Month: September 2010

Is there not something ever more grotesque about this spectacle? In Afghanistan, unrest is spreading directly undermining the counter-insurgency strategy, however flawed, of the US military:

In Afghanistan, at least 11 people were injured Friday in protests. Police in the northern province of Badakhshan said several hundred demonstrators ran toward a NATO compound where four attackers and five police were injured in clashes. Protesters also burned an American flag at a mosque after Friday prayers. In western Farah province, police said two people were injured in another protest.

In New York, this cult-leader is demanding a meeting with the Imam of the Park51 mosque, while not quite canceling plans for a Koran burning. And so one group of fanatics reveals a religious mindset that immediately threatens mass violence if one nutjob in America performs a foul stunt of bigotry; and another group of fanatics tries to leverage that violence to prevent a perfectly legitimate religious center being built in New York City, a position actually endorsed by the leading figures of one US political party.

So Islamism, via Christianism, threatens Islam, while Christian extremism deeply wounds and slanders actual Christianity. All of it brings the world to the edge of violence and war that kills innocents and makes the work of the troops even harder than it already is. Now, of course, Jones has every right to do whatever he wants in an America with a First Amendment. But think of a GI in Kandahar right now. You really think he needed this?

And some people still think we need more religion in the public square.

"I don’t know much about Texas state politics, but the more I see of the Tea Party, the more convinced I am that it is good for gays, not because it is pro-gay (its members are mostly socially conservative) but because it is anti-anti-gay. To whatever extent they succeed in shredding the overdrawn “moral values” political credit card, more power to them," – Jonathan Rauch. The GOP in Texas, however, remains as vile as ever when it comes to toleration.

"You've got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition to extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Bagram [in Afghanistan]. And although it is slightly different, Obama has been as aggressive as President Bush in defending prerogatives about who he has to inform in Congress for executive covert action," – former CIA director Michael Hayden, celebrating Obama's embrace of the unchecked executive power he once promised to restrain. He does not mention a vital difference: Obama's ending of the active torture regime of his predecessor.

Ben Wizner puts it more succinctly:

"It can fairly be said that the Bush administration made torture the law of the land and the Obama administration is making impunity for torture the law of the land."

And the war machine moves on, constrained by no one.

Nir Rosen evaluates the political impasse in Iraq:

In a sad sense, none of this maneuvering actually matters all that much. Regardless of who becomes prime minister or president, Iraq is about to become increasingly authoritarian. Oil revenues will not kick in for several years, so services are not going to improve. Even when revenues reach Iraqi coffers, infrastructure costs will eat them up for the near future. The lack of services means the government will face street-level dissatisfaction and become harsher and more dictatorial in response — even if a democratic façade persists.

I think that's optimistic.

(Photo: The shattered windscreen of a vehicle is seen as Iraqis gather along Al-Sheikh Omar Street in the center of the capital Baghdad, after two near-simultaneous roadside bombs detonated, on September 08, 2010, ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. By Ali al-Saadi/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I think we don't talk about it because we've run out of things to say. But we all still feel deeply about it. I still can't say Ronald Reagan's name out loud, even after all these years. Somehow, I managed to live through that time, as did my husband (although we didn't know each other), and now we find ourselves having come through the woods into the clearing and, now what? The grief is still there. the loss is still unimaginable. Our whole social network has been zapped. We find ourselves with these deeply felt experiences and few people to share them with.

How does one explain a cataclysm? Unless you've experienced one yourself, you cannot know. And so we keep silent. Understandably silent. But don't mistake our silence for avoidance. I'd give anything to engage in a discussion again about this. There's just no one to talk to.

Amy Davidson draws lessons:

One wonders, as always, where our interests intersect with those of the Karzai family. What is their endgame? If it’s just getting hold of a compound in Dubai and some hard-to-trace bank accounts, then what stake do they have in stabilizing the country? Would they simply be happy to have us keep back the crowds until they have taken care of getting as much money as they can out of Afghanistan?

Howard Gleckman makes an important, and often overlooked, point:

A ‘permanent” tax cut is a fiction. No tax cuts are forever. Congress amends the Internal Revenue Code annually, and sometimes more than once a year. Since World War II, it has done a major overhaul about once a decade, and is overdue for its next renovation. And given massive budget pressures, one is likely to come sooner rather than later.And when it does, the entire Code will be in the mix, notwithstanding what it permanent and what is not.

At the same time, our recent experience with four dozen allegedly time-limited tax cuts that Congress extends more or less routinely each year suggests the word “temporary” does not carry the same meaning in Washington as it does elsewhere. 

Gleckman's "biggest objection to the Obama plan is that is manipulates expectations" because it "implies that the nation can solve its budget problems by simply raising taxes on the wealthy." It seems to me that Obama is losing this debate – which is quite staggering. That we cannot return to Clinton era tax levels under this kind of debt burden means that the spending cuts the GOP must propose will have to be larger and deeper than even the Tories' in Britain. And that means, I think, they won't happen. Which could mean a political system apparently incapable of fixing the fiscal imbalance until default forces it. 

Is this how wounded the American giant is? Is this how incapable it is of reforming itself?

Vanity sizing isn't only for women. Abram Sauer exposes the fraudulent waist measurements of several chain stores:

I enjoyed many of these pants, as I mentioned, but I'm still perturbed. This isn't the subjective business of mediums, larges and extra-larges — nor is it the murky business of women's sizes, what with its black-hole size zero. This is science, damnit. Numbers! Should inches be different than miles per hour? Do highway signs make us feel better by informing us that Chicago is but 45 miles away when it's really 72? Multiplication tables don't yield to make us feel better about badness at math; why should pants make us feel better about badness at health? Are we all so many emperors with no clothes?

Ta-Nehisi reflects on the many black Americas:

My time up in the Woods pretty much convinced me that, in many ways, I'm rootless, that "black" is important to me because I've decided to make it so, not because it's objectively true. The obvious counter is that racism forces you to accept an identity. But that's just never been true for me–I can count on one hand, and maybe three fingers, all the instances of direct racism I've experienced.

For me, "black" was always most descriptive as an ethnic identity. "Black" meant that every time I saw another black male who I knew, we always shook hands–even if we'd just seen each other yesterday. (A quick caveat–Please do not respond "Well I'm white and I do that too." Respectfully, good for you. I eat sushi. That doesn't mean that sushi isn't Japanese. "Black" does not translate into "What white people do not do.") It meant a shared way of speaking, a verbal and nonverbal language which gave me a kind of comfort.