Month: October 2009

Today on the Dish we saw Cheney spew his usual nonsense, Obama's approval rating slip normally, and the Senate fail to pass a Medicare payout (to the delight of Andrew but to the chagrin of readers). What we didn't see was sufficient coverage of congressional approval to try detainees domestically.

In assorted commentary, Britons demanded political reform via YouTube, Ross reasoned through the marriage debate, Drezner addressed King Dollar, Megan countered Drezner, NRO opined like it was 1899, Hewitt grilled Dawkins, TNC offered some life wisdom, Dan Choi shared part of his life.

The silver lining of Buchanan's bigoted piece yesterday was the insightful emails we received here, here, here, here, and here.

— C.B.

Andrew Exum calls Jane Mayer's article "perhaps the very best piece on the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Exum, a long time critic of the drone program:

My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.

Spencer Ackerman has further thoughts.

Fallows provides one.

Freddie of Ordinary Gentlemen further counters yesterday's dissent of the day:

[T]here are very strange and illegitimate turns of moral logic here that you routinely see when discussing Israel that you never see anywhere else. Chief among them is the fact that we generally reject relative morality, whether in the vast scope of international affairs or in the day to day of human life. Saying one moral actor is superior to another is irrelevant to the question of whether that actor is moral. This is taken as such a basic element of standard human assumptions about morality that it goes unspoken, and yet it is routinely and flagrantly violated in discussing Israel. Children on the playground know that their actions are not rendered moral or immoral in relation to the other children but rather that their conduct has independent moral value. They likewise know that being of superior morality to some of the worst behaved children on the playground means nothing.

Weigel is right:

The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism.

…[In] the current political context, it seems like they’re missing the forest for some shrubs. It’s as if Democrats tried to press their advantages in 2005 not by going after the Iraq War or the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, but by spending weeks attacking mid-ranking members of his administration and claiming that President George W. Bush was driving the nation toward fascism. And remember, one of the huge political mistakes of 2005 was the Republican decision to do a full-court press on an issue that had come from conservative activists and pundits: the fate of Terri Schiavo.

Nate Silver gets an e-mail from the Yes On 1 campaign.

Despite the announcement a few days ago, Jean MacKenzie, director of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, doesn't think a runoff vote is likely:

Chances are there will not be a second round; weather and logistics could easily combine to torpedo the effort, and the challenger Dr. Abdullah Abdullah has already hinted that he is open to talks “if winter should make a second round impossible.” A runoff is in no one’s interests. The Afghan people are tired and disgusted, and no second round is going to redeem the democratic process in their eyes. The turnout is likely be miniscule – under 20 percent – making any talk of government legitimacy more than a little absurd.

[…] The object of [Tuesday's] morality play was to force Mr. Karzai to acknowledge, at least tacitly, that he could not get away with the wholesale disregard for the law that he had shown throughout the election process.

That accomplished, there is really no need to go the rest of the way. It would be expensive, dangerous, and chancy. Given an extremely low turnout in the south, Mr. Karzai could even lose, which would mean that his supporters would feel the need to resort to fraud, albeit a little more skillfully this time.