But campaign gold. The baby reminds me a little of America realizing it can't have everything. Maybe the calming comes in the second term. But he's trying.
Month: June 2011
The Problem With Male Fashion
I mean, seriously. Number 3 is my fave.
Are Anti-Interventionist Republicans All Talk?
Chait admits that "some Republicans are sounding anti-interventionist notes now" but argues that the "Republican fear of reckless American intervention … will disappear again as soon as a Republican takes the oath of office." Douthat counters:
[I]f you were placing bets on how a particular candidate would govern, the fact that Jon Huntsman seems to be trying to ride the anti-interventionist wave whereas Tim Pawlenty is more likely to channel John McCain provides a decent reason to wager that a Huntsman administration would tilt more realist-Hamiltonian in its foreign policy, and a Pawlenty administration more neoconservative-Wilsonian. And placing bets, in a sense, is all that primary voters ever do.
And the sheer cost of the unending war, given the fiscal crisis, is also an obvious factor. I think deeper shifts are driving this: the massive costs and barely visible benefits of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the incoherence and expense of the Libyan intervention, and the sense that is now endemic that America has over-spent, over-borrowed and over-reached. In a recession that is the new normal, expensive nation-building efforts in foreign countries will have to cede to nation-building efforts at home. And now that Obama has decimated al Qaeda and killed bin Laden, the casus belli has been fulfilled. Hence the record number of Americans favoring immediate withdrawal.
I think Chait under-estimates the collapse of neoconservatism as a governing philosophy. It's alive and well at TNR, butressed by a liberal interventionist chorus, but not in the GOP.
T-Paw’s Pitch
His first campaign ad:
Pareene fails to see Pawlenty's appeal:
The ads won't help the essential problem: There's no reason to support Pawlenty over anyone else. The press loves Huntsman, the Tea Party freaks love Bachmann, the old school Tea Party freaks love Ron Paul, and the majority of voters actually polled tend to prefer Mitt Romney, the competent-seeming rich person they have all heard of.
Quote For The Day
"If someone feels the need to ask me directly about my sexual preference, I have a few responses. If you're an important person in my life, I'll say, 'Yes of course I'm gay.'" If I'm asked in connection to a civil rights issue, I'm happy to stand up and be counted as gay and fight for our rights as I do for all civil liberties. If you're a relative stranger and are prying, I take the Southerner's approach by politely saying that it's my personal business and has nothing to do with you," – Trace, Orlando, FL.
It's from a new book, Gay In America, just out. Hat tip: Moylan.
“Would Be Impossible”
I take Jon Huntsman's view that "re-defining marriage would be impossible" to be a theological, not a political statement. Because politically, same-sex marriage cannot be impossible when it has already been in existence for many years in several states. My civil marriage, licensed both in Massachusetts and Washington DC, is not "impossible", although, like all marriages, it may seem so from time to time. It is an empirical, legal and political fact.
What Huntsman presumably means is that in his faith tradition, a same-sex marriage would be impossible. Here is what the LDS Church believes about marriage:
In the marriage ceremony a man and a woman make covenants to God and to each other and are said to be sealed as husband and wife for time and all eternity. The Latter-Day Saint distinguishes itself on this point…
In the current LDS Church, both men and women may enter a celestial marriage with only one partner at a time. A man may be sealed to more than one woman. If his wife dies, he may enter another celestial marriage, and be sealed to both his living wife and deceased wife or wives. Many Mormons believe that all these marriages will be valid in the eternities and the husband will live together in the Celestial Kingdom as a family with all to whom he was sealed.
But it does seem plenty odd, don't you think, that a leading Mormon would argue that marriage cannot be redefined, when his own church redefined it well over a century ago to outlaw polygamy, previously one of the LDS church's deepest doctrines? If you can redefine it from that, why would subsequent redefinitions – such as allowing inter-racial marriage – not be permitted?
More to the point: if Huntsman is referring to his religious position, wouldn't that bar all non-Mormons from marriage as Mormons understand it? No non-Mormon can be married in a temple. Even non-Mormon parents of the groom or bride are not allowed. So if marriage cannot be redefined outside Mormon grounds, does Huntsman believe that anyone apart from Mormons are actually, you know, married?
Poseur Alert
“F [Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson] is amazing. I’ll be, like, complaining about my music-video director, and he’ll just put everything in perspective by being like, ‘The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more—the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction),’ or something, and he’s right," – Ke$ha.
Update: It appears to be parody. A reader writes:
The Ke$ha-Jameson "friendship" is a silly joke, responding to a silly hoax-rumor yesterday – incredulously reported by the NY Post – that Lady Gaga and Slavoj Zizek have some sort of deep "friendship". The "Gaga-Zizek" friendship is fake, as is the Ke$ha-Jameson connection.
What Knowing Where Your Money Goes Doesn’t Change
John Sides's survey found that giving taxpayers a receipt didn't significantly move opinion:
A tax receipt may be a valuable reform, even if it does not change how Americans feel about their taxes or how they might attempt to cut the budget deficit. Nevertheless, it is perhaps surprising that the receipt had such small effects in this experiment, given how little many Americans know about how the government spends its money.
Example of a taxpayer receipt, via Ezra, after the jump:
Asking Your Parents About Sex
Their sex, that is:
My hippie parents were always open to talking about the mind-bending wonders of meaningful, loving sex — and how it's the "glue" (ew) of marriage — but I knew little of my mom's sexual and romantic past. I had lots of questions, and her terminal cancer diagnosis a year ago drove home the fact that I might never have them answered. I also know someone whose father passed away before he could ask him some burning sexual questions, namely why his dad's marriage to his mom was largely sexless. Now it will forever be a mystery to him, one that is deeply tied to concerns he has about his own sexual experiences, and it haunts him.
(Photo from the "My Parents Were Awesome" tumblr)
Bringing The “Troops” Home
Joe Klein previews Obama's Afghanistan speech:
This will be portrayed as the return of the 30,000 “surge” troops deployed last year, but that’s not quite accurate. The troops being withdrawn, especially those coming home this year, will be mostly support personnel, the engineers and construction workers who built the facilities to house the amped up US presence in Afghanistan. The military commanders want to keep as many combat units as possible–i.e. nearly all of them–for this year’s fighting season.
The Dish 