First, I have no idea about anyone’s motivations. Sure, I’m quite confident that Dick Cheney has malicious motivations. But for all their weaknesses, the arguments of those who thought torture is sometimes justified have points that any opponent must take seriously. Sure, “24″-like scenarios are rare and, yes, might not be made tractable through the use of torture. But maybe they are? Are you willing to let millions of people die when you are fairly confident that some enhanced interrogation technique might do some good?

I’m not saying that torture is ever justified. I don’t think it is. It’s just not clear to me that those who do cross your line would necessarily also have worse motives than, say, Larry Summers as you paint him. But if they don’t have bad motives, and if you don’t assign blame solely through bad effects, and if the president sets policies, what’s the basis for your line you don’t want crossed? I have a feeling that your line is less a line of good intentions than you let on. In any case, my line is more a line of effects, and perhaps this is why we differ on summers.

I’m not terribly comfortable with the language you use when you say that you “don’t mind that appointees have made bad calls in the past.” Of course one would be mad use a bad call as a litmus test. But I don’t get the impression that deregulation was a “call” Summers made. If Obama had picked Greenspan to be a key advisor, our outrage would focus on the discredited philosophy he relied on for his entire professional life, not any particular call he had to make.

Also, isn’t it a bit uncharitable to interpret me as “blaming the current economic crisis on summers.” I’m certainly not doing that. What I *am* doing is pointing to one specific role Summers played, and noting that the economic philosophy that generated it was both Summers’ and fatally flawed. I think this is worth being concerned about, and worth folding this concern into a larger tapestry of lefty motivations that can fuel a movement to keep Obama from moving too far to the center-right.

As for the role of derivatives markets in the crisis, I think you understate their role. Yes the credit rating agencies were inept and in may respects corrupt. And yes Wall St. went crazy with securitization. But derivatives markets had a role to play in shaping prevailing views about the worth of underlying assets. If no agent is willing to issue insurance for the default of a given mortgage-back security, then other agents in the economic system will in turn come to doubt the solvency of that asset. And this helps keeps prices in check. As we learned with AIG, the derivatives market was absolutely enormous. This suggests an alternate lesson from the one you seem inclined to accept: viz., that if the derivatives market had not been left to run completely wild, more scrutiny would have been brought to bear on the securitization and credit rating industries. The economy is in a tailspin now partially because of lack confidence. Imagine if the derivatives industry had expressed its lack of confidence in mortgage-backed securities at the *beginning* of the housing bubble. That is precisely what Brooksley Born was arguing when she lost the argument to Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers.

two reasons:

1st, i don’t assign blame for things solely because of their effects. i don’t think summers intended that the policies he advocated would lead to economic ruin. quite the contrary, he probably thought they would be good for the country. his decisions may have been wrong, but they weren’t evil in an of themselves.

torture, on the other hand, is simply never a good idea. and although i don’t think torture really ever “works”, even if it did, i’d still be against using it and think it was absolutely wrong for anyone to advocate it.

i don’t mind that appointees have made bad calls in the past, even bad calls that ultimately resulted in terrible consequences. we all make bad decision and it’s only through dumb luck that i haven’t killed someone on the road one of those moments that my attention wandered for a second while driving. i simply don’t demand that obama only appoint people who have agreed with me on every issue or who never made a bad decision in their public life. if you take that position, you’ll probably never be satisfied with anyone. that’s not the same as ruling out the pro-torture crowd. that wasn’t just a bad call, it crosses a line like other bad decisions don’t.

2nd, it’s not completely clear to me that you can blame the current economic crisis on summers. it’s true he advocated not regulating the derivatives market and i think that position ultimately proved to be wrong. but it’s still even if he had been pro-regulation and successfully convinced the clinton administration to impose some kind of regulations on that kind of trading, it’s not clear that would have stopped this crisis at all. the current crisis, to the extent i understand it, was caused by the lack of regulation of credit rating agencies and the new class of mortgage-backed securities, not derivatives.

It’s only because I have so much regard for Obama that I worry about some of the appointments – I thnk his presidency can be a lot more than a mere “return to sanity”, but there are so many forces pushing against this that it would be nice tobe sure that he is pushing against them.

If Obama is going to be a “transformational” president he has to have pushed the centre of the political spectrum well to the left of where he found it. We are all aware, or should be, that it’s early, early days and that appointments alone tell us a limited amount. But so far as appointments alone do go it would be nice if Obama broke some taboos in terms of appointing some solid unapologetically leftish types, just to show that the left is not out of bounds.

Apart from anything else, it’s worth noting that how progressive Obama’s administration ends up being is not independent from how vigilant and independent progressives are in monitoring and pressuring him.

We’ll see, we’ll see.

i realize that some of them are potentially problematic, but none cross any of my red lines (for example, none of strongly pro-torture, at least not that i’m aware of. though a few have said bad stuff in the past, and since changed their position)

i could be wrong, but basically i’m just waiting to see what they do. right now, it seems that obama is trying to emphasize the fact that he’s taking the economic crisis seriously and not interested in anything radical economically as a way of reassuring the markets. that strikes me as a wise move right now. so i have no major complaints yet.