In this past week, I've gone to see both I Am Legend and Margot at the Wedding and enjoyed both greatly. They're rather different movies, though. Margot struck me as a bit worse than The Squid and the Whale since Jack Black slightly took me out of things by hamming it up, but it's otherwise really good. Just a couple of days before I went to see it, I caught the lamentable Invasion on a plane flight but Margot completely redeemed my views of Nicole Kidman.
Legend, as I understand it, departs massively and systematically from the book, so if you're a fan of the book and expecting an adaptation: Don't. But its vision of post-apocalyptic New York is brilliantly executed and I don't want to say too much about it since I don't want to ruin the suspense. Naturally, when you look back there are some plot holes, but that's kind of what you get with this genre.
Ross is right -- those of us who predicted that Mike Huckabee's rise in Iowa would ultimately redound to Rudy Giuliani's benefit seem to have been pretty wrong and drastically underestimated the extent to which his rise in the polls could spill beyond Iowa's borders. I think we can say only in our defense that this years Republican race has proven very unpredictable.
HRC picks up the endorsement of The Des Moines Register. Their 2004 endorsement of John Edwards was thought to have given his campaign a substantial boost, helping to propel him from also-ran to second-place. Now they say:
Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the "positive, optimistic" campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.
This seems like a perfect set-up for an Edwards campaign line about how "If we don't take the power away from these people, they're not going to give it up."
Via Andrew, Jonathan Franzen on the kindle: "Yes, in theory, words are words. But literature isn't data. The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in cathedral."
I feel like Franzen's reading this analogy backwards. if the love is real and deeply felt and the vows sincerely undertaken, then what sort of person would hold it against the newlyweds that their ceremony was performed in shabby surroundings? A shallow person, I think. Similarly, it seems to me that one would have to have a poor appreciation of Shakespeare to seriously believe that the power of his work can't come through on a computer screen. I read Notes from Underground for the first time in a crumbling 30 year-old flimsy paperback edition -- it's still a great novel, and I'm sure it'd be great on a computer screen as well.
Does that mean the market for handsome editions you can display proudly on your shelf -- or even just things that feel comfortable to hold in the hand -- will just vanish overnight? Of course not. There's more to the reading (and book-owning) experience than the text itself. But that "more" is precisely what's more than literature about it, it's not the literature itself.
The agreement reached on climate change at the Bali Conference is disappointing in certain obvious ways, but I think John Quiggin is absolutely right to hail it as an important victory for the planet. Given the reality that George W. Bush is President of the United States this is about as good an outcome as could have taken place.
Back when I was attending the UN High-Level Meeting on climate change, diplomats and officials described the purpose of the Bali to me this way: Everyone knew there was no hope of anything really being done unless there's political change in the United States. The goal, however, is to make sure that if there is political change, that the new American president is able to hit the ground running in January 2009 and join an international process that's already under way instead of time and energy being expended in getting the machinery rolling. It's depressing that that's the level on which activities in 2007 and 2008 are going to need to proceed, but that's also the reality of the situation. And given that reality, things are mostly going according to plan. Still, to an almost frightening extent everything hinges on the election.
Mark Kleiman has some wise thoughts on the conservative establishment's hatred of Mike Huckabee. It should also be said, however, that on a more basic level a Huckabee nomination would be an electoral fiasco for the Republican Party. Not just in the race for the White House, but down ballot as well. If you're Gordon Smith or Susan Collins or Norm Coleman the difference between the Republican nominee being Romney/Rudy/McCain or being Huckabee is enormous.
Whenever the Republican Party is in trouble, it's always worth revisiting Christopher Caldwell's classic 1998 Atlantic piece "The Southern Captivity of the GOP". The past nine years have, in many ways, run against Caldwell's thesis. But I think the best way of reading him is as offering not a prediction as such, but a kind of warning: Given the size and distinctiveness of the South as a region, and given the GOP's dominance of that region, the party is perpetually runs the risk of becoming a merely southern party.
The most successful Republican politicians of the "southern strategy" era, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, were Californians who were personally indifferent to religion and both led political coalitions that extended far beyond the south and its brand of evangelicism. Bush, in keeping with the more modest nature of his political coalition, is a Texan able to present himself as southern to fellow southerners. But on the national stage he overwhelming identifies himself with the iconography of the West -- cowboy boots, clearing brush, a ranch -- rather than with the south. And, again, for all his political reliance on evangelicals, he's actually a Methodist.
A Huckabee-led Republican Party would, even if it got its act together and started offering a well-briefed candidate with cutting-edge policies out of the conservative think tax universe, be very very very Southern and not even in a particularly "New South" kind of way. You could pull this off, perhaps, under generally favorable political circumstances, but given the bad overall climate it'd be a recipe for disaster.
Tyler Cowen argues that "it is unfortunate that the subprime crisis exploded in an election year." Except, of course, that there's no election being held in 2007. The election year is 2008: Next year. And yet Tyler seems correct in principle. We were certainly in "election year" mode by the time the crisis hit. But that just shows how far we've come -- these days, essentially three years out of four are "election years" since the primary campaign unfolds so slowly over the year preceding the increasingly-early Iowa Caucus. The only real years that aren't "election years" are the ones in the 2005/09/13/17/21/25 cycle -- the other three are all election years.
That seems like a dreary and depressing outcome to me, but I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with it as such.
I'm watching the Packers-Rams game, and during some interstitial segment Fox was showing a montage of Brett Favre playing. The audio track was Pearl Jam's "Better Man," specifically Eddie Vedder intoning about the impossibility of finding a better man. In context, this really doesn't seem like something one should be saying about a sports legend:
Waiting, watchin the clock, its four oclock, its got to stop Tell him, take no more, she practices her speech As he opens the door, she rolls over... Pretends to sleep as he looks her over She lies and says shes in love with him, cant find a better man... She dreams in color, she dreams in red, cant find a better man... Cant find a better man (2x)
Turkey bombs" Kurdish militant sites in Iraq. But not to worry, "the commander of the Turkish Army, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, said that the United States had helped the operation by offering intelligence and clearance to enter Iraqi airspace."
Nice of us to offer permission to third parties to enter Iraq airspace. Very generous.
It's noteworthy how the McCain-Lieberman alliance is portrayed in the press as a kind of "centrist" independent fusion movement when the main thing that brings them together is their shared ardor for an unpopular war in Iraq. They both clearly see their views on Iraq and related matters as their most important priorities in public life, and the views they share on this subject are well to the right of the median Americans. And yet, they're in the center. One assumes that a Dennis Kucinich / Ron Paul lovefest on national security issues would, by contrast, be talking about as an example of "extreme" views being similar to one another.
The dynamic here clearly has less to do with public opinion than it does with establishmentarian ideas about what is and is not extreme. Washington, DC (or, even more so, the suburbs in Virginia where the power-brokers live) is a kind of place where heavy military equipment is advertised on the subway and defense contractors are a major engine of employment and economic growth. Which isn't to say that there's a direct, connect-the-dots relationship between the C27-J Spartan ad campaign and media portrayals of the Lieberman-McCain worldview, but I think it's important to understand that a kind of casual militarism permeates the atmosphere and anything that serves the cause of ever-growing procurement acquires a veneer of respectability.
Julian Sanchez has a good summary of the legislative fight over FISA legislation that's going to unfold today as Harry Reid introduces the Bush administration supported Intelligence Committee version of the bill.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has, naturally, a very long and information-rich analysis of some of the latest revelations about run-amok NSA surveillance combined with some warranted outrage at the members of congress who aren't standing up to this crap.
The most recent CBS/NYT poll asked people "From what you know about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, how much longer would you be willing to have large numbers of U.S. troops remain in Iraq — less than a year, one to two years, two to five years or longer than five years?" As you can see, virtually nobody in the United States wants to see American troops remain in Iraq for longer than five years. If you put squarely to people a political and strategic choice between a long-term military commitment to Iraq and trying to wrap our involvement up as quickly as is feasible, it wouldn't even be a close call.
At the same time, everyone who's paying close attention to what David Petraeus says, or what gets written on the Small Wars Journal Blog, or what the cool kids in the think tanks are saying, or what the Counterinsurgency Field Manual says, understands that the current strategy envisions us being in Iraq for much much longer than the 1-2 years that the American public seems willing to contemplate. In other words, completely apart from the question of whether or not the surge is "working," the architects of the surge understand themselves to be engaged in an undertaking -- setting the stage for over a decade of intensive, Northern Ireland-style policing and reconstruction of Iraqi society -- that public opinion overwhelmingly and correctly believes to be an unacceptable allocation of national priorities.
And yet, this fact is being kept pretty well obscured from the American public. Part of the fault there lies with the press. But a big part of the fault lies with the opposition party which is simply declining to present the public with a clear strategic alternative. The nit-picking over whether the fact that conditions in December 2007 are more like those of December 2006 (unbearably shitty!) or more like those of December 2004 (merely awful!) pales in comparison to the fundamental choice of whether our troops should come home within the next year or two, as the American people want, or whether they should stay in Iraq for an indefinite period of time definitely lasting over ten years, as the current strategy indicates.
It's not a difficult point to make, rhetorically or conceptually, but it would require the opposition party to actually put the "let's not stay forever" alternative clearly on the table and stop mucking around with half-measures, "residual forces," "phased transitions" and all the rest. You rarely get 75 percent of the public agreeing on anything, but it's right there -- over 75 percent of the public rejects the idea of a military operation in Iraq lasting more than five years. Meanwhile, the people leading the current operation are talking about it lasting "at least nine or ten years".
Petraeus is to be commended for his honest and sober-minded assessment of the challenges on that score and it's genuinely not his job to say whether or not it's a good idea to make that kind of commitment to Iraq. But it's not a good idea, and the people whose job it is to make that decision -- the politicians, in short -- ought to say so and move to cut this thing off.
Jim Henley fesses up: "I’m officially wrong about the 2007 Redskins as of last night. I predicted 4-12; they’ve got a good chance of doubling that. They are not an awful team. Rather, they have earned a descriptor too easily bestowed in today’s NFL: mediocre." He worries, however, that recent successes "will tempt the staff . . . to take it for validation of their overall approach."
Well, just to further enhance Jim's worries about complacency, it seems to me that one might look at an 8-8 season (assuming, of course, the Skins can achieve that lofty feat of mediocrity) that featured a young quarterback, tons of offensive line injuries, and the murder of a key defensive player points to good things for the future. Of course, Zombie Sean Taylor's not going to be suiting up to shore up the secondary, but it would seem perfectly reasonable to hope for modest improvements in Jason Campbell's game plus fewer injuries to produce a better result next season.
Barack Obama reaps the harvest of his campaign's idiotic decision to start releasing oppo research on Paul Krugman as the latter unloads on Obama, slamming him as "the anti-change candidate" who's such a prisoner of his desire for good press coverage that he's ignoring a vast populist tide sweeping the country.
Krugman's spot-on in his argument that what the Des Moines Register sees as the problem with John Edwards is, in fact, what's good about Edwards. But I think he's let his taste for revenge (understandable! I'd be really pissed if I were in his position, too) undermine his perspective on the objective realities. As John Edwards himself has said the most dramatic contrast between his vision of sweeping change comes from Hillary Clinton, not Obama. As Krugman is usually at pains to point out, there's more to life than campaign rhetoric; people have records and so forth that can be subjected to scrutiny. Nobody would appoint Mark Penn to run their political team if what they really wanted to do was lead a bold populist revival. Similarly, it's objectively true that the next president's ability to bring about big-picture change in American domestic policy will be limited by his or her ability to secure Republican votes for his or her agenda. I wish that this wasn't the way that American political institutions work, but it is. I like Edwards' rhetoric about taking down a corrupt power structure a lot more than I like Obama's kumbaya talk, but any president will face the same institutional set-up and the real limits it imposes.
All of which is to re-enforce what I said previously about voting tactically -- I share a lot of these concerns about Obama, while over time Edwards has dispelled most of my concerns about his foreign policy (and it's on these issues where the candidates views seem to contrast most sharply) -- but I think either would be clearly preferable to Clinton from a progressive point of view and the Obama campaign's poor handling of its relationship with the country's highest-profile liberal columnist shouldn't obscure that.
Interesting LA Times story striking writers looking to launch web-startups to bypass the studios who are so unwilling to share web revenues. It's an intriguing development. The TV and movie studios business models are fundamentally all about controlling the channels of distribution -- the very thing the rise of the internet disrupts. But they still have a massive leg-up in the new medium simply because of all the embedded human capital in the form of relationships with the talent.
They seem to have decided, however, that the dawning of the digital age is mostly a good time to try to claw back compensation from their workforce rather than a time when good relations with their workforce are becoming more important than ever in a world where control of the distribution channels is becoming less and less important.
You can read about it here in Foreign Affairs. As Ilan Goldberg says it tends to prompt a sensation of whiplash, "One second he is totally reasonable. The next second I think he's completely clueless."
The sad truth is that this is better than most of what you get on this topic from the other Republicans. Rudy Giuliani's comparable essay, for example, was completely free of "totally reasonable" moments. That said, as soon as Mitt Romney attacked Huckabee for criticizing Bush's "arrogant bunker mentality" Huckabee decided to back down. Nobody in the Republican field is ready to explicitly argue for a break with Bushism except Ron Paul.
Many commenters feel compelled to point out that atheists of all sorts are often not afforded the respect and tolerance that Linker wants atheists to extend to theists. This is factually correct, but as a defense of the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, it's nothing but a tu quoque. Moreover, even if returning the disrespect in kind had some sort of strategic value, which I can't really see, Hitchens and Dawkins attack illiberal and intolerant believers and ecumenical, pluralist believers with the same broad brush.
Right. The level of intolerance that's directed at atheists in the United States is, in my view, disgusting. From Mitt Romney's speech to the polls showing that tens of millions of my fellow citizens wouldn't vote for a non-believer, our culture is full of horrible stuff. But directing equal and opposite illiberal bile at the direction of religious people in a way that draws no distinction between liberal and illiberal strains of religiosity isn't a solution to anything.
Dave Roberts is annoyed to see the press portraying the Democrat's decision to push for an energy bill that was good on the merits and supported by a majority of members of the House and a majority of members of the Senate as a "misstep" because it wasn't sufficiently watered-down to overcome the opposition of a minority of senators.
I'm more accustomed to hearing the generic form of this complaint, but it is true that there's something very odd about this Washington tick of celebrating legislating as such as if the job of public officials was to "pass new laws" and their success or failure should simply be judged by the quantity of stuff they did. This reflects political reports preference for remaining ignorant of policy matters, but it doesn't make any sense as a point of view.
Joe Lieberman's endorsement of John McCain will, of course, only further serve to underscore liberals' deep, deep doubts about the "independent Democrat" from Connecticut. At the same time, I worry if it won't underscore conservatives' doubts about McCain as well. Nobody, after all, really doubts McCain's commitment to a hawkish foreign policy -- he was Bill Kristol's choice in 2000 for a reason -- and that's all Lieberman's endorsement really signifies. After all, Republican primary voters aren't going to be attracted to the other things Lieberman could praise McCain for: his reasonable-for-a-Republican stance on global warming or zeal for certain forms of campaign finance restrictions and general habits of party disloyalty.
This does, however, seem to me like something of a blow to Rudy Giuliani's credibility. After all, Giuliani is closer to Lieberman on several issues than is McCain -- abortion, guns, gays, etc. And Rudy's running as the ultimate hawk, the rock-solid guy on the one set of issues where Lieberman has really distinguished himself by staking out a far-right position. But Lieberman's not buying it. As a consummate hawk, he sees a kindred spirit in McCain and presumably recognizes that Rudy's brand of militarism is a kind of clown show; not insincere, but totally uninformed by any knowledge of the issues or the landscape whatsoever.
Needless to say, I agree with what Greenwald and Atrios and Digby are saying -- given that when Republican members of congress want to put "holds" on things, Reid keeps respecting their hold, it's preposterous for him to be refusing to do the same for Chris Dodd. The "hold" rule is a bad one -- a terrible one, in fact -- but like many elements of the congressional process, even bad rules can be used to good effect sometimes. Except not, it seems, in this instance.
The only word of caution I would add is that one shouldn't exclusively heap opprobrium on Harry Reid. It's clear that Reid wouldn't be interfering with the traditional privileges of a Senator like this unless he felt sure of overwhelmingly support within the body. The Senate as a whole clearly wants this to pass, and that seems to include even some members who are going to nominally go against it. Some Democrats simply favor this sort of measures. And others are desperate to ensure that the 2008 campaign doesn't touch on these issues and thus really, really, really want it to be taken "off the table." It's more or less the politics of 2002 all over again, a belief that public distemper with the economy will glide Democrats to victory if only those mean 'ol Republicans don't run on national security.
Intuitively, a scorer who serves as the clear focal point of his team's offense ought to have a lower scoring efficiency than he would have were he able to shift into a more secondary role. Playing alongside other skilled scorers should, in short, open up more opportunities for quality shots. Ray Allen seems like a good candidate for this effect, going in one offseason from being the first option in Seattle to having the third-highest usage rate on the Celtics where Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce share the load.
As you can see, it hasn't happened. His usage rate is lower "true shooting percentage" (a figure that takes into account free throws and the fact that three pointers are worth three points) than during his Seattle days, but his TS% is nothing special -- lower than it was last season, which, in turn, is lower than it was the season before. But perhaps it's just the effect of aging. Kevin Garnett's usage rate is at its lowest point since the 1997-1998 season and he's posting a career-high TS%.
So-called "honor killings" are, let's agree, an outrageous practice. Emily Yoffe is, therefore, rightly disturbed by western feminists ignoring the issue:
I went to the National Organization for Women Web site, and I would be thrilled if someone could find the place in it in which NOW denounces forced covering and "honor" killing.When the Washington Post's fashion writer wrote about Hillary Clinton's cleavage, NOW was outraged. Their section on violence against women seems to cover every possible permutation except that of Islamic extremism.
Does the somewhat unorthodox interpretation of the joker on display here look totally awesome, or terrible? I'm not in love with it on first blush, but given how much I loved Batman Begins (best comic book movie out there, in my view) and the quality of the talent involved in The Dark Knight I'm optimistic despite my surface skepticism.
Damon Linker has a great essay in The New Republic on the so-called "new atheism" and the ways in which it undermines the vision of a secular politics that it purports to defend:
Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.
Yes indeed. In a raw power struggle between people who, like Harris, want public schools "announce the death of God" and those who want them to indoctrinate us all in the Gospel, the numbers aren't on the side of the non-believers and the outcome is unlikely to be a happy one for anyone. The liberal consensus, by contrast, has served the country well and undermining it from the point of view of ideological atheism is really no better than undermining it from any other direction.
Adam Nagourney noted in yesterday's Week in Review that Republican primary voters aren't just having a hard time making up their minds, they don't really care for their choices: "A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that none of the Republican candidates — not even the suddenly hot Mr. Huckabee — was viewed favorably by even half of Republican voters." Check out the result in graphical form:
This is in stark contrast to the Democrats. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are seen favorably by majorities of Democrats, and John Edwards has a very favorable ratio. The general pattern, is just that the more famous the Democrat is, the more Democratic voters like him or her:
Basically, if either Clinton or Obama winds up winning, the nominee is going to be someone who even many of the supporters of the other candidate have a favorable view of. It seems likely, meanwhile, that Edwards will become similarly well-liked if he has a breakout moment in and after Iowa. The Republicans, by contrast, are going to wind up nominating someone who many Republicans dislike.
David Frum looks at the rise of the Republican Fringe and says the conservative movement needs to engage in some self-criticism -- the anti-intellectualism and suspicion of expertise they've encouraged have allowed Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul to break through despite having quack economic policy ideas. In response Ross points out that Rudy Giuliani has a quack economic policy idea at the center of his campaign, too "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." And yet Frum somehow can't find the strength to criticize him.
And in some ways, I'd note that it's even worse than yet. Mitt Romney, presumably under Greg Mankiw's influence, has always carefully refrained from saying he thinks cutting taxes increases revenue. But he still swears allegiance to the Gospel of Neverending Tax Cuts. And more to the point, he won't criticize his rivals for their adherence to a crackpot notion because he thinks that would be a losing issue for him. The rot goes all the way up and down the structure.
O frabjous day! Over at Sadly, No they have screen captures of Liberal Fascism. I've reproduced s bigger version the most awesome part of the book jacket.
Via Matt Duss, a great map showing rather conclusively that those who warned withdrawal advocates that the result of leaving Iraq would be ethnic cleansing got their continued war, but also their ethnic cleansing as well. We can also see the dubious success of the surge here. The level of violence kept going up during the early surge months and seems to have died down because the radical decline in the number of mixed communities has reduced the opportunities for violence.
I don't get the sense that when people talk about "the success of the surge" that this is the sort of thing they have in mind.
But whether or not you want to characterize walling off Baghdad into a series of separated, segregated neighborhoods while the government remains dominated by a sectarian clique and unable to actually govern in vast swathes of the country (areas where rival cliques rule through force) as "success" this is the new reality. And, of course, for liberals part of that new reality is that the levels of violence really are much lower than they used to be. It's still really violent in that, for example:
At least 20 people were killed or found dead in and around Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province, which is north of Baghdad. The police said that a suicide motorcycle bomber killed at least seven people and wounded 24 in one of the city’s markets. Six were killed in two separate shootouts. Two died from roadside bombs and the authorities found six bodies in two locations on the city’s western outskirts.
That, however, isn't typical anymore. The question is what, if anything, follows from that. Iraq might go back to falling apart at the seams if we leave. On the other hand, it might go back to falling apart at the seams even if we stay. The extent of our impact on the situation isn't clear. What is clear is that the political causes of the conflict are still in place, which is why the violence continues to persist, albeit at a lower level.
Given that, I'd be happy to keep our troops in the country for some reasonably short period of time if there were some reasonable prospects that doing so would push the situation over a positive tipping point where political reconciliation lays the groundwork for lasting peace. But according to our current policy's architects that's not on the table and, instead, their belief is that military engagement will need to continue for over a decade to bring about their desired results. That's not an idea that makes sense to me. The costs would be enormous. And the time-frame itself would be enormous. If American troops just vanished tomorrow maybe Iraq would be at peace again in 10-15 years. There'd be no way of telling if we were really doing any good.
Now if you think it's strategically useful for the United States to be engaged in the military occupation of a medium-sized country in the Persian Gulf region, then things look different. By I think it's strategically bonkers -- making our al-Qaeda problem worse at vast cost for no good reason -- and the "surge" policy itself isn't promising "success" in the "let's keep doing this for a bit longer and then we'll have won" sense, it's promising to have laid the groundwork for an extremely prolonged new occupation phase that we shouldn't undertake.
Ezra has a couple of interesting posts about the Democratic candidates "theories of change" and specifically John Edwards' theory. Brian Beutler also had a post on the subject.
Mainly, though, I think it would be a mistake to take candidates' claims about this sort of thing too seriously. Suppose somebody said "policy outcomes over the long run are mostly determined by structural factors rather than election results; what's more, it's very unlikely that your vote -- or your $250 contribution, or your time volunteering -- can make a difference in the election." Well, I think that'd be a much more accurate "theory of change" than anything I've heard from a presidential candidate, but ceteris paribus I'd still rather vote for someone with appealing rhetoric. That's because a campaign's not a seminar and the candidate's job is to win. The candidates aren't offering theories, they're offering campaign messages. The theory is that a good message wins you the election and then you make your changes.
Scott Lemieux notes, for example, that "Bush in 2000, after all, didn't campaign as a 50%+1 conservative who would increase party polarization in Congress, but that's what he did." I'll just reiterate that on the big domestic policy issues, if you assume a Democratic win in 2008, the big determinant of what happens legislatively is the makeup of the Senate not the "theory" of the president. What's more, insofar as "theory" matters, you can't really infer anything from what people say in the middle of a primary campaign.
This is a bit hokey, but I was walking down Constitution Avenue yesterday when I found myself noticing an inscription on the National Archives building that read: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Coming on the day that a terrible surveillance bill got over forty votes in the Senate, it struck me as incredibly sad. We're compromising important parts of the meaning of America.
Fortunately, it seems that Chris Dodd's moves paid off and the bill has been pulled until the New Year. We'll see what happens then.
UPDATE: Of course I mean that the terrible bill got over seventy votes, not "over forty" (except in the sense that seventy is greater than forty).
Photo by Flickr user Chris and Kelly used under a Creative Commons license
Despite Jonah Goldberg's notions, it turns out that you can't really major in education at Swarthmore. Sara was also telling me that a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore under any major wouldn't ordinarily qualify you to teach grade school without some additional certification.
John McCain: "The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should." Now that's what I call straight talk! And, I suppose, the point of this straight talk is that when McCain says stuff that's not true like "Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues" that talk isn't un-straight, it simply reflects his ignorance.
Via Julian Sanchez a nice rundown of the origins of FISA. It's particularly crazy that we're going down this path because the surveillance restriction were so specifically written in response to a long and well-documented chain of abuses of power. It's not like anyone's going to be able to plead ignorance when it turns out that President Someone Or Other is using these powers to spy on political opponents.
It's hard to express how odious I find Bob Kerrey. His behavior as a Senator was entirely discreditable, and it's hard to see that he's done anything good in his life in non-Senator roles. Keeping it up, he's now following up on his "Barack Hussein Obama" remarks by alleging that Obama attended a "secular madrassa" whatever that's supposed to mean. The Obama campaign's been pretty successful at painting Team Hillary as unduly nasty and, frankly, the stuff they were dishing out previously was child's play compared to this BS.
To grasp the full madness of the policy we're pursuing in Iraq, you need to look toward Afghanistan. Consider Gregory Warner's observation in The Washington Monthly that "according to the RAND Corporation, the American-led nation-building effort in Afghanistan is the least-financed such effort in sixty years." Now why on earth would you think that's a good idea?
And note that it's not because of a shortfall in overall spending on defense-related matters. Lorelei Kelly notes that when you add together the DOD budget with the military programs in the Department of Energy and the special war supplementals we're spending about $700 billion on defense this year. That's a ton of money. In the context of such extravagant spending there's simply no excuse for the vital military mission in Afghanistan to be getting shortchanged in this manner.
There's no excuse but there is a reason: Iraq, where it seems that no amount of spending is too much, no duration of the war too long, and no amount of patience too much to ask for whether or not the war has any kind of clear strategic rationale. And beyond the money and manpower, there's the crucial issue of attention: what preoccupies the top officials in Washington? Where have we sent our best-regarded commanders? All to Iraq rather than to a theater of more strategic importance to the United States, where our operation has more legitimacy, and where there's a real chance we could secure more international assistance with our efforts if we were willing to make them a bigger priority. But rebalancing in that way would require people to implicitly admit that they'd made a strategic error in the first place by moving attention out of south/central asia and to the Gulf, and we can't have that!
As I understand it, though, the difference here is that in Liberal Fascism Goldberg isn't drawing an analogy. He's saying that "the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood" just are the "modern heirs" to the American tradition of fascism "an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries." Contemporary American liberalism, in short, doesn't resemble Nazism. Rather, according to Goldberg it's a variety of fascism, albeit a "friendly" one.
I'm inclined to believe Bob Kerrey was just freelancing, rather than trying to twist the knife, when he went off message yesterday. He used nearly identical language in an interview with the Economist on October 30th, a good six weeks before he endorsed Clinton. Occam's razor suggests that this is an honest "mistake" and not a semi-subtle dog-whistle attack on Obama. In the same way that people need to stop thinking that everything Karl Rove does is part of some triple indirection Jedi-mind trick, it's possible that even the hyper-disciplined Clinton campaign can make mistakes.
Of course they can make mistakes. Mistakes like . . . courting the support of Bob Kerrey! I'm not sure what the fact that he's repeating already-used language proves except that Bob Kerrey is kind of an ass. But we knew that already.
We'll add these revelations from David Corn to the "things that probably help Huckabee with the GOP base" pile:
In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.
An Obama supporter was trying to make the case to me yesterday that the real advantage Obama would have vis-a-vis his Democratic rivals (but especially John Edwards in this instance) in bringing about change is not so much his ability to bring people together in the micro sense (sitting around the negotiating table) as his ability to bring people together in the macro sense -- drawing huge crowds around the country, building this vast base of small donors, etc. That stuff gives him levers that can be pushed to create constituencies for change and generate pressure on legislators.
This is pretty plausible to me. Certainly, Obama is the politician in the race with the most talent, the most upside. You can imagine his working incredible wonders, if he plays his cards right. On the other hand, he hasn't always done that. Meanwhile, I agree with Clive Crook and Matthew Cooper and Felix Salmon that there's not much in the way of clear policy contrast between the two and I don't see any clear reason to think that Edwards' rhetorical approach will produce larger gains than Obama's. Indeed, Obama's seems much better-suited to a general election campaign, and it's by winning the election that you create the circumstances where change is possible.
Now for the sake of my sanity, I think I need to stop thinking about the Democratic primary.
Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license
Maybe congressional Democrats need more backbone when it comes to Iraq, but as always, it's public opinion that's key. And public opinion just isn't as overwhelmingly on our side as we often like to think. Fix that, and we'll all be amazed at how fast Dems all grow a spine.
But here's the thing. Public opinion doesn't just "happen" -- effective political leaders shape public opinion. The polls show that the public wants a pony in Iraq: People don't want to beat a hasty retreat and they don't want a decade or more of occupation. What they want is to give the war a little more time and then for it to come to a successful conclusion. People in the know, however, realize that that's not a realistic course of action. The job of people who realize that it's not a realistic course of action and who favor a policy of perpetual occupation is to obscure the choices by doling the war out in Friedman Units and getting people to focus on the waxing and waning of the tactical situation -- if things get better, that's a reason to keep trying; if things get worse, that's a reason to hold on a bit until we can turn things around.
Conversely, the job of people who realize it's not a realistic course of action and who favor a policy of withdrawal and strategic reorientation is to heighten the contradictions (to coin a phrase) and make people realize that unless they want to commit to 10+ years of this, we might as well leave quickly and expeditiously. If the leaders of the Democratic Party were serious about ending the war, they'd be trying to do this -- trying to shape public opinion in a strategic way. Public opinion matters to all politicians, but serious political leaders don't just take opinion in passively -- they try to understand it and mold it to produce a political climate favorable to the policies they're trying to push.
I'd been optimistic that the release of the newer National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and the apparent ascendancy of a more rational point of view within the Bush administration might lead to a more cooperative attitude from Russia with regard to the continuing concerns about Iran's enrichment activities. That seems to not be the case, as Russia goes through with a nuclear fuel delivery that had been stalled for a bit. The Bush administration is taking a restrained line, presumably because they don't want the Russians to start considering bad behavior on the Iran front an important point of national pride and principle, but this is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
This John Pekkanen article in Washingtonian is really good. Fortunately, it was also given a really good subtitle, so I can just quote it rather than thinking up my own summary: "After years of health warnings, fewer Americans are smoking. But while Washington is encouraging Americans to quit, it has been helping big tobacco push cigarette smoking in other countries, using trade pacts to force poorer nations to accept American cigarettes and helping cause an epidemic of health-related problems." Read the whole thing.
From the random-but-interesting pile, the 1990 Polish elections get rough as Lech Walesa and a rival solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki trade barbs. This via Tony Karon. I love archives.
Jonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism a very serious argument that's never been made before in such detail or with such care, but it seems to me that the Dead Kennedys covered this ground decades ago:
One has to wonder what it is about Jerry Brown's secret allegiance to fascism that's allowed him to mount his improbable return to statewide political office.
I somehow doubt that David Brooks' glowing endorsement of Barack Obama will darken liberal doubts that he has what it takes to fight for progressive values. Basically, you face the same choice over and over again -- is Obama's undeniable ability to win sympathy and praise from the more mild-mannered and open-minded segments of the right evidence of his internal frailty or is it evidence of his ability to build a dominant political coalition. It counts, in a sense, as "evidence" for either thesis. I'll admit that I liked Obama from before I ever heard a word from him about politics or policy, so obviously I'm biased, but I see it more in the pro-Obama way.
One wag, employed in a position too reputable to make such jokes under his own byline, emails in: "doesn't Jenna Bush qualify as the ultimate liberal fascist?" She is a teacher, after all. And female!
I kind of assume Specter's too old to run for another term, and Utah's the most Republican state in the country, but Smith needs to run for re-election in Oregon next year so I'm pretty surprised to see this sort of gaffe coming from him. It's true that his second-degree praise of Thurmond and the Dixiecrats isn't quite as egregious as Lott's, but this is still pretty despicable.
In his book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind details how the Bush administration, having falsely claimed that their captive Abu Zubaydah was a key al-Qaeda operative with tons of information, had him tortured until he coughed up some bogus information. John Kiriakou, formerly of the CIA, told a different story to ABC, saying Zubaydah was tortured and gave up useful information but torture is wrong anyway.
Now FBI sources are striking back, sticking with a Suskindish version of events in which the torture didn't accomplish anything useful. Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus have the story for The Washington Post. It's hard to know where the truth lies here, and obviously I'm a biased observer at this point, but it's hard to see what motive FBI people would have for going forward with their story if it's false. It's easy, by contrast, to see why administration and CIA sources who'd been torturing this guy might want to exaggerate how useful their torturing had been.
It seems someone at BBC Radio 1 got the bright idea of bowdlerizing the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" so as to remove the "cheap lousy faggot" line. Fortunately, good sense eventually prevailed and the original version will go forward.
I'm always puzzled by this sort of thing. The word clearly appears in the text because the character who says it is trying to direct an offensive insult at the other character. What's the basis for the objection?
I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.
In response, a lot of people got upset, including Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon who, as Sam Stein reminds us said:
However they were intended, Senator Lott's words were offensive and I was deeply dismayed to hear of them. His statement goes against everything I and the people of Oregon believe in. I look forward to working with my Republican colleagues to arrive at a decision that is best for the U.S. Senate and the country.
Greg Sargent even has Smith getting more specific, saying after Lott stepped down from his leadership post that "Senator Lott's decision is best for the Senate and best for the country." Smith was right to be glad to see Lott go. Strom Thurmond's 1948 campaign was based on repugnant principles: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."
Now, though, Smith regrets the whole thing:
I was half way around the world when an event befell Trent Lott that shook me deeply. I was celebrating my re-election and on vacation. I watched over international news as his words were misconstrued, words which we had heard him utter many times in his big warm-heartedness trying to make one of our colleagues, Strom Thurmond, feel good at 100 years old. We knew what he meant. But the wolfpack of the press circled around him, sensed blood in the water, and the exigencies of politics caused a great injustice.
No doubt that was Lott trying to make Thurmond "feel good" rather than intending to seriously consider the historical counterfactual in which Thurmond's white supremacist ticket won in 1948. That said, what he was more specifically trying to do was make Thurmond feel good about his role as a leading white supremacist. Robert Byrd, for example, used to be in the Klan and has now changed his ways. One might try to make him feel good by saying nice about him. Nothing wrong with that. But you wouldn't specifically praise him as a Klan leader.
Unless, that is, you were a racist.
Meanwhile, with regard to both Lott and now to Smith, it should be said that indifference to racism is, when taken to these levels, itself a form of racism. Nobody who took the interests or attitudes of black people seriously would be saying this stuff.
I had a nightmare last night where I woke up, read the news that Mike Huckabee had died in a plane crash, and then found myself paralyzed by indecision over whether or not to make an arguably inappropriate joke about so that's how the moneycons keep control of the party. It sounds dumb, mostly because it is dumb, but it was so vivid that as soon as I woke up for real, the first thing I did was check to see if Huckabee's still alive. Fortunately, he seems to be.
Harold Meyerson asks the question that's on every secular liberal's mind: How is it that the political mobilization of Christianity in the United States seems to have gotten us so much torture, aggressive warfare, and xenophobia? Where's the humane, universalistic ethic of the Gospels go?
I apologize for the extreme length of this post, but the determination of various people to mislead the public about their pre-war stances on Iraq seems to me to require Greenwald-esque post lengths to try to document. At any rate, it would be a lot easier for me to forgive the Democratic Party politicians and prominent operatives who helped sell the country on George W. Bush's disastrous war in Iraq if they would at least 'fess up and admit that they supported a war that they very clearly did succeed. Here, for example, is former UN Ambassador and top Hillary Clinton advisor telling an audience in New Hampshire that Clinton voted for the war as a way of preventing the war:
Dana Goldstein has a great short column in the Prospect on the problems with the popular concept of increased school funding as a kinda sorta form of slavery reparations.
A couple of people have sent me this David Frum article in The National Interest, presumably because it mentions me. I'm sort of disinclined to even bother linking to it, because it seems like something they ran specifically in order to piss liberal bloggers off, thus generating "buzz" and traffic for their website. But this description of the piece from one correspondent was worth sharing, "David Frum is very concerned about the implications of people like you for the Democratic Party, an institution about which he is known to care dearly."
Right, exactly. Meanwhile, I have a hard time seeing past the part of the piece that's about me. Frum characterizes something I said as "personal" and "rude" but I really think it was neither. There seems to be something about attacking "bloggers" that makes it okay to just avoid the merits of whatever point has been made and instead complain about bad matters, whether or not bad manners were really exhibited.
John Edwards should up the populist ante and promise that if elected president he'll conduct warrantless surveillance on all corporate executives who oppose his health care plan and blackmail them into endorsing progressive change.
Torture is no laughing matter, but I just noted this amusing phrasing from Newsweek:
In addition to waterboarding, Zubaydah was subjected to sleep deprivation and bombarded with blaring rock music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One agent was so offended he threatened to arrest the CIA interrogators, according to two former government officials directly familiar with the dispute.
Yes, they went beyond sleep deprivation and drowning to deploy . . . the Chili Peppers:
On a semi-serious note, I have to think you'd feel just terrible if you learned that your music was being used as part of a regime of torture.
As someone who's much better-informed about the war in Iraq than I am about the Vietnam War, it's been interesting to chart the shifting valences of the war of analogies. Initially, many war opponents were inclined to analogize Iraq to Vietnam, and conservative hawks were prepared to concede the point about Vietnam (at least ad arguendo) and dedicate their energies to the proposition that "Iraq's not another Vietnam." At some point, however, it switched and the right started making the Vietnam analogies; this time, though, using the revisionist account of Vietnam in which we were winning the war but cowardly liberals pulled the plug. Thus you started to get things like Bill Kristol waxing enthusiastic that "Bush has the good fortune of having finally found his Ulysses S. Grant, or his Creighton Abrams, in Gen. David H. Petraeus."
All of which is by way of introducing an excellent new essay on the subject by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in Democracy where they argue that, no, Vietnam wasn't winnable after all and that the impulse to keep hanging on only made the eventual outcome of the war worse than it needed to be. There's also a good brief discussion of Northern Ireland analogies up near the top.
This Karen DeYoung article in today's Post leads off on a really weird note:
Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.
That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.
DeYoung goes on to provide an excellent description of military efforts to assess the state of Iraqi public opinion and to explain what we know about it. But the big mystery here concerns the official analysis cited here in the second paragraph. In particular, it this silly, implausible spin or is this project being overseen by idiots? There's just no way you could construe widespread, cross-sectarian belief that the departure of US forces is crucial for national reconciliation as supporting a policy of a decades-long American military involvement in Iraq.
You very well might characterize this as "good news" since it indicates that there's at least some chance that a program of withdrawal would boost political reconciliation, but it's certainly not "good news" for the policy we're actually pursuing.
Meanwhile, it's a reminder that the policy we're pursuing is unlikely to accomplish its nominal goal of creating a stable, democratic government for Iraq. Basically, that objective is incompatible with the objective of sustaining the mission in Iraq. Insofar as the Iraqi government is responsive to public opinion, it will ask our troops to leave.
Ron Brownstein opens his latest column with what is, I think, a pretty powerful anecdote:
While the small crowd milled and munched, Suzanne Zilber, a local psychologist, spoke with passion about the prospect of electing the first woman president. She recalled that her daughter Charlotte, now 12, had been confused and disappointed when she saw only men as she looked through a sticker book about U.S. presidents a few years ago.
I think most people think it would be too crass to simply put "Hillary Clinton has ovaries" out there as a good reason to vote for her, but it's hard to look at the gender gap in the primaries and not conclude that this consideration is, in practice, driving a lot of votes. What's more, contemplating this anecdote I'd be hard-pressed to deny that it actually sounds like a reasonable good reason. I think the alternative choices are probably better, but this is a reminder that Clinton presidency, too, would be a unique and exciting opportunity in many ways.
I'm seeing more-and-more blog posts wherein people post their ten favorite albums / songs / movies / whatever of the year, but the year's not done yet. This blog will be full of lists from December 26-31 but nothing until then.
David Leonhart proclaims Shannon Brownlee's Overtreated to be "the economics book of the year." It also fits into the strange category of book I would recommend even though I haven't actually read it. You see, even though I haven't read her book, I have read several reviews describing it -- not all of them quite as enthusiastic about it as Leonhart's -- and they make it clear that her perspective is interesting and important. What's more, various people who follow health care policy debates more closely than I do have told me that I have a Brownlee-esque point of view on health care policy, and so if I want to expound my views in a well-informed way I should read her book instead of talking out of my ass.
But if anything, the book's been promoted to me too highly! I read the article based on her book in the current Atlantic and it's great. So was this piece in The Washington Post and this op-ed in The New York Times. And I've heard her on the radio a couple of times, plus seen a bunch of people cite her work here and there on the internet.
Even better, the thesis is admirably clear: A system in which health care workers are paid for "providing health care" rather than for providing good health outcomes is a system that's set-up to generate lots of wasteful and counterproductive spending.
So you should read the book. And what's more, I'm going to buy a copy!
Kevin Drum yesterday noted that "The Democratic primary has become more a Rorschach test than an actual contest." He's right. Great example. Yesterday, someone supporting a different campaign was trying to interest me in some story about how Barack Obama had sold out to insurance companies in the Illinois State Legislature. I didn't look into it, but Paul Krugman found something similar. Now I was reading the excerpt, and I had a reply to the implicit critique Krugman was making. And then I read this from Krugman: "being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator."
Exactly, I thought. Krugman has found an example of Obama doing his job as a state senator well, and decided to simply assume that he doesn't understand that being president is different from being a state senator. I see the reverse -- I see a guy who was an effective state senator, which I see as evidence that he'd be effective in other roles as well.
It's a pure rorschach issue, though. So in the interests of my sanity, I'm going to write the following sentence and then endeavor to drastically curtail my involvement in blogospheric debates about the Democratic primary: I believe that Hillary Clinton is likely to pursue a worse foreign policy than would Barack Obama or John Edwards and I don't see any clear and convincing reason to favor her on other grounds; that said, there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the decision -- any of these three could be an excellent president and any of them could screw-up.
You may not be checking Jim Fallows' low-quantity/high-quality blog all that regularly, so don't miss this post on "art factories" in China -- and especially the accompanying photos.
This leads me to a probably crazy thought. The phenomenon of artsy types moving to somewhat sketchy neighborhoods in search of affordable rent is well-known. But do you know what's a lot cheaper than Brooklyn? China. Then we could start reading breathless reports from the US-China Commission about China's menacing efforts to corner the world's hipster reserves.
I'd recommend A.J. Rosmiller's remarks on Vladimir Putin. For my own two cents, I think it's always instructive to compare attitudes toward Putin's illiberalism to attitudes toward friendlier petro-states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, etc. It's totally understandable that the United States government would take a different attitude toward governments who try to challenge US international hegemony than the one it takes toward those governments who help re-enforce it.
But to a striking extent, the press just follows along on this path. Gulf states that are far less democratic than contemporary Russia are typically portrayed as "moderate" or "reforming" whereas Putin's Russia is painted as a dark totalitarian nightmare. Even though though most people acknowledge, when pressed, that Putin is a broadly popular leaders whereas the sundry Sheikhs of the Gulf are mostly detested by their subjects.
The result of the media's decision to adhere to a double-standard is to substantially obscure from the American public some salient facts about the role our country plays in the world. It's widely understood, for example, that insofar as Vladimir Putin backs unpopular undemocratic pro-Russian leaders in the "near abroad" this is likely to make Russia even less popular in Russia-skeptical elements of the population of those countries. The analog of this, that staunch American support for unpopular undemocratic pro-American leaders in the Gulf and in Egypt is a significant source of anti-American sentiment is, by contrast, completely absent from the national conversation.
Earlier this week, we recorded a discussion between myself, Ross Douthat, and Marc Ambinder talking horse race stuff. Thanks to the mad skills of Jenny Rothernberg and Terrence Henry it has a higher quality of production values than you may have seen on BHTV. We're presenting it in three parts, of which this is part one:
Incidentally, it's been decided that vlogging with three or more people is a vlorgy.
Having become accustomed to being accused of anti-semitism, I was interested to learn that anti-semitism is not, in fact, a defining characteristic of liberal fascism. Rather, "the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism". Which, of course, is why they had to open all those concentration camps back when Bill Clinton was president.
The above graphic appears in this Campaign for America's Future report on the unprecedented obstructionism of the Senate Republican caucus. As they write, "A roll call of the bills subject to conservative filibuster shows a vision for a different America. Conservatives filibustered bills to end the occupation of Iraq, reduce subsidies for oil companies, and allow residents of the District of Columbia to vote. Conservatives used the filibuster to kill legislation that would increase renewable sources for electricity and that would allow soldiers in Iraq rest time equal to their deployments."
Digby's right to note the screwy media coverage of this. I got asked by a radio producer maybe 36 hours ago if I thought the congress' failure to "get things done" would hurt Democrats in 2008. I said I thought not, that part of being in the majority is that you only bring up for consideration issues where the public favors your position. The Republicans, thus, have been blocking lots of popular Democratic measures which should hurt them in the fall. She reacted as if this was an unusual perspective, which I guess it is, but it says something that it's an unusual perspective.
But, of course, I might be wrong; this hurting Republicans in 2008 is dependent on voters understanding what's happening and I'm not sure they are. Certainly, though, the GOP is playing a risky game. It's worth considering, though, that they're trying this strategy because they think it works. They think, in particular, that during 1993-94 they very successfully stymied Bill Clinton's agenda and then used their own obstructionism to paint him as a "failure" leading to big gains in the midterms. Unless a whole bunch of Senate Republicans lose their seats next year, you can expect 2009 to be even more full of filibusters than the current congress has been. Even a landslide triumph in the presidential election for your "change agent" of choice probably won't make a big difference unless enough Senators go down to induce panic.
Dave Berri looks at the Wizards' surprising resilience in the face of Gilbert Arenas' injuries. The insight that Caron Butler has been playing really, really well will surprise nobody. He does note, however, that Brendan "Haywood is simply taking more shots from the line and the field. And perhaps surprising to some, the increase in Haywood’s shot attempts has not caused his shooting efficiency to decline." And since Haywood was always a fairly efficient scorer, this has helped thus validating my longstanding decree that Eddie Jordan needs to play Haywood more. Beyond that:
Is there any evidence Agent Zero is missed? Yes, but it’s free throw attempts where we see an impact. Last year this team took 29.6 free throw attempts per game. This year the team is only taking 25.2 shots from the line each game.
I was reading Democracy Corps strategy memo ringing the alarm bells about immigration as a political issue to try to get a handle on this topic. They're very worried and commence their packet of graphs with this one:
But of course, absent context it's hard to interpret this information. My guess is that most people are inclined to say just about anything is "important" if asked specifically about it in isolation. One way or another, the apparent uniformity of the answer there masks an enormous diversity of actual views:
One thing you have to ask yourself when looking at this is whether or not you think Democratic groups like African-Americans, union households, and single women are poised to abandon the Democratic Party over immigration. With regard to African-Americans, at least, I think we can confidently say that the answer is "no." With the other groups, I don't really know how to answer the question. It's interesting, though, that union members seem to be so out of step with the official positions of most union leaders on this topic. Last, there's this poll:
This graph plays to my prejudices. But since I found it in the midst of an analysis designed to play against my prejudices, I find it pretty noteworthy. And, of course, it backs up other surveys indicating that the immigration issue only really plays with a minority of the public. And, of course, it's now well known that immigration is the biggest concern in areas where immigration is a new phenomenon and my guesstimate is that this leaves the target audience pretty small: Most Americans either aren't white or else live in lily-white areas or else live in highly-diverse big metro areas.
Of course I might be wrong about that. But given the cross-cutting nature of the immigration issue vis-a-vis both ideological and partisan groups, I'm not sure it makes real political sense to think about what "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" should do about this. The way the issue plays, politically, clearly has a lot to do with the demographics of the constituency at hand. I don't have a problem with the idea of House candidates who represent strongly anti-immigration districts deciding they need to take a hard line. But the leap from "hard-line anti-immigration views are politically vital in some congressional districts" to "Democrats should all panic about immigration" seems like a large one to take, despite its popularity.
During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.
You see, in 1995 she overstayed a visa for three weeks. I remember standing in the Reykjavik airport on a security line with my shoes off, held in my left hand, ready to be placed on the conveyor belt for scanning once I got far enough in line for that to be possible. I stepped forward toward an Icelandic security guy who was checking passports and boarding passes who asked me: "Sir, why aren't you wearing your shoes?" It was a stark reminder, to me, of how accustomed we've become to an ever-escalating series of irrational security measures. What this woman describes is, clearly, well-beyond asking people to take off their shoes, but it's all on a continuum of panic and sheep-like submission to a culture of fear.
Ryan Avent points out that Prince William County is finding that big crackdowns on illegal immigration cost a lot of money, remarking "Prince William would be far better off identifying the people who claim to be harmed by immigration and figuring out how much money it would take to shut them up."
A joke of course, but it illustrate the general shape of things. The evidence suggests that illegal immigration is damaging to the economic prospects of the least-skilled Americans. It also suggests, however, economic benefits to the majority of Americans who don't fall into the "least skilled" category. On top of that, it has large benefits to the immigrants themselves. Crackdowns, meanwhile, have direct financial costs whereas putting illegals on a path to citizenship has direct financial benefits (fines and taxes). Under the circumstances, crackdowns on illegals is an incredibly inefficient way of helping the unskilled. Most crudely, you could just cut them checks and make everything pareto-optimal. More realistically, improved social services, etc.
Well, for me it's a simple question: I agree with him about very little. Indeed, even though I agree with him about the war in Iraq, I don't actually agree with his broad vision of foreign policy. There's just very little there to like. But for Megan things are different:
Ron Paul has some beliefs that I like, such as his opposition to eminent domain abuse. But he also has a number of beliefs that are, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly insane. The gold standard is one; the belief that NAFTA is a trojan horse for the North American Union is another. Much of his persona, sincere or not, seems to boil down to "Foreigners are scary, and people who like foreigners are plotting to take away all your stuff."
These seem like worries to have once it becomes reasonable to think that Ron Paul might become president. That's not the case right now. If you're as dyspeptic about both political parties as Megan claims to be it seems to me that a protest vote for Ron Paul on a Libertarian Party line would be the best thing to do. The reason libertarians don't like either political party, is that nobody feels like catering to a fringe ideology with almost no supporters. David Boaz and David Kirby claim there's a large "libertarian vote" but the proof would be in the pudding. Paul's not going to be president, so one doesn't need to worry about whether or not he'd be a good president. The question is whether or not there's any constituency for a platform of massively rolling back the government's activities both at home and abroad -- votes for Paul will prove its existence if it's out there, and then major parties featuring plausible political leaders will move in that direction.
Photo by Flickr user Jayel Aheram used under a Creative Commons license
Excellent report by Cara Buckley for The New York Times that shows just how far from normal the new, less spectacularly violent Iraq is:
The government’s widely publicized plan to run free buses from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad was suspended after just two runs. Thousands of Sunni refugees get no aid because they fear registering with the Shiite-led government. While aid organizations are distributing emergency packets that include utensils, blankets and food, deeper structural issues, like securing neighborhoods, supplying housing and creating jobs, remain unresolved and largely unaddressed.
A small fraction of the millions of refugees who fled Iraq have come back. While the government trumpeted their return as proof of newfound security, migration experts said most of them were forced back by expired visas and depleted savings. Ms. Hashim, for one, pawned her wedding ring and gold jewelry to stay in Syria, but came back after her uncle’s visa application was denied.
Given that the West -- and especially the USA -- showed little inclination to do anything to help refugees (helping refugees, you see, would be like admitting that Iraq's all screwed up; better to let people suffer in order to keep up appearances) returning home even under these conditions is probably the right move for many families. It's a reminder, though, of the tenuous nature of whatever kind of security has been brought to Iraq. None of the underlying issues have been resolved, so the potential for further breakdown is constantly looking over the horizon.
Kevin Drum, aiming for some kind of wanker prize, posts the following missive from "[a] member in (extremely good) standing of the VSP community":
One thing you might write about -- if only because nobody else has, I think -- is how that whole dust-up over the O'Hanlon/Pollack oped looks in retrospect. I mean, clearly they were on to something -- the relative quieting down of stuff that has taken place in Iraq over the last several months, etc. Completely debatable whether that was due to the surge, or is sustainable, or is deeply significant, etc. etc., but it's not like the caricature of them put forth in the blogosphere at the time -- as paid lobbyists for the Bushies, reporting back what they were told to after checking out a Potemkin village -- holds up, does it?
Well, of course, if you mischaracterize the critique that was made of them, then that fake version of the critique doesn't hold up well. Pollack and O'Hanlon concluded:
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
This, it seems to me, was deliberately dishonest. Part of the effort to confused people about the nature of the choice facing us, by doling the war out in bite-sized morsels. They also managed throughout the course of their op-ed to obscure the fact that the "surge" hasn't met its stated goals. It remains unclear whether or not they actually visited any portion of Iraq that wasn't a "Potemkin village" of sorts. For some reason or other, for example, they seem to have not noticed that Baghdad had become a network of walled-off ethnically cleansed cantons.
Clearly, though, the summertime decline in violence has proven more sustainable than I thought it would at the time. Equally clearly, Pollack and O'Hanlon have a good relationship with General Petraeus and came back from Iraq speaking from a set of misleading talking points designed to advance the political sustainability of the Bush administration's policies. I'm not shedding any tears for them.
It looks like Washington, DC's finally going to get a quarter of our own just as if we were a real state. I feel all fuzzy inside. Maybe someday we can have congressional representation, too.
As another note on the immigration issue, I should note that some of the fear of this topic in progressive circles seems to me to reflect an undue Fear of Republicans. Basically, the thinking seems to be that if Republicans are all talking about how tough talk on immigration is going to be a great issue for them it must be right because, after all, the GOP is great at this stuff.
It's worth keeping in mind, however, that when the ship was being steered by hardened political strategists, the Republican Party was adhering to a firmly pro-immigrant line. It was always known that Bush's immigration policy wasn't popular with his base, but he thought it was vital to his strategy in the 2000 election, and the pro-immigration version of the Republican Party did quite well in 2002 and 2004. The turn in Republican rhetoric came because the base revolted against the political strategy that had been outlined by the party's strategists. Then, as it became clear that Republicans were facing big losses in 2006, a lot of them turned to anti-immigration rhetoric to try to preserve control, but they lost anyway. Similarly, in 2007 those of us in the DC area were inundated with anti-immigrant ads from Virginia Republicans running in local races and the Virginia GOP did terribly.
Basically, immigrant-bashing doesn't have a great track record as an electoral issue, and it doesn't seem to be the case that this is actually a cause the Republicans started espousing because of it's political utility. If anything, it's the reverse, something the political hacks didn't want to take on, but that the base has pushed them into.
Great column from Rosa Brooks in The LA Times "Iraq today also still moves in darkness. We should be glad of the lull in violence, but if stability in Iraq depends on miles of concrete walls and an indefinite U.S. occupation, that's not 'victory.' It's defeat."
Right. I should note that I mean that pretty literally: Having a large body of American soldiers bogged down in an indefinite occupation of Iraq is a huge strategic boon to al-Qaeda. I know that nobody cares about foreign policy anymore, and Paul Krugman assures me that "no Democrat is not going to end this war" even though some of them seem to be planning to continue it indefinitely but this stuff seems like a big deal to me.
Slaughter feels I mischaracterized the substance of the article, and argues as much in this "Blowback" column for The Los Angeles Times called "The case for collective force" which I thought I might draw your attention to. I'm going to post something in response to Slaughter on Monday.
Reviewing the strange death of the Chicago Bulls a little while back, I concluded that "the only really plausible theory is that Chris Hayes left the Windy City to become Washington editor of The Nation and the Bulls are too sad to play." Well, I went with Chris to the Wiz-Bulls matchup last night and, naturally enough, Chicago won. So score one for my theory. To save his job, Scott Skiles desperately needs to persuade Chris to move back.
You have to wonder what kind of pathological liar would say "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King" in the highest profile speech of his career when it never happened. After all, lots of us have dads who we never watched march with Martin Luther King -- it's not like this is something you vitally need to fake to stay politically viable. And yet, he said it. And yet, it's not true. And his replies are terrible: "You know, I speak in the sense of I saw my dad become president of American Motors. I wasn’t actually there when he became president of American Motors . . . When we say, ‘I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there — excuse me, the Super Bowl."
Meanwhile, the prospect of Boston winning World Series, Super Bowl, and NBA Championship is all too real. Someone needs to check this gathering threat.
Via Kevin Drum, Merrill Lynch says that "real estate pricing in general can be expected to be in the doldrums through 2012." One particularly interesting tidbit is this part:
Beyond that, weak demographic fundamentals point to years of sluggish real estate activity, particularly in terms of the “price”. The looming dominance of the “move down” buyer suggests that home values will continue to soften long after the building industry mops up the current excess supply.
I heard about this from Megan McArdle in conversation, so maybe she'll explain it in more detail at some point, but it's so obvious once you hear it -- just as the media's always reminding us, all these baby boomers are going to be retiring over the next ten years. With kids out of the house, a lot of them are going to be looking to move into smaller homes in order to transform some of their home equity into liquid assets for consumption, and in order to reduce fixed costs in terms of taxes and hearing. There are always people looking to move down, of course, but the large size of the boomer cohort means it'll be exercising a steady downward drag on the market.
I'm just about done with Thomas Keneally's A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia and it was pretty fascinating. Americans are accustomed to hearing the tales of derring do from the early European settlement of our own continent, and precisely because the Australian situation was so similar in so many ways -- so familiar -- the differences loom larger in a fascinating way. That said, I'll admit that I picked up the book basically because Jews love Thomas Keneally and it had a cool title rather than out of any systematic effort to explore the history of Australia.
That said, now that I read the book, I'm interested, so it's time to go a blegging: Any worthwhile recommendations? I'd be looking for a basic introductory text, probably a bit more scholarly than Keneally's book. I really don't know anything about the subject beyond what I've now read about the first few years of settlement and a hazy sense that Australia's politics feature more America-style rightwingery than you have in other countries.
It's too bad The New York Times's Patrick Healy has decided to report on Bill Richardson's point that "Senator Clinton’s comments are a stunning flip-flop — she’s been saying she would keep troops in Iraq for five years, until 2013, and now she comes up with an inconsistent, incredible turnaround" purely through the lens of Richardson's alleged vice presidential ambitions. Clearly, forward-looking Iraq policy is one of the most important issues on the table in this election. What's more, unlike health care or global warming, the new president will just get to implement his or her preferred policy by fiat.
I'd like to know what's going on. Of course, if Clinton really has flip-flopped away from her old position that I disagreed with and adopted a new, better position I'm not going to condemn her for that: being open to persuasive arguments and new evidence is a good thing. But I do want to know what her position is since she's had a pattern of misleading rhetoric on this score, promising to "end the war" but leave tens of thousands of soldiers in the war zone.
UPDATE: The Clinton campaign fires back with this rebuttal that, I think, does effectively rebut the charge of flip-flopping. Clinton has consistently said that, in office, she'll act swiftly to remove one or two brigades a month until we're down to a "vastly reduced" residual force. That's a little vague, and given that the incentives during the primary are to shade your position to the left I doubt it specifies a policy I agree with, but it's one she's consistently adhered to.
Dave Roberts contemplates the filibuster and runs pretty exhaustively through the flaws with the conventional thinking on how Democrats might effectively respond to Republican obstructionism. And I think he's right -- no amount of grandstanding will really work. The good news is that there's a perfectly workable solution to this problem:
At issue is a seldom-used, complicated and highly controversial parliamentary maneuver in which Republicans could seek a ruling from the chamber's presiding officer, presumably Vice President Cheney, that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional. Under this procedure, it would take only a simple majority or 51 votes to uphold the ruling -- far easier for the 55-member GOP majority to get than the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster or the 67 votes needed to change the rules under normal procedures.
Republicans wound up not doing that because of the dumb "Gang of 14" deal. Democrats could do the same thing (you'd need to pick a time when a Democrat, rather than Cheney, was presiding) except instead of "filibusters against judicial nominees" you'd just rule that filibusters in general are unconstitutional. The rules of the Senate aren't written in stone -- they've changed several times over the years. The filibuster rule, though obviously useful when the political party I prefer is in the minority, isn't a procedure with some strong claims of universal justice. Democrats should scrap it.
And they should scrap it this term. It'd be a huge controversy. But the controversy would die down a bit as attention moved to veto battles and the presidential campaign. That way, by 2009 it'll be a fait accompli and the GOP minority won't be able to scuttle the new administration. It's not going to happen, but it's what ought to be done.
Every time I try to get out of primary-blogging they keep pulling me back in. Suffice it to say that I agree with Mark Schmitt's take on the "theory of change" issue:
As an observer of politics, and commenter on it, I almost entirely share Krugman's and Edwards' diagnoses [...] But let's take a slightly different angle on the charge that Obama is "naïve" about power and partisanship. Suppose you were as non-naïve about it as I am -- but your job wasn't writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is not merely to describe the situation exactly, but to find a way to subvert it. In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk. The public, and younger voters in particular, seem to want an end to partisanship and conflictual politics, and an administration that came in with that premise (an option not available to Senator Clinton), would have a tremendous advantage, at least for a moment.
Right. Of course one runs into the rorschach problem here -- maybe Obama really is naive. I doubt it; his background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer doesn't indicate symptoms of naiveté to me. But I can't climb inside the man's brain and look around. But Mark says what I was trying to get at here and says it better.
I was on "Marketplace" the other day talking about the presidential campaign's turn away from national security issues and toward the domestic stuff, and one point I made during the interview (not sure exactly what they actually aired) was that this is likely to change when we move into general election mode. I think there are important differences between the Democratic candidates on foreign policy issues, but they're relatively subtle. By contrast, as Ezra says there's a huge gaping chasm between where the Democrats are and where (assuming Ron Paul doesn't get the nomination) the Republicans are and, as a result, we should expect this subject to come roaring back into view.
Meanwhile, Democrats aren't going to have an easy time of it. George Bush's reputation for incompetence won't automatically transfer to a copartisan, but the press will be very open to stories about Democrats' generic sins of "weakness" on security. Edwards or Clinton will be attacked as flip-floppers; too weak to stand up to their own liberal base, and thus obviously unfit to stand up to Osama bin Laden. Barack Hussein Obama, by contrast, would have left a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein in power to blackmail America into submission.
Not that these are irrefutable lines of attack by any means, but there's going to have to be a big fight about it. The Republican nominee isn't going to agree to have a lot of fights about who's best suited to accomplishing broadly shared goals.
Photo by Flickr user phxpma used under a Creative Commons license
I read Matt Bai's article on how we can understand the current Democratic primary as a referendum on Bill Clinton's tenure in office and Ed Kilgore's remarks on it as well. On one level, I'm not entirely sure this is true. Paul Krugman's complaints about Barack Obama amount to accusing him of being unduly Clintonian, whereas he sees the actual Clinton in the race as possessed of a bold, populist fighting spirit. On the other hand, given that Bill Clinton was in office very recently and that his wife is the front-runner in this race and she's running primarily on her experience as a first lady, it's natural for thoughts on the Clinton administration to enter into things.
It struck me contemplating this that I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the Clinton administration.
It seems to me that people who write about politics for a living are supposed to decide that he was either the Great Innovator Who Saves Democrats From the Hippies or else the Evil Destroyer Who Ruined Everything. In truth, he was a politician. Like all politician, his views on the merits of things drifted around over time and he responded a lot to the prevailing political pressures. And that's not to say he was a Soulless Calculating Flip-Flopper. Rather, he was a politician and that's how politicians do.
So anyways, I do actually see the Democratic primary through that lens. I'm not sure how the future will unfold for American public policy, but if a Democrat wins the primary difference-maker will be the environment in which he or she operates -- the state of public opinion, the state of the congress, the strength of progressive civil society groups, etc. The structure of the campaign tends to obscure that, but that's how it is. Any of these people would happily become much more conservative in office than the game they're talking now if they thought that was the savvy move, and any of them would shift left as well. It still matters who wins, of course, but it's only one of a million things that matter.
I've said, repeatedly, that to me the defining issue in the Democratic primary is that I think Hillary Clinton's foreign policy would be worse than would the alternatives. Under the circumstances, I think I owe the world a clearer explanation of what I think the problem is. One correspondent boiled the issue down the other day to the idea that I think Hillary would be "too hawkish." I don't really like that way of framing the issue, which I think makes things far too crude. Maybe Clinton will be too hawkish, and maybe she won't; maybe it's hard to know what that means; maybe a situation will arise where a hawkish response is warranted. The problem is something else.
The problem is that I think she's unlikely to try any of the bold strokes necessary to turn our situation around. I don't see her trying for a grand bargain with Iran, don't see her making the tough choices necessary to revitalize the NPT, don't see her taking political risks on the Arab-Israeli confict, don't see her acting boldly and decisively on Iraq, and don't see her accomplishing anything particularly innovative and interesting in terms of UN Reform.
By contrast, I think an Obama administration (and probably an Edwards administration as well) will include some people at high-levels who are pressing for those things, and will be led by a man who has some inclinations in those directions. I think Clinton and her people are too narrowly political, too complacent about the depth of America's problems in the world, and, yes, maybe too inclined to believe that if the shit really hits the fan all that'll happen is that public support for the use of force will revive and that under new, more competent leadership, the armed forces will resolve the situation by waging a new war.
And, at the end of the day, I'm against Clinton mostly because I have a choice: I can live with President Clinton and Secretary of State Holbrooke but given that there's a different, better set of people available, I hope they win. If they don't, I'll hope Clinton has the good sense to listen to the smarter members of her team
But mostly it's just that we have a choice: I can live with President Clinton and Secretary of State Holbrooke but given that there's another, better set of people available, I hope they win. If they don't, I'll hope HRC has the good sense to listen to the smarter members of her team: they're not all bad.
The good thing about Ron Paul is that he dissents from some of the misguided elements of the bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy. The bad thing is that said dissent is part and parcel of a deranged extremist worldview, as Dana Goldstein points out.
Commenter Sam responded to yesterday's post on comparative airport security:
Counterpoint: The Schipol airport had more security than any I've ever been through, including Ben-Gurion. They quizzed, bugged and pestered me a lot more than people at Reagan do.
The quizzing is true. I was standing right by the gate and got a pretty serious third degree -- I didn't have a good, brief explanation of what the conference I'd been attending was about ("it was about progressive America" "what does that mean?" "um...") and kind of thought I'd be locked away. That said, they let me get away in the end, things actually moved very speedily and the security personnel were much friendlier than Americans.
In 2007, Mitt Romney "figuratively" watched his father march with Martin Luther King, but back in 1978 he was saying "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit." In reality, Mitt Romney never marched with King, and he never saw his father march with King because his father never marched with King either.
Tyler Cowen says "dressing up actually might make people more productive, but then would not at least a few of us blog in suit and tie?" Julian Sanchez actually does this quite frequently. And, actually, I feel like I am more productive on those days when I have an event to attend that I'm dressed up for.
The thing is that to actually blog in suit and tie all the time, I'd need to buy more suits, shirts, ties, etc. plus probably face higher dry cleaning bills. So the financial and "hassle" costs of shifting to a suit and tie model would be fairly high. The returns, meanwhile, seem uncertain. I feel like my blogging productivity is at a point of diminishing marginal returns. Would 20 percent more output get me 20 percent more traffic? A 20 percent salary increase? It all seems unlikely.
AP: "Toddlers rescued from orphanages and placed in good foster homes score dramatically higher on IQ tests years later than children who were left behind, concludes a one-of-a-kind project in Romania that has profound implications for child welfare around the globe."
It's stunning that the foster parents were able to actually use retroviruses to recode the orphan children's DNA, thus reprogramming them to the new, high-IQ level. Hard to believe that such technology could be so widespread, but several prominent phrenologists assure me that there's no other explanation.
Evidently the question of whose better is a controversial one, and many of ESPN.com's writers think the right answer is Kobe. I was toying with the idea of making a chart, but this is so not even close that it's hardly worth borrowing. Suffice it to say that LeBron is scoring more points on better field goal percentage and better true shooting percentage, plus he has a higher assist ratio and a lower turnover ratio. Plus he's a better rebounder, and he has a higher usage rate (i.e., does more to carry his team).
It's true that Kobe's a better on-the-ball defender, but unless the Lakers have changed strategies radically without me noticing they don't normally use him in a defensive stopper role so it's not as if, in practice, his edge on this front is so crucial as to outweigh the fact that he's worse across all these other dimensions.
Suffice it to say that conservative pundits really, really, really don't care for Mike Huckabee. Here, for example, is Mark Hemingway no longer able to restrain himself:
I had (largely) refrained from piling on Huckabee because I wanted to give him a fair shake. I've now read his last two books (you can read my piece about them on NRO today) and am here to tell you they were terribly written and totally insubstantial. Thought his Foreign Affairs piece was bad? Read his chapter in From Hope to Higher Ground on how to "STOP the Loss of America's Prestige at Home and Abroad." His relentless use of folksy aphorisms and corny rhetorical sleight of hand provokes visceral objections — but the criticism isn't merely superficial. In the TNR I piece I linked to yesterday a member of the Arkansas press corps observed, "He thinks and speaks in metaphors. And, often, they're not right." That, well, hits the nail on the head. [...] I don't think I'm being uncharitable when I say that's disturbingly authoritarian. Huckabee should probably start answering some critics instead of dismissing this all as "The Establishment" trying to keep a good ol' boy down.
This all raises the interesting issue of what would happen in the event that the establishment is somehow unable to beat back his insurgency. Presumably, the right-wing punditocracy would walk back a lot of this anti-Huckabee rhetoric. But it seems to me that you couldn't walk it all the way back. And I feel like a move in either direction would prompt something of a crisis in the relationship between the conservative press and its audience.
Kevin Drum makes an argument worth responding to regarding Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views, but that'll have to wait for tomorrow. Instead, let me note this post by Ambassador Joe Wilson in support of Clinton. Clearly, securing the support of some prominent war opponents like Wilson has, for Clinton, been an important part of the effort to defuse anger over her position on Iraq. And it really is to her credit that she has the support of several such figures. That said, claims like this from Wilson don't really fly:
Many of the most prominent early opponents of the war, including former General Wes Clark and former ambassador to the United National Richard Holbrooke support Senator Clinton for President, as do I.
Needless to say, Holbrooke didn't oppose the war at all. He was a fairly prominent advocate for war, not as influential as Kenneth Pollack, but part of the group of former Clinton administration officials who helped sell the war to Democratic politicians and citizens. The inability or unwillingness of Clinton and her circle to give an accurate account of what she and her allies were up to in 2002 and 2003 really bothers me. I'm willing to forgive people for their errors, but I'd like to know what Clinton et. al. think the moral of the story is (contrast her handling of this issue to the deft way in which she's plausibly argued that her participation in the failed health reform effort of the 1990s makes her uniquely prepared to grasp the pitfalls and find the path to progress) and what they've learned.
Instead, you keep hearing that she was actually opposed to the war! Or if she wasn't, maybe Bill was! Or maybe Dick Holbrooke was! Or, or, or, or ... who knows? It's an odd way to behave and it makes it hard to clear the air. John Edwards has, by contrast, acknowledged error in a straightforward way and then laid out a compelling vision of American engagement with the world that clearly reflects a new, post-Iraq understanding of how the country should conduct itself on the world stage.
Rihanna's "Umbrella" is, it seems to me, a very sweet -- almost treacly -- song: "When the sun shines / We'll shine together / Told you I'll be here forever / Said I'll always be your friend / Took an oath / I'mma stick it out 'till the end." The video, not so much:
Michael Luo runs them down with admirable thoroughness for The New York Times. Obviously, this accumulation of fibs isn't the biggest deal in the world. One suspects, however, that one reason the pile grows so large is that Mitt Romney's fundamental approach to political self-presentation is so deeply dishonest -- it's in part a "what a tangled web we weave" phenomenon.
It's also a bit sad that while George Romney didn't march with MLK, he really was a pillar of moderate Republicanism and a staunch civil rights man. Romney, for a while, seemed like he was very much his father's son. And one could imagine an alternate reality in which he took a tough stand and tried to use his influence to return the GOP to something more like George Romney's political party. Instead, though, he decided to sell it all out and sign up for the party of gay-bashing and immigrant-hating and "no atheists allowed" and dim-witted idol worship like the Reagan zone of economic freedom.
"Did your local news recently do a two-minute clip on music copyright infringement? If so, you can thank the RIAA. They sent out a video press release to local news stations as part of their 'holiday anti-piracy campaign.' In it, they warn people that the best way to avoid counterfeit music is to avoid 'compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan' and to trust their ears, because illegally copied music usually sounds 'atrocious.' Instead, they encourage watchers to buy ringtones for Christmas."
The hard-working, diligent reporters of America who shed light on the dark corners of the world's most powerful institutions and let people know what's really happening beyond the superficial flow of events deserve -- and, I think, often receive -- all the respect in the world. But the fact of the matter is that such work is a minority of what takes place under the banner of "journalism" in America.
Bush administration lies to 9/11 Commission, says it's turned over all “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogation of al-Qaeda members while withholding videotapes:
Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.
But look, people, get real: Al Gore said something that, if deliberately misconstrued, could be understood as claiming that he invented the internet. Think about it.
I'd definitely recommend that you give Kerry Howley's Reason article on guest workers in Singapore a read. It's a very thorough and balanced discussion of the way it works. That said, given that the crux of the opposition to such programs for the United States is "it's repugnant and un-American, violating everything this country stands for" to say in reply but look at how well it works in a small, regimented, highly inegalitarian Asian dictatorship doesn't seem very persuasive.
The experience of a more similar society, Germany, is not something that many Americans look at and would desire to replicate. Meanwhile, I have no desire to see the United States become more like Singapore. We are, however, in the midst of a burgeoning libertarians against democracy moment (a return to classical liberalism's traditional anti-democratic sentiments) of sorts, so maybe we'll start seeing more and more aspects of Singapore and Hong Kong recommended to us as models.
Obviously, a lot of neocon types are down in the dumps about the NIE on Iran. Not to worry, though, AEI's Charlie Szrom, writing for The Weekly Standard and citing the time-honored conservative precept that "everything strengthens the case for missile defense boondoggles" explains that the report strengthens the case for missile defense boondoggles. And, indeed, all indications are that the system would work better against non-existent Iranian nuclear missiles than against the real kind, so in that sense Szrom makes a strong case.
Former CIA agent John Kiriakou's been speaking out against torture so, naturally, the government's now seeking legal methods of shutting him up. The good news is that we haven't yet reached the point where politically inconvenient types are just sent off to Gitmo without charges and then tortured 'till they confess to something.
Much more consequential than Mitt Romney's troubled relationship with anecdotes, is this Wired story about Romney's approach to illegal surveillance issues:
I'm pointing this out because it makes me wonder how the debate over national security is going to shake out as the presidential election proceeds. It sounded as if the Romney team was adopting the Bush administration's approach of mis-characterizing the placement of minimal checks on the system as harmful to national security.
Well, I don't "wonder" how it's going to proceed on the Republican side. Whoever wins the nomination is going to mischaracterize the placement of minimal checks on the system as harmful to national security. The question is whether the other candidate will aggressively fight on these issues -- not just defensively pleading "no no mean republicans please stop saying I hate America" and hoping to shift the debate to jobs and the economy but actually going on the attack about the mess Bush has made of our constitution. I'm not especially optimistic, but I try to keep my hopes up.
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Heads in the Sand
