Month: July 2008

Cue the music from Jaws.

Dan says Jesse helped pave the way for an Osama bin Laden.

Robert Stacy McCain has some Washington advice for Ross:

1. Stay to the right of the Left. Don’t try to get into a one-upmanship situation where you’re trying to outdo them in multicultural enthusiasm. You can’t win that fight.

2. Avoid arguments with Paleos. Those guys play for keeps and (as Joan Jett said) they don’t give a damn about their bad reputations.

3. Keep your friends close, and your Neocons closer. This is the flip-side of my advice about the Paleos. Whatever your quarrels with the Neos, avoid making any outright enemies, or next thing you know, you’re an "Unpatriotic Conservative" and NRO will dump you like yesterday’s garbage.

Clark Stooksbury hits back, as does Larison:

This last point seems the most remarkable, since it plainly acknowledges the culture of intimidation and ostracism that neoconservatives promote as if it were simply a fact of life, rather than a despicable tactic to be repudiated by reasonable people.  The essence of this point seems to be: live in deathly fear of your “friends,” who will try to destroy you the moment that you utter a sentence that they do not like.  Some friends!

His somewhat partisan remarks at an institution supposed to be non-partisan has gotten Gordon Brown into a spot of trouble. Bloggers flushed out the mini-scandal.

How did he film that astonishing simultaneous-reverse single tracking shot? Here’s a video to explain.

Obama has been criticized for only attending one hearing on Afghanistan in the last two years. Which is one more than John McCain.

John Ashcroft says something that has no basis in history or legal precedent: that "waterboarding" has been consistently deemed legal. It is demonstrably untrue, false, self-evidently wrong to anyone who has access to Google. There is no defense of this bald-faced untruth except that Ashcroft cannot bring himself to realize that he authorized war crimes.

Steve Clemons wonders why Obama is skipping Brussels:

…for Obama to neglect Brussels and the vital significance of what is going on in the evolving institutional heart of Europe may amplify doubt about him and his strategic template. Long ago, I broke the story that Senator Obama had not chaired any policy hearings of the European Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I thought that this got overplayed by some others — but still, it raised questions about the status of Europe in Obama’s world view…while I still applaud his forthcoming journey, I need to underscore that the Europe box is not in fact checked off until he gets to Brussels. We’ll consider it half checked off — sort of like a spare in bowling perhaps.

Judah Grunstein agrees.

Washington, Georgia, 11.30 am.

Kerry Howley knocks GNP’s nationalist impulses:

You can’t really get through Grand New Party without feeling that anyone who lacks an American passport is an enemy to this vision. We know that it’s possible to dredge up a few votes by blaming entrenched native-born poverty on Mexican laborers. Nor is it hard to convince (otherwise) educated Americans that the rise of a Chinese and Indian middle class is a catastrophe rather than an unprecedented increase in human welfare. This is a politics of exclusion, and we are tribal beings.

Reihan tries to parry the attack. Wilkinson and Larison are having a debate on similar grounds.