When right-wing politicians decide that the best way to cope with budget shortfalls is by cutting Medicaid the result is that infant mortality is back on the rise in the American South. As everyone knows, despite the United States being richer than almost every country, and despite our American proclivity for spending more on health care than any other country, we have a very high infant mortality rate. In the South, naturally, it tends to be higher than the national average thanks to higher-than-usual poverty rates and worse-than-usual social services and it's getting worse as Bush and the GOP have taken the Dixie social model nationwide for several years now.
I literally can't bear to watch the Wizards-Cavs game. If we're very, very lucky will get to go down to the sort of defeat with dignity that I feel Orlando extracted from Detroit last night. The interesting game, however, was obviously Rockets-Jazz. The poetry of Tracy McGrady falling down on the job after his "it's on me" interview jag -- scoring one point in the first half -- and then turning it on like only T-Mac (well, okay, only T-Mac and Kobe) can do to win the game was brilliant. And, of course, Yao who's really perfected the quiet 28/13 game.
EKlein and GFR think John Edwards is to blame for the Modo Hair Story Fiasco. I join with Scott Lemieux in placing the onus purely on Dowd and her peers in the media:
The error they're making, I think, it to assume that these charges have some sort of objective merit to someone, or that there's some way of avoiding having junior high narratives being developed about you. Consider what similar advice given to Al Gore would look like (and there are many people who blamed Gore for running a horrible, horrible campaign and not adapting to the media.) He wouldn't be able to wear "earth tone" suits, or casual jackets, or Armani suits, or work clothes...actually, I'm not sure what he could wear. He couldn't discuss past political achievements because the media would distort them and make them look arrogant. He can't pass on things a newspaper told him about his friend's novel because it might not turn out to be fully true. He can't pay a feminist consultant. And on and on and on. And if he had done all of these things, Dowd, Rich, Connolly, et al. still would have just made stuff up out of whole cloth, as they in fact did. And it's the same thing with Kerry. If he engages in his actual hobbies, he's an upper class twit. If he does anything else, he's a phony.
One should note that there's a trap here designed to make it impossible, in practice, for anyone to advocate effectively on behalf of working class Americans. It's simply not possible, given the way the American political system works, for a person to be in a position to run for president without having achieved high socioeconomic status. A person will, in that position, be condemned by the press as a hypocrite if he acts like someone with money, and condemned by the press as a phony if he acts like someone without money (indeed, Edwards even got in trouble earlier for acting like a working class person who got rich and bought a tastelessly large house). Meanwhile, someone like George W. Bush who eschews the interests of working class Americans in favor culturalist posturing can get a free pass on sailing in Kennebunkport, and a free pass on phony working class affectations. No real person can uniformly avoid these "errors" -- it's the media dynamic that needs to change.
UPDATE: Also -- what Paul Waldman said. The fact that Maureen Dowd is literally recycling Republican National Committee talking points tells you 90 percent of what you need to know about this.
"I don't suppose even the 'Gee, I'm not sure waterboarding is really torture' crowd will be able to claim that whipping someone with an electrical cable isn't torture," writes Mark Kleiman. The preferred tactic in these cases, of course, is to completely ignore the issue. The issue, in this case, being that the defense department won't let mid-level officers testify in a closed session of a congressional panel about the training of Iraqi soldiers, seemingly because they don't want anyone to ehar about this business.
Before the game, all the talk from the commentators was about Nene's status as the x-factor in this matchup, someone the Spurs didn't particularly have a plan to contain. And, eh, he played pretty well, but certainly not great. Nonetheless, the first big upset of the playoff season. I'd register myself as still very confident that the Spurs will win this series. You can't beat Denver when 'Melo and AI both have efficient scoring nights, but the whole point is that they both do so only quite rarely. In a seven game series, it's not a huge threat.
The softer side of Matt Yglesias is a great love of pandas, and, fortunately, I have a vast network of correspondents scattered throughout the universe prepared to send me news of things like Tai-Shan's potential sibling who may be on the way now that Mei Xiang has been artificially inseminated with the sperm of Gao Gao from the San Diego Zoo. Meanwhile, our theory is, what, that Don Nelson has placed an ancient Chinese curse on the city of Dallas?
Paul Krugman: "There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met."
Indeed. Krugman seems disinclined to end his column on a defeast note, but the maddening thing of it is that all signs indicate that this tactic is likely to succeed and Bush will achieve his goal of ensuring that the war is left on the desk of the next president. Perhaps he thinks this'll mean it'll go down in the record books as something his successor "lost" rather than a catastrophic error he made.
Matt Welch concludes an interesting rundown of the tangled congressional debate over the Armenian genocide on a somewhat upbeat note:
Hitler reportedly said, just before invading Poland, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" It's a chilling reminder that forgetting is the first step in enabling future genocides. Yet Hitler was eventually proved wrong. No temporal power is strong enough to erase the eternal resonance of truth.
I don't think that's right. I think what Hitler's trying to say here is that history will forgive Germany brutal measures -- no matter how brutal -- as long as Germany wins. That historical memory is determined by political power rather than by the objective merits of historical claims. And if you read Welch's account, it's hard to see it as anything other than a vindication of Hitler's thesis. The US government's official position, for perfectly understandable realpolitik reasons, is to avoid talk of an Armenian genocide. The only reason this position hasn't managed to carry the day is the determined lobbying of a politically effective Armenian expatriate community. And, now, the Armenian cause has been boosted by people looking for a kitchen sink's worth of arguments for keeping Turkey out of the EU. People, in short, do speak today of the annihilation of the Armenians, but not because of "the eternal resonance of truth," they do it because the temporal power of Turkey is counterbalanced by the temporal power of Turkey's foes.
Alex Tabbarok tries to explain inequality in terms of globalization- and technology-driven superstar effects, citing JK Rowling's billion dollar earnings as an example. He notes that a Homer or a Shakespeare could only sell their wares to relatively tiny audiences -- maybe 50 at a time in Homer's case or 3,000 for Shakespeare:
Tolkien's words were leveraged further. Tolkien could sell to hundreds of thousands even millions of buyers in a year - more than have ever seen a Shakespeare play in 400 years - by selling books. And books were cheaper to produce than actors which meant that Tolkien could earn a greater share of the revenues than did Shakespeare (Shakespeare incidentally also owned shares in the Globe.)
Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy. And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.
To me, there's no question that this kind of thing is going on. International superstars across fields now have a global customer base that allows the very most popoular -- most popular writers, musicians, baskteball players, hedge fund managers, lawyers, oncologists, etc. -- to earn windfalls far beyond the dreams of mortals. And insofar as this is a large part of the inequality story, it does tend to undercut highly moralized objections to the right being so darn rich. Rowling isn't doing anything wrong to get so rich. But on the other hand, insofar as this story is right, it also seems to me that the primary pragmatic worries one might have about pro-equality measures likewise tend to melt away. If the very best in a range of fields are just bound to reap enormous windfall earnings under current technological conditions then it seems unlikely that tax measures aimed at limiting the size of those windfalls would significantly deter anyone from doing their work. One doubts Rowling set about down this path because she thought it stood any reasonable chance of making her a billionaire.
Phillip Carter's coverage of Iraq continues to be enlightening, though his rhetorical pitch is far too kind. Consider this:
Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus' plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc's resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.
The point about Achilles' heel, as you'll recall, is that he was invulnerable everyplace else. What Carter's talking about here is as if Achilles were a totally normally person. A nice guy, smart maybe, kind to kids and his "Achilles heel" was that he dies if you stab him. Political reconciliation isn't part of Petraeus-style counterinsurgency, it's the whole thing. His counterinsurgency field manual is all about trying to design military operations that can effectively support an effective political process. The "surge" is, at best, such a military operation. But if the political process isn't effective -- which, by all accounts, it isn't -- then there's nothing there.
Barack Obama begins busting out the dread policy specifics, in particular a proposal to reduce the carbon content of gasoline. It's sort of like a carbon cap-and-trade scheme writ small, since it would apply only to the auto fuel market rather than the economy as a whole. This clearly isn't sufficiently ambitious to deal with the climate change problem and, to its credit, the campaign doesn't claim it is.
This is why, I think, people ought to calm down a bit about the demands for policy commitments. What to make of this proposal depends entirely on what else is or is not proposed along with it. As an idea, it's a good one. As a comprehensive approach to global warming, it's terrible. So one has to see if more good ideas come down the pike. This, by itself, is neither worth gushing over nor condemning.
UPDATE: Brian Beutler notes Barack Obama's January support for a coal-to-gas initiative that would be good for the coal industry in Southern Illinois, but bad, bad, bad for the climate. If he's decided to back away from that as he goes nationwide, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Certainly, it's something we all deserve clarity about.
UPDATE II: Okay, this doesn't as a campaign policy proposal per se, but Obama turns out to be one of the cosponsors of the comprehensive climate change plan formerly known as McCain-Lieberman. It's a cap-and-trade scheme with pretty good targets. Edwards' targets are better, but we'd have to consider ourselves lucky if we could pass Obama's.
Okay. The time has come to let you all in on some changes forthcoming soon in my life and on this blog. Most notably, I'm leaving my job at The American Prospect to take a position at The Atlantic Monthly where my primary responsibility is going to be . . . producing this blog. If you read Andrew Sullivan's site -- which is now part of the Atlantic web operation -- that's a very good model for how this is going to work. In short, however, there's actually relatively little to expect in terms of changes. The site will have a snazzy new design (featuring, among other things, Atlantic branding, but no cartoon) and a new URL, but the current URL will redirect you automatically to the new one, and people who subscribe to RSS feeds shouldn't need to change anything. You can expect the same eclectic mix of politics and other stuff that you've come to expect, though in exchange for a salary I think I'm going to try harder to avoid typos.
Logistically, I'm going to leave this afternoon on a trip to some undisclosed locations. You can expect posting to continue, albeit at a reduced rate, until Friday. Friday evening, the DNS propagation of the new URL will being, meaning that over the weekend more-and-more people will start getting redirected to the new site (which will incorporate all of the old site's posts, archives, etc.). By one week for today, everyone should be pointed to the new site and posting will be up to its usual pace as I start my first day on the new job.
Pulling away from the technical details, I should say that while I'm excited about the new gig, the downside will be leaving my previous home at TAP. The Atlantic's offer was far too good an opportunity to turn down, but it's been an honor and a pleasure to work these past three and a half years at a place filled with smart, wonderful people dedicated to advancing worthy ideas. I'm not by any means the first progressive writer who got my start at the Prospect, which has shown a unique and underappreciated commitment to building the next generation of progressive media, and thanks to what Ezra Klein's accomplished, I can leave certain that I won't be the last. At any rate, I think you'll really enjoy the new site once it's up and running. Obviously, none of this is possible without you, the readers, and I thank you all for putting up with yet another URL-and-format switch.
It's hard to know what to say about a man with such a deeply ambiguous legacy. I do, however, have clear positive feelings about "Oregon Girl" by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin:
Let me just observe briefly that I think a lot of American's national security policy elite still loves Boris Yeltsin who, for all his foibles, was pleasingly dependent on US-backing in a way that Vladimir Putin isn't. This probably has more to do with the vagaries of the oil market than with differences between the leaders, but US-Russian relations tend to get personalized, so this is what you get.
I had this totally solid plan for getting to BWI airport. Get on the Green Line at U Street / Cardozo and take it out to Greenbelt. The train is scheduleed to arrive at 4:35 PM, just in time for the $3 bus leaving at 4:40 and taking me right ot my terminal. Except I didn't have enough money on my card to cover the exit fee for the trip to Greenbelt, so I had to put more cash on while in the station, and wound up missing the bus by about ninety seconds. Next bus not until 5:20. Bad news. Fortunately, there were about a dozen idle taxi drivers in the parking lot and absolutely no one getting in any cabs. Under the circumstances, I figured someone would crack and give me a break on the fare. But no. I was able to take the first guy I approached down from "about $45" to "$40 flat fare" but nobody would go any lower. I make no grand claims for my skill as a negotiator, but since I actually wound up walking away and waiting for the bus it wasn't my ineptitude that stopped the deal from going through.
In the whole time I was waiting for the bus to arrive, two people got in cabs and four other cabs drove away (perhaps on calls) so it was more or less a lose-lose proposition all around. One assumes, however, that the cabbies derive some benefit over the long term from not bargaining against one another. It's interesting that the cartel doesn't operate by simply observing the regulatory floor set by the meter of $40 since setting a price floor would seem to be the purpose of taxi fare regulations. Waiting for the bus, all I could think was "what would Tyler Cowen say about this?" I note that about ten minutes in, the only thing stopping me from cracking was pride. If someone had said "okay, you win, $38.50" I totally would have taken the deal.
The "vision thing" is what Obama's good at, and I think it's on display here. An appealing vision of American leadership embedded in an interconnected, fundamentally cooperative world. I think he does a good job of putting the terrorism issue in the appropriate context, as a serious problem on a par with several other serious problems rather than the organizing principle of everything we do in the world. He's also very strong on nuclear non-proliferation, which happens to be the most important issue. The section on when to use force is fuzzy, and manages to not distinguish Obama's view from things Edwards or Clinton could also espouse. There are a couple of head-nods in the direction of indicating that Obama understands the central role the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays in the mess that is the broader Middle East, which is great if I'm reading the head-nods correctly.
Shaw, the neighborhood I kinda sorta live in (it's not clear to me which neighborhood my house is technically in, but I identify as Shaw rather than Columbia Heights since I never go to any CH places) is the second-bloggiest neighborhood in America behind only the insidious Clinton HIll in Brooklyn.
More to the point, as select friends are aware I'm constantly claiming that I'm going to relocate to Portland, Oregon. I barely know anything about Portland, but everything I hear sounds good. The list has someplace called "The Pearl District" in Portland as the sixth bloggiest neighborhood in America. So now it's official, I'm not just moving to Portland, I'm moving to the Pearl District in Portland. Although that's a sucky name and Northwest Triangle sounds a lot better.
I heard some cranky radio dude while in a cab from the airport going on and on about how Bush's reaction to Gonzalez' testimony was the surest proof yet that he was a man of principle who didn't listen to the polls. Blah, blah, I thinks. Now, at last, I see the reaction:
President Bush said Monday that the Congressional testimony of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales last week, roundly panned by members of both parties, had “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.”
I'm hear at my undisclosed vacation location (Not Santa Fe -- ha! -- that's coming later) and you can expect blogging throughout the week to be somewhat sporadic. Tim Lee has a good column about technologu patents run amok in The American, which I think is an AEI publication but the article's still good.
A good observation from Ezra Klein on Barack Obama's foreign policy address. Obama says of Iraq:
In 2002, I stated my opposition to the war in Iraq, not only because it was an unnecessary diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, but also because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threats that 9/11 brought to light. I believed then, and believe now, that it was based on old ideologies and outdated strategies – a determination to fight a 21st century struggle with a 20th century mindset.
As Ezra remarks, "What's telling, however, is what's absent. Obama doesn't say he opposed the war because of a nagging skepticism towards Hussein's WMD capabilities, nor because this administration wasn't competent enough to pull such a conflict off. Rather, he opposed it because it was the wrong war, focused on the wrong threats, and stemming from the wrong ideology." Contrast this with, say, John Edwards in his famous "I was wrong" op-ed:
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
Obama didn't go on to draw any broader programmatic distinctions between himself and other Democrats, preferring to stay within the formal "positive vision" framework, but it'll be interesting to seee as we get some Democratic debates whether any larger doctrinal differences emerge, or if this is just a question of emphasizing different aspects of the same negative view of the Iraq War.
So here's a question as I'm watching the second quarter of the Heat-Bulls game even though it's only ten to six -- what do sports fans do here on the West Coast? You've gotten Eastern Conference playoff games starting at 4PM. You've got NFL games starting at 10 AM. I'm on vacation, so whatever, but this is madness. Sure, sure on more than one spring morning I've felt a bit weary because I stayed up late to watch a western game, but that's not nearly as big a deal as it simply being impossible to watch games if you have a job or asking football fans to wake up early on Sundays. It's probably nice for schoolkids but, seriously, they can't vote. Which brings me to the fact that I'm pretty sure I'm prepared to defend the claim that the 48 states should adopt a single time zone.
I see a fair number of people, including Brian Beutler, disquieted by Barack Obama's call for the addition of 92,000 ground soldiers to the American military. It's important to note that this has become pretty much a standard Democratic policy proposal and I'm not sure it differentiates Obama from anyone of the main legislative leaders or other presidential candidates. As to the merits of the plan, well, it depends. 100,000 more soldiers instead of . . . what? If at the margin we're trading away F-22s, Osprey helicopters, DD(X) destroyers, etc. in exchange for additional troops, that's a perfectly good idea. It would be a great idea to do what Obama proposes in regard to reducing our nuclear spending and use that money to finance additional boots on the ground. By contrast, however, further restraint in domestic discretionary spending in order to finance further increases in defense spending is a bad idea.
At the end of the day, the Pentagon doesn't really "need" more troops. The US military, however, has the luxury of operating well beyond the margins of strict necessity. More troops would be useful. They could guard refugee camps in Chad, keep girls' schools open in rural Afghanistan, let National Guard soldiers stay home with their families ready to respond to natural disasters, help monitor cease-fire lines in Congo, etc., etc., etc. If you're worried that more troops would be used for occupation duty in Teheran I think that's a smart worry, but the solution is to elect a president who won't invade Iran. As we've seen in Iraq, an absence of logistical capabilities won't stop a bad president from launching an unwise invasion.
The problem with the proposal is that "useful" is a low bar to pass. We have way more conventional military firepower than we need and way, way, way more nukes than we need. Restraining that stuff to free up money for more soldiers is change int he right direction. But we have less health care, less education, less child care, less basic infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. than we need. Cutting back there to further incease the capabilities of what's already the most capable military on the planet by a long margin doesn't make sense.
The more I think about this idea, the less I like it. I could imagine forms in which I'd support something along these lines, but the budgetary costs involved are staggering and the strategic rationale is thin. The political rationale, by contrast, is clear but also kind of tawdry and misguided. I don't think you're ever going to convince voters that the Democrats are the authentic party of militaristic nationalism.
I imagine people who woke up on Eastern time have already gone through most of the BS in Joe Lieberman's Washington Post op-ed, but let's note his characterization here of congressional liberals: "Rather than supporting Gen. Petraeus, they are threatening to strip him of the troops he says he needs and sabotage his strategy." You see. It's not the president's policy Democrats aren't supporting, it's General Petraeus' policy!
This is something we've seen for months now and it really rankles. It's a weird way of turning civil-military relations on its head, and then kind of spinning it around. Petraeus is a general. He's supposed to follow orders from the country's civilian leadership. If Bush outlines a policy, Petraeus is supposed to carry it out. The fact that Petraeus is backing it, however, doesn't then become an additional reason for further elements of the national political leadership to also back it. "Look, the general I put in charge because he was willing to defend my policy publicly is defending my policy" isn't an independent basis for thinking the president's policy is sound. What's more, it's bizarre to see discredited figures like President of the United States George W. Bush, Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Joe Lieberman, etc. all hiding behind the skirts of a subordinate to try to make it appear that this is something other than a policy that was outlined by them and that they are in charge of implementing.
I missed the airtime of Bill Moyers' widely discussed inquiry into the media and the Iraq War, but I've been perusing some of the additional features on the show's website and there's some remarkable stuff there. Here's Scott Ritter:
And when I first resigned and spoke out, you know, I was treated as the darling of the right-wing media especially, because it was the time of the Clinton administration. And I was basically Clinton-bashing, or at least that's how they chose to interpret it. When it turned out that I wasn't Clinton-bashing, I was bashing, you know, American policy objectives-- some of which were endorsed by the right wing, the conservative side, I no longer was the darling of the media.
Having been pushed into a corner as a Clinton basher, there are certain elements of the media now that, you know, the analysis put me in another corner, didn't know how to deal with me. So, you're not getting-- the message out. I wrote a book. I made a documentary film. I did everything I could to get the data out there to the public and it wasn't working.
Man, for a while there it looked like we were in for a very interesting first round. Denver wins! Golden State wins! Phoenix struggling! Maybe the Rockets can take it all! Now, the "big three" all seem firmly back in control to me.
David Broder, of course, is a -- if not the -- pillar of the dread Washington Media Establishment. At the same time, it's become so fashionable to mock him these days, one has to wonder if he really is such a pillar. Everyone's doing it, after all. Under the circumstances, it's worth noting that given that we live in a country of 300 million, that one man has ridiculous opinions is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that he has this column on The Washington Post and makes frequent appearances on Meet The Press. And what's much less fashionable than Broder-bashing is noting that Broder would be irrelevant if not for the way key gatekeepers -- Tim Russert, editors at the Post, executives at NBC News -- keep rammig him down the throats of Americans interested in politics.
And what, I have to wonder, is Broder's economic value to the Post? At the margin, how many readers would the Post lose if it didn't carry his column? I have a hard time imagining it's a large number. And yet, to harshly condemn Broder's enablers would simply reduce one's own chances of having op-eds appear in the Post and so forth. Unless, of course, one were a conservatives. Conservatives, after all, can regularly slander both "the media" as a whole and any number of specific media organizations without ill effect.
Asked what she would do if two American cities were simultaneously attacked, Clinton let 'er rip. "Having been a senator during 9/11, I understand the extraordinary horror of that kind of attack," she said. "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. That doesn't mean we go looking for other fights. Let's focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them."
It was at least the second time in the debate that Clinton referenced her experience as a Senator during and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- an effort to show she has been in the trenches fighting terrorism and its aftermath for years.
Edwards, who was asked that same question, emphasized the importance of diplomacy -- changing the way that the world looks at America. "We have more tools available to us than bombs," Edwards said.
Richardson went a step further, advocating an immediate military retaliation.
Can someone give me a better account of what the question was? I mean, military retaliation against whom? I mean, there was no military retaliation after the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London for the very good reason that there was nowhere to retaliate. Having deposed the Taliban from ruling Afghanistan, we can't respond to a new al-Qaeda attack -- even a big one -- by deposing the Taliban again. So what are we talking about here? Presumably not just lashing out at random.
"But no international player has generated this much buzz at such a young age since Milicic in 2002." That's a shameless Chad Ford discussing DVK Joventut's Ricky Rubio.
Huh. Looks like there was more than one "did they really ask that question?" moment in the Democratic debate. Ed Kilgore reports:
Obama had some of the most interesting moments. He initially flubbed a "gotcha" question about America's "three top allies," and didn't mention Israel, but nicely handled the follow-up. He was more specific about health care than in past debates. And he did a solid job of answering questions about his position on Iraq.
Oh, my! A top three allies question. The UK and Canada are, I think, our numbers one and two allies. Apparently, the "right" answer is that Israel belongs in the top three as well. Seeing as how US troops have never fought alongside the IDF and we don't have a formal treaty commitment to the defense of Israel (we surely would have one were Israel to have defined borders, but it doesn't, so we don't) this strikes me as a difficult case to make. Australia is probably most aligned with us in foreign policy terms. But I think you'd have to say that the US-Japanese alliance has a hard-to-beat combination of closeness and strategic significance. The fact that NATO involves so many players, however, makes this a bit hard to answer, since that makes a whole big raft of countries very significant allies of ours.
Okay, kids. I need to pack this computer up and drive to Santa Fe. By the time I make it there, I think we're going to be in the transition window during which you shouldn't see any new posts. Soon enough, though, the MatthewYglesias.com URL will start directing you to the new Atlantic site. I hope you like it.
It looks like the new site is up and running. I'm still in Santa Fe -- went to Bandelier yesterday and I'm going to drive to Taos later today. But if you're hungry for political commentary, let me note that the timing of George Tenet's anti-administration tilt sure is odd. It was clear years if you peered deeply between the lines that Tenet personally and the CIA generally were being made scapegoats for things that were primarily the fault of folks in the White House, in the Office of the Vice President, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. But officially Tenet, like Powell, remained a good solider on board with the party line.
Now Tenet flips. Not before Bush's re-election, not before the midterms, not with the country still "deeply divided" about his administration, but with his approval ratings mired in the low thirties. For people who collaborated in the distasters of 2002-2004 to turn around and tell us now how terrible everything was is the political equivalent of taking cheap shots at a fighter whose already collapsed unconsious to the mat.
But not really. Really, it's just the old DC suck-up. Tenet wasn't happy with Bush before, but as long as Bush was riding high he was happy to be loyal, happy to take his medal and retire quietly. Now that Bush is weak, people want to say they had nothing to do with the whole mess. It'd be sad were it not so deadly serious.
On the other hand, sometimes things do change. I leave DC for a week, for example, and suddenly we have hooker scandals popping up and the Deputy Secretary of State in charge of foreign aid programs is quitting. Not to be too shallow about it, but that's a lot more interesting than the student loan graft that was in the papers before I left. Of course in many ways here the real scandal is that a guy in that position "a former chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co."
We reacted to 9/11 by freaking out and invading one too many countries, creating more terrorists. With the ranks of terrorists growing — amid evolving biotechnology and loose nukes — we could within a decade see terrorism on a scale that would make us forget any restraint we had learned from the Iraq war’s outcome. If 3,000 deaths led to two wars, how many wars would 300,000 deaths yield? And how many new terrorists?
Obama said he first would assure there was an effective emergency response and not a repeat of what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
He then turned his attention to the issue of intelligence. "The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, A) to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and, B) to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network."
He went on to say that what the United States must avoid at such a moment is alienating the world community "based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast," adding that "we're not going to defeat terrorists on our own."
His answer appeared shaped by the reaction, at home and abroad, to President Bush's invasion of Iraq, and he was suggesting clearly that he would not follow that model in confronting a terrorist attack.
But in rapid succession, former senator John Edwards (N.C.) and Clinton offered rather different responses, sounding a far more aggressive tone in their determination to retaliate and unequivocal in their willingness to use force.
I sometimes face some skepticism from people about whether the foreign policy differences between the Democrats really matter. After all, people say, in the wake of Iraq nobody's likely to just start up a new war for no reason at all. This is probably true. But the essence of national security policy is that the environment is always changing in unpredictable ways. It's very doubtful that the Bush administration ever would have invaded Iraq had 9/11 not created the political moment in which it could be done. It's very important that, if the country suffers a terrorist attack under the next administration, that the country be run by a group of people who'll respond intelligently rather than by a group of people who'll think Priority Number One should be lashing out to demonstrate "toughness." Edwards, I think, mitigated his sins on this question by acting very well on the "war on terror" show of hands. Nobody in this race has really won me over on security questions, but Clinton has consistently managed to accomplish whatever the reverse of that is.
We drove this morning to Taos along the highly-touted high road. It's pretty cool. On the way back to Santa Fe, we took the faster but less-touted low road. In my opinion, this less-touted option -- running alongside the Rio Grande along the bottom of a vast gorge -- is actually much more interesting. Taking one way going and the other way going back is probably the smart play so it doesn't really matter, but I really do wonder what these high road advocates are thinking.
Possibly because the "good things" happening in Iraq turn out to be sandcastles: "inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle."
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Heads in the Sand
