Category: Rightwingers

Deconstructing an alleged compliment

Bush administration White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was quoted in the NYT as describing his boss (George W. Bush, for the dim) like so:

“He reminds me of one of those guys at the gym who plays about 40 chessboards at once.”

In my experience with gyms, there is in fact noone there playing 40 chessboards at once. Now, there are chess geniuses who can manage such an incredible feat, but they don’t go to the gym to do it. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that someone wanting to play 40 games of chess at once who thought that the proper venue for such an event was a gym is probably an idiot.

I am reminded of the episode of The Simpsons, in which Bart plays a dozen games of chess, blindfolded, simultaneously. Onlookers are briefly astonished. Bart loses every match.

I know you’re busy, Mr. Abe, but…

Update your website!!!!

abe_top.jpg

(As of the evening of Oct 2, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s website still indicated that he was still Chief Cabinet Secretary and was still trying to use some sort of DOS prompt to “./configure –with-passion=/home/abe/blood”. Blood?)

Hopefully his people are just too busy gearing up to make Abe the first world leader to offer a regular podcast… or a mixi profile?

Winning through political theatre

So the Senate has now passed the detainee treatment bill that will essentially let the president do whatever he wants to anyone at anytime for any reason. Via Andrew Sullivan we have these photographs and description of waterboarding, the most infamous method of torture known to have been used by the US government in the “war on terror.” While there was 10 hours of debate over the legislation, including this speech by Senator Clinton, in the end it passed with a very wide margin of 65-34, most likely due to the fears of Democrats too spineless to stand up for anything due to fears that it would allow them to be portrayed as soft on terror.

How did this pass? Why was there so little public outrage over practices such as waterboarding in the first place?

I personally believe that this is because so few people really understand what these torturous practices look like. Even images graphically depicting the reality of waterboarding, such as the those linked to above have rarely, if ever, appeared in newspapers or on television in the US over the course of this debate.

Hillary Clinton may have made a decent speech about treating prisoners humanely, but it was too little and too late.This is why I think the only way for the Democrats to defeat the administrations torture plans once and for all would be to hold their own demonstration.What she (or some other opponent of government approved torture) should have done is this:

volunteer to be waterboarded on national television. Hold a press conference in a place of appropriate sentimental value. Someplace like the Vietnam memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, or the Holocaust Musem. She does not tell reporters in advance about the stunt, keeping the waterboard behind a curtain for the opening of the speech. Then after an introduction, pulls the cloth back, revealing the object in all its horrific glory (ideally, it should be one actually used to torture in the past, perhaps by the Khymer Rouge, borrowed from a museum). She then introduces the board, explains its history, and repeats the point that this is the same practice that the US has admitted to engaging in. There is a mild stir among the press corp, who are thinking that she has already reached the climax of her presentation and that it was a good try but not enough to swing the issue.

She then announces that there is now going to be a live demonstration of how exactly it works. The audience is quite surprised at this announcement, a murmering going through the crowd-but a shocked silence falls a moment later as the Senator herself lays down on the board and waits to be strapped in by the former CIA employees that have been recruited for this gruesome display.

“The [senator] is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the [senator]’s face and water is poured over [her]. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

The cellophane is torn off quickly, and her pained gasping for air is clearly audible. The former-CIA interogator lets loose the straps and helps her rise. Too weak to do so unassisted, she unsteadily stands, tears still running down her face, as she gripsthe man’s arm.

Having completed the demonstration, she makes a brief statement challenging the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, or any other member of the administration to submit to the same act, and is then rushed to the waiting ambulance for a medical exam without taking questions.

He’s a knight, even if he can’t be a Master

It’s ridden with clichés and won’t tell you anything that you wouldn’t have already known from reading this blog, but this obituary to Koizumi’s political career, written by the Northeast Asia bureau chief of the Washington Post, was at least kind enough to call the outgoing prime minister a “Jedi Knight.”

Needless to say, I’m assuming that the author ripped this idea from me and Curzon.

So are we reaching the end of Episode III now? Is Mori going to pull Koizumi out of the volcano, slap body armor on him and turn him into a Sith Lord? “Darth Kakuei,” maybe?

UPDATE – Curzon went straight to work on a Fireworks graphic. I also just recalled that Kim Jong Il was supposed to be the Emperor analog, so… hmm. Darth Bulgogi? I got nothin’…

Japanese fortuneteller’s picks for the next cabinet

ZAKZAK, never a letdown, has run an article that quotes political/financial fortuneteller known as the “Onmyoji of Nagatacho” (whose sessions start at 30,000 yen) Shoken Fujitani’s predictions for who should go in Abe cabinet. While I don’t understand his system (it’s based on the fact that Abe was born aligned with Mercury in the year of the Horse [1954]), I’ll note his results here so we can come back on Tuesday to see how close he was:

People who are compatible with Abe:

Foreign Minister Taro Aso

Previous Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura (Has good “overseas luck”)

Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Shoichi Nakagawa

Lower House Member Sanae Takaichi (connection to culture i.e. Education Ministry)

Fumio Kyuma, chairman of LDP’s General Council

Lower House member Yasuhiro Shiozaki (pictured below dining with old people for Respect for the Aged Day):

Shiozaki with old people.JPG

Lower House member (one of the “female assassin” candidates from last year’s election) Satsuki Katayama

Lower House member Yuko Obuchi (daughter of former PM the late Keizo Obuchi)

People who aren’t compatible with Abe:

LDP Policy Council Chairman Hidenao Nakagawa (who made some enemies as a diehard pusher of Koizumi reforms)

METI Minister Toshihiro Nikai. Here he is giving Koizumi and companions the classic fakeout (What the hell is that? – Huh? – … See ya!):

hey look over there Nikai.jpg

Ex-PM Yoshiro Mori (but then again no one’s compatible with Mori)

Lower House member Yukari Sato (another “female assassin” candidate that was less well-received than Katayama)

Financial Services Minister Yosano Kaoru

and finally… Koizumi himself!

I have no clue how much stock people actually put in these predictions, but Japan tends to be much more superstitious than the US and they certainly hold enough value to be featured in a trashy tabloid. In politics as well as every day life inauspicious days are usually avoided for major events and traditional superstitions (such as blood type personality distinctions) are usually respected if not wholeheartedly accepted. In one famous episode (as described in Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons), bankers gathered in large numbers to an Osaka fortune teller’s home so they could touch her ceramic toad and hear her stock picks. Japan certainly isn’t anywhere near as bad as Burma, where the ruling junta moved the whole capital on the advice of feng sui experts, but nevertheless a man like Fujitani has been able to make a good living with his essentially baseless political predictions. His list of “accurate predictions” includes warning former PM Keizo Obuchi not to make the incompatible Hiromu Nonaka in his Chief Cabinet Secretary or else he would “risk his life” (he later died of a stroke while in office).

These assessments seem less like astrology and more of a “who’s hot and who’s not” of Japanese politics. Pretty safe choices. We’ll come back on Tuesday to see how he did.

And Kan begat Shintaro…

Where does Japan’s new neoconservative overlord Shinzo Abe come from?

We’ll start in Yamaguchi Prefecture. By the late 19th century, one of the most powerful families in the area was the Abe family of sake and soy brewers. A child named Kan Abe was born into the family in 1894, but instead of hanging around vats, he decided to go to Tokyo and study law at the Imperial University. Upon his return to Yamaguchi he became mayor of the family’s village, and then entered the Diet.

Also in the area lived two other affluent families, the Kishi and Sato families. One of the Sato patriarchs had been among the Choshu samurai who overthrew the shogun, and so he had served as governor of several areas of western Japan in the late 1800s. The families entered a merger of sorts when Shusuke Kishi married into the Sato family and adopted their name. As Shusuke Sato, he sired three sons: Ichiro, Nobusuke and Eisaku.

Ichiro joined the Imperial Japanese Navy and became commandant of a naval base in China, resigning shortly before World War II broke out in the Pacific. Nobusuke was adopted by the Kishi family (which had no male heirs), studied law in Tokyo, became Hideki Tojo’s commercial advisor, got through the purges under Douglas MacArthur and became Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. Eisaku also studied law in Tokyo, administered the railways during the war years, became prime minister from 1964 to 1972, and won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, Kan Abe’s son Shintaro Abe joined the navy during the war, graduated from the University of Tokyo afterward, and worked at the Mainichi Shimbun in Tokyo. It was here that he met Yoko Kishi, the daughter of Nobusuke Kishi (a cabinet minister at the time), and decided to marry her. Not long after their marriage, Kishi became prime minister and Shintaro Abe was appointed as his secretary. He went on to serve in many senior cabinet posts through the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an appointment as Director-General of the Liberal Democratic Party from 1987 to 1989 before his political career ended due to old age and the Recruit Scandal.

So Shintaro and Yoko Abe had three sons. The eldest married a prominent businessman’s daughter and has lived a relatively uneventful life. The youngest was back-adopted into the Kishi family and now has a political career as Nobuo Kishi. And then there’s the middle kid, Shinzo Abe, who as of next week will be the 90th Prime Minister of Japan. Fear him, because he wants to kick your ass… as soon as the constitution is amended to allow it, of course.

Is the DPJ just the LDP with a cooler logo?

Marxy made a good comment on my last post:

Anyone weirded out that Japan’s opposition party is all ex-LDP members who are out of the majority? I am sure the official policies are different, but seems more like a reorganization of sports teams than ideological conflict.

Sure it looks like a rearranging of chairs since most of the party’s leaders herald from the former Tanaka faction of the LDP. But actualyl the DPJ is made up of more diverse groups since politics in Japan continues to be dominated by building up relations with interest groups (outright bribing of voters is pretty well nipped in the bud as of now). But I think that the current election climate and the media/public’s expectations are forcing the parties to compete for public support.

Party President Ichiro Ozawa, Supreme Adviser and ex-PM Tsutomu Hata, Diet Affairs Chairman Kozo Watanabe, Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama, and former president Katsuya Okada all hailed from ex-Tanaka/Takeshita faction, rebelled against LDP after PM Shin Kanemaru was arrested for receiving 500 million yen from Sagawa Kyubin, whose credit was abused by the yakuza to take out loans, went in a million directions forming new parties (mainly conservative Shinshinto and liberal Shinto Sakigake) before most of the small breakaway parties combined into the DPJ.

But it’s not *all* ex-Tanaka faction!

Seiji Maehara – Joined Nihon Shinto (a “progressive party” started separately from the LDP by Morihiro Hosokawa, a former Tanaka faction upper house member)

Naoto Kan – formerly of minor left-wing party Socialist Democratic Federation, joined Shinto Sakigake (a 1993 breakaway of the LDP led by younger liberal minded Diet members such as Hatoyama) before winding up in DPJ.

And then there are the intra-DPJ factions. While factions supporting former LDP members are most powerful, there is also a good number of factions based on former membership in leftist parties.

The mix makes for a center-left ex-LDP led but still somewhat divided party that can result in some watered down policy positions such as their weak response to the postal privatization issue (DPJ was hemmed in by ties to labor unions) and constitutional revision (large range of opinion within the party).

So, a political party that’s run by a conservative and divided internally along factional lines? Sounds a lot like the LDP right? But what you have to consider is that the DPJ was formed in the aftermath of the 1955 system. Accordingly, the politicians involved inherited themselves (career, politicians with stable and often inherited support bases), blocks of interest groups (labor unions, professional associations, religious groups, etc), and the social/economic state that the 1955 system left Japan in.

After confidence in the LDP crumbled in 1993 and a non-LDP cabinet came in, the election rules were changed to make it possible for an opposition party to take over and also for elections to be won on a combination of interest groups getting out the vote AND campaigning on the issues as opposed to interest groups alone. The idea (credited to Ozawa no less) was to allow for a two-party system since people weren’t going along with the one party state, presumably. The spectacular stumbling of the 8-party opposition coalition led to the resurgence of LDP coalition governments, however, and put the 2 party vision on hold until the DPJ rose in status.

The hodgepodge makeup of both parties reflects the conflicting election strategies they need to take. The horsetrading that brings in wildly different politicians under the same fold is necessary to build a large number of entrenched supporters. But at the same time the party needs to pull in the unaffiliated voters with strong policy proposals. Right now I think both parties are better at the former than the latter.

The media of course like the idea of two clearly denominated sides fighting for the right to govern. And as a result the editorial tone when talking about the DPJ tends to focus on the question “what does the DPJ have to do to win?” rather than “does the DPJ deserve to win?”

So slowly both the LDP and opposition have had to find ways to deal with the growth in public interest in the election process that the rule change brought about. In 2003 or so it was Manifestos that helped the DPJ, and in 2005 it was Koizumi’s sophisticated PR techniques that wooed voters. The DPJ is going all out to make itself look smarter and better able to govern than the LDP this July and I believe that is what the election will turn on.

Will Abe last past July? Depends on the DPJ

Two disparate sources provide some good perspective on Abe’s upcoming premiership:

  • Morgan Stanley’s Robert Alan Feldman lays out the possibly dangerous prospects of an Abe government based on the concerns of domestic and foreign investors. Domestic investors, as can be expected, have the most informed opinion and are most concerned about the following: Regardless of his campaign promises, Abe will likely not have Koizumi’s political wherewithal to push reform efforts, for the most basic reason: “Unlike Koizumi, Abe is not a maverick. Abe has yet to prove to the satisfaction of investors that he will say no to vested interests, instead of saying that he will say no.” It also won’t help that Abe is boring (lacks “Koizumi’s sound-bite style” which is effective in selling policies to the people). Second, the Abe government might not last long if his party does poorly in next July’s upper house elections. Two major issues that have a good chance of hurting the LDP are worsened relations with China (pretty likely), or if Abe caves in to demands for increased pork spending in the rural areas (also likely… Feldman sees this as sure to backfire since more spending in this era of disastrous fiscal debt might not do much for the rural voters but will almost certainly anger urban unaffiliated voters which have proven a decisive voting bloc recently). The fall of the Abe cabinet could result in the “frightening scenario” of “a return to the revolving door prime ministers of the 1990s” which was perhaps one of the biggest reasons behind that decade or so of stagnation. Unfortunately, Feldman’s conclusion seems only to support the most frightening scenario since his recommendations are unlikely to be followed: “In the end, I believe that both foreign and domestic investors need to see clarity of message, strong personnel choices, concrete policy agendas with legislative deadlines, and a focus on issues that will help Japan continue allocate resources efficiently.”
  • Kikko (of Kikko’s Blog fame) gives us an idea of how the media works with those in power to convince the public to accept Abe, a potentially controversial candidate for prime minister due to his hardline stances on China etc. She rejects the idea that the public supports Abe, a claim repeated over and over by the Japanese media. Public opinion polls used to prove this popularity she claims are complete fabrications. As a counterpoint, she sites a Yahoo poll that has the public supporting Foreign Minister Taro Aso, with Abe coming in a distant third. According to Kikko, there’s no way the Japanese public could support Abe, a man “riddled with suspicion” who is accused of ties to the Yakuza, the Unification Church (which he recently sent a letter of congratulations to a mass marriage conducted by the church in Japan… Kikko’s big beef with the Moonies is their practice of aggressively selling overpriced goods with “spiritual value”), who abuses his power to help his wife meet Korean actresses, who allegedly helped the Ushio Corporation, which is run by the father of Abe’s sister-in-law, invest in the Murakami Fund (started by a former Finance bureaucrat who is now alleged to have used his political and business contacts to engage in massive insider trading), who lied about studying abroad (claimed to have studied politics for 2 years at USC but actually took 6 courses over 3 semesters, 3 of them ESL classes), and who supports building not only offensive war capability but also nuclear capability for Japan’s military. In her assessment, the major media, especially the Yomiuri Shimbun (she calls them an “LDP PR rag”), are simply lining up to flatter the next leader so they can continue their close ties. She notes that domestic coverage of Abe tends to leave out his international image, as reported in Newsweek and Time, as a potential political weakling and dangerous provocateur of China.

    • The event to watch will be the July election. If Abe really screws up, then he might be in trouble. The question is, though: How can he screw up?

    I have to wonder how important the China issue will be. China is less keen to use the Yasukuni card these days (as noted by Robert Angel at Japan Considered) since they’ve seen they aren’t really getting anywhere with it. Abe, for his part, has never promised he’d go. There are certainly other ways for him to destroy relations with China, but for now things actually seem to be improving. And anyway, people actually seem to support Abe when he takes strong stances against Japan’s neighbors.

    And structural reform has gotten a huge amount of bad press since the Sept 2005 election. Horie and Murakami were strung up as poster children for the dark side of the new Japan, a scandal involving faked earthquake safety documents was blamed on Koizumi-style deregulation, and a national debate over the breakdown of income equality is making further reform look less sexy by the day. Abe’s platform so far is to push growth policies ahead of reform, led by a program to offer “second chances” to companies that have failed. As the Asahi reports, the bureaucrats have listened to his proposal (or was it the other way around?) and have “brazenly” come up with “second chance” programs that would actually increase respective ministries’ budget outlays. He still talks the talk about fiscal reform, but the stars are aligning against it and it’s doubtful he’ll try anything that would risk good relations within the LDP before July.

    So if Abe is likely to remain strong on the biggest issues, then how can he screw up? What Feldman never mentioned was that for Abe’s LDP to lose the election the electorate would have to cast its vote for the opposition DPJ, making that party’s election strategy a key factor. The party recently reelected president Ichiro Ozawa and is attempting to present a united front leading into July.

    Ozawa has taken the unusual tactic of trying to convince some of the anti-postal privatization LDP members who were ousted from their old party to join the DPJ camp. Some of those former lower house members were extremely influential in their home districts, making them attractive candidates since they are electable. As a result, the LDP has had to consider taking them back themselves since they want to avoid losing their slim majority in the Upper House. The DPJ wants these people because they can win elections some of the directly-elected seats that represent Japan’s 47 prefectures. Ozawa believes that if he can win a majority of the 73 such seats that are up for grabs then his party can take control of the upper house, so getting a shoo-in candidate makes the party’s job that much easier.

    On the issues, the DPJ has been pushing policies to close the “wealth gap” and emphasizing the close links between the LDP and the bureaucracy, claiming that the latter is controlling the former and watering down attempts to slash spending through such initiatives as privatizing government-run organizations, moves that the DPJ supports.

    Given Abe’s popularity, especially in national security, it might be tough for the DPJ, which has been weak on international issues, to convince the electorate to support them in a time when North Korea scares the bejeezus out of people. Additionally, the DPJ remains divided on the constitutional revision issue, which Abe is set to give priority early on in his term. If they aren’t able to effectively participate in the debate, the the DPJ may once again look too incompetent to be elected.