: Catching up with the slippery Fish, and digging into Farmer’s flawed reasoning.

Last week I thought I had refuted Stanley Fish’s doubts about the value of the humanities. But it seems that I wasn’t alone in misunderstanding Fish’s point. Fish explains today that he was talking about the academic field of “the humanties” not about art, literature, philosophy, etc. themselves. Fish clarifies his argument: Do humanities courses change lives and start movements or have any other measurable value? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized? He admits that teaching humanties can be one way for people to learn critical thinking, and that it provides people with a better range of subjects for conversation. But he then dismisses these values as being far from the exclusive realm of humanties courses. Now that Fish has made himself clear, I still disagree with him.

Another educator, John Farmer, who teaches at Rutger’s Law School, argues that the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily the right place to pursue the war on terror. Farmer argues that the prosecutions of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani take criminal justice into dangerous territory, toward endorsing the pursuit and prosecution of terror conspirators who have not yet done more than pursue. So far so good. Farmer’s making sense. But then he argues that this situation should be remedied by taking terror law enforcement out of the criminal justice system, permitting the government some mechanism for “preventive detention.” “Considering norms of criminal law and the paucity of evidence the government had at the time,” Farmer says, “its only alternative was to leave him free. Law enforcement should have had another choice.” Hmmm. So to prevent the erosion of our civil liberties we should permit indefinite detention without charges of those we have doubts about.

Stanley Fish puts forth a subtle brand of sophistry in his twin salvos against the usefulness of the humanities. And this sophistry seems to indicate an ulterior motive. Fish’s true motive isn’t relevant to proving him wrong, but I would guess that he likes the idea that his academic pursuit rises above the demands of demonstrating value. He reaches a passionate pitch when he states “the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.” Fish prides his field of study on its “refusal to bow” to pragmatic ends, and, rhetorically, argues that this refusal supports the justification for its worth.

My short rebuttal (”bullshit”) still stands.

Fish’s sophistry is this: He starts with three questions about the humanities “what is the value of such work, why should anyone fund it, and why (for what reasons) does anyone do it?” to which he appends, without drawing a logical connection, the following tests — that if it has value, the value must be measurable, that unless the value is measurable it cannot claim funding, and that those who do it must have consistent, valid and measurable reasons for doing it. Fish then flops around quite happily having avoided answering his own questions.

1. A value need not be measurable for it to be a value. Heat was a value before mssrs Farenheit and Celcius devised their scales and methods of measurement. Or, to take an example more closely related, “justice” is a value that cannot be measured (can we count how many people are rightly convicted? Of course not.) Pleasure and cleverness are not measurable values, neither is academic interest.

2. Funding for academic study always involves some element of uncertainty. There is no logical connection between whether a field of study has a measurable value or not and its appropriateness for investment.

3. People do all kinds of things for the oddest reasons. Fish’s assertion that humanities professors don’t do what they do to impart value is, even if it is correct, entirely irrelevant. Perhaps the best reason that any educator can have for being in the teaching business is that they relish their subject area. Who wants a teacher focused on the value that the course is imparting, rather than the knowledge and enthusiasm for the material?

Fish is carefully stepping over the real reasons that the humanities have value. They have value in the same way that any academic field of study has value, in exploring the world we live in. Humanities studies the world of art and literature. I can thing of few things more intrinsically valuable than studying the way that the creative world lives within, alongside and outside the real world. To say that such study has no intrinsic value makes me want to plea for Fish to take a sabbatical.

John Farmer makes a less subtle blunder. The current administration has been stretching, bypassing and thwarting the criminal justice system to meet its own ends. Farmer is right in saying that we shouldn’t allow this. But to claim that instead we need a whole new arm to the judiciary so that the government can continue to confine, hold and interrogate people who perhaps intend to do harm, seems about as wrongheaded as you can get.

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On the philosophy of accountability in our schools, government, banks, and life in general…

I love this quote from George Bush, speaking yesterday at an elementary school in Chicago. “Look, I recognize some people don’t like accountability, [...] accountability says if you’re failing, we’re going to expose that and expect you to change. Accountability also says that when you’re succeeding you’ll get plenty of praise.” Ah, and they said he’d never learn.

Bush was talking about the grandly ill-conceived free-market assault on education — the “No Child Left Behind” act. Again in Bush’s words: “The philosophy behind No Child Left Behind was in return for money there ought to be results.”

Bush seems to have a very personal feeling for this philosophy. It speaks to him. After all, he came to power under the same diktat from big business and wealthy donors. ‘We’ll fund your campaign and support you in your bid for the presidency, but we expect results.’ And he delivered by cutting taxes, protecting and facilitating industry and big business interests, and handing down spectacularly rewarding contracts in the defense and reconstruction industries.

Unfortunately, the presidency shouldn’t be founded on that kind of accountability. Bush should have felt accountable to the people of the country before big business, because they invested their trust in him, not because they invested money in him. When we conceive of Bush’s presidency in this way it is no surprise that he has seemed to feel no real accountability for his most grievous failures as president — taking us into a war under false pretenses, endorsing illegal and cruel detention and torture, carrying out secret surveillance programs, reacting with lamentable indifference to the flooding after Katrina, and denying, deriding and tampering with the scientific evidence for global warming.

Likewise, the most important thing we invest in our schools is our trust in them to educate our children as well as they can and as well as we wish. When they fail, we should hold them accountable by finding ways to improve their performance. In some schools this will demand smaller classrooms, in others, new teachers, or a different school leader, in others perhaps a different teaching method or catchment approach. But when does it ever make sense to hold them accountable by removing funds? How does that help the children?

Which brings me to think that accountability and trust may be inextricably related from a philosophical perspective. We might test this theory with an example from the world of finance. Bear Stearns CEO, James Cayne stepped down today, the latest in a string of departures from the top spots of financial institutions embattled by the sub-prime loan crisis. My question is this: Have these corporate leaders felt compelled to step down because they squandered investors’ money or because they betrayed their trust?

The answer seems to be that whether Cayne and others felt a sense of personal and direct responsibility for the losses (some didn’t), they all felt a responsibility for the lost trust as evidenced by that financial mismanagement.

Similarly, we want our teaching establishments to feel responsible for educating our children, not for investing education funds. And we want our government to feel responsible for serving our common interests, not repaying campaign contributions.

On tradition and legacy: Thanksgiving, turkey-pardons, and barbarism.

As an English national I’m supposed to feel ambivalent about celebrating Thanksgiving (not as ambivalent as I am supposed to feel about Independence Day, but ambivalent nevertheless). I’m sure that many people would have to pause if you asked them what we’re supposed to be celebrating on Thanksgiving. Although, does it really matter? It’s a holiday. We get together. We eat. We drive.

In Rome yesterday archaeologists unveiled a cave thought to have been adorned by the Roman emperor Augustus who believed it to be the place where the wolf nurtured Romulus and Remus after fishing them from the river Tiber. The idea of this cave, two thousand years old, fifty two feet inside the Palatine hill, lovingly decorated with seashells and marble, inspires a sense of connection to a rich and vital past state of humanity, one in which myth and reality intertwined. But there’s a brutal aspect to the reality and legend, too, just as the slaughter of turkeys can put a damper on the idea of Thanksgiving. As the story about the Paletine cave mentions, Romulus, for whom Rome is named, went on to kill his twin brother Remus in a power struggle.

The story of Romulus allegedly killing Remus reminds me of two pieces related to Bush this week: Firstly, his Thanksgiving witticism (yes, it was actually funny) in which he skewered his boss, I mean his vice president. In announcing the winners of the emancipated-Turkey naming contest, Bush quipped that the winning names “May” and “Flower” were much better than those proffered by Cheney — “Lunch and dinner.” (What’s behind that mean-spirited reference to Cheney’s voracious appetite, one wonders?) The second Bush tale is less amusing. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, in publicizing his new book, reveals that when Bush pressed Scott to announce that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with the Plame leak, it wasn’t true. Scott stops short of accusing Bush of lying, but the indictment of the administration is clear. The question remains whether this administration’s historical legacy of deception and audacious egotism will be recognized by posterity.

Another story today turns up another dark aspect of tradition. A young Saudi woman has had her sentence increased from 90 lashes to 200 lashes. Her crime: Going out in public with a man to whom she was not related. It gets worse. Her crime came to light in the first place because she was the victim of abduction and gang rape.

We may find this punishment abhorrent. I do. But our reaction is mostly a matter of timing. Up until recently, corporal punishment was considered an entirely appropriate punishment in most corners of the world for many crimes. And in this country going back less than two hundred years many slave-owners thought nothing of beating men and women alike for crimes real and imagined, and society in general accepted it.

Tradition, history, and legacy work as a double-edged sword. They can help to maintain some of the best traditions, remind us of great moments, movements and passges in our history, and it can help maintain some of the worst. Without thoughtful reappraisal and rational questioning of why we hold onto certain laws or patterns of behavior, we will inevitably hold onto bad laws and patterns of behavior. For this reason, I think, we are right to question even those seemingly innocent and well-respected traditions. Today’s cause for celebration, after all, may be tomorrow’s cause for shame.

Last week I wrote about the long term risk posed by the Bush administration’s tame response to President Musharraf’s abrupt dismantling of Pakistan’s democratic apparatus. I framed the administration’s reluctance to come down hard on Musharraf in terms of political expediency. But as I read the NY Times recent interview with Musharraf, it occurred to me that Musharraf and Bush perhaps have a lot in common, and that maybe subconsciously (or consciously) Bush doesn’t want to take strong steps against Musharraf because he identifies with him. Not that we should take everything Bush says literally, but he has been quoted as referring to Musharraf as “my buddy and my friend.”

“The emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner,” Musharraf says, which reminds me of Bush’s defense of domestic surveillance as necessary to maintain security.

“I know what [the Pakistan people] feel about the emergency when all these suicide bombings were taking place,” Musharraf commented on the increase in suicide bombings, “Their view is, Why have I done it so late.” Which recalls Bush’s insistence that the American people elected him and support his policy of invading Iraq.

The Times also reports that Musharraf defended his dismantling of the Supreme Court because the court had questioned the validity of his re-election. Similarly Bush has attempted, and in some cases
succeeded, in redefining standards for torture, or ignoring international conventions or protocols, because he doesn’t like the restrictions they place on him.

When we identify with someone, psychologically speaking, we connect characteristics they posses with similar characteristics that we attribute favorably to ourselves. Identification has served us well as a species. Identification induces empathy which helps us reach outside ourselves to help others. But identification also presents a particular danger that we need to guard against: With an excess of ego, we can wrongly perceive a characteristic that we possess as good, and, by extension identify and sympathize with that characteristic in others.

Bush seems to believe that his arrogance is justified. He knows better than the courts, he thinks, about what he should do and what is acceptable. He convinces himself that he is right to work outside or to twist the rule of law. If Bush were to condemn Musharraf for similar actions he would create dissonance in his view of himself.

Bush likes to perceive himself as popular and in tune with the people. Musharraf, the same. Outwardly, the trait they believe they possess is a feeling for the people; they like to view themselves as regular guys, men of the people. The true identification seems to be murkier. Perhaps they each recognize a similar weakness in the other, a desire to be liked and understood. It seems that they each feel defensive and inferior, feelings that bring with them a certain bravado (which brings us back to their arrogance).

Referring to the jailed the head of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, Asma Jahangir, Musharraf calls her “quite an unbalanced character.”

Interestingly, this comment reminds me of Rudy Giuliani and his now famous rant against the “crazy” owners of ferrets (going back to when he was Mayor of NY City).

Rudy Giuliani has said that he would not urge the Bush administration to cut off financial aid to the Musharraf government. “I would not second-guess any president on that because I think they’re in the middle of a very difficult situation right now,” Giuliani said to The Associated Press.

Perhaps Giuliani’s identifies with Musharraf, too. Something we should keep in mind as we move toward next year’s elections.