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February 4, 2007 - February 10, 2007 Archives
Clemens on Peretz and Soros
I've already mentioned New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz's lunatic screed against George Soros wherein the philanthropist and Holocaust survivor is made to answer to charges of being a Nazi collaborator. To me, it seemed the less said about this the better. But Steve Clemons wanted to say more, so I say give him a read. Soros, of course, earned his money, whereas Peretz obtained it through marriage. And Soros has spent his money on various charitable endeavors around the world. Peretz has used his cash to secure publication for his otherwise unpublishable work and, as Clemens says, is so deeply opposed to the notion of political accountability for the architechts of the present disaster because such accountability would necessarily bite him.
The Trouble With Contracting
The trouble with government work, as opposed to the private sector is that there's a lack of efficiency. It's important to understand, however, that there's nothing intrinsically efficient about private sector work. No magical "it's the free market" dust comes and renders private enterprises effective. Rather, the idea is simply that an inefficiently run private enterprise (and there are many) would simply go out of business. An inefficiently run government office, by contrast, goes out of business when it loses political support and sees its budget grow as long as it maintains political support. Thus, you see public sector dollars flowing to whatever there's a strong political constituency for, whereas private sector dollars flow to wherever well-managed firms are meeting demand.
Then enter government contractors which, as The New York Times points out, have exploded to unprecedented levels under George W. Bush and the late unlamented Republican congress. Here you have private enterprises displacing government. Why? For the private sector efficiency, of course! But you don't actually get that efficiency. It's still a government program. Funding is still being determined by political support. The cash doesn't go to companies that can do a really good job, it just goes to companies that have political clout -- i.e. ones that recycle a share of their profits into campaign contributions. It's essentially the worst of both worlds, since you get the inherent problems of the public sector plus the need for owners to be taking a slice off the top in profit margins. It is, however, a very good deal for politicians interested in union-busting and for politicians interested in raking money in from government contractors. Shockingly, the GOP loves it.
Missing Antawn
Like a cruel joke, it was just a couple of days before Antawn Jamison got hurt that I read John Hollinger arguing that the Wizards were unlikely to stay on top of the East because they had no ability to survive an injury. And how true it is. The Hayes/Songaila duo that tried to replace Jamison went a collective 3-12 from the field while failing to get to the line and grabbing just five boards in a combined 36 minutes at power forward. In particular, Hayes kept getting the ball for open jumpers that he would miss, followed by me muttering "Jamisonw would have hit that." Obviously, Gilbert launching 15 (!) three pointers and only hitting three doesn't help.
 Photo by Matthew YglesiasUnrelatedly, far be it from me to tell Phil Jackson how to coach a basketball team, but if the Lakers were healthy and I were (as tends to happen today's NBA) facing a lineup that didn't have a proper inside scoring threat, I would try to play Bryant-Walton-Odom-Radmanovich-Cook . . . with all those sharp-shooting tweeners you'd be an overall decent rebounding team and could spread the floor super-wide for Kobe.
I Wouldn't Be Caught Dead in a Vermont Winter, So I Guess We'll Just Write the Whole State Off
Peter Ross Range never fails to annoy me:
Part of the Democrats' problem has been cultural. Still notionally tied to the 20th century glory days of strong urban working class and ethnic voting blocs, some Democratic activists have trouble imagining themselves as the car-pool and mega-mall party. Educated elites in the core cities, university towns, and inner suburbs often reject the exurban lifestyle -- big yards, big cars, big churches, big families -- and thus refuse to embrace a politics based on their concerns. "I wouldn't be caught dead in the suburbs," one 20- something urban liberal told me recently in Washington's leading political bookstore.
Seriously? That's the evidence? One twentysomething liberal in Kramerbooks or Politics & Prose told him that he wouldn't be caught dead in the suburbs and this is the source of the Democratic Party's political woes? Obviously, though, the suburban lifestyle isn't supposed to appeal to single young professionals. If the Democratic Party's electoral fortunes genuinely hinge on convincing twentysomething activists that they find suburban living personally appealing then the party is fucked. But maybe if Range thought about this for ten minutes he'd see that his account doesn't make sense. It's just that he's writing in Blueprint so he needs to find a way to take a random personal swipe at liberals.
Popping Up Everywhere
Does Brad Plumer hate the Jews or does he just have Lindberg-esque views worthy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
Is Clinton Inevitable?
There's been a slightly weird "speaking truth to non-power" moment recently in the blogosphere where MYDD's Chris Bowers has been joining Team HRC in trying to convince us all that Hillary Clinton has a daunting advantage in the upcoming primary race. I'm not buying it and neither is Jonathan Chait who notes correctly that her polling isn't nearly as good in the early primary states as it is in big, vague national polls:
In a memo published the day she announced her candidacy, Clinton pollster Mark Penn offered up a rebuttal to this inconvenient fact. Clinton, he argued, is bound to rise in the early primary states as she spends more time there. But other candidates will be spending more time in Iowa and New Hampshire, too. The question is: Which candidate is more likely to benefit from endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings? There's no reason to think the answer will be Clinton. While she may be just as smart as--and more experienced than--Edwards and Obama, she is an average orator, while Edwards is a very good one and Obama is a brilliant one. Having seen all three give speeches, it's hard for me to imagine how a prolonged side-by-side comparison will move voters into Clinton's camp. And, as the best-known of the leading candidates, she'll have the hardest time making a strong new impression anyway.
This seems right to me. Something Chait doesn't mention, is that I think she's particularly vulnerable because she's counting on a perception of inevitability to boost her to victory. Insofar as leaders of progressive institutions believe she's likely to win, they're unlikely to point out that she's a poor choice. There's no point in opposing someone who's certain to win. But as cracks in the armor appear more evident, I think there's a good chance of a downward spiral as more opinion leaders speak out.
A Thought on Biden
One thing hanging over Barack Obama is the idea -- voiced by Debra Dickerson among others -- that he isn't really black. He was, after all, raised by his white mother. And his dad was from Kenya, not the descendant of American slaves. It seems to me that Joe Biden should have dispelled that kind of talk, by showing that Obama's black enough to be subjected to bizarre race-related crap from white people.
Similarly, if you watch the NBA I think it's clear that there's a set of stereotypes associated with black players ("amazing speed and athleticism") and a different set associated with Europeans ("incredible skills, but he's too soft") and also fairly clear that black Europeans (Parker, Diaw, Turiaf, etc.) are treated like blacks rather than like Europeans for these purposes.
UPDATE: See also Chris Hayes' article on David Alexrod.
Go Bears!
I still hate Payton Manning; let's go Bears!
Next Year in Edmonton
The feeling around the house is that the people with tickets to the Super Bowl have it too easy. The game should be held outdoors in the most unpleasant weather possible. That way, celebrities and corporate fat cats won't want to attend and hardcore fans will have the chance to live their dreams of shrivering. Based on my brief research, Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta seems to be the ideal candidate. Other suggestions?
Mooney and Sokal
If you read blogs, you almost certainly know about Chris Mooney, one of the world's distinguished Prospect alumns and author of The Republican War on Science. It's also likely that you've heard of Alan Sokal, perpetrator of the infamous Social Text scam, exposing the ignorant anti-science posturing of some post-modern humanities scholarship. Obviously, they're people with some similar concerns, but also very different targets.
It's noteworthy, then, to see them publish an op-ed together in The Los Angeles Times that more-or-less just takes up the (correct, not coincidentally) Mooney point of view that the politically powerful conservative movement is the real problem here.
Postmodern Warriors
Lots of folks have been rightly indignant that Bill Kristol apparently believes the latest carnage in Iraq demonstrates that the insurgents are getting "worried." One might only note that this line of thought goes all the way back to the August 2003 bombing that killed Sergio Vieira di Mello and proved to sensible people that the Iraq operation was, in fact, going much, much, much less well than the Bush administration would like you to believe. You can see David Adesnik's extensive defense of the proposition that these early outbreaks of violence were signs of imminent American success (see also here). For the other perspective on whether massive violence in Iraq was actually a good thing, you can see Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum. I think it's fairly clear which side the verdict of history came down on.
Kristol, in short, is trying to ply his audience with stale bread here.
Dave Noon catches what might be considered some more novel rhetoric in that same Kristol clip where he suggests that the people responsible for this massive bombing attack that killed well over 100 people were "try[ing] to convey an impression of chaos." This is, perhaps, the insurgent side of Green Lantern geopolitics. Great powers like the United States achieve our objectives through "unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will" whereas assymetrical adversaries will try to convey an impression of chaos.
This is, obviously, appealing not only to members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, but also to their elders and betters on Fox News. If the problem is chaos, then it's a problem that's either unsolvable, or else has to be solved by soldiers doing work on the ground. But if the problem is merely an impression of chaos then the work of our soldiers and Marines is secondary. The real battle is fought on the airwaves, on the op-ed pages, and in the blogs. Who has the courage to stand and stifle this impression of chaos? To replace it with an impression of order? A daunting challenge, to be sure, but Bill Kristol is ready for it.
Facebook
Okay, this seems a little too petty to post on, but since there's now a MYDD Facebook group and a TPM Fans Facebook group it seems worth pointing out that back in summer 2006 or so somebody created a "Matthew Yglesias is Kinda Awesome" Facebook group. I bring this up because every now and again I get Facebook requests from people I don't know who, I assume, are readers. There's been a big uptick in this over the past few days which I'm guessing is related to the MYDD and TPM groups.
At any rate, in the nicest possible way I'd sort of rather keep my page oriented toward brick and mortal IRL friends. If you only know me and the other commenters on this site through the blog, I'd recommend the group. In other news, is it possible that Jackson Diehl is being unfair to Bush here and congressional Democrats are just engaged in a little posturing?
Schumer on Iran
As Kevin Drum reminded us with regard to John Edwards, any politician worth his salt should be able to tailor his message to his audience. Certainly that's the case with Jonathan Singer's interview with DSCC Chair Chuck Schumer, at least judging by his ability to absolutely lavish praise on bloggers and the netroots. That said, you've got to go by what you have to go by, and saying good things to liberal audiences is better than saying bad things to liberal audiences. And I found Schumer's words on Iran encouraging.:
Iran was never discussed, and I could not imagine - maybe there are one or two Democrats in the Senate who believe the AUMF authorizes the President to go into Iran. Should he try to go into Iran without an AUMF will do everything we can to try to stop that. . .
I have always believed in foreign policy, particularly when your nation was attacked - not only my nation but my city was attacked - you tend to give the chief executive the benefit of the doubt to defend us. That doesn't mean a carte blanche. But you never give someone who has been so bad the second benefit of the doubt. I think anything the President asks for with Iran is going to be received with extreme dubiousness, certainly by me, by the Democratic Senate and by the American people. I mean he says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iran, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says this is an immediate danger to the US, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says military force is the only way to deal with this problem, people are going to thing 20 times before believing it.
I could imagine better words to offer on this subject, but that's pretty good, and it's significant because Schumer's really something of a bellweather hawk, the kind of guy who backed the Iraq War but doesn't have any deep, Lieberman-esque intellectual commitment to warmongering or a political strategy in which hawkishness plays a key role.
A Woman Advantage?
Via GFR, a Peter Beinart column that, while full of interesting notions, doesn't make sense to me. The main point is that as the public becomes more interested in international cooperation and less interested in military conflict, voters become more open to woman candidates and this is helpful to Hillary Clinton:
Not coincidentally, the percentage of Americans who say they will vote for a female presidential candidate has returned to roughly 90 percent. And the approval ratings for John McCain -- the contender most associated with an aggressive, ultra-tough foreign policy -- have crashed. A February 2006 poll found that, when asked whether a man or a woman would do a better job as commander-in-chief, respondents were evenly split. And, when asked who would do a better job on foreign policy, the hypothetical female candidate led by eight points. It stands to reason. If voters who oppose the Iraq war remain more likely to support female candidates, as they were several years ago, that's good news for Clinton, because there are a lot more of them now.
But this has nothing in particular to do with Clinton. Presumably, any non-Lieberman Democrat will be helped vis-à-vis John McCain insofar as the public grows more skeptical about the use of military force. The more important bit of research Beinart sites comes in the next paragraph where he observes that "Research shows that female candidates--especially Democratic ones--are perceived as more liberal than they really are." This quickly gets turned around into a clever pro-HRC point ("She may find it easier to run as an antiwar candidate because that is how people are predisposed to see her. Ever since she entered the U.S. Senate, Clinton has been trying to overcome people's ingrained perceptions. Now she must hope she hasn't succeeded too well.") but I think it's obviously a huge problem for her candidacy.
Who wants to nominate a candidate who's going to be perceived as more liberal than she really is? Who benefits from that, exactly? Well, it's a good combination from the point of view of Al From, but I think from other points of view it's pretty clearly a raw deal. You want a candidate who broadens the appeal of progressive politics (perhaps Petey has a recommendation), not a candidate whose a useful mechanism for selling a not-so-progressive message to the base voters in the primary.
Vouchers in Utah
Via Alex Tabarrok it looks like Utah may get a fairly comprehensive statewide voucher program. I won't pretend to note the state of educational play in Utah in any detail, but my strong suspicion is that this is very, very unlikely to lead to any noteworthy improvements in student achievement. It's a low population density state where the prospects for meaningful educational competition are not so hot. But more to the point, Utah features a very, very high proportion of the population belonging to a single hierarchical religion.
It seems to me that given a sufficiently generous voucher program (as Tabarrok notes, this one isn't quite there) education in Utah will evolve toward a system where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the de facto education provider throughout the bulk of the state, the LDS church gets a lot of taxpayer money, and people living in Salt Lake City and maybe a couple of other towns may have some secular alternative options available to them.
The Right Get Righter
I think there's probably a simple answer to Kevin Drum's question about why Republican members of congress have become even more skeptical that global warming is due to human activity -- when the GOP lost big in November, the losers came disproportionately from less-conservative districts which means the losers were disproportionately moderate in their views. This is one of several rather perverse consequences of our rather unfortunate constitutional system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no apologist for "moderate" Republicans, but it's still the case that there is and was some difference between even the fauxist of faux-moderates and the true right wing hard core. It's the hard core the voters were trying to reject. But, in practice, it's almost impossible to knock the true believers out of their safe seats unless they get into ethical hot water on the side. So instead you go after the more vulnerable, more moderate members for failing to moderate the GOP agenda in any meaningful way. And fair enough -- don't cry for them. But the upshot is still that most of the worst of the worst get to hang around.
And Now We Know
Joe Lieberman isn't just a surge fan, he's a Mark Steyn reader as well. Sweet, sweet centrism -- now featuring the far right!
Like Me, But Not Real
Tyler Cowen dubs Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias "The Best Novel By A Father of A Major Blogger," and also notes his mother's novels. Under the circumstances, I can hardly let the fiction and non-fiction books of my grandfather, José Yglesias, go unmentioned. Particularly noteworthy from a blog-centric point of view is Tristan and the Hispanics whose title character is a fictionalized version of the major blogger in question.
The Bill Comes Due
One of the many scandals of the Iraq War has been the way in which its real budgetary cost has been obscured from the American people. Not only were we told boldfaced lies before the invasion, but ever since the invasion happened the White House has for years not only refused to budget for the war in advance, but requested supplemental appropriations that clearly weren't covering the actual cost. In particular, we've seen a lot of what you might call war-related capital depreciation as military equipment breaks at a much higher rate during an intense operation. Nevertheless, through almost four years of combat this was never really accounted for. And now the bill's coming due in the 2008 Pentagon budget request.
At this point, obviously, one can hardly avoid spending the money. The equipment has already been damaged, so it may as well get repaired. We're not, however, talking about a small sum of money. This is $37.6 billion, and had this slice of expense been counted up front you would have seen less support at the margin for incurring it in the first place. The other giant source of hidden cost -- which has remained hidden thus far -- is the expense of long-term care for all the wounded soldiers.
The Lowest of the Low
I've been accused of having a monomaniacal obsession with New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz which is comparable to Peretz's own monomanias. Readers can make of that what they will. For my part, it just seems important that the words of the owner and editor of a major American political magazine achieve the wide distribution they deserve. In this offering, for example, Peretz explains that Palestinians, like Iraqis, are subhuman:
This is cold comfort to the Israelis. Their enemies can still maim and kill. It is entirely preferable for the Palestinians to have their rump and run it as they will or can. But, please, enough about how civilized they are. They are on their way to being Iraqis.
Taking the "neo" out of "neo-imperialist" mindset. How sweet it is.
Blatche!
Early in the season, I made a habit of loudly shouting "Blatche!" during the fourth quarter of games when the Wizards had a substantial lead, hoping to transform the prospect into a fan favorite victory cigar. Now that Antawn Jamison's hurt, though, Eddie Jordan is seeing fit to give him some meaningful minutes (17 each against Toronto, LA, and Seattle) and he's actually showing some promise instead of merely being "promising." He still can't play defense at all, however. Watching the Wizards over the past few season, I'd become more familiar than my 90s-Knicks-raised self would have thought possible with sub-par defensive performances, but Blatche is truly out of this world. He's regularly out of place, seems to have trouble remembering which player he's supposed to guard even during leisurely transitions, and he fouls constantly.
Speaking of young big men, ESPN The Magazine's "NEXT" feature always puzzles me, but simply proclaiming Dwight Howard big man of the future strikes me as odd. What about Greg Oden? What about Andrew Bynum? Maybe Howard will be better than those guys at the end of the day, or maybe he won't be, but it certainly doesn't look like a sure thing in Howard's favor, does it? The NBA may just be returning to the olden days when you could have more than one great center in the league at the same time.
The Debate
I know there was a lot of blogospheric skepticism about the merits of passing a non-binding resolution against the surge, but people should consider that the GOP sure does seem determined to stop such a resolution from passing. Maybe the Democratic leadership knows what it's doing?
UPDATE: Aha! Looks like E.J. Dionne got here firstt.
Nuance!
I'm not sure if there's any point in posting this, since I think Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is a clear non-starter, but here's a staggering transparent attempt to have it three or four different ways on abortion:
HANNITY: .... Let's talk about the controversial issues. You will be asked about them. Where does Rudy Giuliaini stand on abortion? And do you think roe v. wade is a good law or bad law.
GIULANI: I oppose it. I don't like it. I hate it. I think abortion is something that is a personal matter I would advise something against. However, I believe in a woman's right to choose. I think you have to ultimately not put a woman in jail for that. I think ultimately you have to leave that to a disagreement of conscience and have to respect the choice that somebody makes. So what I do say to conservatives because then you want to look at well okay what can we look to that is similar to the way you think. I think the appointment of judges that I would make would be very similar to if not exactly the same as the last two judges that were appointed. Chief Justice Roberts is somebody I work with, somebody I admire. Justice Alito, someone I knew when he was US attorney, also admire. If I had been president over the last four years, I can't think of any— that I'd do anything different with that. I guess the key is and I appointed over 100 judges when I was the mayor so it's something I take very, very seriously. I would appoint judges that interpreted the constitution rather than invented it. Understood the difference of being a judge and a legislator. And having argued a case before the Supreme Court, having argued in many, many courts is something I would take very seriously.
I think I like the Mitt Romney's more forthright flip-flop better than this, which has just left me confused. I
Good Read
J-Pod is right -- this John Burns retrospective on Iraq is well worth reading.
Time for a Health Care Post
So . . . John Edwards has a health care plan. You can find some serious analysis from Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein. Mark Schmitt's reaction, however, was just to say that candidates shouldn't release detailed plans at all:
[T]here will be particular problems with any health care proposal. They all have vulnerabilities, they all create situations in which people might have to accept change or might get less than they currently have. And the people who are most likely to vote based on health care are also people likely to be fearful of losing what they have. It will always be for political opponents to push that fear button.
I've argued in the past that it's good to campaign on a specific plan because if you do lay one out and do leave yourself exposed to the vulnerabilities Mark highlights and win anyway, then you're in a strong position as president to get your plan passed. Conversely, if you stand for election on vague promises and then try to get something passed, you'll have a big problem. As Kevin Drum says, "you'll get the feel-good vote during the election but then lose later on when you try to fulfill your campaign promise and run smack into....the fear button." The more I think about it, though, the more I think both perspectives on this are correct.
Which is part of why I came to the conclusion I reach in this column. I don't think it's smart for candidates to either run on specific universal healht care plans or to run on a promise to devise a specific universal health care plan once in office. Rather, what I'd like to see is a candidate who says that Medicare For All is the right idea, who concedes that Medicare For All probably won't be passing congress in 2009, and therefore promises to bring Medicare for As Many As Possible:
First, change the 2003 Medicare reform bill to give the government meaningful price leverage over the pharmaceutical companies and eliminate the role for private insurance companies. Beyond that, see what you can get -- Robert Kuttner laid out a few options yesterday. Propose that Medicaid cover everyone under 25. If you can't get that, take everyone under 21. If you can't get that, take everyone under 18. If you can get that, propose adding full-time students under 25. Then all full-time students. Then everyone under 25. Lower the threshold for Medicare to 50. Or to 55. Or to 60. Lower it to 64 if that's all you can get. Then come back next year and propose lowering it to 50. Or to 55. Or to 63. Keep coming back. Let people under the threshold "buy in" to Medicare on some terms.
To my way of thinking, this kind of approach (call it "flexible intransigence") is the best way of getting things done in the context of an American political system that makes large-scale change intrinsically difficult. And I think that when you look at successful partisan positioning on domestic policy, this is the sort of thing you see. When Democrats run and win on minimum wage hikes, they don't run and win on minimum wage plans they're running and winning on the general idea that the Democratic Party is committed to making the minimum wage higher. Similarly, the GOP will make taxes lower. Democrats, similarly, should be committed to "Medicare for more!" People like Medicare.
Cuban Jews
The New York Times takes a look at the Jews of Cuba. I myself am both Jewish and Cuban, but that's a mixed-ancestry thing, not a Jewish Cuban thing as seen in the article.
Bizarre
Allright, now I'm puzzled. Some kind of advisory committee of right-wing preachers has pronounced Ted Haggard "completely heterosexual." Fair enough, he's straight. He just sometimes likes to visit with gay prostitutes. Happens to the straightest of us. And, sure, meth was involved. But what heterosexual dude hasn't toked up on crystal and fucked a male hooker? Don't lie.
But here's the question. These are the same people who think gayness is curable, right? So what does the heterosexual/homosexual distinction amount to in that worldview? I thought the point was that there's no such thing as a gay person.
Everybody Hates Chris!
Hillary Clinton's doing somewhat better than I would have expected in this New Hampshire poll but the real shocker is Chris Dodd's absolutely miserable 22-20 favorable-unfavorable split. Several people in the poll have higher unfavorable ratings, but they're all much more famous than Dodd who's unknown to most respondents. How is that everyone's gotten such a negative view of Connecticut's other Senator? I think the idea of him running for president is pretty bizarre, but I can't imagine working myself into a frenzy of Dodd-hatred.
Easy Answers
A John Nichols article in The Nation is teased on the home page thusly:
Is the Bush Administration's deliberate inaction and delusional denial of global warming an impeachable offense? John Nichols reports on the Green Party's efforts to call the President to account.
The answer is no, it is not.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with impeachment as it's set up. If you could prove that Bush had taken a $5,000 bribe in order to appoint someone's son ambassador to Portugal, that would be impeachable offense even though it also wouldn't be a big deal in the scheme of things. Conversely, the Bush administration's stance on climate change is incredibly harmful, and quite corrupt in its own way, but by no means impeachable.
The Arab Mind
Why are most blacks, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with 'the sweat of their brow', so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?
I think we can all take it for granted that a book promising to explore that question is unlikely to find itself on a present-day curriculum approved by the US government. Certainly, one hopes that the insights the author may bring to bear on the subject are unlikely to become the basis for public policy in the inner-city, in Subsaharan Africa, or elsewhere. As this old but still relevant Brian Whitaker article notes, however, the exact same question, asked of Arabs rather than blacks, appears in Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind which continues to be influential in some quarters of the US government and in neoconservative circles. Also, "In the Arab view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself . . . once aroused, Arab hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders."
Rudy as Nixon
Henry Farrell pushes an analogy between Nicholas Sarkozy and Richard Nixon that he also floated during a diavlog with Mark Schmitt. A clearly analogy, in my mind, and also in that of this Jonah Goldberg reader, is between Nixon and Rudy Giuliani. Conservative affection for Giuliani seems to be grounded almost entirely in the sense that as mayor of New York City, Giuliani stuck it to liberals (which he did), rather than in a sense that anything in Giuliani's record suggests he would cope with the issues facing the federal government in an effective-yet-conservative manner.
As with Nixon on race and the southern strategy, the basic issue with Giuliani, cultural issues, and the conservative base is whether or not the base will doom what's transparently a cynical sell out as good enough. Last, but by no means least, as with Nixon important parts of Giuliani's persona seem to be driven by personal and somewhat idiosyncratic resentments rather than anything substantive. Obviously, when the name "Nixon" comes up, one's thoughts turn to Watergate and related crimes, and these parallels between the two figures don't necessarily speak to that issue.
"The New Deal" Versus The New Deal
Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling debate the new deal on The Wall Street Journal's website. Eventually, they wind up mostly debating large federal entitlement programs. At one point Brad does try to refocus by noting that Medicare and Medicaid came long after the New Deal. It's worth saying, however, that even Social Security as we understand it wasn't really created during the New Deal era. The initial program didn't cover huge swathes of the workforce, didn't include cost of living adjustments, etc. Read all about the history here and you'll see that the provisions that make Social Security controversial mostly came in the 50s and to some extent the 70s.
And yet it's this -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- that most people are really talking about when they talk about "the New Deal." Ronald Reagan is said to have won over the Reagan Democrats by expressing warm feelings for the New Deal but hostility to the Great Society. When people say that, however, that don't mean that Reagan gave the impression that he wanted to eliminate Medicare, scale back Social Security, and preserve a large series of important-but-obscure regulations to the financial services industry. They mean that Reagan gave the impression of a sympathetic view to large universal entitlement programs combined with hostility to narrowly targeted programs aimed at the poor and identified with the black underclass. And yet, the most controversial of these programs -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- actually does trace its origins to the New Deal.
Start One Already!
Man. Rick Perlstein sure does love blogs and this isn't the first time he's dedicated a column to the subject. So where's the Perlstein blog (or, perhaps, perlslog), damnit? RickPerlstein.org looks like it was created in 1998. They're not hard to set up.
At any rate, I'm not sure how generalizable the FireDogLake/Plame trial experience really is, but the initial point about Jay Carney blundering through recent political history and then lashing out at people who noted his errors really is revelatory.
The Irrelevance of Counterinsurgency Theory
I have all kinds of disagreements with today's Max Boot column, but there's a deeper meta-level disagreement I also have with him and with General David Petraeus, "Front Man for Bush's Iraq Plan" namely that I don't see how all this stuff about counterinsurgency is even relevant to the situation in Iraq today. To the situation in Iraq in 2003? Sure maybe. Maybe even some time into 2004. Back then you had an insurgency/counterinsurgency dynamic. You had a political entity we were wholeheartedly backing -- the Coalition Provisional Authority -- and you had insurgent groups fighting against it. Chestnuts like "Which side gives the best protection, which one threatens the most, which one is most likely to win, these are the criteria governing the population's stand" were likely applicable then.
Today, though, we're beyond all that. The dynamic in Iraq has become complicated and multi-faceted. We don't wholeheartedly support the agenda of Nouri al-Maliki's political coalition. There are competing armed groups in Iraq whose power we'd like to check. There is, as everyone knows, a condition of multi-pronged civil war and we're not eager to take sides in it. Under those circumstances, however, handbooks about beating back insurgencies aren't relevant. If we had some coherent political goals, it would be worth having a discussion about methods of achieving those goals. But we don't have them. The administration's policy is based on the idea that the Middle East is meaningfully divided between an "extremist" team (the Mahdi Army, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, UPDATE: and al-Qaeda) and a "moderate" team (Israel, Sinioria, King Hussein, the United States, Mubarrak) and that we're trying to help the moderates beat the extremists. This is just a giant, baffling, analytical error and no number of handbooks is going to change it.
Player of the Year
Not really following college basketball, I knew that putting up good numbers in college has only a vague relationship to being a great NBA player, but just this morning I saw the actual list of college Player of the Year award winners. It's sobering:
- 1988 - Danny Manning, Kansas
- 1989 - Danny Ferry, Duke
- 1990 - Lionel Simmons, LaSalle
- 1991 - Larry Johnson, UNLV
- 1992 - Christian Laettner, Duke
- 1993 - Calbert Cheaney, Indiana
- 1994 - Glenn Robinson, Purdue
- 1995 - Joe Smith, Maryland
- 1996 - Marcus Camby, Massachusetts
- 1997 - Tim Duncan, Wake Forest
- 1998 - Antawn Jamison, North Carolina
- 1999 - Elton Brand, Duke
- 2000 - Kenyon Martin, Cincinnati
- 2001 - Shane Battier, Duke
- 2002 - Jason Williams, Duke
- 2003 - T. J. Ford, Texas
- 2004 - Jameer Nelson, St. Joseph's
- 2005 - Andrew Bogut, Utah
- 2006 - J.J. Redick, Duke
There are some good players on this list. Elton Brand doesn't get the recognition he deserves and Marcus Camby's contribution to Denver is, I think, frequently understated. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid noticing that of the guys on this list only Tim Duncan is a legit franchise player.
Don't Look Now!
Karen Tumulty's praise of American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson naturally struck me as an intriguing strategic initiative in Swampland's ongoing struggles with left-wing blogofascism. The way I see it, Markos is the Hitler of blogofascism, Duncan the Mussolini, and the TAP gang is Franco, trying to play both sides of the blog/MSM table. So in the spirit of reciprocity, let's note that Joe Klein seems to have perfectly sound views on health care. I particularly agree with him about Medicaid -- insofar as one is going to attempt dramatic reform of the health care system, getting poor people out of the Medicaid ghetto should be a priority.
Congress and National Security
Foreign Policy magazine has an interview up with Bruce Ackerman about congressional ability to check the president's war powers. It mostly focuses on what can and cannot be done vis-a-vis Iraq (as I've been saying, it comes down to the budget requests) but also gets into Iran. Ackerman says the president can't so much as bomb Iran without congressional authorization. I'd like to believe that's true, and it seems consonant with a straightforward reading of the "declare war" clause of the constitution. That said, we all know that declaring war business has been a dead letter for some time. I also seem to recall that Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes against Serbia without congressional authorization.
Continue reading "Congress and National Security" »
Best Mayor Ever
If you want a sense of how we do here in the District, check this out. As part of newly elected mayor Adrian Fenty's First 100 Days initiative, we're going to get a new map of taxi zones in our cabs. The new map is going to have two important features that the old map lacked: - North will be at the top of the map.
- The correct fares will be listed.
Yes. Seriously. This is what we have to look forward to. Accurate fare information and maps with north at the top. And I'm legitimately excited. Seriously.
More Inter-Blog Détente
Joe Klein really nails it here on the ethnic composition of the Iraqi Army and generally bogus nature of Iraqi state institutions. Really.
At any rate, it does occur to me now and again that the netroots could probably use some more good cops to go along with the bad cops. If, say, Klein not only got a torrent of critical email when he wrote something that pissed us off but also a torrent of positive email when he wrote something liberals liked, then he'd probably find himself writing more liberal stuff over the long haul, no? Being nice is no fun and I'm basically an asshole as a general matter, so I don't really want to do it, but surely a big community site like dKos could get the job done.
Neon Bible
I've been anticipating my disappointment in the Arcade Fire's followup to Funeral for about two years now. So imagine my shock when I started listening to Neon Bible and found myself . . . totally not disappointed. Maybe this means I won't be disappointed by the successor to Set Yourself on Fire either?
Helicopters
Josh Marshall points out something I hadn't noticed -- there's been a big uptick in American helicopter crashes recently. It appears, however, that this is a result of better tactics and/or intelligence rather than the acquisition of better weapons.
This brings to mind one of the bitter ironies of the president's recent allegations that Iran is arming our foes in Iraq. The allegation appears, for one thing, to be significantly overstated, raising one's concerns that it's part of a propaganda campaign leading to war. At the same time, however, no matter what proportion of weapons in Iraq come from Iran, it's fairly clear that until very recently at least neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Mahdi Army nor the Badr Organization was an especially well-armed outfit. Compare any of them to an irregular fighting organization that Iran most definitely does equip like Hezbollah's military wing and you'll see that everyone in Iraq is looking rather crude. There's a lot more the Iranians could be handing out in terms of anti-tank missiles, rockets of various kinds, etc. This helicopter business is bad enough allready, but could easily become much worse if the administration continues its efforts to widen the war.
Against Science Before He Was For It
Chris Mooney finds the Bush administration lying and re-writing history to try to pretend that the president has always said human activity is responsible for global warming. As he says, it's "absolutely incredible."
Jonah Goldberg Day!
Two years ago today, Jonah Goldberg threw down the following challenge to Juan Cole:
Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc.
Since Goldberg enjoys throwing a little smear-job in with his punditry, he also offered this:
One caveat: Because I don't think it's right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I'll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.
Got it. So we have a prediction, along with the insinuation that Professor Cole is a terrorist whereas Goldberg is a patriot. Obviously, Goldberg's prediction was incredibly wrong. The prediction, of course, came in the context of a larger argument about credibility and Goldberg's wildly off-base prediction tends to confirm precisely Cole's position in this argument -- Goldberg, while certainly a clever rhetoritician, basically has no idea what he's talking about. Meanwhile, somewhat hilariously, Goldberg thinks that pointing out that Cole turned his wager down should somehow spare him from mockery. The point, however, is still about the very, very poor prediction, not about Cole's skills as a gambler.
Shocking News: Walker is a Chucker!
John Hollinger commenting on NBA players having disappointing seasons, concedes that "We had to anticipate a little slippage from Miami's vets this season . . . but that doesn't mean we should have expected Walker's 3-point Brick-O-Rama extravaganza." Really? We shouldn't? Walker has long demonstrate a mysterious passion for the inaccurate trey. This season he's taking 3.9 per game and only hitting 28 percent. Bad, yes. But in 2003-2004 he was taking 3.7 per game and only hitting 27 percent. In 1999-2000 he was taking 3.5 per game and only hitting 25.6 percent. For his career, Walker shoots 32.7 percent from downtown, which is better, but still not good enough. You don't really want guys regularly shooting threes unless they can hit them over a third of the time. Walker averages 4.8 a game over the course of his career.
What Liberal Media?
One could write posts about this all day and all night, but Ezra Klein asks himself the good question of why The Washington Post is outsourcing its "Best of the Web" feature to Real Clear Politics, an intelligent but distinctly conservative, political site. Why not MyDD?
Similarly, I may as well admit to myself that I'm never going to be a New Yorker writer and express my consternation that they've got Jeffrey Goldberg profiling Joe Lieberman. It's a New Yorker article, so it's hardly "bad" as such, but the magazine has a bizarre hawkish monomania. Goldberg did some terrible pre-war work in their pages hyping all sorts of nonsense, was commissioned just a few weeks ago to write about how everyone to the left of Evan Bayh is an isolationist, and the other guy who writes about US foreign policy for the magazine is George Packer. Why does this not-even-ideological magazine adhere so rigidly to a right-of-center line on national security issues? It's the damn New Yorker it's not like nobody else would take the job if they were interested in ever letting a different point of view surface.
UPDATE: Sy Hersh, of course, stupid mistake. And Hendrick Hertzberg writes for the Talk of the Town. What I had in mind was that neither of them gets these sort of feature profile writing assignments about politicians and American politics. But it's much less clear-cut than what I wrote.
What Jewish Anti-Semitism?
John Judis writing in The New Republic has a judicious take on the American Jewish Committee's accusations of anti-semitism. I'll quote from his conclusion, which makes a broader point:
There is a paradox that haunts these charges of anti-Semitism. On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism--the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.
These controversies over anti-Semitism come, too, at a predictable and particularly unfortunate time in the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. The last time a similar brouhaha arose was in the 1970s, when Jewish peace organizations in the United States challenged Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. At the urging of the Israeli government, organizations like Breira were run out of town by their traditional, and more subservient, brethren. Partly as a result, the United States acquiesced in Israeli policies that, in the long run, have benefited neither the United States nor Israel. The same thing could happen again. A debate has already begun over U.S. policy toward Iran in which AIPAC and the Israeli government have expressed interest in the United States stopping at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Fears of a new Holocaust--made more plausible by the very real anti-Semitism of Iran's president--have been sounded. What policies are in the interest of the United States? And of Israel? These are difficult questions, but they are not made easier to answer when critics of Israel and of the Israel lobby in the United States are charged with anti-Semitism.
I also have a piece on this subject up on The Guardian's Comment Is Free website.
"Silly Season"
I was in a cab earlier today and I heard a news report about the Pelosi jet story. It was a weird report. It went on for a while, making this out to be a big deal. Then at the very end, they brought some additional relevant information into play that made it clear this was much ado about nothing and then quoted Tony Snow pointing out that the whole thing was unfair. Then, in conclusion, was some crack about how it's amazing what kind of nonsense can get people talking in Washington these days.
Well, yes it is amazing, but they missed the whole story. This stuff doesn't just happen to get in the media because, well, DC is like that some weeks. These stories are ginned up in the conservative press in utter bad faith and then they bang away at them until the MSM starts reporting on them. Even if the reports finally conclude that there's nothing there, net harm is done to the Democratic Party and to the cause of progressive politics in America. Even worse, the reports never note that this whole much ado but nothing was not, in fact, about nothing but rather about the repeated and successful efforts of the conservative media to control the debate and engage in character assassination against their political adversaries.
That's why I don't like to see these kind of fake controversies dismissed a "silly season". The allegations are silly, but their existence is deadly serious. We're seeing it with the Amanda Marcotte pseudo-controversy and now again with the Pelosi plane pseudo-controversy and we're going to keep on seeing it until people demand that would-be serious reporters stop taking their cues from wingnut headquarters.
Space Sex
Via Jason Zengerle, a Christopher Beam Explainer in Slate gets to the first thing I thought of when I heard the crazy astronaut story -- do people have sex on the space shuttle? The truth appears to be a somewhat disappointing "no." But if it did happen, it'd be super-awesome, right? Slate says no:
Which raises the question: Would space sex be any good? Recent research suggests it would not. For one thing, zero gravity can induce nausea—a less-than-promising sign for would-be lovers. Astronauts also perspire a lot in flight, meaning sex without gravity would likely be hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat. In addition, people normally experience lower blood pressure in space, which means reduced blood flow, which means … well, you know what that means.
Frankly, I find some of this unconvincing. Does "hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat" really sound all that terrible?
About Rudy
So I wrote this over two years ago but I'm still waiting for an answer: What, exactly, about Rudy Giuliani's record as major makes him a person with a strong profile on national security issues?
UPDATE: "Record as mayor," that is.
Working The Refs
Two sides can play this game, it appears. Chris Bowers explains:
Yesterday, you sent emails to Nedra Pickler of the AP asking her to point out Donahue's history of racially intolerant statements. Not only did she comply, in her new story, she included the exact same Donahue quote you asked her to include. You pressure works.
Impressive, in my view. You can click here to send an email of your own to news organizations complaining about their irresponsible coverage of this matter. Based on the AP's response to complaints, I would advise people to do it. Indeed, I might also note that Swampland is suddenly full of posts I find much more agreeable than the ones they were doing early on.
Your Questions Answered
"The Gaza Palestinians celebrated the Hamas-Fatah ceasefire with rifle fire for over an hour," observes New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, "Can these people do anything without gunshots?"
The answer is that while celebratory gunfire seems to be customary in many Arab nations, it is, in fact, possible for Arabs to do things without gunshots. Indeed, I've observed such non-gunshooting Arabs in person on several occassions. Strange but true. Palestinians, even!
From "Democracy" to Non-Democracy
"[I]t is impossible any more to call Vladimir Putin’s government 'democratic,'" says Thomas Friedman, "given the way it has neutered the Russian Parliament, intimidated or taken over much of the Russian press, subordinated the judiciary and coercively extended its control over the country’s key energy companies." And there's certainly a clear enough sense of "democratic" for which this is true. Later, Friedman re-iterates that "The Yeltsin democratic experiment is over."
This, though, is the question for America's Putin-haters: What Yeltsin democratic experiment? Putin, after all, didn't come out of nowhere. He was the handpicked successor of the Yeltsin regime, installed into office through some pretty dubious machinations. Putin didn't neuter the Russian parliament, he inherited a neutered parliament from the architect of the modern Russian state -- Boris Yeltsin. As nobody seems to remember, "in October 1993, President Boris Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: He called up tanks to shell the parliament building, blasting out his opponents." Later he revised the constitution, creating the current one under which Putin has been enjoying the incredibly broad powers of the Russian presidency. Under Putin, the state directly controls the bulk of the mass media and used said control to prevent a meaningful challenge to Putin's political authority. Under Yeltsin, by "contrast," the media was under the control of a tiny number of close-to-the-regime "oligarchs" who'd benefitted financially from Yeltsin's corruption and used their control over the press to prevent meaningful challenge to Yeltsin's political authority.
What's really changed since the Yeltsin era is the price of oil and gas. Russia under Yeltsin was a very weak country, reeling from decades of Communist mismanagement and a poorly-handled transition to a market economy. Yeltsin himself was heavily dependent on western countries and was unable to effectively challenge American or European strategic priorities. Putin, by contrast, has been enjoying an energy-led economic boom that's allowed Russia to once again become a somewhat consequential player on the world stage, to refuse to cooperate with the United States on issues that are priorities to us. Once that happened, it suddenly dawned on everyone -- hey! this isn't much of a democracy! And it isn't. But we should be spared the pretense that it ever was.
A Question
Jonah Goldberg's very, very indignant that someone would compare global warming denialists to Holocaust deniers. And, I tend to agree, it's not really the same thing. Maybe Jonah would be happier if we just said that the denialists, much like Charles Lindbergh, seems complacent in the face of clearly gathering threats and have some strange ideas about conspiracies in the media.
After all, Lindbergh's not as bad as people say.
What's more, I hear that Hillary Clinton, like most modern liberals, is secretly a fascist. Recall Brendan Nyhan's old compendium of Goldbergian disquiet about Nazi analogies.
The Wages of Pretension
Via Isaac Chotiner an interestingly contrarian Jon Zobenica essay in The Atlantic about Playboy. Zobenica's article is very, very funny so I'd advise you to read it. The argument, however, can be boiled down pretty quickly. He concedes that it's easy to follow John Leland's path and basically mock Playboy for its pretensions:
In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh M. Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: ''We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.'' On first blush his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.
This is fairly silly stuff, Zobenica concedes, but doesn't it actually look pretty good when compared to what you might find in an issue of a present-day lad mag like FHM? There does seem to be a qualitative difference between a slightly silly fantasy about inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, and sex and a fantasy about a woman sitting in a plastic tub and covering herself with ice cream toppings. I'm not sure Zobenica's right at the end of the day -- there's something to be said for not gussying up your photos of scantily clad women as more than it is -- but it's a perspective worth considering.
Striking!
"What is striking," sagely observes Charles Krauthammer, "is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words." In reality, the most striking thing is that Charles Krauthammer, America's Worst Columnist, continues to be published weekly in The Washington Post. Take, for example, this feeble effort at a gotcha. He notes that the Senate unanimously confirmed David Petraeus and then asks, "If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out?"
I promise that Jonah Goldberg could do better than this in his sleep. After a cup of coffee he'd probably even find a way to paint surge opponents as Nazi sympathizers.
To answer Krauthammer's question, nobody opposed Petraeus's appointment because there was no reason to oppose it. The "surge" is the president's plan and whichever general was in command in Iraq would be ordered to carry it out; someone has to be in command of the troops in Iraq even if the troops' mission is to withdraw; and just about everyone seems to think Petraeus is a good general. What's more, the president is always granted very broad deference in these kind of decisions.
What's striking is that Krauthammer obviously knows all of this and is just using his column as an opportunity to write in bad faith. The president is extremely unpopular since at this point everyone knows that he's inept, lazy, corrupt, etc. Petraeus, by contrast, gets good press. So the idea is to paint this as Petraeus's war rather than Bush's. Hence, war opponents should oppose Petraeus' appointment and the argument will be made even though it makes no sense.
Catholic League
A lot of folks are strolling back through the archives in search of Bill Donohue's past outbursts and so forth, but it's really worth taking a look at his less outrageous statements here in the Catholic League's press releases page. You'll quickly get a portrait of a petty, insane little man. See him assail Black Christman ("when it comes to blood and gore flicks, they never open on Christmas Day . . . It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us—a wacko who terrorizes college girls at Christmas—it’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement"), attack Barbara Walters ("playing house mom to bigots"), defend Dennis Prager, and so forth.
There's nothing really all that offensive about these statements (except insofar as the Weinstein-bashing seems, in the context of Donohue's larger record of anti-semitism, to be partially about his anti-semitism) but they're . . . crazy. Nobody should be taking this guy seriously.
People Never Learn
Drew Gilpin Faust poised to be Harvard's first woman president. Apparently, as a nation we've learned nothing from the recent dramatic failure of the whole "women in space" experiment. What's going to be next -- woman congressional leaders? Presidential candidates?
Stop the madness.
You Say "Mean," I Say "Kinda Crazy"
I asked yesterday what Rudy Giuliani's awesome national security credentials were supposed to be, and people replied that he seems mean and therefore tough and therefore good. Jonathan Alter makes an important point about this (via K-Drum): As any actual New Yorker should recall, Giuliani's kind of crazy. Don't get me wrong, I thought he was a pretty good mayor! I was too young (16, I think) to vote to re-elect Giuliani in 1997, but I'm exactly the sort of liberal New Yorker who he won over during his first term to be able to sweep to a crushing re-election victory.
It's worth recalling, though, that in his second term he basically went berserk. He'd always had "His ridiculously thin skin and mile-wide mean streak" but in his second term that came to dominate everything. There were two basic directions in which it would have been reasonable to take that term. He could have tried to apply the hard-charging zeal he'd brought to reforming police procedures to some other significant area of urban policy. Alternatively, he could have focused on keeping his policies in place while trying to heal some of the wounds that implementing them caused. Michael Bloomberg has basically managed to do both. Giuliani, in essence, did neither. Instead, he picked a series of bitter-yet-pointless fights that served to reveal both a basic vindictiveness and a fundamental lack of interest in policies outside the realm of law enforcement.
These are not characteristics which, when combined with the gross opportunism we're now seeing on various cultural issues, are desirable in a president. Also recall his post-9/11 efforts to suspend the City Charter and extend his term in office, adding a dose of power-hunger into the mix.
It's Good to Own the Magazine
This is pretty sweet. As you may recall, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz recently took to the pages of his magazine to accuse George Soros of being a "young cog in the Hitlerite wheel." As Soros points out (follow the link) this charge is false. Peretz, in his response to Soros' response, won't even admit what he accused Soros of doing much less concede that the allegation was false!
It seems to me that when a magazine falsely accuses someone of being a Nazi collaborator that a correction would be warranted.
Ah, Civility
Liberal bloggers sure are vile. Contrast their rantings to the civil debate hosted on the front page of RedState here Hilariously, that post actually comes with a specific request to "keep it clean" even though the poster already started it on a non-clean theme. One commenter is outraged about the dirty, dirty liberal bloggers. Then comes this paragon of civility which the proprietor, absurdly, endorses as "clean."
Never Hire a Blogger
Jon Chait seems right about the semi-perverse consequences of blogger pressure on Edwards to retain his bloggers:
What this episode demonstrated is that, if you're a candidate, hiring a blogger may or may not win you the loyalty of that blogger's friends. But firing that blogger will certainly bring their wrath down upon you. But campaigns, of course, fire staffers pretty often. So why would you hire somebody you can't fire?
That seems right, right? If so, it seems like a price worth paying. Whether or not bloggers get hired by campaigns doesn't really matter. Whether or not the netroots can influence candidates to show some spine vis-à-vis right-wing pressure pressure groups does matter.
Who You Callin' Sensitive?
Dana Goldstein on the Playboy issue:
The essay is entertaining reading, but I think it's obvious why it's especially appealing to sensitive young men. Zobenica makes them feel like it's not only okay to read Playboy, but that it's mature and heck, even feminist. Fundamentally, this is just a rehashing of the infamous male excuse--"Hey, I was reading it for the articles!" I'm not an anti-porn feminist by any stretch of the imagination. But when I pick up Playboy, it's hard for me to take seriously the "Advisor" column's advice about sexually respecting your real-life girl when the centerfolds, month after month, have obviously fake gigantic boobs, identically hairless and child-like vaginas (Playboy seems to have a policy to never show women with visible vaginal lips), and completely flat stomachs.
This seems like a good point. In reality, though, the only issue of Playboy I've picked up since 1996 or so had an article proclaiming this site the best liberal blog. I only it read it for the egomania! By contrast, back in college I traded some frequent flier miles in for a Maxim subscription. I didn't renew when I would have had to pay actual money for it, but I won't deny that I read the issues. So Zobenica's article was, if anything, shitting all over me (not that I don't deserve it); I really just thought it was funny. I think that to form a real political opinion about Playboy I would need to read some issues of the magazine, but it seems to me that Dana's critique doesn't really undermine Zobenica's comparative defense of Playboy vis-à-vis the rising tide of laddism.
"Barack"
Mike Allen begins the attacks on Barack Obama while pretending to be reporting on the attacks others will be beginning shortly. Allen's first gotcha? "Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?" As Brad DeLong points out, he's sometimes said "Barack" is an Arabic word because it is an Arabic word. At other times, he's described "Barack" as a Swahili word because . . . it's also a Swahili word. Yes, yes. Some words are words in more than one language. Shocking stuff. I also enjoyed Allen's account of why Obama is too liberal:
“Audacity of Hope” advocates civil unions for gay people (a position held by most national democratics), declaring tartly that Obama is not “willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.” He says he doesn’t “believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them – or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety.”
He writes that Bill Clinton and conservatives turned out to be “right about welfare as it was previously structured.” He adds, “But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty.”
So he has one stand that all Democrats adhere to, but has an unusually compelling, Bible-based rationale for it. That won't fly! Then he says Bill Clinton was right about welfare reform (so very liberal!) but also that "work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty." But does anyone deny this? It's a matter of math. The minimum wage is so many dollars per hour, those dollars per hour times a forty hour workweek equals sub-poverty living for many families. To avoid being objectionably liberal these days we need to pretend all full-time work pays a non-poverty wage even when it doesn't?
UPDATE: Michael Crowley: "if this is the best people have got (which I doubt: the really saucy stuff will spill in more dramatic fashion) then Barack shouldn't sweat." Agreed.
The Front Load
Jerome Armstrong takes a look at the front loading of the 2008 Democratic primaries. As Ed Kilgore observes:
There are various theories about how front-loading will affect the 2008 contest. One is that it will actually magnify the importance of Iowa, where all indications are that there will be a close four-way race among Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Vilsack. Another is that the candidates with the most money and national support will "go long" and husband resources for delegate-rich post-SC states like CA and FL.
I would only observe that to a surprising extent there's no real "answer" to this question. A whole bunch of influential reporters (the mythic "gang of 500") could just decide they don't really want to spend winter in Des Moines, proclaim that under the new schedule Iowa doesn't really matter, and then all head down to Florida and California to cover the newly important warm-weather primaries. The whole process unfolds according to a series of more-or-less arbitrary pseudo-rules than the media (and to some extent big dollar donors) are just kind of making up as they go along.
Henley on Iran
Read this, and then read a few points on top of it. More later.
Pre-Emptive War
Hillary Clinton tells the New Hampshire Union-Leader, "When I set forth my reasons for giving the President that authority, I said that it was not a vote for pre-emptive war." Obviously, though, the authority she did give the president was the authority to launch a pre-emptive war. More to the point, however, whatever Clinton thought she was doing in October 2002, if she disapproved of what Bush decided to do in March 2003 she could have spoken up. All I can find in a critical vein from Senator Clinton on Iraq in that period is this press release in which she criticized the president's homeland security funding and asks that additional monies by appropriated for this purpose when the inevitable Iraq supplemental comes down. She doesn't actually criticize the president's Iraq policy at all. On March 17, meanwhile, she issued a clear and unambiguous statement of support for Bush's position:
When the President of the United States addresses the nation about possible military action, it is a solemn occasion for every American. Tonight, the President gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war, and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly. While we wish there were more international support for the effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, at this critical juncture it is important for all of us to come together in support of our troops and pray that, if war does occur, this mission is accomplished swiftly and decisively with minimum loss of life and civilian casualties. I have had the honor of meeting and speaking with many of our brave men and women in uniform. They are the best trained, equipped, and motivated military in the entire world, we support them fully and we are grateful for their courageous service in these difficult times.
This should all come as no surprise as Clinton was happy for years to be identified as a war supporter. Like millions of Americans, myself included, her views on the merits of the war have changed as we watched events unfold on the ground and as we gave the matter further thought. She might as well just say so, since pretending otherwise is pretty silly -- she's not an obscure figure, everybody knows she was for the war.
Obama's In
Good speech, I thought. Frankly, I sort of enjoy the absence of policy detail:
Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America. Every single person willing to work should be able to get job training that leads to a job, and earn a living wage that can pay the bills, and afford child care so their kids have a safe place to go when they work. Let's do this.
That's the way to go, isn't? To be frank, nobody can be quite sure precisely what combination of policies can get this done. The thing to do, even in the absence of political constraints, would be to try some stuff. You'd need to make some existing things more generous, you'd need to try some reforms here and there, you'd need to start some new initiatives and . . . you'd need to be prepared for the fact that some of it probably wouldn't work and you'd need to try something else. Goals are good.
Also note: "But all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq. Most of you know I opposed this war from the start. I thought it was a tragic mistake." My instinct is that this is going to be a powerful point.
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Heads in the Sand
