Month: December 2009

Frum asks Charles Johnson to come back:

He offers 10 reasons, but they all boil down to the same one: His outrage at the bad characters found in right-wing media and blogosphere. And yes, there’s no shortage of bad characters. No shortage on the left-hand side either. Or the middle, for that matter. But why surrender to them? Why let them get away with their claim to define your movement? Why not stand up to them? That was Rudyard Kipling’s advice to those who felt as Johnson now feels:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

These are days for stooping and building. So here’s my own hastily jotted counter-list of the reasons to keep right.

It’s the American right that will sustain the war in Afghanistan, the right that will fight the administration’s overspending, the right that will resist paying for the spending in ways that cramp the future growth of the American economy.

It’s the right that champions competition in education, and it is the right that will prevent the undoing of welfare reform. It’s the right that pushes for color-blind laws, and against the abuse of the legal system for attorney gain.

It’s the right that resists, sometimes blindly but still rightly, overbearing attempts by government to direct the economy. It’s the right that sounds the alarm when government neglects public security.

It’s the right that anchors American society against fads and social experiments, the right that favors immigration policies in the national interest, the right that better respects the freedom of ordinary people to live their own lives and make their own choices.

If only David were right. It is Obama who is sustaining the war in Afghanistan as the right neglected it. It’s the right that did not fight overspending this year but voted against any stimulus at all, after spending and borrowing the US into oblivion for eight years. David is right about education, although again Obama is no stock left-liberal there either. He’s right about tort reform, although Obama was open to it in the health reform bill. But I simply cannot see how you can reconcile a right interested in public security when it presided over 9/11 and Katrina in the last eight years. Fads and social experiments? Like feeding tube insanity as in the Schiavo case? Trying to ban any evolution on legal recognition of gay families by amending the fricking federal constitution? Jumping into an invasion of Iraq with no plan for occupation? Leaving people the freedom to live their own lives – while embracing the drug war and supporting anti-sodomy laws, as David once did?

I totally respect David’s attempt to fight back within the existing institutions. But saving conservatism means acknowledging that these institutions no longer represent a conservatism recognizable as anything more than fundamentalist, populist, militarist nationalism. You cannot reform that until you have recognized it.

"In countries with a history of authoritarianism, it is not uncommon for the practiced agitators who presided over a crisis to hold sway long after they appear to exit power…Even after a crisis subsides, much of the population remains in panic mode and supports the bare-knuckled approach of the previous government. America is similarly afflicted. Dick Cheney wields such clout that even after his term ended he gave the order and previously classified information on "enhanced interrogation" was made public… Crisis-rocked Third World countries eventually move on, setting up truth commissions and holding trials. But the United States remains very much in the grip of a 9/11 emergency mentality," – Ximena Ortiz, The American Conservative.

Apocalyptic New York doesn't seem so bad to "Rhapsody in Blue":

That time-line the GOP hawksters are decrying: it seems to have jolted Afghanistan's leadership into less complacency.

One weird contradiction in current conservative thought. Isn't an open-ended commitment of arms and money and troops to a weak foreign country a dangerous form of dependency-generating welfare?

If we can have welfare reform domestically, why can we not have it internationally? 

Eric Pape notes the irony between the perceived threat of radical Islam within Switzerland and the post-referendum threat from foreign radicals:

[T]he minaret referendum invites unprecedented security threats, both within the alpine nation and to its many humanitarian workers in remote outposts. (Swiss Red Cross workers in Central Asia, northern and eastern Africa, and the Middle East can’t be happy about the target that their compatriots have just painted on them.) As the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheline Calmy-Rey warned during the campaign, a ban on minarets risked making her country into “a target for Islamic terrorism.”

Yet:

Switzerland has just four—yes, four—minarets at the moment. (There are—or were—plans to build about ten more.) Sharia law seems particularly unlikely given that barely 10 percent of Switzerland’s estimated 400,000 Muslims actively practice their faith in a country of nearly 8 million people. And most Swiss Muslims have migrated from nations with particularly strong secular traditions (Turkey, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia), leaving many of them about as likely to be extremists as are non-practicing cultural Jews in the US.

Shanghai, China, 6.30 am

Frum sounds naive here:

Having urged the president to honor his commitment to the Afghan war, we Republicans must honor our commitment to support him as he fights it. Given the public unenthusiasm for the conflict, there will be political temptations to “go rogue” on the president, if not now, then in the summer of 2010. That will be our test, for us to pass as the president has passed his.

I know many Republicans and conservatives will say: “Hey – the Democrats did not give President Bush support when he most needed it.” Correct. They didn’t. And the country suffered for it. The right way to react to that dereliction of duty is not by emulating it, but by repudiating it. “For it before I was against it” has deservedly become an epithet for shameful wavering. Let’s not inflict it upon ourselves.

A reader writes:

"The Morning After" is simple, non-hysterical, spot-on analysis. I especially agree that Obama is after bin Laden. No other single action would pay such huge dividends. In this, Obama proves himself again to be, not just the politician as chess master, but the politician as martial artist, always seeking for the fulcrum, the pivot point where four ounces of effort will yield a thousand pounds of result.

It is a very high level skill, far higher and more effective than the brute force men like Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld rely on, and it's difficult to attain, because it depends on three subsidiary skills that lesser men simply never recognize, much less master: listening, understanding and neutralizing. Obama is a master of all three — just think back on his campaign. 

It's only after he's listened to, understood, and then neutralized his opponent that he — or fate — delivers the coup de grace. What appears to some to be hesitation or lack of engagement on his part early on in any effort is really just preparation: listening, understanding, neutralizing.

And since, as you say, he plays the long game, there is really no way to judge his effectiveness at this point — although, if one applies the same skills of listening and understanding oneself, as you've done in this post — and as opposed to the shouting and reacting one sees elsewhere — one quickly suspects he has maximized whatever potential the situation holds, and only waits for his opponent to walk into his trap and "defeat himself", as they say. In this he is the opposite of Bush and Cheney, who walked into bin Laden's trap — and defeated themselves.

Greenwald praises one aspect of Obama's speech:

Obama did not even mention — let alone hype — the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan.  There were no grandiose claims that the justness of the war derives from our desire to defeat evil, tyrannical extremists and replace them with more humane and democratic leaders.  To the contrary, he was commendably blunt that our true goal is not to improve the lives of Afghan citizens but rather:  "Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda." 

There were no promises to guarantee freedom and human rights to the Afghan people.  To the contrary, he explicitly rejected a mission of broad nation-building "because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests"; he said he "refuse[d] to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests"; and even vowed to incorporate the convertible factions of the Taliban into the government. 

New York's state senate continues the recent backlash against recent expansion of marriage equality. The vote against marriage equality was more lopsided than many had hoped for. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, despite intense lobbying. The vote in the Assembly was 88 – 51 in favor of civil equality.