When words change, meaning does also. This is true in the literal sense (in my most craven moments, facing an impatient cashier at a busy lunch spot, I've ordered the most safely pronounceable sandwich on the menu, which is usually turkey) and in more oblique ways, too. Not long ago, Joe Biden, who stuttered openly into college, undertook a famously weird circumlocution seemingly to avoid landing on the word Avatar—a sound that he'd just nearly blocked on. The hesitation was roundly interpreted as a sign not of speech trouble but of mind trouble, and, in some sense, maybe it was. To word-substitute is to substitute one kind of verbal control for another, to feel your speech slowly drifting away from the voice in your head.
The second all Americans were safely out of the country, Obama came out with much more forceful language against Libya. Now think about the discipline of this. It represents the polar opposite of a politician’s desire to mouth off in public before fulfilling his more immediate duties to his own employees and citizens. Of course, preening blowhards are already posturing and gasping at the prudence and restraint of this president, with this kind of rhetoric
The idea that assistance does not compromise the autonomy of the assisted is in fact one of the central beliefs of liberalism. We invoke it in our social policies all the time. We help people to help themselves. And that is all that is being asked of us by these liberalizing revolutions; no less, but no more. We disappointed Tehran. We disappointed Cairo. Now we are disappointing Tripoli. It is so foolish, and so sad, and so indecent.
Indecent? That is a very strong word. Would risking hundreds of US citizens to become hostages of a madman be a model of “decency”? And the notion that America would actually serve its own interests by military intervention in Egypt, Iran or Libya is simply blind to the sobering lessons of the last decade. It is a shot almost defined by its cheapness.
Obama’s warning about war crimes is appropriate. (If only he had the same position when it comes to the war criminals who once ran this country.) It seems to me to be extremely important to state that all those complicit in these atrocities by Qaddafi’s regime be informed that they will one day soon be brought to justice and prosecuted for war crimes. This is the latest:
AJE source says that “security officials were at Tripoli medical centre all day today … the injured did not go in for help”. He estimates that 70 were killed last night alone.
“They were left to drown in their own blood … the blood banks are empty … last night (Friday) Tripoli medical centre was over run with the wounded”
Blackout. No international journalists. No network cameras. And yet the story of Libya's revolution has poured out on twitter, facebook and other online platforms. It's a story that has been raw, uncut and shocking.
More debunking of the "What Facebook Revolution?" argument here.
Here is Paul Bedard of US News reporting on Newt Gingrich’s bizarre assertion that president Obama has said he will stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who plans within two weeks to announce if he will run for president, said today that if President Obama doesn’t change his mind and order his Justice Department to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, Republicans in Congress should strike back and even consider impeachment proceedings.
“I believe the House Republicans next week should pass a resolution instructing the president to enforce the law and to obey his own constitutional oath, and they should say if he fails to do so that they will zero out [defund] the office of attorney general and take other steps as necessary until the president agrees to do his job,” said Gingrich. “His job is to enforce the rule of law and for us to start replacing the rule of law with the rule of Obama is a very dangerous precedent.”
Do either of these individuals – Bedard or Gingrich – understand the distinction between enforcing a law, and, when presented with a circuit court case without binding precedents in its jursdiction, a decision not to defend the law in court, while offering the House of Representatives a chance to do so?
Even the Newsmax interviewer stated the position correctly at the beginning, and Newsmax’s report hedges more than US News by saying that Obama would not “fully enforce” the law. Neither is true, but it shows that Bedard and US News are now more propagandistic than the loony right Newsmax. Now I know that Gingrich is not the brightest light on the Christmas tree, and may be simply confused. Here is Gingrich’s interview:
Here is the salient passage from Holder’s letter to Boehner:
The President has informed me that Section 3 will continue to be enforced by the Executive Branch. To that end, the President has instructed Executive agencies to continue to comply with Section 3 of DOMA, consistent with the Executive’s obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, unless and until Congress repeals Section 3 or the judicial branch renders a definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality. This course of action respects the actions of the prior Congress that enacted DOMA, and it recognizes the judiciary as the final arbiter of the constitutional claims raised.
So what Gingrich said is untrue – but a powerful meme. At best, it’s wrong and he’s merely once again revealing how intellectually vapid he is; at worst, it’s a conscious decision to lie. When appealing to the Newsmax right, expect the various candidates to argue that the president is not going to enforce the marriage law on the books, thereby abdicating his constitutional duty. Gingrich even hints at impeachment on those grounds. This lie needs to be countered.
The first commenter on Bedard’s piece points out the error and yet no correction has been made.
Freeman Dyson reviewsThe Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. Gleick's vision of an infinite library:
We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
There’s a notion in the minds of some that the 70s were a carefree time, cool and kitschy and fun! and innocent, in a peculiar fashion. It was not. For one thing, there was peculiar fashion. For another – well, consider this site a brief against the nostalgia that inevitably attends any bygone time. Every era has its good points and regrettable trends, but for sheer idiocy, ugliness, meretricious music, televised banality and general malaise the 70s are unparalleled.
Your friend comes to visit. You go to whatever exhibit you found on the New York Times website that morning while he was sleeping. At the museum, he talks about the pictures in a voice loud enough to make you uncomfortable. He asks, “What do you think makes this painting so powerful?” Or, “What do you think this artist is trying to say?” The questions are not stupid. It’s just that you can’t think of how to answer them without sounding stupid yourself. Should you say, “I think the vibrant use of orange really enhances the composition”? Or, “She’s critiquing commodity culture, while also reveling in it”? No! Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed.
Stanley McChrystal describes the Taliban as a "uniquely 21st-century threat":
Over time, it became increasingly clear — often from intercepted communications or the accounts of insurgents we had captured — that our enemy was a constellation of fighters organized not by rank but on the basis of relationships and acquaintances, reputation and fame. Who became radicalized in the prisons of Egypt? Who trained together in the pre-9/11 camps in Afghanistan? Who is married to whose sister? Who is making a name for himself, and in doing so burnishing the al Qaeda brand?
The Dish 