Month: February 2010

Spencer Ackerman:

Repealing DADT is going to take a year. Gates and Mullen are very clearly taking this year in order to secure as much military buy-in as they can for what will really be a contentious change. I am not gay and cannot presume to tell my gay friends whether this is an acceptable or unacceptable amount of time. But anyone who watched today’s hearing saw that the nation’s top military officer is an unshakeable ally in this effort. And I do not see how DADT survives after this afternoon.

Andrew Exum:

Congressmen and members of the public should pay less attention to the many retired flag officers (average date of commission: 1835) who oppose homosexuals openly serving in the U.S. military and should instead poll serving U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. That’s who Laura Miller and RAND will be polling. Their opinions, when combined with the desired policy preferences of the greater U.S. public, should be what matters. I could care less what some dude who garrisoned Shanghai in 1932 thinks.

Glenn Greenwald:

It should go without saying that debates over homosexuality, the military, warriors, masculinity and the like are suffuse with all sorts of complex psychological influences.  But one thing is clear:  in American culture, there has long been a group of men (typified by Kristol and O’Hanlon) who equate toughness and masculinity with fighting wars, yet who also know that they lack the courage of their own convictions, and thus confine themselves to cheerleading for wars from afar and sending others off to fight but never fighting those wars themselves (Digby wrote the seminal post on that sorry faction back in 2005).  It seems that individuals plagued by that affliction are eager to avoid having it rubbed in their faces that there are large numbers of homosexual warriors who possess the courage (the “testosterone-laden tough-guyness”) which the O’Hanlons and Kristols, deep down, know they lack.  Banning gay people from serving openly in the military as warriors is an excellent way of being able to deny that reality to themselves.

Kevin Drum:

Here’s the hopeful interpretation: we’re still on track to firmly end DADT in an amendment to the Pentagon budget this year, but implementation will be left up to Gates and he’ll be given until, say, January 2011 to publish new regs. The less hopeful interpretation is that Congress won’t do anything until the Pentagon review is done, which would mean delaying repeal until 2011 and implementation until 2012.

John Cole:

[M]y judgment is that having the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs coming out in favor of repealing DADT in the first day of hearings with an accompanying media narrative that it is not “if” it will be repealed but “when” is probably a lot more helpful in attaining the long-term goal of a full repeal than Obama issuing executive orders without having his ducks in a row, causing a huge congressional and military backlash with a media narrative about nothing but Obama over-reaching his mandate and the accompanying backlash, but pleasing a small but vocal portion of the Democratic coalition.

John Aravosis:

Wow, suddenly Republicans don’t believe that DOD is entitled to an opinion…

"Stand by what I said: Allowing homosexuals to serve openly is the right thing to do. Comes down to integrity," – Adm. Mike Mullen, Twitter.

In stark contrast to even Keith Hennessy, National Review's rank dishonesty cried to heaven. They refer to the current situation thus:

What had been a chronic problem that all involved knew needed corrective action has now become, in the Obama years, a full-fledged disaster in the making.

Notice the propagandistic slight of hand – "in the Obama years". Not because of Obama's policies – that would have been so obvious a lie even they cannot foist it on their readers. Just "in the Obama years." In a word: slimy.

Then this:

In 2008, total spending stood at nearly $3.0 trillion — not exactly government on a strict diet. But Obama wants to take the juggernaut he inherited and supersize it. By 2020, governmental spending would reach $5.7 trillion, driven heavily by mounting entitlement costs. Spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone would nearly double over a decade, going from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $2.6 trillion in 2020.

Well, we have a little more honesty here – a small reference to the fact that Obama did not single-handedly create this crisis and in his first year had little lee-way to ameliorate it without making the recession – and thereby the debt – even worse. Also: a recognition that the overwhelming amount of future debt was already baked in the entitlement cake. More to the point, Obama does not want – and has never said he wants – to "super-size" government, In fact, he has backed the most serious effort in a while – a bipartisan commission to raise taxes and cut entitlements that would require an up-or-down vote in the Congress.

SO what is NRO's response to this cut-spending-and-raise-taxes solution? You guessed right:

The president would like to enlist Republican cooperation to pass a massive, bipartisan tax increase to help pay for it and his other spending ideas. The specific tax hikes are not yet known, as they would be proposed by an independent commission of “wise men” handpicked mainly by Democrats to ensure a pre-determined outcome — one they hope is not covered in Democratic fingerprints. For added electoral protection, the commission’s tax-increase recommendations wouldn’t be unveiled and voted on by Congress until after the November elections, all the better to keep the nuisance of public opinion from interfering with the grand Democratic plan to pursue another Great Society.

How on earth do you describe the proposed commission – with equal numbers from each party – as purely a tax hiking proposal? The entire idea is a bipartisan compromise to raise taxes and cut entitlement spending. Cutting entitlement spending is what NRO says it wants. But when the president proposes it in a bipartisan fashion, they simply ignore its existence, or posture as if they are prepared to make the kind of massive cuts in entitlement and dismantling of the Pentagon budget that a balanced budget with no tax hikes would require.

What one notes about this primarily is not just its dishonesty but its recklessness. If the crisis is as bad as NRO says it is – and I agree with them – then it is incumbent upon conservative thinkers to propose and explain and cost out the spending cuts they say are necessary to avert catastrophe. This they refuse to do. Until they do, they are not serious contributors to the debate. They are partisan nihilists.

Keith Hennessey, who worked on economic policy in George W. Bush's White House,  defends his former boss's legacy:

It is true that President Bush proposed, and in 2001 and 2003 the Congress passed and President Bush signed into law significant tax cuts, and that those tax cuts were not offset by spending cuts or tax increases.  If President Obama believes that enacting these tax cuts without offsetting their deficit impact was profligate, then why is he proposing to do the same thing?  His budget proposes to change the law to extend all of the Bush tax cuts except those Team Obama mislabels as “for the rich.”  He is not proposing offsets for those tax cuts he would extend.  It is inconsistent to argue that Bush was irresponsible when he did it, and that Obama is responsible when he does the same

thing.

This simply ignores the core context of the recession. I think that's simply intellectually dishonest. But let me also say where I agree with Hennessey:

I can imagine someone replying that it’s not fair to blame President Obama for the big deficits we are running as we recover from a severe recession.  The next three bars [in the graph] therefore exclude the first one, two, and three years of an assumed eight year Presidency.  Surely no one can argue that President Obama should not be held responsible for the budget deficits in years four through eight!

No I wouldn't. I intend to be breathing down his, the Democrats' and the Republicans' neck on this question. I support the bipartisan commission – with an up-or-down vote. I think that's the only way we will get the political cover for both parties to do the right thing. Obama backs this; the GOP has dismissed it; the Dems have been inexcusably leery as well. It's not fair to blame Obama if the GOP uses its 41 seat majority in the Senate or the Dems simply lack the cojones to block any serious attempt to tackle the debt in the only way that can work.

An open-source parody site. Many more posters here.

New polling shows that shelving it will hurt the Democrats this fall more than passing it.

It digs in deeper. But this story is not over – by any means. The truth about Sarah Palin, in fact, has yet to be disseminated.

Chait's point remains as true as ever:

If the Democrats had decided not to take on this issue, they may have been spared some backlash. But now that they have passed a comprehensive bill in each chamber of Congress, to let reform die because the two Democratic-controlled bodies couldn't work out their differences would be an act of criminal neglect.

From Cohn's latest:

[T]here are basically two competing forces here. More time means more opportunities to craft a [health care reform] deal and build up political support. But it also means more time for Congress to lose interest. Even if waiting helps reform's prospects right now, that may not be true for long.

Saletan doesn't like the Tim Tebow ad:

Pam's story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it's misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn't end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead.

TNC adds his two cents.