Liberals are bewailing the replacement on the supreme court of the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor by the conservative Catholic Samuel Alito. But on the basis of a convivial and not altogether sober conversation with Justice Antonin Scalia at a seasonal party, Tumbler is confident that Roe v Wade, the bedrock 1973 decision permitting abortion, is pretty safe. Scalia is an engaging fellow, and confided to Tumbler that he could not for the life of him understand why the Democrats had allowed themselves to be trapped into making a fetish of Roe v Wade. Indeed, he said, the sooner they allowed it to wither the better. Millions of naturally Democratic voters, Catholics and Baptists, whose economic self-interest aligns them with Hillary Clinton, had become loyal Republican voters over the single issue of abortion rights. While Roe v Wade endured, the Democrats would find it tough to regain congress or the White House; they should drop it and leave abortion to the individual states. Tumbler concludes that although the new conservative-majority supreme court may whittle away at various abortion rights, it will leave Roe v Wade as the albatross around the Democratic neck.
Feldstein's revenge
Hell hath no fury like an economist scorned. The White House did not pick Harvard professor Marty Feldstein to succeed Alan Greenspan at the helm of the Federal Reserve, choosing instead Ben Bernanke, a more reliable supporter of the Bush administration's lavish way of cutting taxes while spending like a fleet of drunken sailors. Bernanke, who will not be confirmed by the Senate until 31st January, was most recently the chairman of the council of economic advisers at the White House, where he devised a spiffing wheeze to explain why a generous world will continue to fund the $750bn US current account deficit, not to mention the $300bn federal budget deficit. There is, claims Bernanke, a global savings glut, and in the wondrous way of free markets, millions of foreigners with money know that the US economy is the best place for their cash. Deficit problem solved. Or that was how it seemed until the revenge of Marty Feldstein landed in a magisterial op-ed for the FT, which declared: "this optimistic analysis of the capital inflow is wrong. It results from a misinterpretation of the data provided by the US treasury." Feldstein did not name Bernanke as the prime offender; he did not have to. There was a blizzard of gleeful emails between Washington, Wall Street, Harvard and Bernanke's old haunt of Princeton sending the Feldstein piece back and forth. Everyone got the point, and many relished the grand old man's reproof of the young whippersnapper for "misunderstanding the nature of capital flows to the US." At least they relished it until they got to Feldstein's suggestion that the dollar could fall by 30-40 per cent on Bernanke's watch.
The return of Scooter
Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby may be out on bail and awaiting trial, but he's back in the Washington swim with lots of like-minded conservatives. And while he no longer gets picked up at home in Cheney's armoured limo, Scooter's new office is just a short stroll across Lafayette park from his old chums in the White House. He has been given a perch as a senior adviser at the Hudson Institute.
In return for his Hudson stipend, Scooter is expected to concentrate on terrorism and Asian issues in between sessions with his lawyers and writing the novel that is supposed to pay the legal fees. But Scooter's free time is likely to be constrained by the in-house discussions at the Hudson, where he shares space with some of the most argumentative minds on the right, including the legendary judge Robert Bork, barred from the supreme court in 1987 as too conservative. The Hudson also hosts Rupert Murdoch's private guru, Irwin Stelzer, who fears that an early withdrawal from Iraq would leave the Gulf states at the mercy of anti-western Islamists. It's curious that the Hudson Institute has never won the public notoriety of the other right-wing think tanks. After all, it also hosts Meyrav Wurmser, high priestess of the neocons, whose gooey-eyed faith in democratising the middle east helped get the Bush administration into the Iraq mess. Her husband, David Wurmser, was poached from the Pentagon by Scooter to be Cheney's deputy national security aide. Maybe they all get cover from William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, who calls the Iraq war "the greatest strategic blunder in American history."
Cheney's legal eagle
Scooter's replacement as Cheney's chief of staff is David Addington, newly promoted from in-house lawyer. Addington first worked for Cheney in congress in the 1970s, and then became legal counsel to Ronald Reagan's master spy, CIA director William Casey. Addington learned at Casey's knee how to make a legal case for just about anything. Most recently, as the Veep's White House amanuensis, Addington wrote the working draft of what became the famous "torture memo," justifying the detention and abuse of terrorism suspects without giving them access to a court. Any ban or controls on torture, said the memo, "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority… Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."
