Month: January 2009

Yglesias summarizes the news from Gaza:

Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire, but no plan to withdraw troops from Gaza. Hamas counter-announced a one-week cease-fire to give Israel time to withdraw troops from Gaza. At the time of the expiration of the previous medium-term cease-fire, the sensible proposal was for the United States along with allies in Europe and the Arab world (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to press for a deal in which Israel was given enhanced assurances regarding rocket fire and border smuggle in exchange for Israel relaxing the blockade on Gaza. That didn’t happen, and neither Israel nor Hamas pursued that route on their own, and as a result all these people are dead. But it’s still the sensible way forward.

A reader writes:

This hurts:

"He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party."   

But you are clearly on to something.  I remember with Bill Clinton, he had way of making people feel they were "the only person in the room:" and that they "mattered to him" as many articles during his tenure claimed.  But what Obama seems to have is the ability not to appear as if he is acting, faking it.  That is why comedians were able to mock Clinton’s lower lip biting and other such gestures meant to show how much he cared. Why do comedians have such a hard time mocking Obama?  Some say it is because he is black, and they don’t want to be seen as racist; no, that’s not it.  They mock Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all the time. 

They can’t mock Obama because he is not a faker, not a schmoozer,  not a dolt, not a skirt-chaser, not a charlatan, etc. etc.  Obama has the realness that comes from the hard psychological work that it takes to really get to know yourself and come out on the other side unafraid of whatever might come your way.  That is decidedly not funny. 

Chris Brose, writing for Foreign Policy:

… there will be little change on issues of global grand strategy. A refrain from the campaign was rebuilding damaged ties with America’s allies. But those ties have largely been rebuilt already—in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Obama can certainly improve these relations further, especially with real action on climate change. But another challenge may be managing the bubbles of overinflated expectations for his presidency that will soon begin bursting in allied capitals.

Bush will also bequeath to Obama a realistic strategy for managing the rise of great powers. By pushing China, India, Japan, Brazil, and others to be responsible stakeholders in the international order, the Bush administration showed that “the rise of the rest” need not be synonymous with America’s decline. In fact, it might actually enhance U.S. influence.

Brose is pushing it (with the exception of India, I’d say, where the Bushies do deserve some props). The truth is, however, that second term Bush, outside the Middle East, did moderate somewhat toward more traditional realism, and this makes the transition to Obama less traumatizing. Alas, saying "outside the Middle East," makes the statement more than a little misleading; and the stench of Gitmo, withdrawal from Geneva, and the carnage in Iraq made realist retrenchment elsewhere pretty much unavoidable.

I probably shouldn’t be linking to this kind of information. But it does raise some interesting general questions about the war on drugs. If you can create a drug at home out of ammonia and coffee grounds that provides a high not dissimilar to some amphetamines, why is it not illegal?

Very, very strange.

A high-speed-camera low-speed-replay insight into the world we actually live in:

Rob Horning ponders the significance of printed pictures:

I wouldn’t want to take the photos I have in box, scan them all, and throw them away (as I did with my CDs after I ripped them to my hard drive). The physical collection has a gravity to it that would be lost and would probably become inconceivable if it were digitized. Handling the objects seems to affect the feelings I have about what I am seeing. (I feel the same way about my long-since-scattered record collection, sacrificed because of NYC-apartment space constraints.) Paging through photo albums, too, is utterly different than scrutinizing image pools online…

With actual printed photos, there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture. They seem to have an occult power, as pictures in lockets sometimes seem portentous, mystically imbued with significance. Digitization, though, puts photos in the same category with flickering TV images, meant to be consumed and forgotten after being experienced as entertainment. A physical archive seems to put them in a category with paintings, which invite us to take the time for contemplation.

Hello … Jonesers? I’m a little hesitant to encourage political consultants but … here goes:

Jonathan Pontell has gained some fame coining a new category: Generation Jones, as in the slang word ‘jonesing,’ or craving, and as in a generation that’s lost in the shuffle.

Jonesers are idealistic, Pontell says, but not ideological as boomers are. "Boomers were flower children out changing the world. We Jonesers were wide-eyed, not tie-dyed."

And Obama, he says, is "a walking, living prime example of Generation Jones. He’s a classic practical idealist. It’s not the naive idealism of the ’60s."

Jonesers: Goolsbee, Geithner, Rice, Emmanuel, Duncan … Marshall, Foer, Weisberg, Waldman, and the journalistic-political Joneser two-some: Michael Bennet (Colorado senator) and James Bennet (Atlantic captain). I’ve almost got a Style Section front emerging here … so a fast and earnest retreat.

The key point is: Boomer Power is Over! Long live the Post-Boomers!

Here’s another sign of generational change:

Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy Thursday announced the nominees for the 2nd Annual Cadet Choice Award for the movie character that best exemplifies West Point leadership.

The nominees are:

Bruce Wayne in “The Dark Knight”
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in “Valkyrie”
"Indiana" Jones, Jr. in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”
John Hancock in “Hancock”
Harvey Milk in “Milk”
James Bond in “Quantum of Solace”

Contra Bowden, Thomas P.M. Barnett doesn’t want to get rid of the bomb:

There is no good reason whatsoever to lower the threshold of great power war at this time in history. Not suffering great-power wars is a key aspect of our success in spreading globalization. Abolishing nukes also has NOTHING to do with the global war on terror–NOTHING WHATSOEVER.