Month: July 2010

Noah Millman takes her seriously. His fear:

If Sarah Palin wins the Presidency, then she reshapes her party to suit her preferences. And anybody who came out strongly against her will be in the doghouse for years. She is not a “with malice toward none, with charity for all” type of Republican.

Razib Khan gives her a 25% chance at the nomination while Larison continues to believe that "Palin has no chance of winning."

Building off analysis by Myriam Benraad, Joel Wing estimates the terrorist group's staying power:

Benraad believes that Al Qaeda in Iraq will still be around for the foreseeable future. One reason is that the group is largely Iraqi now. At first, it was mostly made up of and led by foreigners like Zarqawi and Masri. Today it is almost all locals.  Another factor is that in June 2009 U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq’s cities. That gave more room for the Islamists to operate in. The Americans are due to drawdown to just 50,000 troops by August 31, 2010 as well, which could increase Al Qaeda’s opportunities to sow mayhem. The group also plays upon the lingering resentment amongst some Sunnis that the United States is an occupier. That wont end even when the U.S. withdraws as Al Qaeda has painted the new Iraqi government as American puppets and the new occupier. The United States has also been emptying its prisons as it pulls out. Some of these detainees came into contact with or were recruited by Al Qaeda while they were incarcerated. The American military claims that the recidivism rate amongst these former convicts is low, but the Iraqis claim otherwise.

Friedersdorf extends Palin's logic:

The closest strip club to Ground Zero happens to be two blocks away, a fact that has nothing to do with our reverence for the place where so many Americans were killed by terrorists. As you've probably noticed, it doesn't even make sense to call it The Ground Zero Strip Club.

But it makes no less sense than naming an Islamic community center "The Ground Zero Mosque"–as much of the media have done–because it's going to be located a couple blocks away.

Brian Goldsmith finds this doozy from Bill Cooper, a "GOP congressional candidate in a tight primary (in a solid Republican district) to replace Rep. Pete Hoekstra":

Dreher, who is opposed to marriage equality, praises Rauch's article on the social forces fighting for and against same-sex marriage:

Gay marriage is the final act of the Sexual Revolution, the thing that institutionalizes it. If you think the Sexual Revolution (which Rauch cannily defines as global information culture + birth control) was on balance a good thing, you're happy with this; if not, not. What's so insightful about Rauch's analysis — and he's quite clear which side he's on — is that he explains why conservative first principles on the meaning of family in society lead logically to opposing gay marriage. I have never read a more clear, cogent, fair-minded explanation of why social conservatives oppose gay marriage.

It's the same reason they oppose modernity as a whole. Which means they are not social conservatives. They are religious reactionaries.

Larison's contribution to the NYC mosque "debate":

Anti-jihadists keep making the same errors over and over. Instead of exploiting differences between jihadists and non-jihadists, among different kinds of Islamists, and between different groups of jihadists, anti-jihadists have been perfectly content to roll all of them into a single “Islamofascist” menace. That artificially inflates the strength of actual jihadist enemies by lending credibility to their propaganda, and as a result it makes jihadist causes more appealing. In this case, anti-jihadists are compounding their error by confusing the equivalent of Muslim ecumenists with hard-line Islamists. That is exactly what Gingrich does when he claims that the project is a “a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” in the face of demands from aggressive Islamists. It’s not just that anti-jihadists are conflating any and all Muslims together here, but they are vilifying as aggressors some of the least aggressive Muslims around.

Lynch makes a version of the same argument. Ackerman a few months ago profiled Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the center of Palin's crusade.

Softwar from Moustache on Vimeo.

Thomas Mahnken defends our intelligence agencies:

Although beginning the story with 9/11 makes a certain amount of sense, in doing so Priest and Arkin miss an important dimension of the story. During the 1990s the size of the U.S. intelligence community declined significantly because both the Clinton administration and leaders in Congress believed that we were headed for a more peaceful world.  Indeed, the Clinton administration made trimming the size of the intelligence community a priority through its Reinventing Government initiative. Many intelligence analysts took offers of early retirement and became contractors — contractors that the U.S. government hired back after 9/11. A good deal of the post-9/11 intelligence buildup thus involved trying to buy back capacity and capability that had been eliminated during the 1990s.

Er, yes, but something significant happened in the late 80s and early 90s that explains why the US envisioned "a more peaceful world." Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, was unimpressed by the series for different reasons:

We have a series that's long on numbers, short on analysis, unwieldy as hell, and offering technology as a panacea for understanding — kind of like the intelligence community itself. If you want the real story, read my book.

Looking more generally at defense spending, the video above "attempts to represent the US military budget of $549 billion dollars as a heap of 88,548 Abram M1 tanks."

Drum notices a pattern:

A reader writes:

One point that keeps getting raised by people who believe Sarah is Trig's mother is that she's not responding because she enjoys using it as another reason to paint herself as a victim.  I think that's possible, but I have serious doubts, mainly because, as far as I can tell, Palin doesn't manifest any particular eagerness to talk about the Trig theory. 

I checked out Going Rogue from the library yesterday and was surprised to find that she only devotes one paragraph – a brief one – to the Trig theory, and quickly dismisses it as too ridiculous to respond to.  Compare that to her reaction to that joke from David Letterman, which she seized upon with unseemly eagerness to spark a public fight that she was obviously trying to convert into positive publicity.  Or the media firestorm she fueled with Rahm's "retarded" remark.  Or the Family Guy nonsense.

When Sarah Palin perceives herself as being unfairly attacked, she has a history of eagerness to jump into the fray.  But as far as I can remember from her public comments on the Trig controversy, she actually has not seized upon it as an example of how unfairly she's treated – she's just dismissed it as a topic beneath contempt, and then moved on as quickly as possible to something else.