Month: July 2008

By Patrick Appel
Jeffrey Goldberg recently interviewed Joe Klein. One of Joe’s answers:

I just don’t want to see policy makers who make decisions on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not.  In some cases, you want to provide protection for Israel certainly, but you don’t want to go to war with Iran.  When Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me antisemitic, they’re wrong.  I am anti-neoconservative.  I think these people are following very perversely extremist policies and I really did believe that it was time for mainstream Jews to stand up and say, "They don’t represent us, they don’t represent Israel."

By Daniel Larison

At the TAC main blog, Clark Stooksbury points us to this gem from Limbaugh:

How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower?

Actually, it makes me feel relieved that I don’t live in smog-infested cities where marathoners collapse and die because of the pollution.  Limbaugh offers here the absurd spectacle of "conservatism" as the embrace of endless consumption and degradation of nature, and really what this reveals is a desire to belong to something like a pink subsidy state (a modified version of what James has called the pink police state).  The implication here seems to be that if the market can no longer accommodate sufficient levels of consumption, the state should come in to subsidize that consumption and over-consumption, but above all it is a declaration that egregiously conspicuous consumption has something to do with national status and power.  Of course, if you were to suggest to a mainstream conservative that support for consumerism is a common or accepted view among them, you would be immediately denounced as a closet socialist who wants to impoverish everyone, unlike all those high-minded economic conservatives who just happen to defend all forms of consumption out of respect for freedom.

Cross-posted at Eunomia

By Patrick Appel
Artist Tim Knowles makes trees draw. More here.

By Daniel Larison

Glenn Greenwald has a pointed, smart post about the responses to his call to oust Blue Dog Democrats from the party.  One of the observations he made that applies equally well to the mentality in both parties was this:

Blind, uncritical allegiance to one’s Party — and to all of its officials — is the defining attribute of a tolerant, enlightened, and savvy progressive, and is the very heart of a healthy democracy. Those who diverge from absolute Party loyalty are Stalinists.

Replace "tolerant, enlightened and savvy progressive" with "prudent, wise and loyal conservative" and you might just as easily be talking about the experience of conservatives in the Bush Era.  Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions.  Bizarrely, it is those on the left who most want to pursue a real progressive agenda who are criticized for imitating the sort of lock-step partisan loyalty to political leadership that typified the Bush years, while those who are content to enable and collaborate in the worst abuses of the administration are the pragmatic and reasonable ones.  This is the absurd, imaginary world in which Ron Paul and Russ Feingold are extremists and Joe Lieberman and John McCain are "centrists"–no wonder the arguments defending that world make no sense.       

What is especially strange about the conventional wisdom Greenwald is attacking is the idea that being antiwar hurts Democratic candidates in the country at large.  Nancy Boyda of KS-02 is allegedly one of the most vulnerable first-term Democratic House members and this is supposedly because of her opposition to the "surge," yet she has high approval ratings and a good chance of being re-elected in what has normally been a fairly reliable Republican district until two years ago.  Both Travis Childers and Don Cazayoux campaigned and won as antiwar Democrats in the Deep South.  The national Democratic leadership continues to cower and refuses to pressure the administration on the war, and in their defense you will hear arguments about the need to protect conservative Democratic candidates in competitive districts.  However, when it comes to the Iraq war the problem is not so much Blue Dogs who are worried about their re-election as it is a party leadership worried about placating Washington establishment opinion.

Cross-posted at Eunomia

By Patrick Appel
Greenwald wants to purge Congress of conservative Democrats. Weigel is skeptical this would get Congress to vote Greenwald’s way on privacy issues. So am I.

Campo Bom, Brazil, 11.22 am.

By Daniel Larison

The most remarkable part of Rich Lowry’s column today was this line:

Berlin at times sounded as much like Obama’s coming-out party as the candidate of a transnational progressivism — in which global norms are more important than sovereign nations — as his audition as commander-in-chief.

What struck me about this passage was its implicit pretense that McCain and the administration Lowry et al. have supported dutifully for years are not similarly transnational.  For reasons I outlined yesterday, Republicans are able to use nationalist language and symbolism to their advantage, but to the extent that "transnational progressivism" is defined by endorsing the idea that "global norms are more important than sovereign nations" most of the leadership of both parties, including the current Republican nominee, can be described in the same terms. 

The illegal war against Yugoslavia in 1999 had the pretext of invoking human rights and prevention of genocide, and the illegal invasion of Iraq was technically based on the implementation of old U.N. Security Council resolutions.  Global norms and global governance, such as they were, took precedence over state sovereignty, and they both obviously had the support of John McCain.  That is not the same as saying that these were the real reasons for these wars, but the public justifcation for both was essentially that "global norms are more important than sovereign nations."  What Lowry’s column does is to remind us of just how conventional and established Obama’s sort of foreign policy is, and why it is going to represent very little in the way of change from the status quo.  Far from being the first transnational President, Obama will simply be continuing the bipartisan foreign policy consensus according to which the sovereignty of other states can be compromised at any time in the name of "global norms" and hegemonic interests.

Cross-posted at Eunomia 

By Patrick Appel
What a four-star chef learned from fast food:

Just looking at the basic burgers at each of these chains — particularly the Big Mac — showed me a couple of very key things: First of all, the burgers are a perfect size. You can grab them in both hands, and they’re never too tall or too wide to hold on to. And the toppings are the perfect size, too — all to scale, including the thickness of the tomatoes, the amount of lettuce, etc. In terms of the actual flavors, they taste okay, but you can count on them to be consistent; you always know what you’re going to get.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

by Chris Bodenner
Alaska’s Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican Senator in U.S. history, was just indicted on corruption charges.

By Patrick Appel
The Evangelicals warn:

An evangelical leader who, though he has close ties to Mr. McCain, confided to The Times that polling suggests that putting Mr. Romney on the ticket likely would cost Mr. McCain 7 percent to 10 percent of the evangelical vote – enough to spell defeat for Mr. McCain in a close race with Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Steve Benen thinks it’s a bluff.