Month: August 2008

Only R & D Can Help

Bjorn Lomborg helps cool the warming debate:

R&D has been dropping worldwide since the early 1980s. If we increased this investment ten-fold, it would still be ten times cheaper than Kyoto, and probably hundreds to thousands of times cheaper than Tickell’s proposal. The literature indicates that for every pound invested, we would do £11-worth of good. The reason: because when we all talk about cutting CO2, we might get some well-meaning westerners to put up a few inefficient solar panels on their roof-tops. While it costs a lot, it will do little and have no impact on Chinese and Indian emissions. But if we focus on investing in making cheaper solar panels, they will become competitive sooner, making everyone, including the Chinese and Indians, switch.

Did McCain Just Pop Off?

Go read the letter that the McCain campaign has fired off to NBC News. The whole thing is below the jump. They are outraged – outraged – that Andrea Mitchell said the following on air:

"The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared."

After hyper-ventilating about this for several paragraphs, Rick Davis then concedes that Mitchell was reporting something that would have been news to most viewers, who were told that McCain was "safely" in a "cone of silence" from which one could possibly hear through the wall (as McCain joked). In fact, for a large part of Obama’s interview, McCain was en route in a limo, and not, so far as one can tell, under Warren’s peeps’ "safe" custody. Now this does not mean, of course, that he was listening to the debate or cheating. I assume he wasn’t, or he was an awfully good actor as he groped toward his answers at the beginning. But it’s a perfectly legitimate piece of reporting, framed so that the source of the charge is clear, and with the bonus implication from Mitchell that McCain won the "debate."

So why the outrage? Is this a calculated attempt to make media bias an issue for the Obama campaign alone, while it is a matter of record that very very few politicians have cultivated the press as assiduously as McCain? Or is it just the senator blowing a fuse because someone accused him of cheating when he didn’t (but could have)? Either way, it’s awfully defensive and prickly.

Here’s the letter:

August 17, 2008
Mr. Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112

Steve:

We are extremely disappointed to see that the level of objectivity at NBC News has fallen so low that reporters are now giving voice to unsubstantiated, partisan claims in order to undercut John McCain.

Nowhere was this more evident than with NBC chief correspondent Andrea Mitchell’s comments on "Meet the Press" this morning. In analyzing last night’s presidential forum at Saddleback Church, Mitchell expressed the Obama campaign spin that John McCain could only have done so well last night because he "may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama." Here are Andrea Mitchell’s comments in full:

Mitchell: "The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared." (NBC’s "Meet The Press," 8/17/08)

Make no mistake: This is a serious charge. Andrea Mitchell is repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated in last night’s forum at Saddleback Church. Instead of trying to substantiate this blatant falsehood in any way, Andrea Mitchell felt that she needed to repeat it on air to millions of "Meet the Press" viewers with no indication that 1.) There’s not one shred of evidence that it’s true; 2.) In his official correspondence to both campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren provided both candidates with information regarding the topic areas to be covered, which Barack Obama acknowledged during the forum when asked about Pastor Warren’s idea of an emergency plan for orphans and Obama said, "I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea;" 3.) John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot.

Indeed, instead of taking a critical journalistic approach to this spin, Andrea Mitchell did what has become a pattern for her of simply repeating Obama campaign talking points.

This is irresponsible journalism and sadly, indicative of the level of objectivity we have witnessed at NBC News this election cycle. Instead of examining the Obama campaign’s spin for truth before reporting it to more than 3 million NBC News viewers, Andrea Mitchell simply passed along Obama campaign conspiracy theories. The fact is that during Senator Obama’s segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed. In the forum, John McCain clearly demonstrated to the American people that he is prepared to be our next President…..

We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race. We would like to request a meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our deep concerns about the news standards and level of objectivity at NBC.

Sincerely,

Rick Davis
Campaign Manager
John McCain 2008

When An Embryo Becomes A Human Person

Obama is being razzed by the usual suspects for saying that the theological, scientific and moral question of when human life becomes a human person is "above his paygrade." A classic response:

News flash: There’s not a job on the planet above the pay grade of the President of the United States. If you can’t solve every problem and are humble about it, that’s fine — but you can’t get away with being unsure about the most defining moral issue in politics.

But even the Vatican doesn’t claim to know that precise answer. From the lips of Ratzinger:

"The Magisterium has not expressly committed itself to an affirmation of a philosophical nature [as to the time of ensoulment], but it constantly affirms the moral condemnation of any kind of procured abortion."

So it’s above the Pope’s pay-grade as well. That "moment" of conception is, of course, many moments in a continuum. Here’s how Steven Pinker describes the actual science in "The Blank Slate":

"Just as a microscope reveals that a straight edge is really ragged, research on human reproduction shows that the ‘moment of conception’ is not a moment at all. Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes … Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the ‘moment’ of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours."

The assumption of Obama’s critics is that a president should always reduce complex issues to simple black and white truisms, unfounded in reality. That’s why they supported Bush. And that’s why they’re supporting McCain.

Georgia And Conservatives

A reader writes:

You were right about the fact that this conflict exposes, as no others have, the chasm between the formerly united cold war warriors in this country.

True conservatives/realists recognize that the US has little national interests in Georgia and even less in going out of our way to piss off the Russian bear. Georgia is a poor, isolated, backwater country that has throughout modern history been within Russia’s sphere of influence, much as the Caribbean and Central American nations have been within America’s sphere of influence. Moreover, even if things were different on that score, there nothing we can effectively do to coerce Russia to act differently.  The realist recognizes this as a windmill at which we should not attempt to tilt. 

But the romantic Wilsonian interventionists (i.e., unchastened neocons) believe we should take on any burden and any cause that appeals to our sense of democratic morality irrespective of how costly and how damaging such rhetoric and actions may be.  U.S. foreign policy is in desperate need of a dose of realism and restraint.  We are not a hegemonic empire, we are at heart a commercially based power whose ultimate demise will come not from challenges from Russia or China but from our own overreaching. 

While I loathe the prospects of Obama’s left-wing economic prescriptions and what they may entail for the country, I do find comfort in the idea that he would actually exercise much more restraint and rectitude in our foreign policies.   

One Reason We’re Polarized

Because Chuck Todd can describe the following as a reason Obama lost last night’s debate:

The two answered the Supreme Court justice question VERY differently, with Obama seemingly trying to say a nice thing or two about justices he disagreed with, while McCain went right to pander mode in his answer. And yet, McCain’s straightforward answer easily penetrated while Obama’s did not.

Chuck basically says that unless you pander in soundbites, you lose. If you show respect for your opponent’s views, you lose. However defensible this is as analysis, it isn’t part of the solution, is it?

The New Dynamic

I totally understand why it makes little sense to game out a presidential election before either convention, either veep choice or any debate. But after the "debate" last night, watching how these two men presented themselves, and seeing how neoconservatism is reconstituting itself for an even fuller metal jacket, I think at this point, McCain’s gaining. Reading Frank Rich’s desperate column today did nothing to dissuade me.

Having watched the Bacevich interview in the same time period, this reader suggests why:

In terms of the simplistic appeals that have passed for political discourse in this country since Reagan, I would say that McCain certainly won last night. Does that mean he can win the general? Actually, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.

 

I watched the forum in the context of linking earlier in the day from your site to the Bill Moyers interview with Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich’s main point about America seemed to be that all of our problems today – whether it’s the mess we’ve gotten into with Iraq, or our dependence on foreign oil – basically stem from the same source: That we’ve become accustomed to expecting something for nothing. And in this respect, it was telling that only Obama, in his answer to the question about taxes, said No, we can’t keep doing that. I’m sure you’ve seen the movie Idiocracy, but if you haven’t, you should definitely Neflix it, and fire up the DVD.

It paints in stark satirical terms exactly the America Bacevich’s describes, positing a future dystopia where the citizens of our fair land are too stupefied by consumption to deal with existential threats. I used to think that if McCain won, it would be because of race. I don’t doubt that race remains a factor, but I’m beginning to think that if he did win, it would also be because – for all his talk of what he would have done after 9-11, calling the nation to sacrifice – he’s still promising the same old something for nothing. He’s certainly not laying out what the real cost of his geopolitical posturing would be.

More and more, November seems to be shaping up, above all, up as a referendum on the American people‹-on what we collectively are prepared to take responsibility for. If McCain wins, we’ll deserve him.