One wonders how President Bush would have governed if the right had been critical of Bush from the start — if uniformity and hierarchy hadn't characterized the Republican Party from 2001 to 2004.
Me too. And some of us were critical. But that made us "leftists". Nate Silver, as always, has some shrewd and fair things to say on the "take off your pajamas" controversy.
This strikes me as a sensible move to prevent spirals into abuse of prisoners in the war on terror. Just so long as the CIA doesn't get to destroy the tapes afterward, as they did under Cheney.
There was a split response from the right to this weekend's events. One segment sympathized with upset gay activists or, at least, happily piled on the president. The other side, the Maggie Gallagher contingent, are unrepentant in seeing gay couples as the enemy. Glenn Reynolds:
My advice to the Gay Left is the same as my advice to the Tea Party
Right — if you don’t like what “your” politicians are doing, quit donating to ‘em and run somebody against them in the primary. They’ll notice. And the Gay Left and Tea Party Right might even want to talk to each other; they may find they’ve got more in common than they realize…
Except this isn't the "gay left". It's the gay right, left, and center as well. Have you noticed any gay Republicans opposing the repeal of DADT? Any gay people at all supporting the government's discrimination against its own citizens? But for too many boomers, if it's gay, it's left. For the next generation, that association doesn't hold any more. Maggie Gallagher:
Pity President Obama. He's done more, more quickly, for gay people than any president in history but it's clearly not enough. The leadership, the old heads, are trying to restrain and redirect their people. But gay Americans have imbibed the heady rhetoric of equality — not just any equality, they are the civil-rights movement of this century… The leveling wave of equality demands more, more, more, from government.
We want nothing from the government but to stop discriminating against us. We want to be left alone, as straight people are, allowed to serve our country without worrying, allowed to have legal security in our families as every straight person takes for granted. Why is that so hard to understand? Robert Stacy McCain:
If gay people vote Republican, they might not get the bullet-point agenda items demanded by HRC, but they will at least not have to accept the kind of two-faced, backhanded insults they get from Democrats who claim to be their "friends."
No, we'll get federal amendments to make us second class for ever, and state amendments designed to strip us of dignity and security. And vicious homophobic rhetoric to boot. Ed Morissey:
One can always tell an organization that fails to comprehend the nature and the reach of the blogosphere when “pajamas” gets used as a snide insult. Say, wasn’t this the same candidate who relied heavily on online activism and regularly hailed it as a sign of increased participation in politics? I guess Obama doesn’t value that participation any longer, at least not when being held accountable for his lack of action.
So, in many ways, the homosexual rights coalition is becoming the evangelical Christian community of the left — a reliable voting pool that the Democrats can take for granted. Could it backfire? Maybe, but I doubt it. Similar to evangelicals, homosexual activists have no other viable third party option. They're stuck. So they make a lot of noise and hope the establishment listens.
In the span of a single sentence, President Obama put his administration publicly on the line to press, not only for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, but for the recognition that same-sex relationships are "just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman." It is virtually impossible to imagine a promise more breathtaking in its revolutionary character than this — to normalize same-sex relationships to the extent that they are recognized as being as admirable as heterosexual marriage.
Saying it's breath-taking and revolutionary doesn't make it so. I see no revolution in the states that have already legalized marriage equality – just lower divorce rates than the Bible Belt, and happy, responsible gay couples and families. Quite why conservatives want to keep gay people marginalized, robbed of civic responsibility and cast out of the family remains a function of two things: fear and ignorance. One person at a time, we are doing what we can to defuse both. Obama, for all his ruthless caution, at least understands that. And I truly believe he does.
Jim Burroway looks at it.
“This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” Noam Chomsky, on why an Arabic-language copy of his anthology of post-9/11 commentary was rejected by the Gitmo library.
As an assessment of military strategy, support troops may not be the best indicator of what will work or not. But as a political matter, it surely matters that many more Americans will be sent to Afghanistan this year by Obama than the headline number. The WaPo has an excellent primer on this. The Obama escalation is already huge – approaching 68,000, double what Bush had when he left office. And yet the war machine demands yet more. This is an enormous human and economic investment that should only be made if we are sure it can work. And even McChrystal, to his credit, cannot and will not guarantee that.
Jeremy Clarkson laments that the British have become so dumb they can't even appreciate Monty Python any more:
Novel Writing is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset, while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don’t find in comedy very much any more.
To get the point you need to know that while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there’s no escaping the fact his novels are dirge. We see these attacks on intellectualism throughout Python. To understand the joke, you need to know that René Descartes did not say, I “drink” therefore I am. You need to know that if you cure a man of leprosy, you are taking away his trade. And that really Archimedes did not invent football.
He didn't?
Shep Smith goes after Krispy Kreme doughnut cheese-burgers for some reason.
DiA draws an interesting parallel:
[F]or some reason we believe that American policy is capable of accomplishing things in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we would never dream it could do in Mexico, even though Mexico is right next door. Nobody in America is under the illusion that some policy shift by America is going to solve all of Mexico's problems on any timeframe, let alone one of a few years. We have a healthy recognition that problems like the drug trade and the gun trade, the unhealthy interdependence of America's desire for cheap labour and Mexico's low levels of economic development, and the shaky legitimacy and effectiveness of local Mexican governance in many places are long-term, intractable problems. We recognise this because Mexico is right next door. The place feels real to us; it's not some kind of abstraction we can remake in our optimistic fantasies. It would be encouraging if the Obama administration adopted a similarly realistic attitude towards its aims in Afghanistan.
A soldier I was talking to recently who was one of the first into Afghanistan explained it this way: "They want to live that way. There's nothing we can do about it." I've long been a skeptic of nation-building from afar. In fact, that used to be a Republican mantra. But nation-building in Afghanistan? It's a fantasy. Obama must know this. The entire project is an intellectual bubble that should have been burst years ago. And if American national security is dependent on turning every Muslim failed state in the world into a stable one, then there is no such thing as national security – just various degrees of insecurity – and we might as well man up and deal with it.
There are obvious logistical questions about what the US does now.
And it still seems sensible to see how various factors now play out – the Afghan election fraud and the Pakistani military's current campaign against the Taliban. But I simply cannot see an ambitious counter-insurgency strategy changing these core dynamics of a foreign power trying to recreate a country that is not a country, especially when the foreign power is bankrupt. This is too hard – culturally, militarily, politically. A long-term commitment at the scale necessary to even have a chance will never get a solid majority of Americans behind it.
(Photo: a gathering of Afghan elders by John Moore/Getty.)
The combination of a reporter's ear and an intellectual's mind is a rare thing, which is why I'm grateful for David Brooks, and particularly excited about his burgeoning interest in and study of neuroscience. It seems quite likely to me that this relatively new field will be the most fecund in the future for understanding just who we mortals be. Nuggets like these leap out:
Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.
The complex interaction of environment and genes, and the fluidity and flexibility of the human mind, take us beyond what we used to think of as science and what we used to think of as being human:
Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.
Maybe that's why Jews tend to be liberal. And maybe that's a useful insight into the politics of the Middle East.
The Dish 