Month: October 2010

George Packer mulls the state of conservatism and liberalism. On the latter:

After all the analysis of his political flaws and tactical mistakes (I’ve engaged in this cheap spectator sport myself), here is the heart of his political weakness. F.D.R. had the labor movement; L.B.J. had the civil-rights movement. Obama had Obama for America. His campaign was based on the man more than any set of ideas or clear vision of the future. Everyone knew what Reaganism stood for. No one knows what Obamaism means, which has allowed his enemies to fill in the blank.

Could the President have helped bring a progressive populism into being, by vilifying the banks and hammering his money-backed opponents from the start, as a counter to the right-wing populism that totally dominates the media? Maybe, but it would have been contrary to his character and his approach to governing. I’m not sure it would have found an answer in the country, either.

TNC reflects on how fighting evolved from a necessity in his adolescence to a liability in his adulthood:

If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield. Some people take to this lesson easier than others. As a kid, I hated fighting–not simply the incurring of pain, but the actual dishing it out. (If you follow my style of argument, you can actually see that that's still true.) But once I learned the lesson, once I was acculturated to the notion that often the quickest way to forestall more fighting, is to fight, I was a believer. And maybe it's wrong to say this, but it made my the rest of my time in Baltimore a lot easier, because the willingness to fight isn't just about yourself, it's a signal to your peer group.

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which–once one leaves the streets–is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

(Video from an unsettling series of clips compiled by Choire, who declares high schools "hotbeds of people beating each other up and other people filming them on their phones.")

Scott Morgan smacks the LA Times for being kowtowed by Holder's threat:

How far up your ass does your head have to be stuck to actually believe California is "unlikely to win" a fight with the federal government over marijuana policy? California has been winning that battle for more than ten years. LA Times is literally suggesting that Obama and Eric Holder are more determined opponents of marijuana reform than George Bush and John Ashcroft, which has got to be some of the worst analysis of marijuana policy ever put in print. It was Eric Holder himself who issued a memo calling on federal agents to find something better to do than bother dispensaries. How could anyone be dumb enough to believe he'll now turn around and begin busting hippies for simple possession?

Adam Ozimek is unsettled:

I know campaign ads shouldn’t affect us. We should vote based on policies and expected welfare impacts of those policies. But at some level these political ads become pollution, a pure negative externality. And I can’t look past it when a party or politician is willing to spew pollution to get elected. If you’ve got to denigrate a whole nation of people and one of the greatest economic miracles of the last 50 years, and stir up a hornets nest of ugly xenophobia in order convince people you’re the man for the job, then you’re demonstrably not the man for the job.

Ezra Klein broadens Mark Zuckerberg's critique of The Social Network:

Both fictional and factual reportage have a bias towards human relationships and failings as the driver of professional achievements. In part, that just makes for better stories. The psychology of a president — his complicated bond with his mother, or father, or wife — is more interesting than a story of sweat, talent and interest being joined by luck.

The personal conflicts between legislators make for a better story than "yes, they wanted to do this, but no, they didn't have the votes, and couldn't have gotten them." And particularly in political reporting, tracking donations or reading polls — a story, in other words, of personal corruption or opportunism — is a preferred explanation for a politician's behavior than the idea that he or she simply thought this or that problem worth solving.

So Zuckerberg is wrong on one point: It's not just Silicon Valley that gets that treatment.

Reason talks to supporters and opponents:

Today on the Dish, Dan Choi re-enlisted. Andrew pushed back against Walter Russel Mead and Goldblog on Israel, and on Ross for lowering his expectations on the GOP establishment and the Tea Party. Farhad Manjoo tracked the blogazine's rise while we lived it, and this reader tried to balance the right and the left. Frum preached compromise and Andrew urged conservatives to be realistic (when imagining a world where McCain had won). Andrew picked apart Obama's stealth tax policy, and we hoped it wasn't true about his visit to India.

France and Britain joined forces to blow Bagehot's mind while saving money on defense, and we rounded up opinions on what the UK's defense cuts meant for the U.S. Scott Horton reported on Obama's secret prison in Afghanistan, albinos were still in trouble in Tanzania, and aid money engendered the need for more aid money.

Hillary Clinton believed It Gets Better, to the consternation of some in the gay community, while Adam Serwer wondered if DADT was going to be Obama's Prop 8. Daniel Larison made the constitutional argument for church and state that O'Donnell was incapable of making, and 9/11 terrorists never attacked Texas. Rand Paul slipped down on Rasmussen, and Charlie Cook predicted a counterwave to this election's wave. DePaul University curbed their students' cannabis policy group, and the drugs and states rights battle escalated in California.

Bristol Palin danced in a gorilla suit, painters lied about how pretty Venice is, and the Rent Is Too Damn High went the way of the meme. DVR killed the political ad, supply killed the demand for prostitutes, and lots of people drop their cameras. Malkin award here, Yglesias awards here and here, view from your CPAP here, more BLT community names here, VFYW here, more on the "successful" here, email of the day here, dissents of the day here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

Chris Beckman's oddly moving montage of people dropping their cameras won the 2010 Vimeo Award for Experimental work:

oops from Chris Beckman on Vimeo.

Here's a rundown on what is being cut from Britain's defense budget. From the lede: "PM David Cameron said defence spending would fall by 8% over four years." Richard Norton-Taylor contends that the British defense review means no more "Iraq-scale military interventions":

Though defence chiefs said … they will still have significant expeditionary forces, they will not be able to intervene on the scale of recent years. According to new defence planning assumptions, UK forces will be able to carry out one enduring brigade-level operation with up to 6,500 personnel, compared to the 10,000 now in Afghanistan, plus two smaller interventions, at any one time.

Alternatively, they will be able to mount a one-off, time-limited major intervention – "with sufficient warning" – of up to three brigades with about 30,000 personnel, which is two-thirds of the force deployed to Iraq in 2003.

Yglesias thinks the sort of cuts that the British are pursuing is bad news for America:

Cutting conventional military personnel while spending money on renewing Britain’s nuclear arsenal is more-or-less the worst case scenario from an American perspective. The UK’s ability to contribute to the “global public goods” functions of the Pentagon will be diminished more than is necessary to meet the monetary targets, and British possession of a nuclear second-strike capability accomplishes nothing whatsoever for America. What’s more, it doesn’t really accomplish anything for the United Kingdom either—it’s just a way of hanging on to a bit of faded imperial glory.

Greg Scoblete shrugs:

I think it's useful to keep in mind that if we accept the fact that waging preventative wars followed by large-scale military occupation is not the proper way to combat terrorism, then fielding a smaller army is not necessarily a major setback to international security.

Ezra gives a quick lesson in hardball:

There's a question as to whether politicians should play hardball and another question as to whether any particular instance of hardball is smart. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, for instance, were effective in part because they were an independent organization, and thus the backlash against them didn't mean a backlash against George W. Bush. Similarly, though Karl Rove suspects that Al Gore's campaign was behind the revelation of Bush's 1976 DUI, the campaign never admitted that and refused to comment on it. By contrast, John McCain just looked foolish when he started bringing up William Ayers.

Bernstein thinks that to "the extent that the parties have followed different strategies, it's not at all clear that Republicans have benefited." His more general principle:

Conservative activists believe … Republican pols are a bunch of wimpy, half-hearted idealists who allow ruthless liberal Democrats, who play this game for keeps, to trample all over them. Indeed, this follows the Iron Law of Politics that everyone believes that the other side is better at the mechanics of politics: the other side is always more ruthless in their exploitation of the rules and willingness to ignore ethical niceties, more tactically adept, better at extracting money from their base, and (depending on who is complaining) either better at ignoring the policy demands of their crazy ideological base in order to win the center or better at addressing the policy demands of the base, while our side uses and then ignores the policy demands of the base.