Month: January 2009

Tom Ricks makes a few predictions about Obama’s Iraq:

Obama’s first year in Iraq is going to be tougher than Bush’s last year. Three reasons for that: First, three rounds of elections are scheduled in 2009, and those tend to be violent in Iraq. Second, the easy U.S. troop withdrawals have been made, and the pullouts at the end of this year will be riskier. Finally, none of the basic existential problems facing Iraq have been answered-the power relationships between groups, leadership of the Shiites, the sharing of oil revenue, the status of the disputed city of Kirkuk, to name just the most pressing ones. Compounding the problem will be the incorrect perception of many Americans that the Iraq was all but over when Obama took office.

Despite the conventional wisdom that the war is nearly over, Obama’s war in Iraq may last longer than Bush’s, which clocks in at a robust 5 years and 10 months. "So now you back in the trap–just that, trapped," to quote Big Boi and Dre. My best guess is that we will have at least 35,000 troops there in 2015, as Obama’s likely second term is winding down.

I think Ricks is optimistic. When one contemplates what president Bush has bequeathed – from $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see to a war without end in the Middle East to an intelligence capacity poisoned by torture – the jaw still drops. Did he really do this much damage to America and the world? Yes, he did.

Timothy Kincaid is skeptical of the new National Gay and Lesbian Task Force report (PDF) on prop 8 and race:

The fact is – regardless of how much NGLTF would wish otherwise – that the gay community does not truly have a strategic alliance with black voters. We do not have African American support. We can fully expect that unless something drastically changes, future votes on gay equality will have large percentages of African Americans voting against our rights.

Now there are a number of things we could do.

We could make a concerted effort to strategize and find allies for a long-term plan to educate and influence the African American community to recognize that discrimination based on sexual orientation is no more admirable than discrimination based on race. We know that many leaders, from Coretta Scott King and Mildred Loving to John Lewis and Al Sharpton, have been open to learning this message.

But we also know that there is a strong and unapologetic voice of harshest homophobia that has no hesitation in using race as a justification for denying that gay and lesbian Americans deserve civil equality. If we seek change, it cannot be haphazard or hesitant. It will be no picnic and we have to be willing to offend some who believe that they own the concept of civil rights and not be afraid to be called racist by those who oppose us.

Or we could also just write off this subset of the population and hope that we can sway enough whites and Asians to outweigh the African American vote. But while it may be pragmatic for winning an election, this approach strikes me as particularly cold. It not only leaves another generation of young black gay men and women growing up in a community that has pockets of severe hostility, but it also dismisses a lot of otherwise decent people as not being worth our time or effort.

So I ordered the fancy-ass Tazo London Fog Tea Latte at Starbucks – because a man has to have something to help the petite vanilla bean scones go down. It cost over $3. And when I started to drink it, I got this Proustian feeling. Starbucks have discovered the old cup of cha that my mother reared me and my siblings on. The same strange blend of hot water and milk and sugar; the same black tea steeped a little too long; the same impact on the nose and lungs on a cold damp evening. All that’s missing is that ritual: the English zen of making the tea.

My mum (yes, I have to use the English spelling) made around 10 of these a day. We were either drinking tea or the kettle was boiling. If my parents were having a fight, the kids upstairs listening to the uproar would wait until we heard the voices fade and then the all-clear siren: the sound of the water being drawn and the kettle being readied. When I told my poor mother I was a homosexual, it was her first impulse: "Oh my God, I’d better make a cup of tea."

My poor mum. Funny how a cup of tea reminds me how much I love her.

Isn’t it great to have conservatives complaining about government spending again? It’s been eight long years …

Jeffrey Goldberg links to a prayer for the children of Gaza.

Obama has picked Brian Bond, which makes my day. Brian is a pragmatist but, unlike some others, actually believes in real equality and is prepared to take risks for it. He’s a good man. And this is another inspired pick.

It seems to me to be important to allow a debate about the wisdom and morality of Israel’s current military incursion without accusing critics of being anti-Semites at the first opportunity. But it is equally important to note when genuine anti-Semitism really does rear its disgusting head. Item One.

Blumenthal praises Ambers’ new piece on how the Obama campaign approached race. Cornell Belcher, one of Obama’s pollsters, gives his take:

Belcher resampled the white voters whose racial animus he had measured before. More than half had voted for McCain, but not by an overwhelming margin. Belcher concluded that Obama might have done better among them had he not been black. In 1992, Belcher noted, 85 percent of voters who said the economy was bad broke for Bill Clinton. In 2008, in a verifiably worse economic climate, only 66 percent of voters who said the economy was bad voted for Barack Obama. “The economy is clearly not the only story. I could argue that the economy wasn’t as big an impact this time around as in 1992,” Belcher told me. “You can’t look at that swath of hard-red counties that actually grew even redder and say that we are post-racial.”

Surely the truth is that there is greater polarization on this than ever before. The range of views and feelings in America on race and gender and sexual orientation now has a far wider span than in the past. Crude bigotry endures at one end while total post-racial consciousness grows at the other. This stretches both across generations and regions, creating a bewilderingly complex picture in which everything you could say about America is true in some respect. Americans, to take the gay example, are probably more homophobic and more accepting of homosexuality than any other modern culture. There is Appallachia and Provincetown. And racially, there are those parts of America that actually trended GOP this past cycle – and then a place like Adams Morgan.

To me, this is an overwhelming reason for federalism. America cannot endure as a coherent polity without more of it.

A cat owner wondered what his feline friend does at night and set up a time lapse camera. I know a beagle with similar habits: