Month: May 2011

Genius:

State Department diplomat Nelson Milstrand, who appeared on CNN last week and offered an informed, thoughtful analysis implying that Israel could perhaps exercise more restraint toward Palestinian moderates in disputed territories, was asked to resign Tuesday. “The United States deeply regrets any harm Mr. Milstrand’s careful, even-tempered, and factually accurate remarks may have caused our democratic partner in the Middle East,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an unequivocal condemnation of the veteran foreign-service officer’s perfectly reasonable statements.

Tim Pawlenty: he's not an exciting presidential candidate, but he plays one on TV:

Yglesias sees Mitch Daniels decision not to run as a benefit to Pawlenty:

Intrade bettors continue to think that Mitt Romney’s odds are better than Pawlenty’s but I don’t see how that could possibly be right. I don’t think it’s appropriate for guys who write about politics for a living to bet on those markets, but I’d say is a huge buy opportunity priced at around 20%. I’d rate 50% as a fair market value.

In an op-ed, Pawlenty says he's "I’m in Iowa to speak truthfully about farm subsidies." Ed Morrissey holds his breath:

If Pawlenty goes to Iowa to oppose farm subsidies, that’s about as honest as a Midwestern politician can get.  Will Iowans support that kind of long-overdue honesty, or will they punish Pawlenty for it?

P.M. Carpenter, meanwhile, sees Pawlenty as a better anti-Romney candidate than Huntsman:

I can't see how Pawlenty fails to gain the advantage here. He's been on the hoodwinking campaign trail for months, polishing his evasions to reporters' question, while Huntsman is so politically rusty, he actually answers them.

For my part, Pawlenty seems to me like a re-run of Bob Kerrey. On paper, he's perfect. In reality, he drains the energy out of the room. But he may become the last man running.

A helpful summary from Peter Beinart:

A sailor throws a drowning man a life preserver. How dare you, screams the man. Because of you, people are going to think I can’t swim.

And here’s an important observation on the “indefensible borders” of 1967 meme:

If Israel’s 1967 border is indefensible against conventional attack, land swaps of the sort that Clinton and Olmert envisaged actually make the problem worse. The settlement of Ariel, which Olmert hoped to swap for land inside Israel, juts like a bony finger 13 miles into the northern West Bank. According to the 2003 Geneva Initiative, keeping Maale Adumim, another large settlement for which Israel might swap land, requires a thin land bridge across a Palestinian state to Jerusalem.

How on earth would keeping these islands of Jewish settlement make Israel’s borders more defensible? To the contrary, if Israel ever did suffer a conventional attack from the West Bank, one of the first things it would do is evacuate places like Ariel and Maale Adumim, precisely because their location makes them, well, indefensible.

A reader writes:

We had some laughs at my church yesterday (Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York) about the non-event Rapture.  A former curate had said on Facebook, "No Rapture, and a jockey named Jesus just won the Preakness."  A woman had an automated text message that said, "I have been taken in the Rapture and will not be avialable to return your message."  That sort of thing.

I got to thinking, and I remember a prediction that the world would end – I was about 10 years old at the time, in mid 1950s.  I vividly recall feeling terribly frightened by this prospect, since I was not prepared to die and lose everything that I had.  I felt sick to my stomach, and I lost several nights' sleep.  The memory made me wonder how many children felt the same way yesterday.  These thoughthless, self-aggrandizing prophets of "doom" do not realize how much harm they can do.

Another writes:

I'm not so much interested in mocking the poor delusioned people who got caught up in the hysteria. I want to call Howard Camping to account for hurting them.

This man managed to strike such fear into the hearts of certain gullible, frightened, un-educated people that one man committed suicide (Nairobi) and one attempted the murder of her own children (California). He terrified people into destroying their own lives. What happens on Monday morning when the guy who blew his $140K life savings on pamphlets about the Rapture which didn't happen wakes up and still has rent to pay? What happens to the child born to that couple in Florida who didn't plan on having any money in June? Granted that these people did these things on their own, but they wouldn't have come up with this particular idea of this particular date if Camping hadn't roused such utter fear in them.

When the jokes have died down and we're on to the next political scandal or summer blockbuster, these people's lives will still be in rubble. Camping must face charges of fraud, and take some kind of responsibility for the cruelty he visited on the foolish. Maybe then the next foaming-at-the-mouth prophet will be less likely to shout "fire" in a crowded church.

Another:

You said, "They are not examples of religious faith but of marginal nutballism."  To an atheist, the belief in a omnipotent god is nutballism already – further marginalization is not needed.  In my opinion, the reason this story had so much traction was because, for once, a self-proclaimed prophet made a specific prophecy of something easily disprovable.  While there was an aspect of "look at those crazies!", to me the bigger story is how they were going to react when it didn't happen. To a strict rationalist, it's just one more in a long line of failures for religion and faith, but it's one we can definitely cite as being firmly incorrect (rather than True but pending).

The Daily What captions the above video:

“I do not understand why nothing has happened,” said former MTA employee Robert Fitzpatrick as it became evident that the Rapture was not taking place as Harold Camping had predicted. The 60-year-old spent $140k out-of-pocket to promote the Family Radio Network founder’s Judgment Day prophecy. “I did what I had to do,” Fitzpatrick told an angry Times Square mob that had gathered to excoriate him. “I did what the Bible said.”

"We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that," – Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family.

An amusing little gaffe from the St Paul Pioneer Press.

A recent study (pdf) charted bureaucrats' alignment with President Bush and Congress from 2007 to 2008. John Sides summarizes their findings:

They … aggregate the survey responses to measure the average ideology of various federal agencies.  And here’s where it gets really interesting.  When agencies are ideologically far from the average member of Congress, the longer and more detailed are the laws that Congress passes to govern that agency.  In other words, when an agency is ideologically distant from Congress, Congress appears to afford that agency less discretion, as manifest in its insistence on these detailed legal rules.

Toolik Field Station, Alaska, 10.38 pm

The Leveretts have a cold-blooded analysis of the president's speech to the pro-Israel lobby:

The President’s fourth point—about the changing international context for Middle East peace efforts—is new in presidential rhetoric and absolutely critical.

The language used by the President describes this changing context in terms of an “impatience” with continued irresolution that “is already manifesting itself in capitals around the world” and “is growing”. At the same time, there is a subtly conveyed assessment that this impatience is growing not just in predictable places, like the Arab world and Europe, but also in Latin America (with Brazil in the lead) and Asia (where the world’s greatest concentration of rising powers is found). In other words, impatience is growing in precisely the non-OECD parts of the world that will gain relative power and influence at the expense of the United States in coming years. That is why, in the President’s words, “we cannot afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades, to achieve peace.”

Obama justifies his position on the grounds that “the world is moving too fast” and that “the extraordinary challenges facing Israel would only grow”. But what this really means is that, in coming years, America’s ability to continuing shielding Israel from the consequences of its own benighted choices will shrink. America’s commitment to Israel’s security may be, as Obama described it, “unwavering”. But the extent to which that unwavering commitment actually translates into incremental security for Israel will almost certainly decline in the future.