If you're interested in the foreign policy views of major Hillary Clinton financial backer Haim Saban, there's no need to follow the Atrios path of attempting guilt by association with Kenneth Pollack. He discussed his views on the Middle East and Persian Gulf region in great detail in a reasonably recent interview with Haaretz:
When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. They speak the same language. His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal. And for a religious person of deep self-persuasion, that supreme goal is worth the liquidation of five and a half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a religious leadership that is convinced that the annihilation of Israel will bring about the emergence of a new Muslim caliphate? Israel cannot allow that. This is no game. It's truly an existential danger."
You have a deep knowledge of the United States - will the U.S. take action to stop Iran?
"President Bush has no capital. He doesn't have the political capital to take a drastic step. We know what the Chinese and the Russians think, and a move by the United States alone - I doubt it. And now, with the Democrats in control of both Houses? I don't believe it will happen."
Saban was the largest overall contributor to the Democratic National Committee during the 2001-2002 cycle, when the party leadership was backing the Iraq War and Terry McAuliffe was DNC chair, and if Clinton becomes president, they'll be back in the positions of influence they enjoyed back then. I doubt this all means that Hillary Clinton's secretly itching for war with Iran, but it's yet another illustration of the fact that her views on national security policy are too neoconnish for my tastes.
Truly odd Gallup poll result. The question: "Next, we'd like to ask about your views on two different explanations for the origin and development of life on earth. Do you think [see below] is definitely true, probably true, probably false, or definitely false?" They rotated two different answers into the blank space. One was "Evolution -- that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life." The other was "Creationism -- that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
In the Evolution sample, 18 percent said evolution is definitely true, and an additional 35 percent said it's probably true. In the Creationism sample, however, 39 percent said creationism is definitely true and 27 percent said creationism is probably true.
We've all heard of "framing effects" in polls, and that's what you're seeing here -- people seem inclined to agree with the questioner -- but the scale of the effect seems enormous here, especially since the question isn't particularly obscure.
The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.
The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.
That's some good counterinsurgency stuff right there, I guess? The old arbitrary detention followed by endless exile in Albania approach to hearts and minds.
As part of, I guess, the continuing campaign to get the United States to launch a war with Iran, there's going to be an article forthcoming by a liberal hawk that quotes a good friend of mine in a misleading way as part of his effort to make the case that the damn dirty hippies of the blogosphere have become apologists for Iran's ruling oligarchy (we know how this story goes). Meanwhile Jim Henley observes:
Gary Farber is onto important news about the actual effects of America’s “pro-democracy” program for Iran. It’s getting lots of people arrested, and various Iranian reform leaders abroad warned the State Department and others against stamping “Made in the USA” all over Iranian dissident groups within the Islamic Republic.
It's almost as if all this chest-thumping isn't really about putting serious thought into the best interests of the Iranian people.
Megan McArdle links to this propaganda classic of Stalin paying a visit to Berlin:
"Stalin, upon viewing it, is said to have remarked that it was so lovely, he wished he had actually gone," she says. Mark Kleiman adds that "By the same token, no doubt George W. Bush wishes he'd actually accomplished the mission."
A nice counterpoint to Dan Balz's weird Broderish moaning that "the political culture of Washington" didn't bring forth the immigration compromise he desired is provided by John Broder in The New York Times who points out that the institutions of American government are designed to make it hard to pass legislation on controversial topics.
All things considered, I think this is a bad thing, and think it's generally better to operate under more parliamentary methods. But like it or not, you go to war with the institutions you have, and there's no sense heaping personal scorn on individual legislators for institutional factors beyond their control.
Thomas Ricks reports on the plans for a permanent "post-occupation" force of 50,000 or so troops in Iraq. This is probably the best way to operationalize talk of "winning" the war. The goal, according to the war's proponents, is to create the kind of situation where the country is sufficiently stable and under sufficiently docile leadership as to be willing to play host to a series of permanent bases.
But, of course, it's precisely the widespread -- and, crucially, accurate -- Iraqi perception that US forces aren't there just to help them out and aren't planning on leaving that drives the appeal of both Sunni and Shiite nationalist groups that are opposing us.
UPDATE: Re-reading the piece it dawns on me that this plan is tragically consistent with the Democratic mantra of withdrawing "combat forces" from Iraq but leaving troops for training, force protection, and counterterrorism. Bill Richardson says let's really withdraw.
Gilbert Arenas says he'll opt out of his contract after the 2007-2008 season in search of more money, though he's hoping to get that money from the Wizards rather than go elsewhere. At his current salary, Agent Zero's a fantastic bargain, but he also strikes me as the kind of guy (tons of scoring, but not terrible efficient and not much as a rebounder or defender) who's poised to get overpaid by someone as a free agent.
Phil Leotardo, seeking to build support for his proposed decapitation of the Soprano crime family, cites, among other things, the idea that the Jersey mob doesn't do the initiation ritual properly. I'd read that as nothing more than puffery, but then I read this this afternoon:
New Jersey crime family mobsters talk a good game. They claim to be the models for The Sopranos. They once pulled off a hit for John Gotti when his murderous crew couldn’t get it done.
In Gang Land, however, the Newark-based DeCavalcantes have long been second class wiseguys. [...]
The problem, Palermo told FBI agent Nora Conley, was that decades earlier, legendary boss Simone (Sam The Plumber) DeCavalcante, (left) who took over the family in 1962, had altered important long-standing parts of the initiation rite.
These included the well-known use of a gun, knife and a burning holy card, Palermo said, recalling that during his induction in 1976, “DeCavalcate explained that he did not feel it was necessary to actually use these items in the induction ceremony.”
I lost the sort of reverent awe for the Sopranos that would have led me to be upset about the ending several seasons back, so I can't say that I was genuinely disappointed by the disappointing conclusion. At the end of the day, every single episode of this final demi-season has been eminently watchable which is more than you can say of, say, the dream episodes from the previous demi-season or else the vast majority of other television shows.
Speaking of disappointing endings, how about that Game 2, eh? Super-uncompetitive all the way through and then, suddenly, Cleveland comes out of nowhere to make it look like you're gonna be watching a basketball game and then . . . no. They say the ratings for Game 1 were historically bad, and going up against The Sopranos can't have helped Game 2 (thanks to the magic of DVR I saw both; it was even possible to "catch up" to realtime by skipping the adds in the Cavs-Spurs game) do any better. At this point, I think the NBA needs to seriously consider disbanding the San Antonio Spurs franchise. Meanwhile Chad Ford's mock draft says the Spurs are likely to snag a European guard with a late pick. Dude's name is Marco Bellinelli and he's a "A long, lanky combo guard who knows how to put the ball in the basket. Big-time scorer with an excellent 3-point shot." What's more, "He's a very smart player, with excellent court vision and a handle that would allow him to play the point occasionally in the NBA. Good athlete with nice quickness."
I feel like this situation has "I can't believe this guy slipped to 28" / "how does RC Buford do it" material written all over it. Haven't we seen this story before? I'm nervous. I don't even hate the Spurs. Indeed, I kind of like the Spurs, which is what makes watching them so depressing. If they were more dynamically despicable, things would be more interesting.
Andrew Sullivan directs me to Fred Thompson's pro-choice past. Of course, such flip-flops are hardly unheard of in either party or in either direction.
Still, this one's odd. Oftentimes, you'll see a politician (Mitt Romney, Al Gore) start out in line with local sentiment and then change his position to line up with the national party's position. Thompson, however, was running as a Republican in Tennessee, where I have a hard time believing he needed to be pro-choice in order to stay politically viable.
I was watching some PBS show about the 6 Days War yesterday. They were talking about how Israeli PM Eshkol was under a lot of pressure to attack Egypt but, personally, didn't really want to. He was desperately seeking some kind of victory short of war that would relieve his position. Thus, he kept appealing to the western powers to use their navies to force open the Straits of Tiran, believing that Nasser would back down from such a confrontation, thus defusing the crisis without the need for war. The documentary explains that none of the western powers were going for it -- except Denmark.
The show didn't explain anything about why Denmark was so much more eager to involve itself aggressively in the situation than was anyone else. Does anyone out there in blog-land know anything about this?
I feel like Scott Lemieux is suffering here from some kind of television version of the Stockholm Syndrome: Since David Chase is a genius, and The Sopranos is a brilliant show, it therefore follows that all of his narrative and dramatic choices were brilliant coups.
The idea that desire to see the story of the show brought to some kind of conclusion rather than this childish "is he dead?" / "did the FBI pinch him?" / "guess we'll never know" BS is inherently "middlebrow" has got to be the prime symptom of the illness. I think the beginning/middle/end narrative structure characterizes a lot of perfectly highbrow works. Not to give anything away, but at the end of Anna Karenina we find out what happens to Anna, and it's not because Tolstoy sold out.
I'm about to head out for the ONE Campaign's launch of their ONE Vote initiative now, s
The ONE Campaign is about fighting disease and severe poverty in the developing world, and the idea of the ONE Vote initiative is to inject this issue into the presidential race. Honestly, this strikes me as the kind of topic where elite views matter a lot more than popular ones and there's probably nothing to be accomplished by trying to insert it into practical politics, but I suppose getting all the presidential candidates to at least address the subect (Edwards and to a lesser extent Obama have already done so that I'm aware of) is probably important to shaping elite views.
I tend to agree with Matt Stoller that the Democratic primary campaign thus far has been fought in an unfortunately kid gloves-ish manner. There is, however, a good reason for this. One of the more insightful parts of Bob Shrum's book is when he's talking about the 2004 primary. There was a lot of sentiment inside the Kerry campaign that the thing to do was to hit harder against Howard Dean. The dissenters pointed out that hitting Dean would only drag Dean and Kerry down, and the real beneficiary would be someone else. The only hope was that someone else would start mixing it up with Dean, and then the fact that polling showed Kerry was favorably regarded by most Democrats -- even though few expressed an intention to vote for him -- would work in Kerry's favor, as people turned to him.
This year, you have three Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama -- who are all quite well-liked by primary voters. A candidate who viciously laid into the flaws of one of the other two could quite possibly sow some doubts. But he (or she) would also alienate some people. And, of course, the subject of the attacks would fight back. The real winner would be the third candidate.
The trouble is that it would actually serve everyone well to see the big, obvious attacks get rolled out and see all the candidates counterpunch. This is especially true, since all three really have very little electoral field testing.
Marc Ambinder has some advance skepticism about efforts to build support for stronger action against global poverty and disease on a bipartisan basis:
The second is to create a transpartisan set of solutions. That's going to be hard. The politics of poverty is perceived as intractable. Liberal and conservative solutions rarely overlap, and when they do, there are distinct political downsides for at least one of the political parties. Remember, the mass of Americans who want bipartisan solutions aren't the same Americans who vote in primaries. That's why Fred Thompson talks about bipartisan solutions and espouses fairly conventional Republican policies.
Naturally, this came up a lot in a small meeting I and some other bloggers attended with Bill Frist, Tom Daschle, John Podesta, and Michael Gerson who are, I guess, the key symbols of bipartisanship. I came away fairly convinced. Frist, who turns out to be almost shockingly impressive on this subject, specifically said that in his view "the real turn was the faith-based community embracing an issue that heretofore they'd been uncomfortable with, largely because of condoms." What happened was less that people with strong religious opposition to condom promotion decided to embrace it anyway, said Frist, but that people reach the conclusion that "we don't have to be out in front on all aspects of the issue" and just focus on helping in the ways they can help in good conscience (distribution of medical supplies, campaigns on the importance of faithfullness in marriage) rather than fighting other people over different prevention methods.
Frist did, however, concede that thus far it's the Democratic candidates who "have taken a leadership role today on these issues." The main obstacle, as best I can see, to bipartisan action on this front is that (as one conservative blogger in the room noted), on the right this kind of thing is specifically identified with exactly the kind of Gerson-ian "compassionate conservative" strain of conservatism that's becoming deeply unfashionable at the moment.
Arg. This is just incredibly frustrating. The US-sponsored alliance of Sunni Arab nationalists in Anbar Province aimed at ejecting al-Qaeda seems to be fracturing as some elements of the alliance accuse others of being dupes and collaborators with the American occupiers. And, of course, this is the essence of the problem. It's simply impossible for the United States of America to be the main sponsor of a credible nationalist resistance to al-Qaeda. The only way to take advantage of Sunni Arab discontent with foreign fighters in Iraq is for us to step out of the way and stop trying to micromanage events. Instead, though, we insert ourselves into every embryonic promising trend and wind up wrecking it.
Somewhat oddly, Democracy has an article advocating that we begin adopting the "arm Sunni militias" policy that has, in fact, already been implemented and that's running into some problems.
For all the talk of Iran's autocratic tyrants, here you have the president being burned in effigy, interrupted by firecrackers, and condemned to death, all while he's giving a speech. And he does nothing more than "smilie tightly" throughout it! In this country, if an activist exposes an anti-war t-shirt while the president is talking, she gets muscled out of the room. That's not to say Iran doesn't have all sorts of human rights violations of its own, but the attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda.
. And yet, as in 1967, too many progressives–so chastened by the Bush Administration’s deceptions over Iraq and the egregious mistakes that followed–are in danger of letting the past prevent them from focusing on the real threats looming ahead. Some even go so far as to excuse the Iranian regime, the better to deny the very existence of a threat. One prominent blogger, Ezra Klein, wrote, in a post titled "Autocratic Iran?" that the "attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda."
I think Ezra worded the half-sentence that Baer quotes out of context poorly, but taken as a whole I don't think any fairminded reader could reach the conclusion that Ezra is "excus[ing] the Iranian regime."
Meanwhile, it's frustrating to me personally to see yet another go-round of this with Baer who, thanks to his occasional participation on TPM Cafe, has some interactions with progressive bloggers, myself included. Every now and again he'll pop up to accuse progressives generally, and progressive bloggers in particular, of not taking the Iran issue seriously enough. Each time, I try to engage him in an actual argument about the merits of different policies vis-a-vis Iran but instead he kind of vanishes only to reappear once again, months later, with another effort to pathologize opposition to military action against Iran rather than wrestle with the many, many actual arguments that have been raised by a wide variety of knowledgeable experts as to why this would be a catastrophic course of action.
I'd like to know more about who created this John McCain mash-up, which is just a bit unfair but also, I think, pretty effective and cutting:
Mike Crowley says McCain is "at once defensive, irritated, and a little arrogant" these days. It seems to me that years of worshipful media coverage have sort of addled his brain. Years worth of having craven panders hailed as yet another example of your straight-talky awesomeness have, I would guess, rendered him incapable of coping with the idea that some people may doubt his intrinsic awesomeness.
I have to say that I'm a bit shocked by the regularity with which a criticism I offer of someone -- Martin Peretz, Jonah Goldberg, Ken Baer -- will be met with the response that person x is terrible and a liar and I should just ignore them. The notion that incorrect ideas will just vanish if bloggers with midsize audiences ignore them is pretty odd.
Sawicky says: "Another fearless forecast: the next great gangster epic will be about Russians." Certainly I hope so. La Cosa Nostra has been the subject of a ton of great American popular culture, but now I think it may be time to start moving on to more contemporary gangster stylings.
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz proclaims Judith Miller to be "a damn good reporter." I wonder if Peretz thinks the other writers working at his magazine are up to the Miller Standard.
I don't want to focus too much on Ken Baer's Iran column, but since he's a professional at rhetoric rather than at foreign policy analysis, the column is a veritable font of key argumentative moves. One of the real signature ones is that Baer uses the failure of the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf region as a reason to continue the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf. In other words, instead of trying to grapple with the substantive reasons why lots of people have now reached the conclusion that preventive war is not a good approach to non-proliferation policy, he's psychoanalyzing opposition to his preferred Iran policy as based in the fact that "many progressives–so chastened by the Bush Administration’s deceptions over Iraq and the egregious mistakes that followed–are in danger of letting the past prevent them from focusing on the real threats looming ahead."
In short, the failure in Iraq is construed as putting a higher burden of proof on the doves since we now must operate under a cloud of suspicion that we're irrationally overreacting to Iraq. The hawks, meanwhile, just get to blithely move on without reexamining any aspect of their own beliefs. Instead, Iraq can just be dismissed as merely reflecting "the Bush Administration’s deceptions" and unspecified "egregious mistakes."
I was flipping through channels at the gym, and I saw that Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan were talking about Iran and figured I'd watch that for a bit. I thought it was strange that the "from the left" panelist for this topic was a "Democratic strategist" rather than some kind of Iran expert or a journalist who writes about foreign policy or something. Weirder, the "strategist" in question turned out to be Hilary Rosen who, a bit of Googling now that I'm home confirmed, was the Hilary Rosen who used to be the head of the RIAA.
As best I can tell, it's just not the case that Rosen is a Democratic strategist. She's a longtime recording industry lobbyist, who's also heavily involved with gay rights issues through the Human Rights Campaign, and currently works as some kind of lobbyist or PR consultant or something for a variety of media firms. I'm biased against her since I hate the RIAA (I was also a Cheryl Jacques fan back in her Massachusetts days), but she did a fine job. It's just always struck me as odd that cable networks rely so heavily on these random people described as "strategists" and even odder to find one such "strategist" who doesn't genuinely seem to be a Democratic strategist.
The indomitable Haggai reads dozens of pages of old Senate transcripts and finds that "Baer's analysis of the differences between Wayne Morse's instincts and those of his colleagues in the run-up to the Six Day War is somewhat subtly--but very importantly--incorrect. It just doesn't fit into the framework that Baer tries to put it in." I know you're as surprised as I am.
It's also worth saying that this is a very odd choice of analogy. Say what you will about the Six Day War, but Israel fought it alone and . . . won decisively anyway.
I'm gonna be at this conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation today. I'm told there's going to be wifi right there, so the blogging should continue uninterrupted.
Rich Lowry argues against yours truly that the problem with leaving the Sunnis alone to fight it out with al-Qaeda "is that if we absented ourselves, al Qaeda would prevail." Frankly, I doubt it. As we've seen over and over again, local support matters a lot. It's extremely difficult for a foreign force to sustain itself in the face of hostile public sentiment even if the foreign force is in some sense superior from a technical point of view.
To me, the overestimation of al-Qaeda's ability to impose its will upon Iraqis is just of a piece with earlier overestimation of the United States' ability to impose our will upon Iraqis. This stuff is hard. It's crucial to recall that the Taliban was not just a religious movement, but also an expression of Pashto nationalism, and that that the Taliban had a lot of trouble expanding into areas where other ethnicities predominated.
Based on everything I've ever heard, Mudcat Saunders is an asshole. Thus, I wasn't especially surprised to see him acting like an asshole, slamming bloggers and the dread "Metropolitan Opera wing" of the Democratic Party. It was a bit surprising to learn that he's a John Edwards advisor. It seems odd to have one of your aides out there insulting a bunch of people who've treated you well.
Madeleine Albright just walked right in to one of my pet peeves, calling for the United States to adhere to a moderate (i.e., neither isolationist nor imperial) foreign policy, and then sets it up with the old "consider Harry Truman." Frankly, I think people should consider spending less time considering Harry Truman.
If there's some very specific thing Truman did that you want to do again, that's great, but overwhelmingly the only point Truman-invokers are making is that they want a foreign policy that's not too hot and also not too cold. This is nice, of course, and Goldilocks agrees, but it's really not an especially deep point or one that carries a ton of analytic bite.
It's telling, for example, that Peter Beinart was able to maintain his "liberals should emulate Truman" message in both his pro- and anti- phases on the Iraq War. Realistically, all we're seeing there is that "position yourself somewhere between two extremes" covers an extremely broad range of positions. I'm sure that Charles Krauthammer believes he, too, is inhabiting a wise middle ground in some sense. After all, he's not like Ann Coulter who wants to convert all Muslims to Christianity.
More substantively, Madeleine Albright mostly said things that I think are true but also a bit banal (Bush has squandered American power, China's rise, Iran's rise, we've "paid for mistakes in Iraq," "Iraq has made everything harder," UN reform is good, but it's difficult) but waded into riskier waters with a forthright defense of the view that we should be backing democratic reform -- elections -- in the Arab world. Crucially, she conceded that "if Arab democracy develops, it will be to advance Arab interests" as understood from an Arab perspective and, in particular, there's no reason to expect elections to "soften attitudes toward Israel."
She didn't follow that up with much in the way of saying how we should be doing those things. Shadi Hamid, for example, thinks the congress should make aid to Egypt conditional on reform. I see some strong arguments on both sides of that issue, and it'd be interesting to hear more people weigh-in on it, since it seems to me that this is certainly the most obvious lever to use if one were to want to put something more than rhetoric behind the idea of Arab reform.
Damon Linker writing in The New Republic has an odd take on Richard Rorty's influence on the development of liberalism. Linker accuses Rorty of "implying that every outlook but his own inevitably clashes with liberal politics" and of therefore coming "perilously close to transforming liberalism into a monistic philosophy--a comprehensive doctrine to which all liberal citizens must pledge absolute allegiance." Curiously, Linker doesn't quote any writing by Rorty that carry this implication.
He then recommends as an alternative "less dogmatic philosophies of liberalism--those found in the essays of Isaiah Berlin, in the later writings of John Rawls, and even in the books of conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott," people who "defended a form of liberalism that Rawls called 'political, not metaphysical.'" The thing is that this is exactly what Rorty thinks. His essay on "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy" (see also this) is an explicit defense of later Rawls against critics who maintain that he needs deeper philosophical foundations.
I totally understand the need to provide a patina of bipartisanship, but it strikes me as a big mistake for the American Progress / Century Foundation event to feature Gordon Smith as a speaker. When someone like Chuck Hagel plays this role you say to yourself "he's from Nebraska, you've got to take what you can get." But Smith's from Oregon, he's got an eminently winnable seat. The last thing progressives need to be doing is helping him bolster his moderate credentials ("we need more leaders like Gordon Smith," says the woman from CAP who's introducing him).
Writing about Democrats' tendency to want to shoehorn energy policy issues into discussion of national security, Ezra says he "can't quite decide if the subject is acting in a complementary way to a straight national security policy, or serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about."
The correct answer is that it's serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about. Global warming is an extremely important issue for the country. It's potentially a favorable issue for the Democratic Party. But when people say they want to hear from Democrats about foreign policy, they're saying they want to hear a message about war and peace. The trouble is that you can't articulate a clear theory about war and peace that doesn't provide a clear conclusion about Iraq. And reaching a clear conclusion about Iraq would involve confronting the large number of Democratic elites who backed the war.
People on both sides of that divide, however, have been very interested in sort of covering up the breach and having everyone play together nicely. And party unity is a good thing. But you're never going to have a clear, forceful message on the core foreign policy issues unless you're willing to take a stand on preventive war, on democratization by invasion, etc.
Is it even worth recommending E.J. Dionne columns? People should be reading him anyway. But if you're not already a regular follower, read this one on "political hypochondriacs" who like to blame "the system" when legislation they want doesn't pass:
It's all nonsense, but it is not harmless nonsense. The tendency to blame the system is a convenient way of leaving no one accountable. Those who offer this argument can sound sage without having to grapple with the specifics of any piece of legislation. There is the unspoken assumption that wisdom always lies in the political middle, no matter how unsavory the recipe served up by a given group of self-proclaimed centrists might be.
Indeed. It's just too bad that convention prevents Dionne from specifically calling out his colleague Dan Balz, whose commentary on the immigration is the perfect illustration of the dynamic he's complaining about.
The only innocent in the show that I remember (who can forget her?) is Tracee, the young, unsiliconed, and doomed stripper; and the only pure villain, beside whom even that cocksucker Leotardo looks complicated, is Livia Soprano, the demon-mother who sets the saga in motion but is its least explored figure. Otherwise there are no heroes and no villains: there are good people who sometimes do bad things and bad people who sometimes do good things.
I think this "ooo, shades of gray!" reading of the show was natural, initially, but would have made for an extremely trite show were it to continue for seasons and seasons. By the end, I think it's clear that this is all backwards -- for the core characters, at least, there's no gray at all. These are bad people. Evil people, really. Not just people who do bad things. But people who do bad things, confront the fact that the things they're doing are bad, semi-seriously wrestle with the idea of not doing them anymore, and then deciding to keep on doing them.
What's true is that at the same time as these are evil characters, they're also complicated characters -- characters with real depth, real feelings, real idiosyncrasies, and even some real virtues. The show makes us confront our own voyeuristic fascination with them, and it also makes us sympathize with them. We sympathize, however, not because they aren't bad people, but because we aren't bad people and bad as the bad people may be, they're still people and we, as good people, recognize a common thread of shared humanity between us. The fact that Tony Soprano isn't a cartoonish villain doesn't mean he's not a villain.
Damon Linker was kind enough to send a response to my doubts about his take on Richard Rorty. You'll find it below the fold. I'll write some more about this later, but for now here's Linker:
Zbigniew Brzezinski at the conference says the US and Israel should try to put their demands for Iranian disarmament in the context of support for a regional nuclear-free zone (i.e., Israeli nuclear disarmament). After all, he says, if we're supposed to believe that Israel's nuclear arsenal isn't a sufficient deterrent to ensure Israeli security in the face of Iran's nuclear program, then it obviously isn't a very valuable asset.
This sounds smart to me. The odds that nothing would come of such a proposal a pretty high, but even if nothing comes of it, calling the Iranian bluff in this regard would be valuable and it would help reframe the issue, regionally and globally, in a useful way.
Jonah Goldberg's for it, Sara Mead's against it. I bet you can guess whose side I'm on. Sample: "Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post's recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools--which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal." Indeed.
It's all over the internet already, but it really does look like some Albanian steals Bush's watch here:
At about 0:50 seconds, you can see a watch on Bush's wrist. Then his wrist is obscured for a bit because he's shaking hands and then when you next see the wrist, there's no watch.
Fun fact: I realized recently that most older people don't realize that these days few young people wear watches because we're all used to checking the time on our cell phones.
A person affiliated with a rival campaign directed my attention to this Ted Koppel commentary on NPR in which he observes:
I ran into an old source the other day who held a senior position at the Pentagon until his retirement. He occasionally briefs Senator Clinton on the situation in the Gulf. She told him that if she were elected president and then re-elected four years later she would still expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq at the end of her second term.
I find that the tendency when I talk to people leaning in a Clintonish direction is that they express confidence, as Clinton herself does in the debates, that all of the Democrats will, if elected, move rapidly to end the war. If anything, I think the stronger argument for Clinton is the reverse -- that while she seems disinclined to really end the war, it's not clear that her main rivals are inclined to do so either. Neither Edwards nor Obama has, after all, exactly come out swinging against Clinton on Iraq in a forward looking sense. There have been some indications that Clinton's envisioned "residual" force would be bigger than what other candidates have in mind, but her main rivals haven't argued this explicitly.
With regard to the Middle East nuclear free zone, Kevin Drum's quite right that for the US to unilaterally propose this only to have the Israelis reject it would be counterproductive. What I believe Brzezinski was saying is that Israel would serve its own interests well by being open to the establishment of a region-wide nuclear free zone, were such a zone to be implemented in a verifiable way.
The point is that Israel would be better off with a nuclear free Middle East than with a Middle East featuring many nuclear powers and that the odds of maintaining Israel's sole possession of a nuclear arsenal are poor over the long run.
Good line: "Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting." Quite so. What's more, I can honestly say that I've been hunting more times (i.e., once) than I've been married. Back in my Camp Winnebago days I was even a pretty good target shooter.
I should probably say something more substantive about it and, in fact, plan to do so tomorrow. For now, though, let me just note that my diavlog with Ramesh Ponnuru is online and that he's damn reasonable for a conservative, justifying my contention last week in an off-the-record email discussion that we should seek to replace all currently existing conservative pundits with Ramesh Ponnuru.
Well, nearly so at any rate. It was a very close game, but at 3-0 it's certainly not a close series. As a result, the ongoing ratings catastrophe is sure to get worse. At this point, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that game four amounts to must-see TV. I'll watch since unless something dramatic changes I've got nothing better to do, but it's not exactly gripping drama at this point.
In both his initial article on Richard Rorty and in his reponse to my original criticism posted on this blog, I continue to feel as if Linker is misreading Rorty, John Rawls, or both. Linker says we should be Rawls-style "political liberals" whose liberalism isn't intrinsically tied to any comprehensive metaphysical (or, in Rorty's case, anti-metaphysical) view and that this vision is preferable to Rorty's. I say -- and, crucially, Rorty says -- that this is Rorty's vision.
Over at Atrios' place I see Bob Shrum observed that "The blogosphere was a lot more right about Iraq than all the experts in the Democratic party." This is a nice thing to say to bloggers, but in important ways it's not really true. After all, lots of progressive bloggers (your truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I'm sure there are more) got this wrong. And, at the same time, it's just not the case that all the experts got Iraq wrong. What happened was that all the experts the Democratic Party leadership listened to were wrong. Plenty of other, non-obscure voices were around, but the leading figures in the party decided not to listen to them.
This is possibly one good way of getting into the difficult question of assessing the Democratic contenders' foreign policy differences. As I said to Ramesh it's my sense that Barack Obama would probably appoint a sounder team, but I've found it difficult to articulate what's driving that sense. After some chit-chat at yesterday's conference, the basic shape of it comes clear. Basically, left-of-center foreign policy professionals who opposed the Iraq War felt very alienated by the party leadership's embrace of the war back in 2002-2003. Since Obama opposed the war, and since Obama entered the Senate as a celebrity figure interested in foreign policy, those people have tended to cluster around him. Conversely, the left-of-center foreign policy professionals who won the argument in 2002-2003 tend to find themselves in Clinton's orbit and see boat-rocking as a bad thing. The Edwards situation is less clear to me.
Now, since the next president isn't going to hop back into a time machine and redo things, maybe we don't care about this. The point, however, is that the division over the war has a kind of institutional legacy in terms of what kind of people are likely to influential in one administration versus the other.
Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told Der Spiegel that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Awad claims that they were held on a military base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer, and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.
Questioned about Swedish Muslims? What did they want to know?
That, however, is the exact same message of June 2004, which failed to reassure anyone. The US's allies in Iraq want the US to stay in force - if not forever, at least for some extended duration. The US's enemies in Iraq - a far more numerous and politically salient force - want the US out expeditiously. Anything that reassures one horrifies the other, leaving US troops caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi political process is meant to provide equilibrium for the complex dynamic of post-occupation, but it has only dragged the country into a zero-sum sectarian contest, with each side inspecting the US's intentions to see which faction it will back.
As the 2004 handover demonstrated, Iraqis are unlikely to be fooled into thinking 40,000-plus US forces stationed indefinitely in the country represents an end to the US presence. Worse, if the idea is to either protect Iraqis from a slide into chaos or safeguard enduring US interests - be it preventing genocide or fighting al-Qaida or keeping the oil flowing - then keeping only 40,000 troops in Iraq is senseless. As Major General Joseph Fil commented to Ricks: "My nightmare - the thing that keeps me up at night - is a failure of Iraqi security forces, somehow, catastrophically, mixed with a major Samarra mosque-type catastrophe." Leaving the Iraqi security forces aside, another huge sectarian provocation is guaranteed. In 2009, US commanders of a post-occupation force will find themselves powerless to deal with it. At that point, US troops will be little more than a constabulary force to keep the Iraqi politicians who failed to avert the crisis - and probably contributed to it - alive.
Right. We don't have 160,000 troops in Iraq right now because that's somehow a convenient or expedient thing for us to be doing. The plan never called for that many forces to be in the country. Rather, the US ideal is a much smaller force along the lines of the Democrats' "residual" or the Bush administration's "post-occupation" force. The trouble is that 40-50,000 troops turns out to be far too few to exercise meaningful control in Iraq. At the same time, it's far too many troops to credibly wash our hands of things. 50,000 troops indicates a commitment to controlling the situation, but 50,000 troops is too few to control the situation, so why not surge another division in? Meanwhile Iraqis opposed to a US occupation (i.e., the vast majority of Iraqis) will still feel occupied, and the fact that the troop presence will have the imprimateur of the Iraqi government will do more to discredit that government than to legitimate the presence.
To me this sounded like one of the worst TV show premises ever. But the first was pretty intriguing. Certainly intriguing enough that, given that I already subscribe to HBO, I'll watch the second episode. I could totally see this show sucking after two or three episodes, since TV built around a Central Mystery isn't normally my cup of tea, but the pilot was very well-executed so I'll give them some benefit of the doubt. What's more, the whole first episode's available online.
Word to the wise -- no fan of woman-fronted Canadian indie rock's record collection will be complete without Tegan & Sara's The Con. Given my general inclinations, I don't understand why it took me until last week to get my hands on So Jealous, but their both great. "Hop a Plane" on the new record wins bonus points for incorporating a "Clash City Rockers" riff into the beginning.
Filterobserved that that track and the preceding one ("Back in Your Head") "are a little bit poppier and carefree-er, but we're probably not likely to hear them at baseball games, like we did 'Walking With a Ghost.'" This is probably true insofar as any particular song is extremely unlikely to get played at baseball games, but I'd say that "Hop" is definitely poppier than anything on So Jealous.
In case you were wondering whether Republicans will really turn against the war if there's not progress by September, note that we're actually in the midst of witnessing significant regress. Drum and Rosenfeld lay it out, but American casualties are up, the Iraqi government hasn't met any of its political benchmarks, and the Pentagon is now raising estimates of the number of Iraqi security forces that need to be trained.
Back in the 1940s, US Army advice to American soldiers included "There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won't help matters any by getting mixed up in them." More in PDF form. Via Danger Room and Robert Farley.
Okay, here's another reply from Damon Linker on Rorty and Rawls below the fold. I think I'll let it drop after this since Linker and I don't really disagree on the core point; we're reduced to an exegetical argument about Rorty and since I don't have any copies of Rorty's books in DC that seems like a bad kind of argument to have. I thought, however, that I might also link to Ross's post on the subject.
New website lets Hill staffers (and only Hill staffers, you need the right kind of IP address) post anonymously to a message board for all the world to read. Potentially an interesting resource, though at the moment there's not much up there.
Progressives are not so much appalled by Libby's lies as they are frustrated that this is all they have: Libby and only Libby. Left with only this, they want this small victory unspoiled. They want someone to pay.
But if the President pardons Libby, and by this act makes the case his own, he will have picked up a portion of the cost. Libby will fall back, restored to obscurity. Bush will step forward and take the lead role. He will have to explain himself; he will have to answer questions.
That seems true enough to me, if a bit bank-shottish. Indeed, this is exactly why I think most people think Libby will be pardoned, if at all, during the lame duck phase of the Bush presidency. But there's the rub -- if Libby's in jail, then Libby's the villain. If Bush springs Libby, then he's officially sanctioning involvement in a coverup, and he becomes the villain, which is as things should be.
Good to know. Rudy Giuliani says he doesn't need an Iraq policy because "that’s in the hands of other people." This as part of his response to the question of why he didn't include anything about Iraq in his "twelve commitments." Greg Sargent correctly wonders if the media really intends "to let Rudy skate by with such answers?"
The answer is: probably! Giuliani has, for example, tended to get a free pass on his effort to position himself as an immigration restrictionist. He's achieved that positioning by opposing the immigration compromise and saying his opposition is grounded in the fact that its ID measures are insufficiently stringent. Be that as it may, when he was mayor of New York City he went as far as legally possible to create a citywide amnesty zone and even went to court to push the legal boundaries further. The press, however, doesn't seem to care about this.
And, of course, for years now they've been pushing the idea that Giuliani has credibility on national security issues even though he has no experience with foreign policy or military issues. So from his perspective, why shouldn't he get away with not having answers to Iraq questions.
This is definitely true. If you're working for a presidential campaign, you'd be well advised to very strictly avoid blogging unless you're putting the campaign's official message out.
Is it possible that American desires for a large, semi-permanent military presence in Iraq have something to do with a desire to maintain leverage over Iraq's oil policy? Nah, that's impossible.
John McCain's campaign has put together this video of Mitt Romney, apparently still pro-choice, some six months after his alleged conversion to the anti-choice cause:
The pro-Romney spin here is that he was just sticking with his 2002 campaign promise not to change the state's abortion laws. In short, he didn't want to flip-flop. But the problem with this defense is that the Romney campaign's story is that he did in fact flip-flop back in 2004.
The situation in the Palestinian territories has really deteriorated to a level of awfulness that I really don't know what to say. I suppose I do wonder why the Bush administration, having underestimated Hamas' electoral strength, then went about implementing a post-election policy that was based on underestimating their military strength. I think I should have linked to this Daniel Levy post yesterday back when it was still more prescient than poignant:
Given the apparent rigid opposition of the Bush administration to a political compromise between Fatah and Hamas, its rejection of the Mecca deal, and the embargo on the Unity Government -- it is apparently safe to assume that the second option was rejected. However, the first option, even ignoring considerations of the desirability or ethics of such an approach, simply makes no sense in the Gaza context. Currently Hamas clearly has the upper hand militarily, and that was predictable. But even if Fatah were in a stronger position, a military victory, if at all possible, would likely have come at a massive price in human terms but also in terms of social disintegration, and a likely after-effect of increased radicalization. So the US was encouraging a military confrontation that its favorite could not win, and was further muddying what would anyway have been a very difficult political accommodation.
It's hard to see this as much of a win for Israel, either. This turn of events could be used as a pretext for reoccupying Gaza, but there's nothing Israel wants there and the settlers have already been removed.
It seems that the newest bad energy fad is taking congress by storm as "top Democrats were circulating a proposal to provide $10 billion in loans for plants that make diesel fuel from coal" as part of a larger energy bill. The problem with using liquid coal as a fuel is that even if it didn't require subsidies it would still be worse for the environment than all kinds of alternatives. Subsidizing it is just terrible. The good news is that Brian Beutler says Harry Reid will oppose this nonsense and he doubts it'll go through.
It was also good to see at the national security conference earlier this week that the message about the trouble with slogans about "energy independence" is breaking through. They had one panel on energy policy during which nobody used the term. A questioner asked why nobody had used the term, and everyone was unanimous in the view that it's become a pernicious concept. There's a problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, not with over-reliance on "foreign energy" as such.
If you don't know what that headline means, or why you should care about it, you really need to read Kevin Drum's explanation. It's probably the most undercovered issue in American politics today.
Whack-a-mole approach to Iraq note working. Good for The Washington Post for laying things out so clearly right here in the lede:
Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.
The surge, as you'll recall, was launched amidst a tide of praise for General David Petraeus, warrior intellectual and student of all things counterinsurgency, who was to be put in charge of the enterprise. All of Petraeus' work on the subject of counterinsurgency, however, along with the things he himself was saying somewhat subtly, all pointed toward the conclusion that peace in Iraq required not a "surge" but political reconciliation between a sufficiently large set of Iraqi factions as to represent the overwhelming majority of Iraqis. The "surge" was, in some vague way, supposed to facilitate that, which it hasn't, it was never a realistic method of securing the country on its own, which is why it hasn't worked.
Amidst all the sturm und drang of the Iraq debate, one thing both parties were able to agree on was the need to create a series of "benchmarks" for the Iraqi government to see if we're making progress toward realistic goals. The National Security Network, an underrated newish outfit, is doing us the favor of trying to measure the benchmarks in a series of reports. The first one looked at Iraqi security forces:
Incredibly, it has been 707 days since President Bush first declared that, “As Iraqis Stand Up, We Will Stand Down.” Now, almost two years later, the Administration is still making the training of Iraqi security forces a key component of its escalation plan. Unfortunately, Iraqi security forces are still incapable of providing security. In fact, because of their poor performance and lack of manpower, the President’s Baghdad Security Plan is already far behind schedule. Meanwhile, these forces cannot be trusted to enforce the law fairly. Numerous times, trained Iraqis have turned against American forces or taken part in sectarian violence. Put simply, on this front the Administration is failing to meet its benchmarks for success and there is little sign that progress is likely.
In May of 2003, the Bush Administration enacted ill-conceived de-Baathification laws, which alienated the Sunni population, fomented sectarian divisions and established a recruitment pool for insurgents. Repealing the harsh de-Baathification laws is absolutely critical to bringing Sunnis back into the political fold in Iraq and achieving reconciliation. It has been more than a year since President Bush declared progress on this front and yet there is still no agreement. The latest attempt to amend the law was thwarted this spring by Ahmed Chalabi, a former ally of neo-conservatives, who and used his position as head of the de-Baathification Commission to build opposition and block the legislation. With Iraq’s government still in gridlock, progress in the near future appears unlikely.
Ezra Klein gets serious about liberal hawks and Iran:
Insofar as Iran is a serious foreign policy issue -- and it is! -- those who pride themselves on their seriousness in such matters should be honest in offering their answers. The "dovish" view is that a military campaign against Iran would be a seriously bad idea. It is a view shared by many generals, most foreign policy experts, and, according to some reports, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Liberal hawks seem to dispute that conclusion, but won't quite say why. The danger of Iraq, it turns out, is not that too many liberals overlearned its lessons, but that too many liberals didn't learn them at all -- and instead have merely become more circumspect in their saber-rattling.
One point I was discussing with a few other people the other day is that we need to understand one of the costs of the continuing US military presence in Iraq as constantly posing a small-but-real risk of war with Iran. It's one thing to have such chilly relations with a country on the other side of the world, and another thing entirely to have the kind of poor relationship we have with Iran while simultaneously maintaining a huge military presence right next door. It creates a situation where screwups or confusion on the part of relatively low-level members of either nation's military and intelligence apparatus could easily lead to an "incident" that hot-heads in either government would exploit.
Bob Wright points out to me that our very first BloggingHeads.tv diavlog took place shortly in the aftermath of Hamas' electoral victory. He was a Hamas optimist (Hamastimist?) who saw this as, finally, an opportunity for Israel to negotiate with a government that was actually capable of controlling anti-Israel violence and thus being held accountable for a failure to do the same. I was more pessimistic and thought that the Israeli government would primarily see this as an opportunity to secure international diplomatic support for continuing a no negotiations posture. Predictions are rarely perfect, but I think I came out pretty well on this point.
Have I really not recommended The National's new album, Boxer, yet? Unlike some albums I enjoy because they're exactly the sort of album I'm usually into, The National is more the kind of band that a bunch of my friends would love and I'd be kind of unimpressed by. But I really like this one. Alligator had, I thought, two great tracks ("Secret Meeting" and "Looking for Astronauts") but this new one is all good.
They also appear to have posted a whole bunch of videos right here, though I've only had the time to look at one, so maybe that page sucks. But then again, maybe it doesn't. What do you really have to lose?
Hillary Clinton's crushing her primary rivals among woman voters, but fares no better than past male Democratic nominees or her male primary rivals among women in general election trial heat polls. I don't totally understand that dynamic, but I think it clearly deserves more scrutiny. My friend Dana Goldstein's done a great piece on progress women's love for Clinton, but it doesn't give much sense of why this appeal doesn't carry over at all to independents or moderates.
UPDATE: To be clear, it's not surprising why Clinton would do better with Democratic women than with independent women -- that's because she's a Democrat. What is surprising is that, all else being equal, she does better than other Democrats with Democratic women -- seemingly because she's a woman -- but does no better than male Democrats do with independent women.
Jon Chait makes short work of the argument that if you think it's sometimes a good idea to intervene to stop genocide, then you must be a hypocrite unless you support the indefinite continuation of a fruitless war in Iraq.
Democrats complain about "income inequality", and at the same time
support importing a bunch of low skilled/low wage workers into the
US. Huh?
Look, that's moronic. It's obviously possible to both believe that something is a problem and also to not support every conceivable initiative to ameliorate it. I, for example, think it's a problem that the streets in American cities are so dirty. I don't, however, think that we should execute people for littering. Nor do I think we should import Mauritanian slaves to clean the streets. What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans are solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite.
By contrast, what really is baffling is the strain of conservative thinking which holds that income inequality isn't a problem but that then turns around and cites inequality as a reason to curb immigration. There's nothing hypocritical about rejecting certain solutions to certain problems, but it doesn't make any sense to propose a solution to something you don't think is a problem.
UPDATE: To be clear that I'm not dealing with a straw restrictionist here, Mickey Kaus is both the author of a book about why we shouldn't care about income inequality and a passionate defender of the view that we should restrict immigration to curb income inequality.
I'm something of a Fantastic Four apologist, but I really can't believe they're doing midnight showings of Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. I think I'm the only person I know who doesn't consider the original to have been absolutely horrible, and even I think it only achieved mediocrity thanks to my very low expectations going in.
I wasn't really as blown away by John Edwards health care as some others I know (it was good, though) but this here is a real game-changer:
Edwards' plan would remove long-term patents for companies that develop breakthrough drugs and then reap large profits because of the monopolies those patents provide, according to a statement by Edwards obtained Wednesday evening.
Edwards said offering cash incentives instead would allow multiple companies to produce those drugs and drive down prices.
That's an idea that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Obviously, the details matter, but competent people can work out appropriate details -- what Edwards is giving us here is the political leadership necessary to start putting details on the table. Realistically, this goes in the "unlikely to happen" file anyway, so they details sort of don't matter (sort of), but fortunately there are a whole variety of ways a president sensitive to the perversity of the current intellectual property status of pharmaceuticals could make things better.
Catherine Andrews recommendsWashingtonian's guide to "dining out in U Street and Shaw" which includes the hilarious assertion "$30 or less." This is true in the same kind of way that "grass is green or Bush is a great president" is true rather than the sense in which you might realistically spend $30 there. If you got two chili half smokes (both come with potato chips), plus an order of chili cheese fries, plus two large sodas, plus two slices of cake, that comes to $24.80 and you'd almost certainly die if you ate all that.
Also, the review falsely states that Ben's "is best known for its chili dog and chili burger" and doesn't even mention the chili half-smoke which is actually what it's best known for, and contains the odd assertion that "Ben's is at its best at breakfast." On the contrary, Ben's is at its best when you're drunk off your ass. For an old-school U Street breakfast, go to the Florida Avenue Grill.
Photo by Flickr user Josh Thompson used under a Creative Commons license
If you want to learn more about the US role in promoting Fatah-Hamas warfare, check out Tony Karon. Deliberately initiating a proxy war and then having your proxy lose is really just incredibly shoddy. I've said before that we should hope for a Democratic Party that puts something better on the table than superior implementation of a Bush-esque worldview, but it really would be nice to see some better implementation.
A few weeks back I was talking to an adviser to one of our Democratic campaigns who was making an observation about the narrow focus of our political debate at any given time. Right now, we've very concerned with Iraq. We're also pretty concerned with events in some countries near Iraq -- Iran, Israel, Egypt, etc. These related issues form a kind of rough-and-ready political spectrum that we understand and can refer to in convenient shorthand.
But it's a big world out there. Today, I read Rick Perlstein's long article on China and also Gary Schmitt's brief op-ed on the subject. I also recently read a long James Fallows article about China in The Atlantic. What's striking is that though Rick and Schmitt are definitely saying different things, the lefty historian and the former PNACster also have a great deal in common -- a common sense that the country is in the grips of an establishment (one that includes me and, quite possibly, Jim Fallows) of dupes caught in the grips of an unduly benign view of China and its rise.
At any rate, if we're fortunate as a nation, the current series of blunders in the Gulf region will come to an end at some point, and China-related issues will start looming much larger. At that point, you can probably expect to see a lot of things configure themselves in different ways from how they are at the moment.
All this talk of reseeding the playoffs thanks to the West's superiority seems a bit premature to me. Let's review some history:
1996 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1997 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1998 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1999 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2000 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2001 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2002 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2003 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2004 Finals winner: Detriot (East) 2005 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2006 Finals winner: Miami (East)
There's nothing about the present day that seems unusually imbalanced. Indeed strictly in terms of the finals the current era seems unusually balanced, rather than the reverse. I'm not dogmatically opposed to shaking things up, but the system doesn't seem especially broken.
Former (and quite skilled) Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson laments the demise of the centrist political tradition he says Bill Clinton and George W. Bush shared. James Fallows isn't buying it:
natural path for people leaving an Administration is to angle for inclusion in the Council of Elders, the DC permanent-pundit class who spend the following decades wringing their hands about how much nastier and less public-spirited politics is now than the olden days. Politics is plenty nasty now. But is interesting, to put it mildly, to hear one of the Bush Administration’s main rhetoricians locate the lost golden age at 1992 and 2000. Sentences like this, from the Post column, are written as applications for the Council: “The abandonment of Bushism and Clintonism is also leaving many Americans ideologically homeless.” So is a title like this: “Two Parties Fleeing the Center.” Moral equivalence indeed! It would be convenient to think that Bush is a conciliator, whose ideal of harmony is sadly being ignored by the squabbling midgets who hope to succeed him. But donnez moi un break: you know, we’ve been reading the papers these last six and a half years.
Of course, reading the papers might be the problem on some level, since they're the ones who spent years painting notions like "let's not wage speculative wars against countries that haven't attacked us or our allies" as fringe left-wing ideas barely fit for serious discussion.
There's not much to say about the San Antonio Spurs at this point, but it is worth taking a moment to savor how difficult it is to win four championships in nine years with today's rules. On top of that, they've consistently done it from the tougher conference and show no particular sign of relenting.
Photo by Flickr user Compujeramey used under a Creative Commons license
WIth the benefit of follow-up reporting from Ezra Klein, John Edwards' plan to establish prizes for pharmaceutical research turns out to be less awesomely radical than it at first appeared:
This was muddled in their fact sheet and much of the initial reporting, but this program is not, in any way, a replacement for the current system of patents. It does not, in any way, change the way patents are awarded, or how long they last, or who can apply for them. Rather, it creates a separate and parallel track, a pilot program of sorts, wherein a committee would identify diseases and conditions that would benefit from alternative incentives for innovation, and offer prize money as the reward.
