Not to nitpick or argue semantics( OK that’s what I’m going to do) but strictly speaking Hamilton and the late-18th century Federalists didn’t really believe in Federalism (a balance of power between the federal and state governments on approximately equal footing) per se, they wanted a strong central government (with something akin to a monarch as the head)much closer to what we have today. Hamilton and the “Federalists” brilliantly co-opted the name so as to leave their opponents with the image of just standing in the way of progress(much as FDR co-opted the name “liberal” in the 1930′s which had previously meant small government, laissez fair and individual liberty). The Federalist party of the day ironicallly were at best luke warm to the idea of “federalism”, but found the new Constitution much preferable to the Articles of Confederation.

This provides a nice transistion to a discussion I’ve been having with myself: Is the EU constitution closer to the Articles of Confederation or the US Constitution?

I’ll start with: Whomever holds the copywrite on the name Constitution aught to sue the EU for defamation of character for the sheer gall in naming their fascist rule book a “constitution”.

But their “union” is much closer in structure the the AoC, with the bold exception that far from being an arrangement that grants too little power to the central governmnet it is very much biased in the other direction.

I will be fascinated to watch how Brussels handles the first secession crisis, which is inevitable. The American Civil War could play out all over again. It could be like watching history play itself out before our very eyes.

Hint to the moderators: This would be a great discussion to have as a seperate posting.

I don’t much care for Posner. So, he can go on top of someone else’s blog.

The real question: Where’s the late great Karl Weintraub?

It’s worth noting that the EU elections were scheduled to be insulated from any of the big EU members important National ballots. This has at least three side effects: a) lower turnout; b) larger representation for “single issue” candidates (including anti-EU types); c) half-hearted, “slow news day” reporting (mostly post-election).

Regarding the irony of an anti-EU Party like the UKIP ending up with MEP’s… there’s a several hundred page draft of the EU Constitution on the table that’s exceedingly Federalist. When the US was going through a similar debate the authors of The Federalist took a very particular angle in their arguments that often left out important details. They were strongly criticised and resisted by those within individual States, and a collection of counter-point essays to The Federalist Papers eventually formed as “The Anti-Federalist Papers”. Here’s a link:

http://www.constitution.org/afp.htm

It was the Anti-Federalist representatives that most closely resemble the Euroskeptics in the UK and etc. today. Most Eurocrats are unrepentant Hamiltonians and Federalists… blindly so, in fact (if they knew their US history they’d never have established the ECB before getting the EU Constitution ratified). Here’s a link to John Adams’ defense and historical/philosophical review of the US Constitution…. very very good reading.

http://www.constitution.org/jadams/ja1_00.htm

If the EU is not interesting enough to most people to bother voting for it, this means the votes we are seeing come from people who bother and who care more than the average. And it is quite interesting to see such a rise of support for EU-averse parties and platforms across the Continent. And that is a real story, and one that is far from being pointless. (It is also funny to see UKIP candidates, people who want to get out of the EU, now going to the Parliament in Brussels…you’d think people who really want to be out of the EU would never want to take the risk to go there….)

The other interesting aspect resides in the long-term trend and one of the longstanding justifications for giving more and more power to the EU parliament. For a long time, the rationale was that the less power the Parliament had, the less people would care about it. Yet, the more power the EU Parliament gets the lower the turnout, and the better the score of those parties who have serious issues with the overall project. The trend is unmistakable and, in my opinion, very healthy.

Here’s the article. The author calls the UK Tories the “Michael Moore conservatives.” You decide.

I was in Europe, both the UK and Italy during the EU elections. The singular impression I came away with was that this was a big yawn. I was told not only by my hosts and everybody I met as well as by the TV news in both countries that these were not the “important elections”, it was just for the EU parliment which nobody cares about.

To read anything into such a lightly voted election is really pointless. Maybe that’s the real story here.

It’s not just EU elections or John Kerry’s history, it’s everywhere and you’re just catching them where you know the facts of the story.

They called John F. a “war hero.”

I almost choked on my egg.

(Granted, I didn’t look at the story closely, so they may have made other errors.)

The Lib Dems were definitely anti. We are left with the Tories and UKIP. That’s not three parties and they didn’t score 67%.

British voters back war ? uh ? When every other opinion poll says the opposite ?

The truth may be out there but this might not be a sample of it…

I’ve been contemplating the impact of European Bureaucratic government for a while, and come to the conclusion that the EU is likely to be come authoritarian in 5-10 years and perhaps slide into some bizarre totalitariansm after that. The EU is very undemocratic – rule by bureaucracy would seem to naturally lead to rule by sociopaths.

The other interesting aspect was how the independent party broke through the wall of press censorship.

And now for a bit of a thread shift – related to the difficulties of dealing with a non-diverse press:

This resonates with my recent experiences as an anti-Kerry Vietnam Veteran activist. It has been solidly demonstrated to me that there is a press Iron Curtain in America also, and I and others have been trying to figure out how to break through it.

We have considerable information about Kerry that is of a nature unprecedented in US history. The main stream media either ignores it, or shoots the messenger in the coverage. If this same information existed about Bush, we are confident that everyone not in a coma would have heard it a hundred times.

The most shocking example was when the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” held a press conference in which Kerry’s entire command chain held him to be incompetent to be Commander in Chief, and over 200 of his fellow combatants signed the letter to that effect. This is an unprecedent event as far as I know.

The coverage was weak – small stories, often with as many words attacking the group as were used to describe the event. Only UPI had a fair article, while CBS (according to the transcript on LexisNexis) provided an amazing smear job. In general, the Kerry campaign painted the group as Republican operatives (incorrectly – they used McCarthy style guilt by association – in one case imagining a long dead Richard Nixon reaching from the grave to manipulate one of those people). The media took the information from that campaign and salted it through the reports, tainting the messengers with a false picture of Republican Activists by guilt through association (in fact, a fair number of the group are Democrats).

The stories didn’t contain outright lies, but they left out much pertinent material, and emphasized the quite weak ties of the group to the Republican Party – namely, the PR company used to put together the event had done work for Republicans and had former Republican activists in it (would anyone take anti-Kerry information to a Democratic PR company?). One of the veterans, who took over Kerry’s boat after Kerry’s abbreviated combat tour had been chosen by Nixon 34 years ago to debate Kerry, so by association, he was guilty of being a Republican stooge, and hence his statements ignored.

Other stories very germane to Kerry’s campaign theme of being a war hero have been utterly ignored, even one showing that he attempted to cover up the fact that from 1970-1972, his anti-war activism years, he was still an officer in the Naval Reserve (the Boston Globe reported an honorable discharge in 1970 and has not retracted it – the correct date is 1978). The fact that he met with enemy representatives once (by his testimony) and twice (by other sources) during this propaganda campaign has not been widely reported. Even the true depth of vilification through falsehoods that Kerry laid on his fellow veterans and the United States has been brushed off.

If you are the typical American who gets his news from the major network evening news show (you aren’t if you are reading this, but anyway…), there are many facts you may never hear about Kerry (conversely you will have Abu Ghraib burned onto your retinas). CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, The major dailies – especially the NYT, BG and LAT, and AP constitute this propaganda machine (not a conspiracy per se, but a shared attitude of “Anybody But Bush).

Even though a new Pew Poll shows that only 25% of Americans consider their news sources to be truthful, the Goebell’s Big Lie theory says that people will believe some of what they hear even from sources considered untrustworthy. I have met former (or current at the time) USSR residents where that effect was apparent. Now the mainstream US media is using an equivalent approach – for example, the New York Times put the Abu Ghraib story on its front page 28 times in a row and ran a total of 60 stories on the subject prior to Reagan’s death.

While Abu Ghraib was not a lie per se, the repetition implied an importance (and a temporal continuance of misbehavior) that was incorrect. All of the images of abuse came from a single day’s events, when an improperly disciplined military unit had what I guess would be called a sex party. As a soldier, I endured more humiliation and genuine torture (SERE school) than those prisoners, and yet it was just training. Furthermore, there was no reporting (that I know of) about how the pictures, which were classified SECRET/NOFORN, were released to the press, or why (which was to poison the investigation – they were apparently released by a relative of one of the accused – creating through the huge publicity a biased jury problem (in military parlance – “command influence”) making it less likely that the guilty will be convicted. In fact, the events occurred in November, the investigation headed by a major general was disclosed to the press in January, and the proper measures were being taken: the guilty were being investigated for courts martials. A news story, yes. An every day, every night showing of homoerotic images to every American for weeks? No, not nearly that important.

In any case, the Vietnam Veterans in America, except those few who cluster around Kerry, are being systematically denied access to the mainstream media. We can get our story out in right wing publications (World Net Daily .com) but not in the major news. It would seem that the press of the western world in general has been driven a bit crazy by the war in Iraq, and is moving farther than ever from reality or fairness as a result. Just as Dick Morris had to deal with a monolithic press with a bias against his position, so do we.

For those interested (as long as I’m here), you can find the unpublished facts (and I’m not talking tin-hat conspiracy nonsense) from the following sources:

wintersoldier.com – the best compendium of anti-Kerry information related to his war and anti-war behavior.

Swift Boat Veterans For Truth – use the “media” link for the details. Also see here for an article about the press Iron Curtain they encountered.

For information about an organization (disclosure: I am a member) that is calling for Kerry to renounce the propaganda and lies he told about the United States and those of us who participated in the Vietnam War, check out Vietnam Vets for the Truth. It also includes a breaking story (except in the mainstream media) about the discovery of a picture of Kerry in a museum room in Saigon devoted to foreigners who helped the communists win the Vietnam War. As of the last report, the Swift Boat veteran who took pictures of that picture and those around it is not being allowed to leave Vietnam.

And now back to European elections and their press situation and the revenge of the real people…

You sure wouldn’t guess that from the news coverage, would you?

In case you’d like to read Sky’s report on the poll, here’s the link:

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-13125786,00.html

If you’d like to read more examples of the European and American media twisting the story into a “Voters Punish Blair for Iraq War” narrative, you can find those here:

http://highway99.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_highway99_archive.html#108704577677755354

I agree completely about the importance of the alternative media in helping to combat this sort of journalistic malpractice.

Good question re Posner. We should probably add him to the pantheon.

This coming November, I wonder if ABC News will report Kerry ‘has won Florida’ before the polls close?