Month: August 2010

From a week-old poll:

A poll on the Palestinian Ma’an news website that ended Monday showed that more than 56% of Palestinians support a former Israeli defense minister's idea to annex the West Bank and grant Israeli citizenship to its 2.5 million residents.

Ali Yenidunya runs through some of the normal objections:

On the Palestinian front, those who argue for a one-state alternative and political “vision” assume that Palestinians would overtake the rule of the state through the state’s democratic channels. However, the Palestinian question would face new and more complex problems and the nationalist movement could lose its support from the emerging Palestinian elite.

I'm against a one-state solution because I'm a Zionist. I want the Jewish state to endure, as a coherent, decent democracy. But this position – which includes the urgent necessity of ending the settlements and returning to something close to the 1967 borders – is now, apparently, anti-Semitic, or, at least, worth sabotaging to prevent Obama from having any foreign policy success. We've been over this territory before. Here's Yglesias's defense of Zionism from almost a year ago:

I really kind of hope that hundreds of years from now there won’t be national states at all, instead we’ll all be lumped in with the Vulcans and the Andorians in a United Federation of Planets and off we’ll go. But there’s clearly no prospects for the abolition of the nation-state in the short-term. And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim. Or, for that matter, as the Palestinian claim. By far the best way to secure a just resolution of those conflicting claims is through a two-state solution—an independent Palestine, and a democratic Jewish Israel.

I completely grasp the pull of radical cosmopolitan values, but I think people who think that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing them in the short-term are being a bit crazy. It’s not even clear that Belgium or Canada will be able to survive as bi-national entities.

Andrew Sprung tells Dan Senor where to put his threats.

What are they doing about our two failing, counter-productive wars? Nada, but passing the buck to the president and Petraeus.

Should she win, her campaign strategy will serve as a proof of principle for Palin's campaign. Angle is losing among the general population but the supporters she does have are highly motivated:

According to a Reuters/Ipsos survey of Nevada voters released Tuesday, 81 percent of Republicans say they are certain to vote on November 2, 17 points higher than the 64 percent of Democrats who say they’ll vote in the midterm elections. The poll indicates that Reid leads Angle 48 to 44 percent among likely voters. Among the larger poll of registered voters, Reid holds a 52 to 36 percent advantage.

Kleiman goes another round:

If all Manzi means when he disses “social science” is that you shouldn’t just read some random paper in an economics or social-psych journal and propose some insanely risky venture such as privatizing Social Security or voucherizing public education or wiping out labor unions based on that paper, then I’m happy to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him against irresponsible radicalism and for cautious and evidence-sensitive approaches to bringing about social improvement.

Manzi (who agrees with my thoughts on the exchange) nods:

While I don’t think that “all I meant” was that “you shouldn’t read some random paper in an economics or social-pysch journal” and propose X, I certainly believe that. Most important, I acknowledge enthusiastically his “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” point that the recognition of our ignorance should apply to things that I theorize are good ideas, as much as it does to anything else. The law of unintended consequences does not only apply to Democratic proposals.

In fact, I have argued for supporting charter schools instead of school vouchers for exactly this reason. Even if one has the theory (as I do) that we ought to have a much more deregulated market for education, I more strongly hold the view that it is extremely difficult to predict the impacts of such drastic change, and that we should go one step at a time (even if on an experimental basis we are also testing more radical reforms at very small scale). I go into this in detail for the cases of school choice and social security privatization in the book.

John McWhorter scoffs at our intermittent race conversation. Glenn Loury gags as well.

David Rothkopf sounds like a politician:

We need a new international understanding on these issues, one that will produce a coalition of nations that will strictly enforce a ban on aid to countries that abuse women — and one that will introduce sanctions on those countries until they comply with what must be the most basic entry-level rules for participating in global society.

Sure, that will work. I mean: please. Could we get any more utpoian? Norm Geras, meanwhile, takes issue with my response to a supporter of the war in Afghanistan:

No one who undertakes some putative good or the combating of some evil is thereby obligated to take on an impossible burden of doing good and combating every evil. Otherwise, we couldn't do anything without being called on to do everything – which is a practical reductio ad absurdum. When Andrew supported the interventions in Afghanistan and then Iraq, this type of argument was put by some of those who were opposed. Why Afghanistan or Iraq and not North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe as well? Because there's only so much one can do (even if 'one' is a powerful country). This is not to criticize him for having changed his mind on certain things. It is only to say that a style of argument that was no good then is still no good. Also: between 'on the cheap' and 'a century of neo-imperialism', there are intermediate possibilities.

I'm not sure there are, actually, unless Norm means the kind of hands-off counter-terrorism that seems the only realistic option in Af-Pak. I did support these wars in part because of the evil of the enemy, Saddam and the Taliban. But I have learned my lesson. It is not enough for the enemy to be evil, or even dangerous. We must be able to do something about it that is within our capacity and skills and budget. Building nations in Iraq and Afghanistan fails this sniff-test, and the experience of the past decade proves it.

Jeffrey Goldberg and countless others have cited the peaceful and constructive Muslim faith and organization of Feisal Abdul Rauf. He may be surprised to find that National Review regards him thus:

He presents himself as a peacemaking Islamic Gandhi, but he is in fact an apologist for the terrorist outfit Hamas, which he refuses even to identify as a terrorist organization… The fact that an apologist for terrorists and an associate of terrorist-allied organizations is proceeding with this provocation is indecent.

They repeat the lie that only Americans were killed on 9/11, and ignore the Muslims who were murdered on that day and indeed the Muslims who bear the brunt of Islamist terrorism worldwide. They make no mention of freedom of religion. And they propose a boycott:

No contractor, construction company, or building-trades union that accepts a dime of the Cordoba Initiative’s money should be given a free pass—nobody who sells them so much as a nail, or a hammer to drive it in with. This is an occasion for boycotts and vigorous protests — and, above all, for bringing down a well-deserved shower of shame upon those involved with this project, and on those politicians who have meekly gone along with it. It is an indecent proposal and an intentional provocation.

I am actually heartsick about this. That the official right is now engaged in exactly the kind of thing that empowers Islamism, alienates moderate Muslims and betrays core American values is a deep sign of the cultural and moral rot we face. Dorothy Rabinowitz asserts that there is no need to restate America's commitment to religious liberty, while arguing that, in this case, it doesn't stand. Her case – in which "demagoguery" is now the work of those defending American values and in which "piety" means resisting bigotry – is a study in how the right came to embrace torture, a dictatorial presidency and now, restrictions on minority religions rather than the inheritance of the West.

They are the unwitting allies of the Jihadists; and they want a war with an entire religion. It may even win an election or two, I suppose. Hey, the gays are getting mainstream.

Weigel responds to the Levi-Bristol break-up by shaming the media:

Why assume that [Sarah] Palin was behind [the Levi-Bristol engagement], cleaning up a problem before a possible 2012 run? It’s because the alternative, truer explanation is dull. Palin as tabloid joke is a story for 2008. The story for 2010 is that she’s a master plotter, a recruiter of grizzlies, whose book sales and TV deals prove that she’s outsmarted everyone.

This theory doesn’t have many takers inside of Alaska, where Palin’s celebrity and national designs are frowned upon by people who wanted her to serve out her term. But outside of Alaska, Palin has had so much success with a memoir and a Facebook account that we assume she’s about to outsmart everyone in some other way. In this case, the assumption was that Palin thinks so far ahead that the idea of a Bristol-Levi shotgun wedding, something treated as a joke when rumored in 2008, became an example of Machiavellian strategy and media manipulation. Well, now we know—Palin cannot actually force her child into a loveless marriage to fix a political problem.

I cannot quite fathom through the intricacies of this saga. But it does seem I was wrong to worry that the Bristol-Levi reunion was a function of Palinite political hardball. Dave is right about the banality of all this in the end. What I fear he is wrong about is this deranged person's ability to appeal to the identity politics of the right in such a way that she can barge through the door of the GOP nomination. She is the Jesse Jackson of the right. But he was never a former vice-presidential candidate when he did so well in the 1988 primaries. And the rural white right is far more powerful within the GOP than the urban black left ever was for the Democrats.