Month: February 2010

Steve Hadley seems the sane one here. My bet is that if McCain had been president, the US would have launched a war with Russia.

Many conservative Republicans in Alaska are happy to see Sarah Palin disappear into the large bosom of Roger Ailes. I was struck by this one:

Moments earlier, another woman, who called herself a conservative Republican, spoke incredulously about the "cynicism" of national Republicans in choosing someone clearly unqualified for the vice presidency. "How in the world could they?" she asked. "The phenomenon of Sarah Palin exists because people are uninformed politically." (Like several people interviewed, she refused to be identified for fear of "retribution" from Palin and her allies.)

My italics.

 

Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, recently gave his first interview in 20 years. He explains why he stopped when he did:

If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Responding to my declaration that the Iranian regime's "fate is as sealed as those tyrants in Moscow two decades ago," Larison cautions:

[It] could be that the regime could lose control, but this is far from certain. Indeed, it seems to be getting more improbable every day. So how can we say that the fate of the current Iranian leadership is “sealed”? The tyrants in Moscow accepted that their fate was to lose power. On the whole, to the extent that they gave up power, they went quietly. The Chinese and Burmese governments have offered different examples to follow. Following these examples, Iran’s leadership apparently believes it can outlast the protests and remain in power.

So far, the opposition has given them and the rest of us little reason to think otherwise.

Why do I bother writing this? It is certainly not because I like the way things are. It is not simply to be contrary. Neither am I interested in assuming the worst about the situation just to do it. The danger in thinking that the regime’s fate is “sealed” and believing, contrary to evidence, that Tehran is isolated in the world is that it encourages misguided policy decisions. If one believes that Tehran is extremely isolated, pursuing sanctions of one kind or another might seem much more practical. It is only when we recognize that Tehran is not isolated and has many partners and allies around the world that we see the futility of going the sanctions route. If one assumes that the regime’s fate is “sealed,” and we just need to wait and watch the collapse happen, that militates against negotiations and engagement, and it encourages hawks to lobby for increased pressure and confrontation to try to push the regime over the edge.

A reader notes something from that astonishing DADT hearing on Tuesday:

Did you notice Admiral Mullen’s smackdown of Jeff Sessions, scion of the Old South, which has owned the military for a century? Sessions accused Mullen of “undue command influence”, a serious charge–just one step away from “illegal command influence”. (At 4:00 in the Youtibe above).

The accusation was so ugly, and so serious, that Gates (rightly) leapt to Mullen’s defense, and smacked Sessions hard (5:20), after which Mullen looked straight at Sessions and said:

“Senator Sessions, for me, this is not about ‘command influence’, this is about leadership, and I take that very seriously.”
(5:50)

(Emphasis in the original. I should note that Mullen’s language contrasting “command influence” to “leadership” is not merely rhetorical, it is legal, and the outline of Mullen’s legal defense:

“While some types of influence are unlawful and prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice… other types of influence are lawful, proper, and in certain circumstances a necessary part of leadership”.

Sessions, in other words, told Mullen that the Republican line of attack would be to question his competence and integrity, as well as the legality of his open support for the repeal of DADT; Mullen in turn told Sessions that if the Republicans insisted on war, he was happy to oblige them.

Not only is that an extraordinary personal moment, and an extraordinary moment in the struggle for gay rights, it is an extraordinary moment in American history: we just watched the tide turn. Yes, there is much work left to do, and pain and loss still to come, but the tide has turned on gay rights–and you won. The war is over. Everything the Republican/conservative/Christianist coalition does from here on is nothing more than a rearguard action. They just lost the military; they just lost the gay-bashing card.

They have been routed–and at the most unexpected moment. And this has enormous implications for national politics going forward.

I have noticed – with great relief – the lack of furious blowback so far. But I am not as confident as my reader, as I have learned not to under-estimate the passionate intensity of reaction in America. But Tuesday was a deeply moving and powerful moment for many of us. It happened because of one man’s skill – Obama – and one man’s integrity – Mullen.

Mullen just earned himself a place in history. 

Douthat's column this week has rekindled the sex education debate. Jonah Lehrer joins the fray:

I think [Douthat's] larger point is accurate: it's really difficult to change the sexual habits of adolescents.

That's because we've been trying to change behavior with facts and information. We've assumed that the way to get kids to wear condoms is give them statistics about sexually transmitted disease, or that the way to get students to abstain from sex is to lecture them on morality, or the difficulty of caring for a child while in high school. The problem with such facts is that they don't help teens deal with their moment of sexual decision, which most likely occurs when they're half naked and deranged with desire. In other words, we've assumed that sexual choices are rational choices, influenced by classroom exhortations and dry information. But that's wrong.

Sonny Bunch whacks Yglesias:

The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs.

Yglesias responds:

The point of intellectual property law is to benefit consumers, not producers. I don’t really want to turn this into an ideological food fight, so I’m eager to note that libertarians like Julian Sanchez and Tim Lee have the right take on this. I note that this issue is specifically addressed in the Constitution, which says that patents and copyrights should be granted “for limited times”—i.e., not as a transcendent moral right—in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” again, not as a matter of transcendent moral right.

Yglesias makes his pitch for the health care bill and argues that it is in the Democrats' political interest to proceed. Suderman isn't persuaded:

[T]he choice for Democrats may actually be whether they want they want to be portrayed as so single-minded in their determination to push their unpopular agenda on the public that they are willing to use party-line voting and any sort of obscure procedural trickery they can come up with to get it passed, or whether they want to be able to make the argument that they responded to the public's clear concerns and backed off an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation when they had the chance.

A reader writes:

The real irony with people like Bill Kristol, Elaine Donnelly, Saxby Chambliss, and Peter Sprigg (above) is that many of them haven't ever served in uniform. They talk at length about the purpose of the military, culture of the military, and how gays and lesbians are incompatible with military life – but they've never been in the military themselves. As a veteran of the current Iraq war, who has served and is continuing to serve in the military, I can't adequately articulate how angry I get at these clowns who wish to deny the privilege to those who actually desire to serve their country. At least Senator McCain has served honorably, and while I disagree with him strongly, at least he has the credentials to speak knowledgeably about the military.