Month: April 2009

You figure it out (from the people who brought you the Creation Museum):

Marc Lynch takes Iraq's temperature:

The situation is extremely murky, and it's hard to really know anything with confidence.  What I've been seeing in the Iraqi and Arab media, and hearing from the people I've spoken with, is a wide range of competing interpretations and arguments over everything from the identity of the attackers (al-Qaeda? rival Awakenings groups? Shi'a militias looking to stir things up?) to the intentions of the Iraqi government (eliminate the Awakenings?  weed out the 'bad elements' within them? force the U.S. to take sides, and test the U.S. implementation of the SOFA?).  The high level of uncertainty and confusion is itself a significant point — the impact of fear and uncertainty on strategic calculations should never be underestimated.

Neck and neck among Americans on the question of trust. As in: not.

A reader writes:

I don't know whether the generational conclusion of your reader is ironclad (I was born in 1950, but I'm not immune to reason), but it's true that in the 1980s, along with a great many people I moved to the right precisely in reaction to the hideously narcissistic leftism of the boomer generation, my idiotic peers. I was reasonably at home on the right for nearly 2 decades–while it meant constantly having to overlook banalities or make excuses for the excesses of the Christian Right, it was still the case that all the exciting talk was there, and the privilege of being heard as a woman without being squeezed into the soul-killing assumptions of hard-core feminism meant a lot to me. However, the rise of the populist right began to worry me seriously by the mid and late 90s. The attacks on Clinton were so viciously over the top and so ugly that, although no Clinton defender, I felt a growing unease; the unreason of the anti-science right infuriated me (creationism is a particular hot button for me, it has never seemed to me that a serious Christian should have any difficulty accepting real science). In 2004, I almost stayed home from the polls because of Bush's social conservatism, so smug and intolerant, not to mention a missed opportunity (he could have had a Nixon-to-China moment on the subject of gay marriage, but instead embraced the predictable smug, small, conventional, cruel, adam-and-steve bigotry). Still, I'm a slow learner, and it wasn't until Limbaugh's announcement of Operation Chaos during last year's primaries (plus considerable prodding from my four children, all fierce Obama supporters) that I finally realized I'd had it. I turned off the radio, vowed never to listen to Rush again (and nor have I), and became a fairly dedicated Obamacon.

Once my soul was freed of the daily imperative of making excuses for the angry excesses of the right and pretending to myself that I wasn't being sickened by so much of what I was hearing, I became aware of a peculiar thing–it was very much like giving up drinking or cigarettes, giving up my daily dive into the right had somehow begun the process of healing my very brain chemistry. I was thinking without rage, suspicion and paranoia–and it was only in giving these things up that I realized the extent to which they had became my peculiarly toxic daily bread.

I've come to believe that the endless mantras of hate, the repetitions of key phrases, the ritualistic paranoia, the angry, frought refusal even to hear other words (so pitifully depicted in your reader's comments) are druglike–I know shamefully little about science, but I would be willing to bet that if you could test a Limbaugh fan in full spleen you would find real and significant alterations in the brain chemistry.

I am actually frightened by what I see going on now. This level of rage and unreason is measurably worse than its corollary on the left over the eight years of the Bush presidency. There is a call to violence going on out there, whether conscious or not, and it cannot end well.

Anyhow, keep up the good work. You're a 'leading indicator,' which is an immensely lonely thing to be in politics, but over the next ten years I suspect a great many people will quietly give up their last stubborn defense of the indefensible right and join you. At least, in my optimistic moments this is what I prefer to think.

Why, one wonders, would Michelle Malkin read a DHS report on fringe, far-right extremism that could lead to violence or Oklahoma-style domestic terrorism and think … they're talking about her?

It's on now.

Spain is serious, as any country concerned with human rights should be:

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.”

Garzon will step aside. And Obama, it appears, will get out of the way:

The Spanish prosecutors advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters. They pressed to know whether any such investigation was pending. These inquiries met with no answer from the U.S. side.

I share Greenwald's deepening concern about Obama's concessions to the national security state. But I am not convinced there is no method to his meandering.

Obama understands he is the president, which means that he understands, unlike his overwhelmed predecessor, that he is the president of all Americans.

He knows that indictment and prosecution of the war criminals at the heart of the last administration would appear to those cocooned from the reality of what happened as an assault on American unity and stability. That proper concern has to be balanced against the gravity of the crimes, the profound nature of the constitutional claims that underpinned them, and the necessity to uphold the rule of law. And so a process whereby the president hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out,  releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal … is not to be despised.

I think Obama knows what happened; and he knows that, in the end, America will have to face it. He will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either. It's the long game he knows. And it's the long game that will bring these people to justice.

For some reason, I was distracted and mistook the sport in this ad for soccer. It is, of course, rugby. And those men are All Blacks, one small rung above sainthood in New Zealand. A reader notes:

They play rugby union,  the guy in the middle is the captain, in NZ rugby is THE game, nothing else is half as popular, and Richie McCaw is a kind of folk hero, so this is not a small difference. Given the context you place this in and just in case you haven’t met many of us Kiwis, I should note that while things are changing soccer has not quite lost its connotation of effeminacy in this part of the world.

My rugby-fanatic dad will not be happy with me this morning. Not for the first time, of course.

Ambers:

Card check — the Employee Free Choice Act — is as dead as Audrina's eyes.  But wait. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending $1 million to run ads in Nebraska, Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota and Colorado. The ads are aimed at senators who might be a swing vote on EFCA.  If EFCA has been pronounced, as they say in the ER, then why bother?