Month: January 2011

by Patrick Appel

A post from this morning was incorrectly titled. It has been fixed. Apologies.

by Patrick Appel

Marc Lynch isn’t betting that what happened in Tunisia will be replicated in other Arab nations. He presents solid evidence for his skepticism:

Dictators learn from each other, not just from the past.  The Arab Summit last week displayed this very clearly.  Every Arab leader is on red alert at the moment, determined not to repeat Ben Ali’s mistakes.   They are frantically offering concessions on economic  issues, reversing price rises and increasing subsidies.  And of course they are ramping up the repressive apparatus, on the streets and online, to try to stop any snowballs from rolling before they get too big.   The lesson most seem to have learned is not “be more democratic,” it is “be tougher.”  No Arab leader seems likely to be taken by surprise, or to disregard the early signs of trouble.  The success of Egypt’s protestors yesterday doesn’t mean that they won’t be violently crushed today. 

However:

There are strong reasons to expect most of these regimes to survive, which we shouldn’t ignore in a moment of enthusiasm.  But we also shouldn’t ignore this unmistakable new energy, the revelation of the crumbling foundations of Arab authoritarian regimes, or the continuing surprises which should keep all analysts humble about what might follow.

(Photo: Egyptian demonstrators pray in central Cairo during a protest to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and calling for reforms on January 25, 2011. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

by Conor Friedersdorf

He still loves his wife. But after 25 years of marriage, he has lost his enthusiasm for sex with her. Still. It is Valentine's Day. And she has been hinting. So he takes her to a nice dinner, uncharactertistically orders an after-dinner drink, and feels extra discouraged when it only makes him more tired. He is 55. And so tired. Upon returning home, he wants more than anything to just fall asleep, but damnit, he makes the effort. He surprises her with a gift, lights candles, and dutifully makes love to her in the fashion he thinks that she will most enjoy.

It is with similar enthusiasm that some responses to the State of the Union are penned. Everyone expects that it will be covered by political bloggers, newspaper columnists and magazine writers. Especially at movement magazines on the left and right, lots of people are going through the motions,  feigning passionate intensity that isn't there. In marriage, it is perfectly understandable for one partner to occasionally perform despite not being in the mood. Sex is built into the expectations. Justifiably so. But I'm skeptical about the system of expectations in political letters. Fresh insights are nice. I've read good stuff about last night's SOTU. We've linked some of it here. What I find pointless is the completely predictable boilerplate that gets published. The banal right-leaning editorial inveighing against the speech. The left-leaning editorial vaguely extolling its virtues. If every possible reader will agree with everything in a piece what exactly is the point of writing it?

Here's another funny thing about the media. Pitch an obscure story to an editor at USA Today. Likely as not he'll get on the Google, and if he finds the New York Times wrote about the same thing 5 weeks before in a little read blog item, your story idea is no good to him. But the State of the Union! It is guaranteed that every newspaper in America will editorialize on it… and every newspaper still editorializes on it.

Why?

Here's USA Today:

Obama appropriately called this "our generation's Sputnik moment" — a time to be shocked into a new American awakening the way the nation was when the Soviets launched the first space satellite in 1957. But the nation's staggering deficits also point toward what might be called a Hindenburg moment, one in which the debt-laden economy explodes like the infamous airship. Without stronger leadership than the president offered Tuesday night, that calamity will make his other goals unattainable.

To his credit, Obama acknowledged that there will need to be painful sacrifices, something politicians often pretend is not the case, but he failed to define in any substantive way what they will be. He even stopped short of endorsing the very sensible findings of the bipartisan deficit commission he appointed, leaving the impression, as he has before, that he doesn't have much taste for the task.

Is that apt analysis? Or wrongheaded? Who cares. Either way, what is possibly the point of publishing it? I can't believe that America's budget motel travelers would be disappointed if there weren't an editorial on SOTU left at the threshold of their room, and I could easily list 1,000 more desserving topics.

Can we end obligatory pieces? I don't think the audience likes reading them. And I know journalists don't like writing them.

by Patrick Appel

Frum partially blames Fox News for the delayed 2012 campaign:

Once a candidate declares, they will be obliged to resign their jobs as media commenters. Media Matters calculates the value of airtime devoted to Fox commenters Huckabee, Palin, Gingrich, and also John Bolton and Rick Santorum at $55 million. 

That does not include the value of whatever fees are paid those commenters. A lot has been said about the role of Fox in 2012. One effect could be unexpectedly perverse: a late start.

Pareene imagines a May 2nd debate devoid of candidates.

by Conor Friedersdorf

It may be effective in war zones:

In November 2009, the Mental Health Advisory Team of the United States Army published the surprising results of a year-long study of more than 1,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. The study evaluates, among other things, the coping behaviors employed by the soldiers to deal with the stress of serving in the war.

The soldiers’ coping behaviors included a range of activities, like reading, listening to music, using Facebook and working out. But what proved to be the single most protective activity — the habit that best bolstered the soldiers’ mental resilience — was spending three to four hours a day playing videogames. A regular daily gaming habit corresponded with the overall lowest levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide attempts or domestic violence.

And yet — and here’s where we see too much of a good thing — for soldiers playing more than 28 hours a week, there was a steep decrease in the protective benefits of gaming. Indeed, 40 hours a week or more was predictive of significant psychological distress. These results suggest the need for careful balance. The positive emotions we feel, and the social relationships we build, by playing games can help us be stronger in real life, but only as long as we’re not spending all of our time avoiding reality.

 

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Matt Continetti's assertion that " . . . if Republicans in the 112th Congress spent the next two years doing nothing but debating the health care law, beginning to dismantle it, and offering alternatives, they would have real momentum heading into the 2012 election" is dead wrong.

A fairly conservative republican lawyer in my office, who lives in Stafford Virginia, and who voted for Obama in 2008 (the first time she had ever voted for a Democrat for any local or national office in her entire life) told me a few weeks ago that she had voted for the Republican congressional nominee in her district because she was annoyed that Obama had seemingly made health care reform the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, rather than jobs and the economy. In trying to explain the connection between what he was doing and the economy/deficit (particularly in a long term sense), or the unified efforts undertaken by Republican members to water down the stimulus and the HCR bill (both of which they ultimately voted against), and to defeat every other administration effort to stimulate the economy and turn the unemployment situation around (for the politics of it all), she was having none of it, focusing her complaints on all of the time and attention that the Obama administration spent working on HCR.

But another thing she said in that same conversation illustrates why Continetti is way off base in the assertion quoted above. She also made it very clear that, if the GOP focuses much or all of its energy on repealing health care and taking other political shots at Obama in order to defeat him in 2012 (such as by playing chicken with the extension of the debt ceiling, etc.), she will be just as pissed off at the GOP, because she thinks that they should focus all or almost all of their attention on improving the economy and reducing unemployment. No ifs, ands or buts.

In 2012, the normal increase in the number of people voting during a presidential election, which will likely include as many as 40+ million people who voted in 2008 but sat out the 2010 election, in and of itself, will hurt the GOP enormously. That said, if the Republicans who won in 2010 piss off many of their newly repatriated voters by focusing most or all of their energy on repealing health care reform and taking political shots at President Obama, the President's margin of victory in 2012 will likely be even larger than the 9 million vote blowout margin that he enjoyed in 2008.

So I hope the GOP takes Continetti's advice, which appeals to a lot of them (mostly because they have nothing else to offer that makes any sense economically).

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Regarding the piece by Conor on Olbermann: He writes as if Keith's show happened in a vacuum. "Why don't you read a newspaper?" To not acknowledge the full-on bile spewing from Faux News is wrong. Liberals needed a voice of their own. There were countless man-hours being spent at the number one "news" org spewing lie after lie. To say liberals should have just picked up a book is like suggesting they bring a knife to a bazooka fight. Night after night the jackals at Fox were telling less-well-read people (who, like it or not, only get their news from teh TV) multiple lies. Olbermann is a hero on the left BECAUSE he brought some fight in his game.

The problem here is imagining that war analogies map onto public discourse. In a war, the object is to kill the people on the other side. So bringing a knife to a bazooka fight isn't very effective. But in politics, the object is to persuade as many people as possible that your side has better ideas for running America.

A guy like Olbermann isn't suited for that task. What he's good at is making people who already agree with him feel relief that someone is on their side. His angry demeanor is an asset in that project, but it's not helpful in actually pushing the country in the direction that progressives would like it to go. I'd suggest that folks who use this silly knife and bazooka analogy reflect on the politicians who are elected in the United States. Check out our presidents and senators. You won't find a lot of people who take the bazooka approach to public discourse. Angry, self-righteous bile spewing isn't actually effective.

by Patrick Appel

Douthat faults both Ryan and Obama for offering vague, partial solutions to our fiscal troubles. He notes that "in his first big moment on the national stage, the words 'Medicare' and 'Social Security' did not pass the Wisconsin congressman’s lips":

It’s clear that both parties have decided that a period of divided government twelve months before a presidential election is the wrong time to make big moves on entitlements and the deficit. Better to wait, jockey for position, and hope that the correlation of forces after 2012 will be more favorable to their preferred solutions. And it’s clear, too, that they’ve decided (with honorable exceptions) that it’s too risky to even begin building support for the unpopular cuts or tax increases ahead. The bet, on both sides, is that there’s still time to work with, and that the other party will blink, or at least give ground, before the real crunch arrives.

Let’s hope they’re right.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Bering can count on me to think that evolutionary psychology is bad science no matter what subject it's addressing, and not useful in the least for understanding human behavior. But his purported shock at people (and by people, he certainly means women) coming out of the woodwork when he is attempting to explain vastly different experiences and behaviors of fully 50% of the population that is still oppressed in myriad ways (and has often been the victim of "scientific" explanations of difference and weakness) is ridiculous. Nobody comes yelling at him about his opining over humor or blushing, because those things don't have any danger of being used as the next volley of pseudo-scientific justification for continuing systemic misogyny (or discrimination of any sort). Science is political, especially when it's about people, and I'm surprised he would find that strange at all. 

by Conor Friedersdorf

This seems like a sign that we're failing our troops: "For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan."