Month: November 2009

Commenting upon some recent criticism of the US health care system by the Dutch health minister, Scott Sumner explodes the right-left divide:

Yes, some conservatives oppose any form of universal health care.  But at this point would any conservatives/pragmatic libertarians prefer the US health care system we will have 5 years from now over the Dutch, Swiss, or especially Singaporean universal health care plans?  And our “universal” plan will still have 20 million uninsured.  So for how much longer can progressives claim that universal coverage is the issue separating the left and right?

Phuket, Thailand, 8.52 am

Yglesias pivots off the debate over KSM's trial to make a larger point about the "war" on terrorism:

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.

Tyler Cowen defends the two-party system:

Political competition is better than autocracy, but its benefits are not well understood by a comparison with economic competition.

A reader writes:

Don’t do it Mr. Sullivan. Don’t legitimize Sarah Palin and her ridiculousness. She is a joke. You know that. Any reasonable intelligent person knows that. You are a reasonable, thinking, intelligent person, but more than that, aside from maybe Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, you are one of the few sources of calm, reasonable political discourse out there. I don’t always agree with you, but I always understand where you are coming from. But if you challange this woman, you give her credibility, which she doesn’t deserve. Then your site  becomes “The Huffington Post” or “The Drudge Report” or “Dailykos.”
 
Yes, she is a liar. That is not news. Let her hang herself with her book. Let her hang herself with her lies. Don’t stoop to her level. Don’t do it sir. It is beneath you.

Another writes:

Tone down the Palin butchery.

I am behind you 1,000%. I think you were instrumental in exposing that farce for what it was to the national thinking community- right and left. Congrats, and thanks. Seriously. Well done.

But now that she’s a joke, looking to make some money and host a talk show or whatever the hell she’s up to, I only think you elevate her to rock-star right winger status by dedicating so much time to tearing her down. How much lower can she go? She’s worthless as a candidate and the intelligent right is pointing that out (love me some david brooks!) Shes a white trash soap opera, a Kate and Jon Plus Octomom, who happened to run for president. I hate to see her sharing your blog’s stage with actual important people, at least to the extent you seem to be gearing up for.

I’d lay back a bit and let her self-destruction take its course. That said, if she does actually plan on entering public service again… pounce.

The neoconservatives have been having a difficult time of late. In particular, the possibility that the American people, via the election of Obama, and the Iranian people, via the Green Revolution, may be moving toward a grand bargain that would avoid war alarms them. That's why Daniel Pipes wanted Ahmadi to win the election beforehand  (a view he alone had the admirable intellectual honesty to air in public). The emergence of a Green Movement in Iran that does not share the worldview of the neocons is a terrible threat to the solipsism of the neocon right, in which every global conflict is really about religious war "for ever," to quote Irving Kristol, and in which the Iran-Israel question is actually a "Fourth World War," to quote Norman Podhoretz. If you are an Israeli, this might be plausible. If you are not an Israeli, less so.

In all this, a figure like NIAC's Trita Parsi is dangerous. Charismatic, telegenic, close to the Obama administration and yet a man whose credentials during the Green Revolution are impeccable: he suggests that neocon Manicheanism is far too crude to understand let alone resolve this crisis. Parsi opposes sanctions, for example, as do Karroubi and Mousavi. And, more relevant with respect to the neocons, he opposes war. And so if you want to understand the motives behind the leaked documents behind Eli Lake's recent fair story, you need look no further. Smearing the non-neocon Green opposition as essentially pro-Khamenei solidifies the neoconservative war project. 

This is pretty obvious but we now have some rare and clear proof of how the neocons operate.

An email error gives the entire game away:

The central neocon smear of Parsi was that he was actually an agent for Kamenei. The absurdity of this is underlined by the fact that Eli could find no evidence for it whatever in his expose. But the origin of the story came from the neocon right, engaged in a defamation suit with NIAC and Parsi. And we now have, via Josh Rogin, the details of the strategy:

Previously unreported documents provided by NIAC to The Cable show that Daioleslam was working with neoconservative author Ken Timmerman as early as 2008 and that their moves on Parsi were part of a larger effort to thwart Obama's Iran policy.

"I strongly believe that Trita Parsi is the weakest part of the Iranian web because he is related to Siamak Namazi and Bob Ney," Daioleslam wrote in one e-mail dated April 2, 2008, "I believe that destroying him will be the start of attacking the whole web. This is an integral part of any attack on Clinton or Obama."

Namazi is a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy with whom Parsi has worked. The e-mails show that Parsi and Namazi coordinated efforts to make recommendations to administration officials.

Tim Kapshandy, a lawyer for Sidley Austin LLP, came to represent Daioleslam in 2009. Upon seeing the e-mails about Parsi and Namazi, he accidentally sent a note to both of them. The note read, "Send it to [Washington Times reporter Eli] Lake right away!"

It's just a rare and small glimpse of how neocons operate. It is warfare abroad and warfare at home. It is a philosophy of attack and force, not dialogue and thought. And if we are to find a sane way through our current perilous global environment, it must be exposed and resisted as thoroughly and as relentlessly as we try to resist its mirror image among the extremists within the Iran coup regime.

Palin-Prejean 2012!

And doesn't Prejean's media strategy echo Palin's exactly?

The gay press appears to be in meltdown, like so many others.

Tyler Cowen argues that "the proposed reforms will make the core problems of U.S. health care worse not better" after reading a new Center on Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report (pdf). The report warns that the health care bill could reduce the profitability of treating medicare patients and that some providers might therefore stop taking medicare patients. Yglesias and Ezra Klein counter. Ezra:

Medicare cuts are a crude tool. The more damning conclusion from the CMS report is that the House bill has little else to control costs, and that's largely accurate. This report shouldn't lead reformers to abandon efforts to trim Medicare, but it should convince them that the bill can do more on the cost control front.

And that is a critical measure by which to judge the final bill. In this legislative process, this to and fro is vital. And what I admire about Obama's handling of it is what so many are horrified by: letting the debate unfold through the deliberative process, in full view, with as much input as possible.

The health insurance battle should not be a zero-sum war between Obama and the Republicans. It should be a non-zero-sum dialogue about how we can get the best practicable reform now. Of course, it will always be both. But we can do what we can to promote the latter.