Month: June 2010

Today on the Dish, the president removed General McChrystal but not COIN. Reax here. Andrew's take here. Pre-announcement analysis here, here, here, here, and here. Beinart examined the MacArthur analogy. The Rolling Stone reporter responsible for it all shared the secret of his craft.

In other news, Australia selected its first female PM, the Bartonites dug in, and we provided polling on Obama here, here, and here. Team America kicked ass at the last minute to keep the dream alive. Other Cup coverage here and here.

In assorted commentary, three bloggers from the Dish stable debated the power of the presidency, DiA doubted that citizens change their minds based on reason, Bernstein didn't relent over criticizing tea-partiers, and Balko kept up his campaign against canine-killing cops. Vaughan Bell relayed some fascinating trends among the divorced, Bundled showed how much we spend on gas, Jonah Lehrer explained why computers suck at Jeopardy!, Drum joined the discussion on kid flicks, and Andrew overshared over animal masturbation. A reader watched a goat get off, others extended the public execution thread, and another sent in a stirring video of dancing with cancer.

Derbyshire served up some more racism while Steyn contributed some cant. MSM bashing here and here, great acts of journalism here, and dissent of the day here. Recession views here. Colbert bait here and badass Palin bait here. More ex-gay hilarity here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

Speaking of masturbating animals (yes, I've been waiting for this), did you know that male billy goats orally pleasure themselves to the point of climax?

I discovered this one summer while working as a Farm and Wilderness camp counselor in central Vermont. It was in the middle of morning barn chores that I noticed half of my nine year-old campers were lined up along the goat's fence, staring quietly ahead. "I thought that was a boy?" one of them asked me, without looking away from the goat who was joyously going to town on himself–he thought it was a female goat milking its own tit! And if that sounds sort of gross already, let me only add that goats (a) have long beards and (b) don't swallow.

Oh now I'm all nostalgic for camp!

Those of us who hoped for some kind of winding down of the longest war in US history will almost certainly be disappointed now. David Petraeus is the real Pope of counter-insurgency and if he decides that he needs more troops and more time and more resources in Afghanistan next year, who is going to be able to gainsay him? That's Thomas P. Barnett's shrewd assessment. Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops in 2011 is now kaput. It won't happen. I doubt it will happen in a second term either. Once Washington has decided to occupy a country, it will occupy it for ever. We are still, remember, in Germany! But Afghanistan?

Obama's gamble on somehow turning the vast expanse of that ungovernable "nation" into a stable polity dedicated to fighting Jihadist terror is now as big as Bush's in Iraq – and as quixotic. It is also, in my view, as irrational, a deployment of resources and young lives that America cannot afford and that cannot succeed. It really is Vietnam – along with the crazier and crazier rationales for continuing it. But it is now re-starting in earnest ten years in, dwarfing Vietnam in scope and longevity.

One suspects there is simply no stopping this war machine, just as there is no stopping the entitlement and spending machine. Perhaps McChrystal would have tried to wind things up by next year – but his frustration was clearly fueled by the growing recognition that he could not do so unless he surrendered much of the country to the Taliban again. So now we have the real kool-aid drinker, Petraeus, who will refuse to concede the impossibility of success in Afghanistan just as he still retains the absurd notion that the surge in Iraq somehow worked in reconciling the sectarian divides that still prevent Iraq from having a working government. I find this doubling down in Afghanistan as Iraq itself threatens to spiral out of control the kind of reasoning that only Washington can approve of.

This much we also know: Obama will run for re-election with far more troops in Afghanistan than Bush ever had – and a war and occupation stretching for ever into the future, with no realistic chance of success. Make no mistake: this is an imperialism of self-defense, a commitment to civilize even the least tractable culture on earth because Americans are too afraid of the consequences of withdrawal. And its deepest irony is that continuing this struggle will actually increase and multiply the terror threats we face – as it becomes once again a recruitment tool for Jihadists the world over.

This is a war based on fear, premised on a contradiction, and doomed to carry on against reason and resources for the rest of our lives.

Maybe this is why you supported Obama – to see the folly of nation-building extended indefinitely to the least promising wastelands on earth, as the US heads toward late-imperial bankruptcy. It is not a betrayal as such. But it is, in my view, a huge and metastasizing mistake.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

DiA entertains a depressing thought:

I'm trying, and failing, to think of an instance where voters on any side have been persuaded by a reasoned opposition on any issue. It might happen with individual voters on particular issues, largely of the technical variety—if someone sits down to figure out whether they support a bond issue, maybe—but I can't think of a single issue where an argument, however elegantly expressed, has tipped the balance. These, I think, are the methods by which public opinion may be moved:

• A momentous event (9/11, the oil spill, a botched execution)
• The gravitational pull of mounting social change (gay marriage)
• A timely and effective message, repeated ad nauseam ("It's the economy, stupid;" "change")

Balko's campaign against cops shooting dogs continues:

The point here is not that all cops are trigger-happy dog murderers. But there does seem to be an attitude that an officer is justified putting a few bullets into a dog if he feels even the slightest bit of discomfort around the animal. Mere fear of a bite, not even an actual bite, is justification for gunfire. Subsequent complaints about dog killings are usually dismissed with little consideration. The lack of training is especially troubling. A spokesman for the Humane Society told me last year that his organization offers free training to any police department that requests it. He could only think of a few that had taken advantage of the offer.

A reader writes:

I may be the 400th person who has sent you this, or maybe the first.  Either way, it's from the 5th season of "So You Think You Can Dance?"  Choreographer Tyce Diorio had a friend who was battling breast cancer at the time, and he choreographed this piece to not only express her feelings but the feelings of a friend who must balance being strong for someone ill, while also grappling with the immense frustration at being powerless to truly help them.  In the end, those who are ill in many ways help us.

P.S. Tyce's friend is now cancer free.

Thanks for that. Today is a good day to be alive.

Joyner isn't sure about Ezra's prescription:

My strong hunch is that the reason people became slightly more confused about health reform over the course of the debate — and a difference of 6 percent in a poll with a sampling error of +/-4% is negligible — is because they started paying more attention and realized how complicated it was. Similarly, Ezra’s proposed solution falls into what I’ve termed the Wonk’s Fallacy, the belief of people who are truly fascinated with the details of public policy that normal people are similarly interested…

Mark Steyn, whose sense of irony seems to have deserted him:

What is fascinating about the age of Obama, and about what Senator Fulbright was saying, is what I call, “the persistence of the monarchical urge” — two and a third centuries after George III was given the boot, there are a lot of people who want a strong, charismatic leader who knows what’s best for you. I don’t. I like citizen legislators, and I don’t regard the president of the United States as “my leader.”