Month: December 2009

Rooftop chanting from last night:

(Hat tip: Enduring America)

"Frankly, this town and the way the political dialogue is structured right now is not conducive to what we need to do to be globally competitive. And all of you are leaders in your communities — in the business sector and the labor sector, in academia, we even have a few pundits here — it is important to understand what's at stake and that we can't keep on playing games. I mentioned that I was in Asia on this trip thinking about the economy, when I sat down for a round of interviews. Not one of them asked me about Asia. Not one of them asked me about the economy. I was asked several times about had I read Sarah Palin's book. (Laughter.) True. But it's an indication of how our political debate doesn't match up with what we need to do and where we need to go," – president Obama, calling us out.

Travelers wait for their baggage next to an advertising sign showing a picture of grown old German Chancellor Angela Merkel and reading 'I'm sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change…we didn't' at the Copenhagen airport on December 6, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Politicians and environmentalists will meet for the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 which opens on December 7 and runs until December 18. By Miguel Villagran/Getty Images.

The Dish has noticed the uncanny resemblance between Obama's early job approval and Reagan's. They both inherited disastrous legacies – although Bush had the chance to double the disaster with two terms. They both had deep recessions early. They were both lionized and loathed, and both had problems with their base early on. Anyway, I didn't realize how close the parallels were until

"In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a

sign that said, in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours." And they nearly took the world. Lenin once said, "give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And, he nearly did.

A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think 'what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say 'Jesus, we are yours' ?

What kind of spiritual awakening would we have?" – Rick Warren, April 17, 2005.

My column this week is on the remarkable rise of isolationism in American polling, and the deep ambivalence many feel toward the president's quick surge in Afghanistan:

To have experienced the blow of 9/11 and to watch almost a decade later as young Americans die for a kleptocracy in Kabul and a sectarian bazaar in Baghdad is to experience a deeply demoralising and discouraging morass. Osama Bin Laden, moreover, remains at large — eight years after the worst mass murder in US history. And he is sheltered by a supposed ally that has received enormous sums of aid. Americans see all of this as they lose jobs in vast numbers, or see their wealth vanish in a collapsing housing market, or struggle to send their children to college or even a doctor. They know, too, that even with all this sacrifice and effort, their security remains tenuous. That’s why no president could have announced, as some Republicans wanted, an indefinite massive campaign in Afghanistan. It simply isn’t sustainable — politically or economically. The country is more broke than at any time since the second world war in a global economy still vulnerable to another relapse.

The upshot:

The Pew survey has polled Americans for decades on their attitude towards the wider world — measuring how unilateralist and isolationist the mood is, or how multilateral and interventionist. The latest results, announced last week, were striking.

The percentage of Americans now saying that the US should “mind its own business” and let the rest of the world get on with it is now higher than it ever was during the Vietnam war and higher than it was in the low point of the Carter era. A full 49% of Americans now favor isolationism. The previous peaks were 41% in 1995 and 1976; at the height of the Vietnam war, the isolationist position mustered only 35%.

For the first time, most Americans also see China as the pre-eminent economic power; and 47% believe that Afghanistan will revert to the Taliban once the US leaves.

I wonder if the neocon right has a strategy for the predicament their own over-reach precipitated. The whole column is here.

The tea-party brigade rallies against a civil trial for tortured terror suspect and alleged 9/11 architect, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed:

"I take Sarah Palin seriously, I take America seriously, I take her ideas seriously. Do you NOT take her seriously? Should I have picked up a four hundred page book and assumed it was error riddled fluff, but that is o.k. because it was just for the folks? How condescending is that? People are not well served when it is assumed any old dumb thing will do for us if it strokes our egos and tells us what we believe. That is the real snobbery.

My grandfather never got to go to high school, but he wanted his political heroes (men like Bob Taft and Eisenhower) to give it to him straight and to get it right. He wanted men of substance. He read his paper and his King James Bible every day and he would have had no time for books like “Going Rogue” that take his hard earned money, but don’t bother with the most basic fact check," – John Mark Reynolds, a Palin voter and supporter, writing in the Christianist journal, First Things.

It's easily the best review of the book I've read.

This question

Should I have picked up a four hundred page book and assumed it was error riddled fluff, but that is o.k. because it was just for the folks?

is actually best directed at the editor of this book, Adam Bellow, a man of great intellect and learning. How proud is Bellow of a book that quotes made-up Plato and Aristotle, culled from QuoteGarden web sources that have no actual citations and cannot be traced to either Plato or Aristotle? 

How proud is Bellow of a book that makes an elementary fact-check 101 error, mistaking a quote from John Wooden when it was from John Wooden Leg and meant the opposite of what was intended?

Is Bellow really not paid enough to find these things and prevent them from being published?

Does he regard the job of an editor as not checking to see whether transparent, freshman college year bullshit is included? Yes, some errors will always seep through and the internal incoherence of the book is enough to make any editor simply throw up his hands at making any sense of it. But these basic errors, correctable in five minutes with Google?

What's interesting is that a right-of-center blogger was able to edit and fact-check this book in ways that Adam Bellow and Jonathan Burnham and an army of professional publishing fact-checkers couldn't or decided didn't matter.

What it reveals is the real elitism and condescension toward Palin's base exists … at Harper Collins.

A reader writes:

I really enjoy when you post things like this.  I grew up in Washington Heights in Manhattan and am a product of B-Boy culture.  I spent half my teenage years in house parties just like the one in the video, breaking and rapping and drinking and laughing and having a great time.  Language aside, we really aren’t very different from the people of Iran despite the effort our politicians and media exert in making us think so.

Tomorrow is student day in Iran. Pray for them. The Dish will be covering.

“I am entertained every time I see these people attack her and attack her and attack her. She’s irrelevant, but they continue to attack her. I am so proud of her and the work that she is doing,” – John McCain on Sarah Palin. I think he meant the "irrelevant" adjective to apply to those who both call her that and yet attack her.

But, look, this blog does not for a minute believe Palin is irrelevant. I think she's the de facto leader of the GOP at this point, certainly more so than McCain. And all the critics are doing is holding her to a basic standard: a) is what she says true? and b)  what policies does she propose for the problems we face? The answers we can glean at this point are: mostly no; and nothing but cliches and drilling for oil.

This blog, moreover, does not believe that Sarah Palin is the real issue here. The real issue is the McCain campaign and the mainstream media. I'd really prefer it if Sarah Palin had never come onto the national scene just as I devoutly wish that the US had not authorized torture. But she did and Cheney did. What I refuse to do is just pretend none of this happened and that it doesn't matter.

With all due respect to someone who really shouldn't be as exposed as she is: No one this unhinged, this unvetted and this delusional should have been allowed to be foisted on a national ticket and be one heart-beat away from a job she isn't faintly qualified for. If we discover that the McCain campaign simply ignored or the press simply avoided issues that cut to the core of this candidate's integrity, honesty and candor, then the system is broken. And we need to fix it. We cannot fix it until we identify the problem accurately.

That's all we're trying to do. That's our job. It's what the press is for. A media that is deferent to un-fact-checked propaganda from someone already shown to be a compulsive truth-rigger is not doing its job. And what public servants are for is answering such valid factual questions promptly, plainly and with proof if necessary. I do not believe the problem is with those in the blogosphere asking questions that have factual answers. I believe the problem is a system where the political and media elites do not think it matters if what a leading politician says is true or false. 

Once the system has stopped caring about that, the game is over. The Dish will do all it can to insist that these normal rules be maintained. And that we are able to know for sure whether what powerful people are saying is true or false.