disconnect

From Officials Fear Chaos if Iraqis Vote Down the Constitution:

Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.

So if the constitution is defeated, the terrorists win. But if the constitution is approved... the terrorists win.

Aren't you glad we got in this mess?

I'm going to paste this post by Matthew Yglesias here in its entirety, because it's the best summary I've read yet that explains why the Bush administration is unable to implement policies that any sane person would say are necessary.

The LA Times has a nice report on how the Bush administration is looking at effective ways to help the poor people displaced by Katrina, then rejecting those methods in favor of less effective ones. The reason for deliberately choosing ineffective measures is that the White House fears that implementing effective measures would make it politically easier in the future to get the government to do stuff to help poor people. And the crazy thing about it is that they're not really crazy!

This is the basic dilemma the right faces. It's committed to the view that the government shouldn't help poor people. But things happen from time to time that make it politically imperative to do something to help poor people. And if the government responded to those circumstances in ways that were efficient and effective, that would generate more political momentum for further poor-helping measures. Thus, the right finds itself forced to implement policies it knows to be ineffective. The Section 8 housing vouchers discussed in the article are a case in point. This was an idea that came into vogue with Ronald Reagan as his free-market advisers noted that poor people didn't lack houses (implying a need for the government to build some) but rather money for rent (implying a need for the government to give them some) and that by taking option number two you could avoid the catastrophic poverty-sinks of public housing.

Flash forward to today, and liberals (who care about poor people) have learned to love Section 8. Well-meaning right-wing economists still like them because, well, they're good. But Republicans hate them. Public housing disasters make the case against big government, housing vouchers make the case for ... more housing vouchers. The EITC has made a similar ideological journey, beginning on the right as a suggestion that anti-poverty spending could be put to better use and now opposed by the right precisely because the idea is too good. The purely ideological case against helping poor people is grossly unpopular, so conservatives need to rely on the pragmatic case which, in turn, relies on deliberately rejecting good ideas in favor of bad ones in order to "prove" that government programs don't work.

I would say that this same mindset applies to things like fuel efficiency in automobiles. It happens that better fuel efficiency requirements would be helpful for many reasons, like reducing global warming, becoming more energy independent and generally reducing the amount of money Americans spend on gas. But tightening efficiency requirements goes against the basic right-wing principle that government should never be telling businesses what to do. And so a policy which has almost no downside (unlike a higher gas tax, which would accomplish basically the same thing but would be politically much more problematic) is DOA because it violates the ideological purity of the Bush administration.