The Washington Post‘s editorial page continues its Pravda act:

There is one major area of disagreement between the administration and House Democrats where we think the administration has the better of the argument: the question of whether telecommunications companies that provided information to the government without court orders should be given retroactive immunity from being sued. House Democrats are understandably reluctant to grant that wholesale protection without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding, and the administration has balked at providing such information. But the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment.

This is ludicrous. Democrats are “understandable reluctant” to hand out retrospective immunity “without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding.” But, according to the Post, since based on the limited information the administration has agreed to release immunity seems justified, Democrats should hand it out without asking harder what information the administration isn’t releasing. Even better, the Post refers to the “difficult and uncharted environment” during which the conduct-whose-nature-we’re-still-not-sure-about took place, bolstering the false impression the administration has started to give that this justified-and-no-we-won’t-tell-you-what-it-was conduct took place only after 9/11, when in fact it began in early 2001.

It’s reminiscent, I suppose, of the argument that since Scooter Libby, by committing perjury, had successfully blocked investigation of the Plame leak case, that Libby was entitled to be left off the hook for perjury. Call it the “it’s not the crime, it’s the fact that the coverup succeeeded” defense.

James Fallows notes the historically solid track-record of the Nobel Peace Prize:

There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and deKlerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time.

I don’t really know what the state of play was in 1973, but even though the ’94 Nobel looks bad in retrospect, it doesn’t seem like that bad a mistake. Rabin was murdered, Peres lost the election, we had the bad faith of the Netanyahu years, and then Arafat walked away from the table in 2000 but that sequence of events wasn’t inevitable; rather, Israel-Palestine in the 1990s brought forward several good candidates for the hypothetical war prize for scuttling a once-promising peace process.

Al Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, so National Review‘s Iain Murphy decides that maybe Osama bin Laden should get a Nobel too since he “implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance — and that of the Nobel committee — in his September rant from the cave.” At first blush, this would appear to belong to the Hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation, but even that’s going to far. Hitler, after all, as best one can tell was sincere in his desire to reduce cruelty to animals. OBL as climate change activist seems about on a par with the idea that Josef Stalin was driven a principled opposition to European colonialism, and that in order to spite him we ought to encourage its perpetual continuation.

Which, come to think of it, actually was the view of National Review and the American conservative movement of the time. Brad DeLong celebrates this occasion by pointing me to National Review‘s contemporaneous attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Generally speaking, the list of past winners isn’t one the American right can have much enthusiasm about.

Moira Whelan:

So the fact that the CIA is investigating their own IG is, um, just not ok. But as any IG will tell you, one time is an “incident” but three is a “pattern.” Recently, Democrats have released evidence demonstrating the Republican hackery of the State Department’s latest IG, and Administration officials have sought to stop Congressional efforts to strengthen the positions of IGs after several had been removed for <<gasp>> being critical of the Bush Administration. Clearly there should be an investigation into how investigators are being handled.

Once again we see the perils of being governed by a political movement that believes that instances of malgovernment demonstrate the correctness of their ideology. They believe, falsely, that it’s not possible to make public sector institutions function properly and once given the keys to power have set about trying to make their theory true in practice.

Robert Farley says that the more we understand about Israel’s recent air strikes in Syria, the more it looks like Bush and co. have succeeded in killing the Non-Proliferation Treaty:

The strike, and especially the apparent acquiesence of the United States in its planning and execution, means that the NPT is pretty much a dead letter. The treaty has always been open to charges of unfairness, since it legitimized the nuclear programs of a select number of states while delegitimizing similar programs in other states. This was a deal worth upholding, based on the principle that fewer nuclear states is better than more nuclear states. The deal also ensured that signatories would have the capability to engage in peaceful nuclear activity, some of which is indistiguishable from the opening steps of a long term weapons program. American complicity in this strike means that the deal is as good as dead, and has been replaced by a de facto arrangement in which states that the US approves of are allowed to have nuclear power, while states we dislike get airstrikes. I think this is a tragedy; the NPT has, in my view, worked to minimize the spread of nuclear weapons across the international system through a combination of moral suasion and legal inspection for the last forty years. It only works if the states involved agree that it’s legitimate and of some benefit to all; as I said before, that concept is pretty much dead now. Combine this with the recent nuclear deal with India, and I’d have to say that the Bush administration’s effort to kill a legal cornerstone of international stability have been remarkably successful.

The upshot of this is going to be more nuclear proliferation over the long run. Iraq was the neocons’ big chance to show that the approach to WMD policy they prefer — basically an ad hoc regime enforced by American military power and undergirded by nothing more principled than American whim — was workable. To make it work, they needed to show that we could successful topple a regime we didn’t like and replace it with one we liked better cheaply and easily enough to make it credible that we’d go and do it again. But it failed. The low-cost airstrike approach isn’t going to succeed against any kind of determined adversary, and the more we act like a rogue superpower the harder it will be to get our way.