Month: October 2009

Ben Smith passes along an e-mail from Kevin Nix, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network:

There were indications of seriousness of purpose on DADT repeal today by this White House with its intent to nominate an Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. [Retired Marine General Clifford Stanley] is likely to be the President’s key Pentagon player in the DADT debate and will be critical for the President in getting military uniform buy-in. Historically, the position of Under Secretary of Defense provides oversight of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Robert Draper offers some fascinating new detail:

[L]ast March 13, when the incendiary sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blew up all over the cable networks, Obama had spent the entire day and evening in the Senate. That Friday, after enduring a series of tough interviews, Obama informed Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe, “I want to do a speech on race.” And he added, “I want to make this speech no later than next Tuesday. I don’t think it can wait.” Axelrod and Plouffe tried to talk him into delaying it: He had a full day of campaigning on Saturday, a film shoot on Sunday, and then another hectic day campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday. Obama was insistent. On the Saturday-morning campaign conference call, Favreau was told to get to work on a draft immediately. Favreau replied, “I’m not writing this until I talk to him.” That

evening, Saint Patrick’s Day, less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead.

On Sunday morning at seven, the speechwriter took his laptop to a coffee shop and worked there for thirteen hours. Obama received Favreau’s draft at eight that evening and wrote until three in the morning. He hadn’t finished by Monday at 8 a.m., when he set the draft aside to spend the day barnstorming across Pennsylvania. At nine thirty that night, a little more than twelve hours before the speech was to be delivered, Obama returned to his hotel room to do more writing. At two in the morning, the various BlackBerrys of Axelrod, Favreau, Plouffe, and Jarrett sounded with a message from the candidate: Here it is. Favs, feel free to tweak the words. Everyone else, the content here is what I want to say. Axelrod stood in the dark reading the text: “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.… But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He e-mailed Obama: This is why you should be president.

Could this be a clue to where his thinking remains:

We are going through a very deliberate process that is completely consistent with what I said back in March. At the time, I said we were going to deploy additional troops in order to secure the election. After the election I said it was important for us to reassess the situation on the ground, and that's what we're doing not just on the military side but also on the civilian side … And I won't provide you a preview of what I've been seeing or hearing. I will tell you that our principal goal remains to root out al Qaeda and its extremist allies that can launch attacks against the United States or its allies. That's our principal mission. We are also obviously interested in stability in the region, and that includes not only Afghanistan, but also Pakistan.

That's from his remarks October 13 with Zapatero. It doesn't sound like a major counter-insurgency to me.

A reader writes:

Last night the DADT issue kept me awake as I lay in bed.

Specifically, it was the “small minded” phrase from the ““Protecting” Homosexuals” reader/writer that jumped out at me.  I actually consider the writer responded to, in “Why the Ban Remains,” to be much closer to the unpleasant truth of the situation, and I would definitely not characterize him/her as pessimistic or gloomy.

“Gloomy” reader/writer pointed out that the military has a disproportionate number of middle- and lower-class (financial, of course) members, but he/she neglected to also point out the enormous number of them who are (using your term here, because it seems so appropriate) Christianists.

Further, the military integrates religion — Christianity, of course, not other religions — into the military in insidious ways, thereby reinforcing anti-gay feeling and rhetoric. Repealing DADT will certainly go some way toward seeing that some in the military will set up some as gay servicemen & servicewomen as heroes and role models, but others, likely the majority, will never feel that way.  They will allow the government to dictate how they tie their shoes, dress, and behave in public, but there is no way in hell that they will allow the government to dictate whether or not they accept gays or work along side them.

I agree with both writers, but, unlike you, I believe that because the writer in “Why the Ban Remains” left out the religious aspect of the situation, it is even more discouraging than it appears in his post, and far more discouraging than you believe it to be.  I have many gay friends who I look up to in many ways, and certainly I’ve met a (very) few in the military who are open-minded enough to respect and admire gay servicemen and servicewomen, but gays are a minority, and as such will never get the much-deserved respect and admiration of their fellow servicemen and servicewomen under any circumstances.  As our country simmers with barely-veiled racial and religious hatreds and tensions directed toward non-whites, non-Christians, and gays, it seems to me to be fairly obvious that repealing DADT at this moment in time could be setting a spark to the tinder that exists in the US.  Doesn’t that play right into the hands of the GOP noise machine, the Tea Partiers, the hate-mongers?

At some point, you have to face down the fear. Then it will dissipate. End the ban now.

They built it in the 1980s, and it's still around. Nicholas Thompson explores the paradoxical nature of nuclear weaponry:

[O]ne obvious question that people ask when they learn about this system is “Why didn’t the Soviets tell us?” As we all know from Dr. Strangelove, the point of a Doomsday Machine is to convince the other side in a conflict that attack is futile. The answer to that question is the most interesting thing I learned in my research. Yes, the Soviets were extremely secretive; and, yes, they were worried that, if they told us, we could disable it. But the more interesting reason is that they also built the system to deter themselves.

Robert Reich is still bearish:

Corporate earnings are up — mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies' costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is a self-defeating strategy. If workers don't have jobs or are afraid of losing them, they won't buy, and company profits will disappear.

I have no doubt that the recovery is still fragile; but I do think it's worth noting that very few people expected a Dow 10,000 any time soon last January. Obama has done the critical – and largely overlooked – thing. He has restored confidence in the markets and the economy after what came close to a total panic and meltdown. That is not easy. It is not sufficient, but it was necessary. And he did it.

Is there an iPhone app that actually places a call reliably? Or are we stuck with AT&T?

Judah Grunstein gets lost in "the fog of politics" surrounding Afghanistan:

[T]he debate, as it's unfolding in the media, is riddled with misinformation and false propositions. Remember how last March, al-Qaida was a grave threat, and drone strikes targeting its leadership in the Pakistan FATA were exacerbating a catastrophic situation that, if not urgently reversed, could lead to the imminent takeover of Pakistan, nukes and all, by the Taliban? Now it turns out that, for all that Afghanistan is on the brink, things aren't so bad in the FATA, after all.

I suppose it makes as much sense to complain about opinion shaping as it does about the weather. But there's still some value in pointing it out as it happens.

The debate in Washington now boils down to political optics — namely, of whether or not to send more troops, itself an area of some opaqueness. Generating public support, of course, is an important component in a democracy's conduct of war. But the current battle for American public opinion obscures the ways in which the answer to many of the questions we're confronted with in Afghanistan is that we simply don't know. The only thing that's certain is that none of the proposed approaches is free, and none offers an iron-clad guarantee of success. They all come with costs and risks attached. It would be refreshing to see that more forthrightly acknowledged as the debate moves forward.

Yglesias makes the best of it. Sigh.