Month: December 2010

Here's a bit of undercovered news from last week:

A decade ago, a former Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin, left the Clinton administration to become a senior adviser and board member at Citigroup — collecting a $10 million a year paycheck with no management responsibility.

On Thursday, Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s first budget director and a protégé of Mr. Rubin, followed in his mentor’s footsteps and joined Citi’s investment banking group as a vice chairman. Mr. Orszag, 41, is the second cabinet official to join Citi this month, and his appointment comes days after the Treasury Department’s $10.5 billion stock offering helped further extricate the bailed out bank from Washington.

Fallows articulates why this is tremendously problematic:

Objectively this is both damaging and shocking.

   – Damaging, in that it epitomizes and personalizes a criticism both left and right have had of the Obama Administration's "bailout" policy: that it's been too protective of the financial system's high-flying leaders, and too reluctant to hold any person or institution accountable. Of course there's a strong counter argument to be made, in the spirit of Obama's recent defense of his tax-cut compromise. (Roughly: that it would have been more satisfying to let Citi and others fail, but the results would have been much more damaging to the economy as a whole.) But it's a harder argument to make when one of your senior officials has moved straight to the (very generous) Citi payroll. Any competent Republican ad-maker is already collecting clips of Orszag for use in the next campaign.

   – Shocking, in the structural rather than personal corruption that it illustrates. I believe Orszag (whom I do not know at all) to be a faultlessly honest man, by the letter of the law. I am sorry for his judgment in taking this job,* but I am implying nothing whatsoever "unethical" in a technical sense. But in the grander scheme, his move illustrates something that is just wrong. The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution — and then, less than two years after his Administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the Administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service — this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.

Should Peter Orszag be ashamed of himself? Yes, but it's unclear if the people who serve in the upper echelons of finance and government retain the capacity for shame.

Innocent Smith sees what we're trying to get at with print-on-demand projects like "The Cannabis Closet":

Personally, I don’t plan on buying the book, don’t smoke pot, and am indifferent toward marijuana legalization. What impresses me is how the book was created and is being distributed. Once again, Sullivan defies cliches, demonstrating that the internet may not be killing so much as transforming print media. Here is a book without a conventional author or publisher. What it does have is an editor (the Dish) which has compiled a popular online discussion thread (“The Cannibas Closet”) and bypassed the traditional publishing industry by printing copies through blurb.com. On top of all of this innovation, the book generates revenue for the Dish at a time when most journalists find it increasingly difficult to get paid.

You can buy the book here – for just $5.95 (and don't forget to use the promo-code DISH for $3 off shipping).

Matthew Continetti challenges the right to work with Obama:

The rapidity with which the president has been moving to the center-right on fiscal issues is nothing short of amazing. In the aftermath of the midterm election, not only has President Obama frozen nonmilitary federal pay. He’s inked a trade deal with South Korea. He’s welcomed the budget-cutting recommendations of his fiscal commission. He’s negotiated a deal on taxes that would extend current rates for another two years. He’s told reporters that he wants to work on a pro-growth tax reform. At this rate, it won’t be long before Obama endorses Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future and starts calling for a return to the gold standard.

Okay, we may be dreaming on that last part. But the larger question is this: Are conservatives and Republicans willing to take yes for an answer?

Consider the deal on current tax rates. The left is howling that Obama has abandoned his principles and capitulated to the right. Outraged House Democrats are demanding changes to the agreement before they hold a vote. The left is angry because President Obama has reversed a long-held position and agreed to a truce in the class war. What’s more, he’s spent the last week fighting with many of his fellow liberals, calling them unrealistic, unserious, and sanctimonious.

Music to our ears. And yet some conservatives seem unable to enjoy the melody.

But what if the melody guides Obama to re-election? There's the rub.

Stephen Walt continues the thread:

The real difference between the United States and virtually all other countries is that the United States has been unusually secure for much of its history, and very powerful for six decades or more. Realist theory tells you that when a state is really powerful, it will be less constrained by the power of others and it will be able to indulge all sorts of foreign policy whims. It can decide that it has "vital" interests on every continent; it can declare itself to be "indispensable" to almost every important issue, and it can convince itself that it really knows what is good for everyone else in the world. If you're wrong, it may not matter that much in the short term. If you are really powerful, in short, you can do a lot of stupid things for a long time.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately (yes, I have nothing better to do). It's still vexing to see how Obama's clear adherence to American exceptionalism is simply obliterated by the far right and the neocons. Why? I think it's because he's a Christian and not a Christianist. Christianism is essentially political, not spiritual. And for Christianists, America was founded by God and for God's purposes. The Providence that even atheists might appreciate in terms of America's role in world history is translated into divine exceptionalism for this one country. America is not exceptional because of the ideas in its founding documents – but because those ideas were divinely imparted.

In a way, that's why traditional Christianity is so bad a vehicle for Christianism. Jesus' message is far too subversive for a truly conservative, capitalist, pro-torture, pro-war movement.

The idea that there could be a "chosen people" for the Christian God is, also, absurd. Paul, while acknowledging the Jewish roots of Christianity, clearly stated that no nation or nationality or identity could exclusively exemplify the words of Jesus. Neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female, remember? How could such a God favor … the United States in 20th and 21st century history?

That's why, it seems to me, that Mormonism is much more coherent a faith platform for the rightist religious popular front that the GOP increasingly is. Because it places Jesus in America and gives America a unique role in global salvation. Christianity – the actual religion, not its strip-mall bourgeois impostor – is universalist, not nationalist. What the far right means by American exceptionalism is a divinely blessed and guided country, whose enemies are God's enemies, whose role in the bringing about of the End-Times is unique, and who therefore cannot truly do wrong. That's how Christianists like George W. Bush can say "damn right!" when asked if he would authorize torture again. Merely because he is the American president, he cannot definitionally commit an absolute evil – placing him on the same moral plane as, say, the Communist Chinese whose torture techniques he cribbed. 

So we can engage the exceptionalists rationally and still fail to reach them or understand them, because we are missing the point. The point is the hubris and self-righteousness that a certainty of divine blessing gives you. And when you get to declare yourself beyond good and evil, you truly are exceptional – and can torture knowing that it is all part of God's will in God's holy war.

And this is what Christians of a more traditional type would call the work of the devil.

A reader writes:

As you guys so often do, your staff photo sans Conor  just got me into the Christmas spirit more than anything else! I know Christmas isn't your cup of tea, but coming from someone who just left his LSAT exam here in NYC and after studying for the past several weeks, I couldn't have imagined a better sight when opening your blog for the first time this week!

Another writes:

How could you keep the attractiveness of your staff a secret for all these years? 

Between your youthful modeling indiscretions and the ever-present Andrew Sullivan Gun Show, we've been looking at you for decades.  Given their lack of visibility, I've been picturing your staff as a group of wretched galley slaves shivering in fear of your lash.  It's quite a treat to discover that you're swimming in cuteness over there; Chris, Patrick and Zoe are adorable!  (Conor has been visible for a while, so we already knew he's a cutie as well.)  Find some occasions to let them poke their heads out more often.

That said, Dusty and Eddy still have more cuteness in their little wet noses than all of you put together.  Sorry.

Another:

Wow, you let your beard go gray! Seriously, you look great. With Gandalf as my guide, gray beards are my personal beard ideal.

Another:

Well there it is. We now have photographic proof that you're left-leaning.

Another:

$24 is a T-shirt price I can get behind, thanks! No matter how much you argue on behalf of a $50 T-shirt, even ones as beautifully done as yours, that price simply offends my Midwestern sensibilities. It's a T-shirt, for cripes sake. For $50 it'd better be lined with chinchilla or give me a shoulder rub or tell me how awesome I am in the sack. Seriously, though, this is good news. I appreciate it.

Another:

What, does not one of you übergeeks not know how to use Photoshop? Get a picture of Conor and insert it in there. It's only fair.

Übergeek lashed.

Greenwald interviews Nir Rosen about his book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World:

I guess one thing we miss is just the deep humiliation and disruption that results from a foreign occupation. Now, most American soldiers are familiar with the movie Red Dawn, so sometimes I try to use that as a way to get them to understand the other side, although I guess they're these days probably too young to remember that movie. But even if the American soldiers aren't necessarily killing innocent people or torturing them, it's the mere presence, it's so brutally disruptive, the checkpoints, the strangers going into your house, constantly having foreigners with guns pointed at you wherever you go, people telling you what to do who don't speak your language. If they arrest one of the men in your house, you don't know who to appeal to.

If you're lost and scared, there are huge guys with helmets and vests and weapons who are shouting at you. And even if they were girl scouts, they have these immense vehicles and they go on the roads and are breaking irrigation pipes and accidentally running over your car or damaging it. It's a constant disruption and humiliation and fear which I don't think Americans have been able to appreciate. To us to perceive the American military is acting somewhat like cops on the beat or boy scouts whereas for locals it much a more painful and humiliating and scary experience.

 

3Quarks offers a modest proposal:

Resign from your job in broadcasting and run for public office.

But can't Fox News "analysts" already do both?

Bolinas, California, 9 am

In such a spectacularly incoherent and misinformed way he feels the need to apologize for it.