Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More | Hacker News Reader

Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More

nytimes.com

143 pointsteawithcarl80 comments

The article is biased and, from what I gather from the comments, factually incorrect. However, the comparison with Nixon must be done, because:

a) Nixon and Watergate happened, so it is plausible that Administrations feel the pull towards excessive surveillance and illegal actions. I.e. It happened before so it will happen again.

b) If Watergate happened today, would the Administration get caught? I'd wager a sound "No, it wouldn't". With current powers and control structure, the Watergate objective could be secretly achieved, while controlled by secret courts all the while having any whistle-blower incarcerated under perfectly legal reasons.

Lastly, this is not a Dems vs Republicans issue. Both parties have failed. Bush set the ball rolling while Obama gladly let it roll...

This is easily much worse than Nixon. Nixon was a paranoid president with a cadre of political flunkies willing to do whatever it took for him to stay in power. Once the bozos were thrown out, that game was up.

This is a systemic problem, not just one president. Obama's just the first guy really seeing how far he can push things. You can bet that the next president, no matter which party, will keep pushing.

This is much worse than Nixon. Nixon was a scandal. His own party deserted him. With Obama you still have millions standing by to make apologies for whatever has been done -- and whatever comes next. A very bad situation.

What we're going to see now is what the world would have looked like if Nixon had gotten away with it.

Nixon was also operating at the height of the Cold War, when there may have been a legitimate right to more control over what the press can and can't say or release.

Obama is operating at the height of what? Asymmetric warfare where we're basically beating third world peasants into submission. Or maybe the War on Drugs where we're basically beating first world peasants into submission and slavery, whilst turning a complete blind eye to what's only comparable to genocide in a country we share a boarder with.

What our government is trying to do is on par with returning us to serfdom. I keep hearing that things are supposed to get better, but it's important to remember; freedom comes after the blade of a guillotine. No one in power is going to stop abusing it, we only have to look at the repeated introduction copyright legislation, time after time after time it gets submitted until it gets broken down and submitted piece by piece and slips under the radar. This will stop when its forcibly stopped, and the longer it takes the greater chance it will be done by violence.

How about the less inherently violent Pareto "history is a graveyard of aristocracies". We've got something akin to that in our ruling class, and we need a Pareto style circulation of elites to fix it. That doesn't inherently have to be ultra-violent, then again, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power.

As you specifically note, "on par with returning us to serfdom", which does not strike me as hyperbole.

It sounds hyperbolic, but when you look into the prisoner rates and the amount of non-voting past felons who essentially are stuck in wage slavery at or below minimum wage just to work. The amount of people who are stuck well below the poverty line due to working minimum wage jobs, with zero job security and zero ability to move as unemployment is so high there's less than no guarantee you'll get a job if you do, and the size of the middle class who are frequently living pay check to pay check.

> The Domesday Book showed that England comprised 12% freeholders, 35% serfs or villeins, 30% cotters and borders, and 9% slaves.

It really doesn't look too far from where we're already at. Although we do have the right to vote who oppresses us... even though we have no way of knowing if the votes are actually representative of the desires of the people what with vote rigging.

> ... there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power.

I disagree. There are strong limits on what our courtier class is willing to do. Those limits are not even particularly objectionable. The problem is that the limits are beyond what it takes to provoke a strenuous response from the average person.

Our government is unstable. If it were to move one millimeter beyond public toleration, a vicious cycle of escalation would start. The last straw would be something seemingly trivial, like a flippant speech about how hungry Americans could just eat cake. (A scenario that is actually plausible, given Washington, D.C.'s obsession with paying their cronies to turn corn into transportation fuel.)

The most disturbing thing about the courtiers' obsession with espionage is how careless they are being with operational security. They are using espionage to score PR points but neglecting the basics of opsec: mandatory access controls, cryptography, competent background checks, etc. If some Booz Allen yahoo could rifle through NSA documents, then other countries already had everything.

What's worth pointing out with the corn->ethanol issue is that it would take 1 acre of prime farmland to run your average F150 for 5 weeks. That acre would be damn close to perfect nutritionally (IE mixed diet, animals actually use more land but can feed on relatively infertile but pasture-able land) feeding one person for a year.

However, in actuality one bushel of corn averages 50 ears, the national corn harvest average per acre is 123, which means 6150 ear of corn, which means ~16.8 ears of corn a day. 110 calories for your average ear of corn, meaning 1800 food calories a day for a full year. On one tank of gas for your average commercial vehicle.

I do not get why anyone would want to turn corn into fuel, because even fuelling a statistically insignificant portion of the market would literally mean removing hundreds of thousands of peoples food from circulation. And it is food grade corn that goes to make ethanol, because unsellable ears of corn are already spoken for and sold for animal feed.

One of the main reasons I want to buy land is so I can become as close to fully self sustaining as possible.

And even forgiveness and generosity can only be applied once the chains are broken. As long as you're still under the yoke of someone else, you cannot really punish them; when you're free from it, you don't need to. I had a dream to that effect a long time ago, I still remember it vividly and it's still my favourite dream.

People are chained with lies, anything more real than that they built themselves, based on those lies, and they can destroy it just as easily. I hope.

Obama's just the first guy really seeing how far he can push things.

How about Reagan?

Specifics, please?

I was around for all of these presidents, and I don't remember even a "nattering nabobs of negativism" from Team Reagan (although I'd be happy to be corrected there), let alone declaring that opposition was inherently illegitimate and the organs of the state then acting in congruence with that.

Reagan was focused on two particularly broad things, that I'll also note were stunning successes: rescuing the economy and government fiscal situation (e.g. the prime rate was around 20%), and ending the Evil Empire. Both required working with Democrats in the Congress (Republicans only held the Senate in the beginning) and in the permanent bureaucracy.

Wow, thanks! It was like the liberal skies over HN cleared when I read you comment. I remember what it was like during the Carter years. The economy was in the toilet. Reagan took the reins, Iran immediately released the hostages which had been a saga played out every day in the news, counting each day they were held. People started to have real hope again. Was he perfect or a perfect president? No, but he did do some real, tangible and historically significant and positive things that liberals (today's liberals, not the real ones from the distant past) dismiss.

You're very welcome.

For those of you who weren't of political age during the '70s and especially the Carter Administration, it really was a time of losing hope. I don't know of anyone including myself who thought Reagan could put the nation out of its tailspin, and while the medicine was plenty bitter (helped by the idiots in the Congress insisting on phasing in the tax rate cuts), he truly did save the nation.

Another way of looking at it is to ask which recent president Obama compares himself to: it's Reagan, the most recent who was significantly consequential, just like Obama has been consequential (I mean, the Democrats have been trying to achieve government health care since Truman (that's 1945-52), and Bill and Hillary! famously flamed out on it). Obama does not dismiss Reagan ... I guess he is smarter than the average bear....

I was too young to remember his presidency. But my understanding was that he started the war on drugs as a major component of his platform.

I could see his war on drugs falling under economic rescue, although my understanding is that this effort has had serious deleterious economic effects in the U.S.

While the "war" long precedes him, it was Nixon in 1971 who coined it as such. From Wikipedia, which I wouldn't expect to be overly friendly to Nixon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs):

"Although Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, the policies that his administration implemented as part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 were a continuation of drug prohibition policies in the U.S., which started in 1914. Less well-known today is that the Nixon Administration also repealed the federal 2–10-year mandatory minimum sentences for possession of marijuana and started federal demand reduction programs and drug-treatment programs. Robert DuPont, the "Drug czar" in the Nixon Administration, stated it would be more accurate to say that Nixon ended, rather than launched, the "war on drugs". DuPont also argued that it was the proponents of drug legalization that popularized the term "war on drugs"."

I can remember creating in 3rd grade in 1969-70 in class (along with everyone else) a workbook detailing all the common illegal drugs of the time, names, effects, and why they were bad for you, etc.

And as you probably know it continues to this day, the Obama Administration has been a terrible disappointment to those seeking decreased restrictions on marijuana (harsher than Bush? I forget). This has long been a Progressive cause (remember Prohibition?), and most don't know or remember that Nixon was a Progressive domestically, a long Republican tradition. EPA, OHSA, there's a whole list of things like that that Nixon signing into law and supported.

You are right, of course. Some simple research would have enlightened me. Appreciate the detailed response.

I think my memory is being influenced by what I remember vs. what I read in history class. Reagan did say "We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag", and he did increase funding (including a big jump in the late 80s). Still, it's clearly not accurate to state he started the war (although I think he helped/supported/funding the militarization of that issue).

Please consider my incorrect view of history to be amended.

Well, in the '70s the Democrats were perceived as weak on drugs, the party of "acid, amnesty and abortion" circa McGovern's run in 1972. And the Supreme Court delivered on abortion in 1973's Roe v. Wade, and Carter on amnesty for Vietnam era draft dodgers on his first day in office in 1977.

But I don't remember any president in my politically aware lifetime really being "weak" on drugs (any more than they were weak on crime, that is). And by the same token, opposition to the War On Drugs is not particularly ideological, it's a requirement for libertarians, lots of notable conservatives including William F. Buckley have opposed it ... overall it's a colossal mess.

Although I'm entirely uncertain a complete reversal would be better for anything but civil rights, especially since efforts in that direction in other First World countries have not worked well to my knowledge. And there are worrying studies that indicate marijuana might kindle schizophrenia, which we as a society no longer handle well at all.

Me, I said prior to all we've learned in the last few months that make it look like a sideshow, that we could have a free society or a war on drugs, pick one. This made no impression on parents I've discussed it with, they are terrified their kids will be harmed by them.

For the record: among many other things, Reagan's CIA ran a covert war in Nicaragua, over the direct, statutory(!) objections of congress, in contravention of a law Reagan himself signed. Tens of thousands of people were murdered.

While I disagree with you on all of the specifics, I have to ask, if we accept that, what exactly does it have to do with his Administration and the press?

Well, Reagan has the honor of being the first president to have convicted a government official for leaking information to the press (the Samuel Loring Morison case). A New York Times editorial about the Morison case basically presented an argument that Reagan's DOJ invented the modern leak prosecution, using a novel interpretation of the Espionage Act to override the will of Congress, which had refused to criminalize leaks in general.

And of course, the information Morison leaked was positively anodyne compared to entire databases full of diplomatic cables, or North Korean proliferation intelligence sources, or the precise details of which Chinese computers the NSA TAO group was hacking. Which is funny, because the NYT editorial called some of that kind of information out as the sort of the Congress did want to outlaw leaks in.

But that aside: I was stepping back from leak prosecution to the broader issue of transparency.

The Reagan administration was less transparent than this one, or even the Bush Administration (which was itself also less transparent than this one). The Reagan administration not only got the US involved in a war based on entirely opaque objectives and analysis, but conducted the whole war without the knowledge of the American people.

It bears mentioning that Samuel Loring Morison was essentially leaking to himself, in that he was, per Wikipedia and my contemporary memory, at the same time working for the organization he was leaking to (Janes).

The 2 year sentence would argue his leaks were "anodyne" ... it all depends on how little you believe the Soviets knew or assumed about how good our spysats were.

Which war were you referring to? Certainly not fighting the Communist Sandinistas, that was about as secret as Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan are today, and you don't need any more justification than distracting them from other mischief, anything else is gravy.

As for transparency, where outside of the Cold War was Reagan significantly less transparent than Obama or Bush for that matter? While the hits are noisy, just try a search for obama in private for starters.

Reagan's desire to escalate the anti-Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua was so well-known that Congress passed a law banning it, which Reagan secretly bypassed. It's easy to call something "as secret as drone strikes" after it produces the Iran Contra Hearings.

The Congress passed a law forbidding various parts of the government not including the president's staff from prosecuting it, since they can't do that constitutionally. As I remember, an amendment to do the latter was voted down, further delineating exactly what the Congress was doing.

And I guess you weren't reading the same sources I was, and as I looked up the the Dear Comandante letter from 1984 I'm reminded of at least one overt, passed by the Congress in 1988 (!) aid bill to help the Contras, point your favorite search engine at contra aid bill. Which makes it crystal clear the simple picture you are painting is far too simple to be true.

Ah, and how about this, from the AP's archive (http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1985/Reagan-Signs-Foreign-Aid-B...):

"REAGAN SIGNS FOREIGN AID BILL, PRAISING CONTRA AID

AP , Associated Press

Aug. 9, 1985 1:37 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) _ President Reagan, hailing new funding for Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, has signed a $25.4 billion foreign aid bill.

''I am particularly pleased that the Congress approved the renewal of aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters,'' Reagan said Thursday before he signed the measure...."

Gaaah, bad memories. Anyone who thinks our foreign policy is messed up today should really review post-Vietnam War Cold War policy, where way too much of the nation up to and including Congressmen were openly on the other side. And then there's Carter's 1977 "inordinate fear of communism", and, oh, hugging and kissing Brezhnev on the signing of the SALT treaty, following in just 6 months by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Which we're still paying the price for (as well as Iran, but that wasn't so Cold War specific).

And if you wonder why today's domestic politics are so bad, it was noted when the Sandinistas theoretically fell in a popular vote in 1990 those people ran out of Socialist Worker's Paradises to support, leaving them pretty much with the US as their only target.

I'm referring to the Boland Amendment, which Reagan signed into law.

Nothing at all. People in tech have this need to bring up how Reagan is the devil. It's very odd because it was a sitting duck presidency, if there ever was one. Hardly a Senate majority for some of the time, no house majority at any point.

Heh, I've never heard of a "sitting duck" presidency, but the name fits. It was the first post-Watergate Republican one, and the first to which criminalizing of normal politics was applied. The number of high administration official who were prosecuted on totally bogus grounds was appalling, from Department of Labor Secretary Ray "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Donovan (a singularly honest man if the prosecutors couldn't make anything stick to a New York City construction firm (!!!)) to the head of NASA, indicted by a team that didn't have a single expert on the subject in dispute (federal contracting by the team that made a working DIVAD; when they asked to dismiss the charges, the judge wouldn't let them do it without prejudice, i.e. they could not try again). In 20/20 hindsight he says he wouldn't have forced the launch of Challenger ... certainly disrupting the leadership of NASA is going to be without consequences.

ADDED: And the press lied through their teeth. E.g. we were constantly regaled with horror stories of vicious budget cuts ... but in the rarefied lingo of the Beltway, a decrease from the automatically rising baseline, even if more nominal or real dollars are spent than last year, is a "cut".

But most of all I think they hated how successful and happy he was, even with the Democrats holding so much power. Of course, back then enough of them realized we were facing existential threats from the two areas I've remarked on; the same in terms of threats is true today, but it's less in your face for the moment. But wait until we can no longer run "trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see" because we can't maintain zero percent interest rates (which by themselves are crushing so many, especially retirees).

It's relevant because Reagan renewed the Nixon-era drive towards assertions of executive power to advance national security.

You might even think he did it for good reasons, e.g. because the threat of communism was sufficiently dire that it really did justify a suspension of the usual legal niceties in order to defend the U.S.'s national interests. The point is not "Reagan was wrong", but rather a more descriptive one: Reagan pushed the boundaries of executive power. Maybe that's good, maybe it isn't. But as a descriptive matter, Reagan is an important link in the modern chain of presidents broadening executive power on national-security grounds.

I don't think this is particularly controversial even among conservative historians. The debate is over whether Reagan's general tendency towards a strong-executive, law-and-order-via-military-if-necessary position (shared with folks like Edwin Meese) was justified, not over whether it was the case. Even going back to his pre-presidency days, for example, conservative historians typically argue that Reagan's declaration of martial law in Berkeley in 1969, in which he sent in the national guard to put down a series of protests, was necessary to maintain order and prevent subversive elements from gaining a foothold. Nobody actually argues that he didn't do so, or that it was some kind of situation where he was tricked into it. He was pretty explicitly a national-security hawk in favor of a strong executive.

This is the kind of comment one could have written without reading the article. Did you? What do you think about the Rosen case?

You can't make a reporter doing his job a crime.

ADD: Further details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5924505

Rosen hasn't been charged with a crime.

He was served a search warrant alleging he was part of a criminal conspiracy. This is a prelude to criminal charges. Stop your semantic hysterics.

Ahh, 2013 Hacker News, where the difference between "being charged with a federal crime" and "not being charged with a federal crime" is "semantic hysterics".

Innocent until proven you're against my political beliefs.

tl;dr "President Obama wants to make it a crime for a reporter to talk to a leaker"

Worth reading it in full.

I don't get it. How can someone make such a drastic 180 degree turn on his principles and in such a short time? If there ever was a civil rights activist in him, how can he so easily go ahead with trying to harm US' historical press freedom so drastically by trying to make it illegal for a reporter to speak to a leaker, and prosecuting twice as many whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all presidents in the past 100 years?

I really don't get it and I don't see how a person could change so radically in only a few short years. Unless the whole initial campaign was just a major joke played on the American public, and it was all a set-up, saying that he'll turn things around from the Bush era, while he was actually plotting to continue his surveillance policies all along.

There's also the blackmail possibility, but would the US president really be that dependent on a blackmail to change his policies 180 degrees and also continue the charade for so long? I think the second possibility, that he was lying the whole time, seems more realistic than this.

While I have no personal insight into Barack Obama, I have dealt personally with several politicians; and while there are many earnest politicians dedicated to public service, there are also those who conflate public service with their own personal interest.

I do not mean they are cynical; that they are lying or have abandoned their principles, but that their principles are directed solely to getting themselves elected. Any form of lie-detection or telepathy would reveal they truly believe they are doing the best, most moral thing by getting themselves in a position of power. I find this attitude hard to describe; imagine “I am a good person”, “anything that is good for me is good for everyone”, “I should be leader”, “anything that makes me leader is good”, “anything that restricts my leadership is bad for everyone” all merged together into one single thought. Perhaps “I am the state” is the best summary.

This is how you get civil libertarians restricting others’ civil liberties, homosexuals getting elected on anti-homosexual legislation, and drug-users campaigning for harsh penalties for drug use. These people do not see any contradiction between their words and their actions; it is as if words and actions are the same thing to them. If I campaign for civil rights, then I am a civil rights leader, my actions are irrelevant. They do not seem to understand that other people can be good, that they themselves can be evil; or how restricting their own power could possibly be good. They do not seem to understand that arrests, investigations, or invasions, whether of privacy or of nations, which do not harm themselves could harm other people.

There ought to be a DSM classification for this type of disorder.

> How can someone make such a drastic 180 degree turn on his principles

Those were not his principles, it was his marketing strategy and it worked. There is no honesty in politics, it's a game of manipulating the masses, not of winning a prize for morals.

Indeed, this is an "I'm shocked, shocked to find that politics is going on in here!"

I disagree with you on the "no honesty in politics", successful politicians tend to have a degree of honesty that, when it successfully translates into policy and results, helps to make them successful.

See my comments on Reagan and the economy and government financial situation, and ending the Evil Empire.

See G. H. W. Bush repudiating his "Read my lips, no new taxes" and getting booted from office.

See Clinton promising sane economic policies and delivering (ADDED: and after the demonstrable failures of LBJ and Carter). I think in general he was an awful president and no one denies he lies a whole lot, but when the financial guys pointed out what the bond market was saying, he accepted reality. I can't find the good quote from him on that, but here's the great one from James Carville: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

ADDED: but that wouldn't seem to explain Obama's successful reelection. There's a more focused explanation which which still hinges on honesty: when there are two candidates, one is running on values, one isn't, the former wins. Obama has been honestly running on (hard Left) values, and beat two opponents who weren't. I think that'll also explain 2004, and it's been noted that if the Republican base voted like it did for W in 2004, McCain would have won; don't know about 2012, but "Hairpiece Q. Mother$*%&^$" as one former resident of Massachusetts conservative friend refers to him is widely thought to be the least principled, "value" free national politician in a long time.

The idea that a President who's DOJ would aggressively investigate the leak of North Korean nuclear intelligence is an indication of outside blackmail says more about the person sharing the idea than it does about the President.

Because to win an election you tell people what they want to hear, once elected you give the lobbyists (this includes govt workers themselves) as much as possible. It's all about marginal revenue, the votes cast are a sunk revenue.

Bush: Ran on humble foreign policy, expanded foreign policy drastically. Obama: Ran on civil liberties, eroded civil liberties drastically.

The crowd that pretends to be outraged on principle depends on the letter behind the politician's name.

Your dinging of Bush on his post-election shift to a foreign policy president fails hard due to it being after 9/11. And it's not like he didn't continue his promised domestic policies, remember Medicare Part D, No Child Gets Ahead, the all in effort that ruined the party for a while on immigration, and the attempt to reform Social Security?

About the blackmail possibility, the NSA wiretapped Obama in 2004: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama...

Another possibility is that Obama is under a lot of stress (like any president) and those who advise him and were in power before him (NSA, the Fed, etc.) end up persuading him. This is perfectly possible if you are under stress and suffer constant interruptions that don't allow you to think long term. This is another way of saying that he's in fact a puppet, even if he doesn't realize.

This is the charitable reason. He has all these possible risks brought before him and has to make a decision quickly -- why not err on the side of "safety", especially if the ultimate responsibility for that safety is in his hands.

Plus a little blackmail if it's on tap.

Worth a read: http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-field-guide

Generally: the First Amendment protects the right to publish news, but not to gather it; when it comes to newsgathering, the law generally doesn't favor reporters over any other kind of person. There are (according to RCFP) some jurisdiction-specific protections for newsgathering, but it's hard to read RCFP's guide and leave with the sense that the Constitution permits reporters to commit felonies in the interest of getting stories.

So, James Rosen. James Rosen (allegedly; for brevity, add "allegedly" mentally to everything else in this graf) received secret information from Stephen Kim, a counterproliferation analyst at LLNL. Kim passed information to Rosen about the proximity of a North Korean nuclear test. Kim's response was that the information he shared was harmless. The DoJ's response was that it wasn't, and that aside from the direct details about the DPRK nuclear test, the specificity of the information shared threatened sources & methods, and that regardless Kim was criminally liable for sharing top secret classified information.

(FAS, as always, does a great job of keeping up with the paperwork of the case: http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kim/)

It's not at all surprising to me that in a case where an analyst leaks counterproliferation data to a reporter, the DoJ would have an interest in ensuring that the reporter wasn't an accessory to the crime of leaking the information. Simply hearing a leaked story isn't criminal, but coaching an insider to do so is. DoJ has a valid interest in figuring out which happened with Rosen.

James Rosen has not been charged with any crime. Stephen Kim, the leaker, is dollars-to-donuts going to prison; his defense seems already to have conceded the leak occurred, and posits that his prosecution is political.

As I've said on other threads, I'm ambivalent about counterterrorism. When I think about it in the context of signals intelligence, I'm fine with it. When I think about it in the context of the TSA and electronic strip searches, I'm not. But this isn't a terrorism case.

I am not at all ambivalent about counterproliferation. Just 40 years ago the US was locked in a standoff with an adversary with enough nuclear weapons to end life on the planet. Today, that adversary is a shambles, split into countries of varying competence and openness, any of which might have enough nuclear materiel to end a major world city. Meanwhile, the world's most evil country has a functioning nuclear arms program and is thought to be arming dictatorships around the world for money.

I'm glad DoJ isn't playing games in cases involving proliferation.

I don't mean to be sarcastic in my response, but the "most evil country" could be any number of countries, even given the context. Who are you referring to?

North Korea is the most evil country in the world.

Note: tptacek said "most evil" not "most dangerous", and I may have to agree with him. Inside North Korea is a hellhole the likes of which we rarely see in the 21st century outside of movies about Nazi atrocities. Most estimates of deaths due to state crackdowns, gulags, and so forth within North Korea put the number right around 10% of the entire population of the country. A catastrophe equivalent to the holocaust has happened in North Korea but few people appreciate that it has because of the extreme secrecy of the regime. On top of that there are the continual threats North Korea makes to the security of the region and the world, their acts of terror (they've downed airplanes, kidnapped civilians, and worse). And, perhaps the worst of all, they've been a major player in the international export of both nuclear and ICBM technology.

Number of deaths due to US wars of aggression since 2001 [1][2]: 400,000 - 1,000,000

Number of deaths due to North Korean wars of aggression since 2001: 0

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_war

Sophomoric comments like this are why we'd be better off if all politics stories were kept off HN, wholesale, like the guidelines suggest.

From the guidelines:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

If you reread my comment I think you'll see that I wasn't in fact calling anyone a name.

Really?

> Sophomoric comments like this ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_calling

> Name calling is abusive or insulting language referred to a person or group,

If I squint in a half light, I might consider you have obeyed the literal letter of the guidelines. So, congratulations.

But seriously? You want to defend that comment as not insulting to the poster?

Also, at what point did you reply to the argument?

Are they sophomoric or do you just dislike being reminded of the fact? He linked statistics (although I'm almost certain it's >0 for DPRK) that are worth being reminded of, that's it. YOU made a judgement. Twice.

If that's the count, fine, let's let this comment make it three times that I "judged" North Korea as the most evil country on the planet. Want to make it four times? Five? Fine by me.

Pay no attention the forced labor camps behind the curtain?

I'm not sure how are you counting the death, but according to Wikipedia [1] since 2001 there are between 8 and 54 death of South Korean in incidents against North Korea.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_involv...

You've got to count the victims in North Korea, and with an official population of 24 million today, we know from the history of other Communist countries who's killing fields have been at least partly revealed that they're going to number in the millions.

Would you care to elaborate why, if you feel like it? When I try to cognize the word "evil", I get hazy connotations in my mind. Why North Korea in particular, what are your criteria? (genuinely curious.)

Let's just mention some bottom line things:

Due to pervasive malnutrition, North Koreans are on average a foot shorter than South Koreans, and significantly less intelligent (IQ/g), which is one very good reason the latter don't want reunification.

They are by far the largest of the last unrepentant Communist counties, so all the inevitable evils that come with that are in their greatest effect there (although China is just so big it's GULAG very possibly has more inmates).

How about their still being in a state of war with, well, everyone else in "the West", and regularly reminding us of that with overt lethal attacks?

I agree that what the NK regime is and has for a long time been doing to the people of NK is brutal, atrocious and nigh-unimaginable, at least when you try to understand the scale of it all / of the labour camps where people are born and live their lives inside the camps, and so on. I don't want to be that guy arguing semantics, but just a small remark:

    > How about their still being in a state of war with, well,
    > everyone else in "the West", and regularly reminding us of
    > that with overt lethal attacks?

I dare speculate that this must be how (in a sense) the U.S. looks/sounds like to many people from the countries it has deemed to be its enemies (say, Iran and Iraq); the difference being, the U.S. did actually go ahead and commit lethal attacks. But this line of strictly consequentialist reasoning (however one may call it, not sure) is not without its flaws, of course. Thanks for the comment.

But compare the nature and focus of the lethal attacks. Have we done anything like (and this is just from memory):

Randomly, not as part of a campaign or anything, shelled an island.

Randomly torpedoed a naval vessel.

Brought down a civilian airliner as an act of terror.

Attempted to assassinate a country's leader and take out a good fraction of his cabinet with an indiscriminate bomb on foreign soil (foreign to both; and this is a debatable point, we certainly hit with 2,000 pound bombs any place we thought Saddam was during the war in the last decade. These details, including the lack of an all out hot war, are frequently used to label this act as terrorism, plus it wouldn't have made much difference to South Korea vs. taking out someone who'd been the Maximum Leader of a country for around 3 decades).

In the save vein as the above, we might debate their regular landing of commandos (especially given the fairly random violence they then engage in) and perhaps their regular naval skirmishes.

My bottom line is that they're batshit crazy in a way we simply aren't, whatever the bottom line is in those killed and wounded. Generally you can divine a fine grained rational cause and effect from our lethal actions, the DPRKs' only in a much broader way.

> North Korean news sources alleged that the North Korean actions, described as "a prompt and powerful physical strike", were in response to provocation from South Korea that had held an artillery exercise in the disputed waters south of the island

The US tried to assassinate Castro without even a declared war, they assassinated Gaddafi and have instigated various coups. On the other hand North and South Korea are actually at war.

United States brought down an Iranian civilian airliner.

North Korea is desperate and does terrible things but I don't think there is any reason to believe they are as completely irrational as everyone tries to paint them. One problem is that the extremely aggressive military actions by the United States often go unreported while far more benign military action by North Korea are disproportionately reported (e.g. moving missile launchers and missile tests a few months ago).

I am in no way saying North Korea is "better" than the United States or that they are not evil, only that there are significant distortions in the way each is viewed, especially by Americans.

The South Korean artillery exercise was routine, and if you accept North Korean sources, or find any equality between a shoot down made in error and a premeditated terrorist bombing, we have absolutely no common ground for discussion.

Are they dangerous? Yes. Do they commit terrorism? I wouldn't doubt it. Do they do stupid things sometimes? Sure. Are they insane? Almost certainly not and your examples do nothing to provide evidence to the contrary. Why even provide a justification for the shelling if they were insane? Do you really believe they do not try to act in their own self interest?

I haven't seen any evidence that the depiction that they-could-do-anything-next and are therefore immune to normal diplomacy and threats of force is anything but a caricature.

Again, I am not defending North Korea just pointing out distortions which impair making informed decisions and correctly interpreting world events.

They run death camps. They so impoverish their people as to force them into cannibalism. The regime in North Korea is insane and evil.

That they commit terrible crimes isn't the question. This is:

When North Korean leaders make geo-political decisions do they act in their own self interest? As a state or even individuals?

The mad man caricature is an attempt to justify arbitrary action against North Korea, actions which would be much harder to justify against someone rational that could be influenced by carrots and sticks. It denies even the existence of motivations, however ill-intentioned those motivations may be.

I'll let someone else elaborate why.

I can't find the actual counts in the fas documents, what is Kim alleged to have disclosed? I thought it was how soon North Korea could conduct a missile test. What is the reasoning for how revealing that information contributes to nuclear proliferation?

By betraying to North Korea aspects of what we know about their program and, indirectly, how we obtained that knowledge.

But how does proliferation increase as a result?

But he paid the price. The current president will never face the same punishment.

Nixon wasn't punished for what this article is complaining about, though. He wasn't impeached over his handling of the Pentagon Papers case, but because he paid some people to break into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.

I would guess that if Obama got caught running an operation to break into the RNC headquarters, Congress would be pretty quick to impeach him, too. And conversely, had Nixon not organized the Watergate break-in, he wouldn't have been impeached over his (and Kissinger's) hardline view on prosecuting leakers and those in their vicinity.

Why is the title like that? The article makes it obvious the brunt of his criticism is on Obama.

because the NY Times cannot call him out completely having bent over backwards to support him. Simply put, its no different than Obama claiming he was no Dick Cheney.

What is going on now is far far worse than Nixon. I am referring to NSA and IRS activities brought to light over the last few months. I am not sure which is worse, nah strike that, what the IRS is accused of is worse.

I'm not sure what kind of inside-the-beltway myopia it would take to think that controversy over who gets 501(c)(4) status is worse than dragnet surveillance.

Let's just quote half-reformed Obamacon Peggy Nonan (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732441260457851...):

"What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights."

Note, it doesn't matter a wit that you don't believe this. Because we do, and it's at least a debatable point, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. A potentially country killing one. I suggest you work to fix it, either by convincing us we're wrong, or by fixing it---at this point, one necessary ingredient is clear, completely revising our tax system to eliminate the IRS's discretion.

It's usually the case that half the country thinks the federal government's revenue-allocation is biased against them. If indeed 501(c)(4) status is allocated in a biased way, that's functionally equivalent to government subsidies being allocated in a biased way (because a targeted tax exemption is equivalent to a targeted subsidy). This is quite different from police intimidation, surveillance and similar things: it is solely an argument over whether subsidies are being allocated in a viewpoint-neutral manner.

Controversies over whether federal subsidies are being given out in a biased way are important, I think, but not a novel or apocalyptic matter. Sometimes the right alleges bias (as with funding going to e.g. NPR, and climate-science funding), other times the left alleges bias (as with the bill explicitly excluding Planned Parenthood from funding, or the tax exemption given to political organizations organized as church branches). It's worth investigating, but nobody is being shot for raising their heads.

Compare, say, COINTELPRO, which was not a dispute over whether federal tax exemptions or funds were being allocated fairly, but direct state intimidation of political organizations. That is what I think we need to be most wary of.

Now, there is some contingent of raving loons who already have it in their heads that IRS=UN=jackboots=Waco=helicopters, and certain opportunists (e.g. Glenn Beck) and politicians (some Tea Party groups) like to egg them on. I am not as sure what to do about them, but I don't think they are responding to any particular set of events based on any attempt at rational analysis of the actual events. And percentage-wise, they're closer to 10-15%. If you ask people to agree with particularly strong interpretations of the IRS scandal, which involve paranoid fantasies of violence by jackbooted government thugs, you don't get anywhere near 50% agreeing.

As for your proposed solution: I do think it's prudent to reform the tax-exemption laws to remove subjective categories. Some subjectivity is difficult to avoid, e.g. in the definition of a 501(c)(3) charity, but clearly 501(c)(4) is one of the more problematic categories. I would support just eliminating that status entirely, rather than attempting to have the IRS determine who legitimately belongs in it vs. who doesn't; an organization aimed at "the promotion of social welfare" but not necessarily a "charity" is just too subjective a catch-all.

Geeze, you simply have not been paying attention, this goes way beyond 501(c)(4) denials (while Obama's Organizing for America -> Organizing for Action was waived through), to the minor detail of 501(c)(3) denials, to leaking of application data to 3rd parties (as admitted by Pro Publica, one recipient), to the campaign calling out major Romney donor as evil people, to all of the above getting audits ... and that's just counting the IRS harassment.

And characterizing these as "subsidizes" is flatly wrong. Money donated for political action is not tax deductible; rather, it is the question, why are political efforts organized as non-profits? It's not like any of these organizations are trying to make monetary profits, their objective is of an entirely different kind.

Without a level playing field and with particular, focused harassment of donors ... well, many asked in 2012 what happened to the "TEA Party" that was so powerful in 2010 ... well, now after all these revelations, our side believes we know.

You may consider half the country to be "raving loons" ... even if it's only "10-15%", YOU still have a very big problem, history suggests only 3% are necessary to successfully prosecute a hot civil war (we're already in a cold one), and at least on my side we believe we're sliding towards one, since peaceful means of engaging in politics have and are being foreclosed by these actions (none of this has stopped), and no reform seems to be on the horizon.

Protection of citizens matters much more strongly to politicians when a politically-connected citizen is targeted. When people are targeted en mass it is less of an existential threat to the two-party dog and pony show.

Would Watergate have been much of a scandal at all if it weren't for the fact the offices Nixon broke into belonged to the Democratic Party?

I'll just leave this right here:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeche...

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