A reader writes:
According to the hydra-headed GOP, Obama should have unilaterally attacked Libya weeks ago to help Al Qaeda sympathizers assassinate a terrorist tyrant who was recently courted by the Bush administration. Also he should have concluded the mission by now, sent the bill to China and then done the same thing in Syria, Yemen and Iran.
It will get worse before it gets better.
Conan and Jake bond hirsutically. I can't help being prophetic, can I?
Gallup’s latest poll on Libya reveals that, for now, Obama’s exquisite balancing act is more palatable to the public than to the consistency-seeking pundits:
In scaling back the United States’ participation in the NATO operation in Libya to a supporting role, rather than the lead role it started out with, President Obama has moved U.S. policy closer to where public opinion resides on the issue. Relatively few Americans want the U.S. to play the lead role (10%) or to withdraw altogether (22%). Most, 65%, can live with something in between — either a “minor” or “major” U.S. role.
Whether Obama can satisfy both of these groups going forward remains to be seen, but adopting a moderate supporting role of some kind could earn broad public backing for this military engagement. At this point, the goal of the mission — whether narrowly focused on a no-fly zone or broadened to include regime change — does not appear to be critical in attracting majority public support.
A reader pleads:
I greatly enjoy reading your blog. You always have something interesting to say, and you link to interesting notes from other media and your own readers. But according to my RSS reader, you are shoving some 50 to 60 articles per day. (Yesterday was 64!) This is just too much damn volume.
I know you have a team of editors helping you out. It’s nice that your blog is successful enough to hire help and shove ever more content down the pipe. But, at some point, too much content became crap crammed down the pipe.
Please, Andrew. I want to read what you write and the articles you deem most worthy of linking too. But I don’t have time each day to sort out the worthy articles from the unworthy ones. Reading your blog has become too damn much work. It is just too much cool stuff. Ease off the volume and stop showing off. 20 to 30 polished posts per day is vastly better than 50 to 60. I know this might mean fewer hits on your blog, but at some point, quality is superior to quantity.
Please, turn off the firehose.
We have indeed gone a little nuts the past couple of weeks, with over 700 posts. When the stories in the news are this fascinating, and when events which alone would merit total attention pile on top of each other (the Libyan war, Fukushima, government shutdown, the Egyptian revolution), this can happen. We’re going to calm it down a bit as we approach the Beast.
Douthat remains a skeptic, as I do, of the Libyan war. This is dead-on:
Obama’s “false choice” was actually a real choice. And by choosing war in Libya, he probably committed America far more completely than last night’s speech was willing to admit.
This is not a prediction:
From the air, the United States is supplying much more firepower than any other country.
The allies have fired nearly 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles since the campaign started on March 19, all but 7 from the United States. The United States has flown about 370 attack missions, and its allied partners have flown a similar number, but the Americans have dropped 455 precision-guided munitions compared with 147 from other coalition members.
Besides taking part in the airstrikes, the American military is taking the lead role in gathering intelligence, intercepting Libyan radio transmissions, for instance, and using the information to orchestrate attacks against the Libyan forces on the ground. And over the weekend the Air Force quietly sent three of its most fearsome weapons to the operation.
Chait rightly marvels at the latest from Newt:
"I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."
So we're facing a secular socialist Islamism? Run that by me one more time, will you? And this, I think, is where Gingrich gets his otherwise absurd reputation for being an intellectual.
What he does is grasp constantly for huge, world-historical theories and systems in order to situate himself in the present. Doubt rattles him; moderation befuddles him; pragmatism offends him. Only Great Ideas appeal. But he is too emotional to separate his feelings from his thoughts in all this (a human failing but one to be resisted as best one can). And so the content of the ideas becomes secondary to their political usefulness. Only then – when Gingrich sees himself as utterly right and, duh, winning – does he feel comfortable.
His conversion to nineteenth century Catholicism is the kind of thing a Marxist/neocon would do in the 21st Century. What else today has the appeal of total truth in which the tension between faith and politics is reconciled entirely? Apart, of course, from Islamism.
Dan Savage reacts to the news:
I have to say that between DADT, DOMA, anti-bullying initiatives, and now this, the Obama administration has turned things around. Was it Rahm's departure? Was it the realization that gay issues have become a wedge that divides Republicans? Was it panic over the drop in gay donations to Dems during the mid-terms and the rise in the percentage of the gay vote going to Republicans? Whatever it was, whatever it is, I'll take it. Even if it is, as some have suggested, a cold political calculation and not true lurv, I'll take it. (Why wouldn't we want those cold political calculations to add up in our favor?)
I really hope it isn't true lurv. That can evaporate; political interests endure. But I want to second Dan's point. He and I were pretty brutal on the Obamaites for dragging their feet on civil rights in the first year or so. But they get it now. We should not be complacent, as the GOP becomes even more implacably hostile to gay equality. But we should give credit where it's due. The cumulative effect of Obama's incrementalism has changed the landscape.
Nick Kimbrell compiles it:
Many of the most inspiring songs are far from new. The Egyptian national anthem, "Biladi, Biladi, Biladi," composed by Sayed Darwish after the First World War—another revolutionary period in Egypt’s history—has taken on an entirely new meaning. As have the Tunisian national anthem, "Humat al-Hima" (penned in part by Abdul-Qasim Al Shabi, whose poem “To the tyrants of the world” was recited at protests) and the nationalistic ballads of Egyptian icon and enchantress Oum Kalthoum. But a number of new songs have emerged during the uprisings, often written by those participating. Some are touching, some are tinged with menace, others are undeniably hilarious.
(Video: Egyptian musicians Amir Eid and Hany Adel’s compelling gentle rock song “Sout al-Horeya,” or “Voice of Freedom”)
A reader writes:
Having just written a piece on Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, I found the following slip amusing:
"he had just committed a Kinsey gaffe, which is to say he had spoken the truth when, ahem, something else would have perhaps been a better political option."
It should be a "Kins[l]ey gaffe."
But why not in fact a "Kinsey gaffe"? Alfred Kinsey was famous for getting his interviewees to tell the truth when they didn't want to, e.g. "When did you commence homosexual relations?" Instead of : "Have you ever had homosexual relations?"
Well, it's a slow morning here in Manhattan.
Steve Kornacki sees the danger the GOP has put itself in:
Unlike 2000, there's no George W. Bush in the current GOP field, a candidate with strong appeal to both the pragmatic party "establishment" and the right-wing base in Iowa. And (unless he decides to jump in), there isn't even a Huckabee, someone capable of at least putting a friendly face on the Iowa GOP's extremism. But there is Michele Bachmann. And Rick Santorum. And Newt Gingrich. And maybe Sarah Palin, if she were to run. And maybe even Herman Cain (you never know). It's hard to imagine any of them winning the GOP nomination next year, but one of them could very well win Iowa, and emerge as a major player on the national stage throughout '12 — a non-stop headache for a GOP that desperately wants swing voters to see the party as something more than a collection of hysterically irrational ideological extremists.
I wish this weren't so bloody predictable. A long long time ago, I wrote that it was "going to get worse before it gets better." My parallel was with the Tories after their crushing defeat by Tony Blair in 1997. You'd think a political party would respond to a massive loss by re-tooling completely. But in fact, those who survived the drubbing were in the safest seats and had the least to gain by reform. They marinated in their own obsessions and delusions, intent on distinguishing between those who were "sound" and those who were "unsound" (the equivalent of the RINO debate), and fixated on a mythic figure of the past (Thatcher, like Reagan and the GOP). So their defeat actually reinforced itself. They lost three general elections in a row.
The same is true of the Labour party after losing to Thatcher in the 1980s. They became controlled by their base which further entrenched their opponents. The GOP is, to my mind, in a worse state. The most alienated are minorities, who form the fastest growing slice of the electorate. And the Republicans' ability to leverage their base into winning mid-terms (thanks, Roger!) gives them an outlet in government, without controlling it. So they increasingly don't even have the outsider card. Hence their post-election slide. And the slim pickings for 2012.
The Dish 