Month: September 2009

The latest Republican critique of the president.

Dayo Olopade wonders:

MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.” And even within the networks, black kids befriend other black kids, Latinos mix with Latinos, and the self-segregation often practiced in real life is rampant online. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, compares this dash from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight” from inner cities.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Robert Satloff reminds Obama of a cardinal rule of American politics: no pressure on Israel ever. Just keep giving them money and they will give the US the finger in return. The only permitted position is to say you oppose settlements in the West Bank, while doing everything you can to keep them growing and advancing.

Adam Serwer takes aim at Liz Cheney:

For the GOP, torture is no longer a “necessary evil.” It is a rally cry, a “values” issue like same-sex marriage or abortion. They don’t “grudgingly” support torture, they applaud it. They celebrate it. Liz Cheney’s unequivocal support for torture methods gleaned from communist China has people begging her to run for office.

The psychological underpinnings of Liz Cheney’s absurd proposition that, for example, “waterboarding isn’t torture” – a phrase that trips off her tongue as if it were a consensus, rather than an extreme outlier – are pretty obvious. Her father is a war

criminal, a man whose incompetence is only matched by his paranoia. Since it is understandably, forgivably hard for her to accept that a person she loves and reveres is actually a torturer, she has to double down on the proposition that it’s obvious he isn’t a torturer, axiomatic that every torture session gave us actionable intelligence in ways ethical interrogation never could, indisputable that every single threat is a ticking time bomb mandating the use of any means to extract intelligence from any handy victim. Even to have a debate on this is mind-blowing for someone who still thinks of herself as someone who supports human rights, and of her father as a moral man.

There is, moreover, virtue in all this. It is something to be proud of. Because it is only by embracing positive pride in torture that she can keep the nightmare of reality at bay.

But she is conflating private loyalty with civic responsibility. This is, of course, one profound flaw of nepotism and dynasty in political life. Perfectly admirable filial piety in the private sphere warps independent judgment in the public square. Psychological forces best left to private dynamics rupture into civil discourse, giving some citizens far more power than others merely by the accident of DNA or marriage, distorting the debate, turning politics into melodrama, infesting the republican public sphere with monarchical and oligarchic cross-currents. This was Hillary’s problem as it was Dubya’s. And so it is utterly unsurprising that family members are in the vanguard of defending a war criminal.

Family members are always, and understandably, the last defenders of the criminal. The Cheneys’ natural inability to see Cheney in any reality-based perspective renders them psychologically able, even eager, to defend evil as a force for good in ways more forthright than others. Why this should be a plus for Cheney among the GOP rather than an obvious conflict of interest is part of the right’s current derangement. They too cannot hold the concept of their own moral fallibility in their fearful, clenched minds.

While I’m at it, the next time Liz Cheney simply states that “waterboarding isn’t torture”, will someone please ask her to follow through? She needs to take a trip to Cambodia, visit their Museum of Torture, and request that the waterboard be removed from the exhibit. It is, after all, a mere enhancement of interrogation. And television hosts are constrained from asking her such a blunt question because it appears unseemly to attack a daughter for the sins of the father. And so the corruption spreads.

(Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but those 400 pages probably surprised everyone.  I'd bet there are whispers in Alaska that she didn't look like she had been writing non-stop for months.  The question on everyone's mind but that everyone's afraid to ask openly is, did Bristol write Sarah's book?

Another surrender:

We may never know what would have happened had Obama been willing to divert some portion of his prestige from health care to the creation of a political coalition for strong counterterrorism measures rooted in statutory powers debated and passed by the people’s representatives.

Pareene captions:

Here's Barack and Michelle Obama with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his family. The State Department uploaded it to Flickr. (What an unlikely sentence!) Whoops—no one in Spain has ever seen Zapatero's Goth daughters before!

Clay Shirky, generally a web optimist, worries about the end of print:

I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place. To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.

So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don't think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don't think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent.

I think he under-estimates how new media could jump-start old media. The Daily Beast's foray into book publishing, this blog's support for dead-tree long-form journalism, and the relentless rise of print-on-demand suggest a future that may come faster than Shirky thinks.

Bill Keller. Wuss.

Larison continues his helpful prodding:

What conservative critics ignore and what Andrew only touches on towards the end is that the Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membershop and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to the de facto permanent partition of an American ally.

Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do.