Month: February 2010

Douthat compares the Tories and the GOP. He likes the specifics in Cameron's platform:

[T]he British state is more centralized than ours and reaches into more walks of life, which arguably makes it easier, politically and intellectually, for conservative politicians to find places to prune and ways to devolve authority. (Although a decade’s worth of losing Tory leaders might dispute that point.) And of course neither the ideas cited above, nor the admirable Tory emphasis on family-friendly tax policy, may end up going anywhere. As Alex Massie notes, in a smart post on localism and Cameron, “it’s easy to make good speeches and interesting promises in opposition,” but “it remains to be seen whether Tory talk on these matters is matched by real action should they form the next government.”

Still, after a year and change of the post-Bush G.O.P., the idea of a right-of-center party that just offers “good speeches and interesting promises” sounds pretty appealing to me.

CSPAN is psyched for tomorrow:

Is light on jobs.

Ackerman highlights this passage from Speech-Less, Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer's memoir:

When Marc [Thiessen] was writing remarks on the war in Iraq, he tried to browbeat a CIA analyst who was unwilling to state unequivocally that America was winning in the war on terror. “The president wants to say we’re winning!” Marc thundered.

Just what we needed — another accusation that the Bush White House wanted to politicize intelligence.

And that's his basic position on interrogation: "The President Wants To Say We're Not Torturing!" So he goes out and says it. He's a political propagandist who graduated from the schools of Jesse Helms and Dick Cheney.

So why is he now given a weekly column at the Washington Post? As if that paper's implosion wasn't obvious enough? Are there really no actual writers or independent thinkers available?

George Packer watched Glenn Beck's CPAC speech so you don't have to.

Tom Ricks makes it. He argues that "the best way to deter a return to civil war is to find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come." His final paragraph:

As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there. Yet, to echo the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you should leave it stupidly. The best argument against keeping troops in Iraq is the one some American military officers make, which is that a civil war is inevitable, and that by staying all we are doing is postponing it. That may be so, but I don’t think it is worth gambling to find out.

I believe – and have said so for some time – that the US occupation will likely be in place as long as Iraq remains ungovernable. Which means the rest of my lifetime.The surge failed. The idea it succeeded in its critical criterion was and is untrue.

If Obama does not have the courage to withdraw regardless of the consequences, he will end up entrenching Bush's insane gamble, not ending it, as he was elected to do. If Obama increases troop levels in Afghanistan and extends Bush's timetable for leaving Iraq, why on earth did we support him? Those were McCain's policies. Why have elections if they are essentially meaningiless?

Occupations are the foreign equivalent of entitlement programs. They never end. Why should Americans be denied basic access to health insurance because the money is going to sustain 50,000 troops in Germany, for Pete's sake, or to tamp down sectarian conflicts that have existed for centuries in a country we had no troops in for all of US history until 2003?

When will this madness end? Do we really have to go completely bankrupt and be forced to withdraw from these anachronistic pretensions? Are seven years not enough?

Howard Gleckman breaks down the Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Gregg (R-NH) tax reform proposal:

While the details of this plan are interesting, what’s really important is the growing number of lawmakers who are thinking about tax reform. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI.) has introduced a reform plan (his business provisions are somewhat similar to Wyden-Gregg). House Ways & Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) put a plan on the table a few years ago that was also built around lower rates and a broader base. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) periodically expresses his interest in reform. Taxes will inevitably be considered by President Obama’s deficit commission. And, of course, we patiently await a report from the Administration’s tax reform panel.

Slowly, but surely, tax reform is creeping into the public debate.

And about time. Since 1986, the whole system has become incomprehensible, unfair and unmanageable.

Tony Woodlief’s definition:

A real American conservative, to me, is someone who understands that markets are the best means of allocating resources, that liberty is essential to human thriving, and that man is sinful and in desperate need of checking and elevating institutions like the Church and marriage and childrearing. A real American conservative believes in aspiring, at the very least, to truthfulness and humility and thoughtfulness, which means he can’t help but cringe when he hears the likes of an Ann Coulter bellowing about her enemies being traitors. A real American conservative understands that the ills of mankind will not go away if we could only just have a lower tax rate and less regulation.

A real American conservative is not, I’ll submit to you, at home in the maneuvering and manipulation of state capitols, and certainly not in Washington, D.C. A real American conservative does not trust large government or mass democracy or even himself, certainly not himself, which is why he wants to keep undivided power out of any man’s hands, including his own.

I don’t disagree with much of that. And if you want to read a modern philosophical defense of it, try this.

Joe Klein's reading of Netanyahu's latest move:

For the first time in the 30 years that I've been following this story, the Palestinians are making a good faith effort to govern themselves effectively–the subject of my print column this week–on the West Bank. Which means that the Israelis–who have made most of the good faith efforts toward peace in the past–are increasingly seen as the primary obstacle to a two-state solution, especially given the presence of right-wing fanatics in Netanyahu's government who are completely opposed to any sort of deal. And so, the question: Are Bibi's recent actions calculated to provoke the Palestinians? Does he want to prove to the world that you still can't trust those volatile Arabs? I mean, if he were really caught up in historicity, he might propose a tripartite commission–Muslim, Christian and Jew–to establish the mutual designation of historic sites on both sides of the green line. But I have a sneaking feeling that this isn't about historicity at all.

This is about killing any peace process, telling Obama to jump off a cliff and annexing the West Bank for eternity. Some readers have said that Netanyahu was merely trying to make the Cave of the Patriarchs an "archeological" site and not a "Zionist" one. But it's clear from the Israeli press that this site will be added to a list of "national heritage sites" and their inclusion was at the behest of two far-right religious parties.

The meretricious move has outraged Abbas and given Hamas an opportunity to call for renewed violence. At some point, even the US press is going to have to cover this as what it is.