Month: June 2010

But this always lifts my spirits – and may yours.

Matt Yglesias sees much to admire in this analysis of the current moment, but adds:

I think Chait’s enthusiasm for the analysis reflects the main pathology of mainstream American Jewish thinking on the subject—a bizarre willingness to believe that Israeli politicians are bafflingly stupid. I mean, yes of course nobody will believe that Netanyahu seeks peace as long as his top priority is to expand settlements. Yes of course if Israel wants the world to believe that Israel holds the moral high ground it should unambiguously offer to renounce occupation. Yes of course if it’s really true that the Palestinians are hell-bent on refusing reasonable peace offers Israel should expose this fact. But that’s just to say that the current Israeli government isn’t seeking peace—it’s seeking settlements. These aren’t tactical blunders, they’re substantive commitments.

Amen. Chait fires back:

I confess to believing that the current Israeli government is bafflingly stupid. I don't understand why such a belief is necessarily "bizarre." The United States recently finished eight years of being governed by a bafflingly stupid administration. I see baffling stupidity in politics all the time. I don't think that makes you naive, let alone pathological. Does Yglesias think George W. Bush's plan was to spend the remainder of his first term and all of his second term fighting a counterinsurgency in Iraq, and letting Osama bin Laden escape Tora Bora?

No, but it has long been Netanyahu's plan – and that of his coalition partners – to permanently coopt the West Bank. This is obviously stupid, but not "bafflingly" so. It's obvious why. Netanyahu and his allies have long wanted Greater Israel. God, they believe, gave all of Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people, and they also believe that occupying them permanently is essential to Israeli security. Christianists believe the same and see the process as an unfolding of divine destiny. Why are we supposed to be incapable of recognizing fundamentalism when it stares us in the face? This is the issue – which is why I do not believe for a moment that Israel will voluntarily leave the West Bank in my lifetime.

They're there for ever, if they can manage it. And when your policy is ultimately governed by religious diktat and fathomless paranoia, then there is no reason to wonder why it's self-defeating. It doesn't matter if it's self-defeating. It's your religious and sacred duty to stay put and expand; and psychologically impossible to withdraw.

This, to echo Matt, is obviously more than a tactical error, like Tora Bora. It's a strategic goal. AIPAC is just waiting for president Palin to back an acceleration of settlements and a full-scale war, subsidized by Americans, against Iran.

Like Matt, I'm tired of pretending that the West Bank settlements aren't Israeli policy when they could stop them any time – and won't. Like Matt, I'm tired of a simple minimal request by an American president – to freeze construction of such settlements – being interpreted as some kind of attack on Israel, and pilloried by AIPAC, TNR, Commentary, WaPo, National Review et al. Like Matt, I do not believe we can have a real debate about this without acknowledging the radicalism of the current Israeli center.

Either you favor Greater Israel or you don't. Those who sided with Netanyahu over Obama in this fight for the future favor Greater Israel in fact. Their claimed opposition to settlements has been rebutted by their actions these past two years. And every day, their vision becomes a deeper part of reality.

A reader notes a detail in the biography of the theocon fanatic featured in the official newspaper of the Archidocese of Boston:

Michael Pakaluk is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, VA, where he teaches courses on ethics and the philosophy of marriage and the family.

The Institute is allied with the Legion of Christ, formerly led by the cultist sexual abuser – and rapist of his own children – Marcial Maciel. Child-rapists: yes. Stable gay parents: punish the kids.

The elections in the Netherlands seem to me to be a wake-up call. Holland has fared remarkably well in the Great Recession, but even there, the rise of the populist far right is unmistakable. If you put Mark Rutte's fiscal austerity party with Geert Wilders' anti-Islamic party, you have the Dutch tea-party coalition:

A campaign that many thought would focus on immigration and Afghanistan instead seemed to turn on economic issues, with voters apparently embracing the Liberal Party’s message of austerity and spending cuts — but no tax increases — to reduce the expanding budget deficit.

But reaction to immigration was never far below the surface, with even the Liberals taking pages out of Mr. Wilders’ policies and vowing to keep immigrants from getting social benefits for 10 years.

Wilders does not hide his beliefs: his beef is not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself.

(Photo: Party for Freedom (PVV) anti-immigrant leader Geert Wilders reacts in Scheveningen after winning the most seats in the Dutch parliament after national elections in the Netherlands on June 9, 2010. By Robin Utrecht/Getty.)

Here's a charming editorial in the official paper of the Archdiocese of Boston arguing in defense of barring the children of same-sex married couples from Catholic schools. One of the uglier passages:

The third reason is that it seemed a real danger that the boy being raised by the same-sex couple would bring to school something obscene or pornographic, or refer to such things in conversation, as they go along with the same-sex lifestyle, which–as not being related to procreation– is inherently eroticized and pornographic. He might expose other children to such things, as he might easily have encountered them in his household.

Really? One wonders whether the author has ever spent any time with a married same-sex couple with children. Well, one doesn't wonder. But here's the real kicker:

It was inevitable that either the teacher, or some parent, would deal with the two men in such a way as implicitly to teach my son, or other children in the class, that there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships. But this is scandal: that is, leading a “little one” astray in some serious matter by the example you set.

Yes, this is what "leading a 'little one' astray" conjures up in the mind of a theocon in the archdiocese once run by pedophile protector – and curia member – Bernard Law. More reaction here.

A gruesome new detail:

[A] bird has a natural repellent in its feathers that keeps the water out. That’s a little area – a little cushion – that keeps it cool. Well, this oil here gets on those feathers, and they lose that little insulation. And then, when you have this oil at 100+ degrees, the bird experts say, it begins to literally cook the birds.

This thing begins to eat into your soul after a while, doesn't it?

I sound like a goddamned hippie but you have to be emotionally and spiritually dead not to watch this and not feel some deep qualms about what our civilization is doing to its environment and to itself. The addiction metaphor – even used by George W. Bush by the end of his term – is the only apposite one. We're like junkies trying to find a new vein. It keeps us alive and growing, but that simply brings into sharper focus the moral and spiritual costs of exploitation of the earth rather than prudent stewardship.

Heh:

Some are getting touchy over the demonization of the multinational with "British" in its name, and when you hear someone like Anthony Weiner mouthing off, you can understand why. My column for the Times last Sunday tried to address these concerns, but the right is getting antsy:

In a clear snub to the President, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson claimed this morning that BP was a victim of “anti-British rhetoric,” which he described as “permeating from America.” Mayor Johnson told the BBC’s flagship Today programme, “When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves.” The Mayoral view was echoed by former Conservative Party trade minister Lord Tebbit, who uses an interview in this morning’s influential Daily Mail newspaper to accuse Obama of “despicable” anti-British language. Tebbit accused President Obama on his blog of, “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political Presidential petulance.”

Alliteration is not dead. I think they're being way too sensitive.