Month: January 2009

Michael Wolff:

He’s out on a limb, Rush. His current themes are about Obama’s radicalism, which, with every day of the new administration, seems a less and less sellable image, and—say-again?—the new president’s racism. Obama’s the racist, you see, in one of those message inversions coded so as to speak to actual racists. (“Racism in  this country is the exclusive province of the left.”)

It’s an unaccustomed verbal flailing: “Most of these guys came alive in the Civil Rights battles of the Sixties…” (When Barack Obama was under seven). Obama is being forced on us by a left-wing, racist, homosexual conspiracy: “We’re being told we have to bend over and grab the ankles.”

Sydney Freedberg Jr. asks the question to a panel of experts. Here’s Hillary Mann Leverett:

A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never drawn the support of more than a narrow majority of either Israelis or Palestinians-and, much of the time, not even that. Such a solution only meets the minimum needs of each side-and nothing more. As such, a two-state outcome will never win truly broad and deep political support among Israelis or Palestinians.

The proper analogy here is not with Northern Ireland — now much in vogue, given Senator Mitchell’s appointment as President Obama’s Middle East envoy. The more appropriate comparison is with the Balkans — where the international community, led by the United States, defined its own interests in negotiated settlements to the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and effectively told the parties that negotiated settlements would be achieved.

Has arrived. Drum thinks it’s pretty good. Clive Crook’s take:

My main reaction to the CBO’s new review of the House stimulus bill (see the director’s blog; a fuller version [pdf]) is that the package is much smaller than previously supposed. The CBO says it would increase the budget deficit by $816 billion during  2009-2019, but by only $525 billion when it is most needed, in the remainder of fiscal 2009 and 2010. The stimulus for the rest of 2009 is put at just $169 billion. The 2009-2010 stimulus needs to be much bigger, in my view. And the ten-year stimulus should be much smaller: if you are going to look that far ahead, you should see lower spending and higher revenues relative to baseline.

A blogger over at The Next Right makes a prediction:

…this new deficit will mean that, by Congressional standards, every agency that gets money in this "special times" "stimulus" will be able to complain about "slashed" budgets next year if they do not get the same amount of money.

Thus the Dems will do two things:

Retain much if not all of the additional spending.

Trumpet their fiscal conservatism as they "slash the budget" when all they are really doing is reducing the 2010 budget to, say, 25% more than it was in 2008 . . . but they will call it a reduction since it is less than what was spent in the "special year" of 2009.

And they will get away with it to because the Reps don’t have the ba . . . er, courage to stand up to them and tell the nation what is really going on.

And that’s because, after the last eight years, the GOP has zero credibility on spending. Bush legitimizes every Pelosi wet dream. And the collapse of demand makes this an unfelicitous moment to champion fiscal austerity. My view is that fiscal conservatives should focus on entitlements and long-term spending commitments and let Obama own the short-term stimulus, as he must.

A reader writes:

I, too, was struck by this interview. I am Muslim (a convert) and have been on board with Obama since Iowa. My husband’s family (Lebanese Sunni) have always been skeptical about Obama, his motives and his intentions throughout the campaign. I always forwarded them information during the campaign about Obama’s positions on the Middle East, the I/P situation, etc. telling them "This guy is different". Their response has been "Just because his middle name is Hussein doesn’t mean he will be a friend to the Muslim world", preferring to wait it out and see his actions.

Well, this interview changed a lot of their minds! The most skeptical, my brother in law, who is from Syria, was shocked that he mentioned his Muslim family, knowing that during the campaign he tried to downplay this information. He was also surprised (and elated) when Obama said "[The U.S] needs to start by listening…typically in the past we have started by dictating". The rest of my family was pleasantly surprised, and very happy when he said (paraphrase) "But these are just words, and what we need now are actions." This impressed them greatly. The most striking aspect they liked was his empathy for Muslim children and their lives. This really resonated for them.
 

 

If the reaction of my family is any indication (cynical, jaded, suspicious of American influence) he hit it out of the park.

When the tectonic plates shift a little below …

Tyler Cowen tells everyone to act rationally about releasing terrorists. Good luck with that.

It popped up on television last night and I had two reactions. The first was a sense of met expectation. Part of the rationale for Obama’s presidency from a foreign policy perspective was always his unique capacity to rebrand America in the eyes of the Muslim world. Since even the hardest core neocons agree that wooing the Muslim center is critical to winning the long war against Jihadism, Obama’s outreach is unremarkable and should be utterly uncontroversial. Bush tried for a while to do the same. But Karen Hughes is not exactly Barack Obama. And the simple gesture of choosing an Arab media outlet for his first televised interview as president is extremely powerful. It has the elegance of a minimalist move with maximalist aims. It is about the same thing as inviting Rick Warren or supping with George Will: it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

This respect came with the following astonishing words:

Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries … the largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.

What Obama is doing is appealing over the heads of Muslim leaders directly to Muslim populations. I cannot think of any other president with the same kind of personal credibility in such a critical time. And his appeal is to relieve the state of humankind:

[T]he bottom line in all these talks and all these conversations is, is a child in the Palestinian Territories going to be better off? Do they have a future for themselves? And is the child in Israel going to feel confident about his or her safety and security? And if we can keep our focus on making their lives better and look forward, and not simply think about all the conflicts and tragedies of the past, then I think that we have an opportunity to make real progress.

Onto the choppy waters of religious strife, the old oil of material improvement. It’s a way in; a way to change the subject; a subtle appeal to Muslim and Arab peoples on common ground.

And, of course, it begs the question. Is he serious? Is this a huge hinge of history – or just a rebranding of an old policy with the old interests at play? And the truth is: we cannot know. The odds are against him. Israel seems to be entering a period of a defensive crouch so intense it will spurn all efforts to save it; the Arab regimes are as potentially threatened by Obama’s opening as anyone; Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah and al Qaeda are temporarily flummoxed but will be eager to foil any grand bargain.

My sense, for what it’s worth, is that Obama is genuine. He doesn’t know whether this bold new play will pay dividends any more than we do. What he does know, I think, is that we have no choice. The trajectory of the current global conflict, centered on the question of Islam and modernity, is an apocalyptic one if the game isn’t changed soon. He is attempting to change the game. Which led me to my second reaction.

Hope.

John Allen tackles the history of the Lefebvre movement:

When the Vatican lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops Jan. 21, it’s entirely possible Rome was unaware that one of those bishops, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, had just given an interview to Swedish television in which he denied that the Nazis had used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews had died during the Second World War.

In retrospect, however, it would be disingenuous for anyone to feign surprise.

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.

Reacting to the furor over Williamson, the Vatican has stressed that lifting the excommunication is not an endorsement of his views on the Holocaust, and has repeated its firm commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to combating anti-Semitism. The pope’s outreach to traditionalists should instead be seen, spokespersons said, as an “act of peace” intended to end the only formal schism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Canonical experts also point out that, technically speaking, Holocaust denial is not heresy. It’s a denial of historical truth, not a truth of the faith, and hence repudiating it is not inconsistent — at least from a strictly logical point of view — with the Jan. 21 decree from the Congregation for Bishops ending the excommunication of the four Lefebvrite prelates.

That’s a fine distinction, however, likely to be lost on much of the world, especially given that Williamson’s comments hardly came out of the blue.

I normally ignore them, or glean the scoops from the p.r. and move on. But Mike Crowley’s and Dan Goldman’s comic book rendering of the 2008 roller-coaster is a fun and vivid graphic tour down memory lane. Think Sin City Meets Michael Barone. You can buy it here. A sample:

Ha’aretz reports:

In addition to infantry, armor and intelligence units, the Israel Defense Forces has also deployed eight Eland antelope to further secure Israel’s tense northern border against Hezbollah. The antelope have been stationed in the zone between the security fence and the international border to clear problematic foliage that distorts views of the Lebanese side and within which Hezbollah guerillas could hide. The animals, each weighing in at over 500 kilograms, are known for their sharp incisors and fondness for eating vegetation. Hailing from eastern Africa, the animals were first brought to Israel more than 30 years ago as part of a project to raise them at local zoos before sending them to Europe.

(Hat tip: Abu Muqawama)