Month: June 2011

A reader writes:

OK, I get it that it's bad that politicians lie to us. But I'm much more concerned about the political lies they tell us than the lies about their personal lives.  For me the lie "I didn't have sexual relations with that woman" will never trouble me as much as "Our involvement in Iraq will be a matter of weeks, not months".

Let alone president Bush's repeated lie on a matter of far graver significance: "We do not torture." The Vitter analogy seems powerful to me. Vitter broke the law; no one is suggesting Weiner did. If Vitter is still in the Senate, why should Weiner resign? And think of the odd lies Sarah Palin has told the public in her brief career. Some perspective please. Rick Hertzberg finds the distinction between illicit sex and lying to be practically speaking non-existent:

The problem is that lying is an inherent part of adultery and, by extension, of any illicit or potentially embarrassing sexual activity or proclivity. By itself, the fact that a person has lied about sex tells you nothing about that person’s general propensity to lie. Unlike most citizens, prominent politicians like Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Anthony Weiner make speeches by the hundred, give media interviews constantly, and have extensively documented public records. If the politician is a habitual or characterological liar, the public record will show it and the lying-about-sex is redundant. If the politician is not a habitual or characterological liar, his lying-about-sex is misleading—is itself a lie, in a way.

His approval rating is significantly higher than the number of Americans who think things are going well in the country. But Nate Silver sees danger for Obama:

[T]he “going well” number and presidential approval have historically come into much sharper alignment with one another in presidential election years. … Americans may think of their presidents in fundamentally different ways in election years, taking their president’s performance and their satisfaction with the direction of the country to be one in the same.

Why muddy what most regard as an unexpectedly successful bail-out with rhetorical sleights of hand?

Lana Asfour assesses the women's rights movement in the wake of Ben Ali:

Nadia Hakimi, the executive director of the Association des Femmes Démocratiques, told me that a general swing back to conservatism is likely, and she believes that Islamists deserve to express themselves after their terrible persecution. … It was the ‘crazy contradictions of this country’ that caused Nadia to shake her head in frustration. ‘Whole families were terrorized under Ben Ali,’ she said. ‘Yet it was his party, and not the leftists, who defended women’s rights.’ The Arab Spring has opened up the region to the unknown, and no one can predict exactly how events will unfold or how popular the Islamist parties ultimately will be.

There is an obvious economic policy mix for the current moment: bipartisan agreement on long term cuts in entitlements and defense and short-term quantitative easing and help for the housing market. That's Clive Crook's view and it makes a great deal of sense to me. But he deftly sums up why it won't happen:

[W]hat ought US fiscal policy to do? It should combine renewed short-term stimulus (in forms that subsidise jobs) with measures to reduce borrowing (revenue increases and entitlement reforms) in the longer term. How could something so obvious be controversial? In a way, in fact, there is no controversy: Democrats and Republicans are agreed in rejecting this out of hand.

This is, to my mind, where Obama has failed. In much of his decisions, even when I have disagreed, I have seen the policy rationale. Here, I see only a political rationale. By refusing to grasp the nettle of the debt in his State of the Union, Obama ceded the initiative to the GOP. They typically over-reached by ruling out any tax increases at all and ending Medicare years down the road. Obama and the Dems will benefit politically from this in the short and medium term. But it remains my view that Obama's decision to duck backing his own deficit commission was a mistake.

I wish there were a reasonable opposition party to negotiate with. But a refusal even to use tax reform as a way to increase revenues is reckless. Proposing such a radical overhaul to Medicare renders it politically dead for now and the foreseable future – which is not pragmatic reform; it is ideological posturing. But I also wish Obama were not as cautious. Many of us backed him because he promised to put policy before politics. If this debt crisis is not a moment for exactly that kind of candor, when is?

Bruce Bartlett argues that Europeans are not much more heavily taxed than Americans once you consider healthcare costs:

In short, a substantial portion of the higher tax burden that Europeans pay is really illusory. They are really just paying their health insurance premiums through their taxes rather than through lower wages, as we do.

And so we confront the question. Can the shameless beat the clueless?

More than six in 10 Americans say they do not consider Palin qualified to serve as president. That is a slightly better rating for the former governor than through most of last year, but is another indication of widespread public doubts about a possible presidential run.

The Post-ABC poll asked Republicans and GOP-leaning independents whom they would vote for if a primary or caucus were held now in their state. Romney topped the list, with 21 percent, followed by Palin at 17 percent. No one else reached double digits …

Meanwhile, the Post poll finds the OBL bounce for Obama over. The poll of polls does not yet suggest that as we reported a couple days ago. But the WaPo might be the leader of a trend, given the recent gloomy jobs news. Then there's the data that Ron Brownstein reports in National Journal, which suggest resilient Obama strength:

[Obama']s approval rating among college-educated white women–who gave him a 52 percent majority of their votes in 2008–has revived from 46 percent last August to 56 percent in the latest survey. Likewise, he's recovered among independents from 43 percent then to 54 percent now, and among Hispanics from 53 percent last summer to 65 percent in the latest poll. Each of those results returns him close to his 2008 showing with those groups.

Obama has seen comparable improvements in the poll among groups more dubious of him. His approval rating among white men without a college education–one of his toughest audiences since his emergence as a national candidate–has improved from 30 percent last August to 38 percent now, essentially even with the 39 percent of them he carried in 2008. He has recorded similar gains among whites aged 30-44–families in their prime child-rearing years–also placing him back at his vote level with them in 2008.

That poll was taken May 18 – 22. I think we can safely say that the political climate is volatile.

Joshua Landis sees the latest indications that Syria "is slipping toward civil war":

The announcement today that 120 Syrian officers have been killed in Jisr al-Shughour indicates how dire the contest between the opposition and government forces has become. This weekend over 100 Syrians were killed by government troops. None of the reporters I spoke to today believe Syrian reports of a massacre. The LA Times puts the word in quotation marks. Other reporters stated to me that the government has offered neither proof nor pictures of killings in Jisr al-Shaghour. Opposition leaders argue that the claim is being manufactured by the government in order to justify escalating security measures.

The chilling propaganda from Syrian state TV:

The state will act firmly, with force and in line with the law. It will not stay arms folded in the face of armed attacks on the security of the homeland … The armed groups are using weapons and grenades … the people in Jisr al-Shughur are urging the army to intervene speedily.

The weekend massacres produced some horrifying details:

[P]rotesters poured out of mosques and marched in record numbers toward the city’s main square, said a 27-year-old resident who gave his name as Hassan, many carrying roses to give to security forces. Before they reached the square, Al Aasy, security forces opened fire. “They didn’t warn us with speakers or fire tear gas at us,” Hassan said. “They began shooting directly at us. They wanted to kill all of us, not frighten us back to our homes.” …

In neighboring Idlib Province on Saturday, Syrian forces used helicopter gunships for the first time. They bombarded the village of Jisr al-Shughour for more than half an hour, killing 10 people and sending dozens of families fleeing to Turkey, activists said. …

So many were treated for gunshot wounds at local hospitals that blood supplies ran low, residents said. Throughout the night, loudspeakers on mosques normally used for calls to prayer urged people to donate blood.

Enduring America describes the above video:

The propaganda war over the identity of the martyrs continues. This video allegedly shows anti-government protesters carrying the body of a police officer, Hussein Kamal Ismail Hula, who was killed because he refused to shoot protesters. If the man in the coffin is a police officer, and these protesters are anti-regime, it adds a high amount of credibility to the opposition's claim, as they have the body.

A reader writes:

I have to quibble with your selection of Commentary's Jonathan S. Tobin. The award is for people who choose truth over loyalty to a faction. But Tobin is a neocon, and Palin has broken ranks with the neocons and their foreign policy. As a result, Jennifer Rubin has switched from defending Palin to attacking her. Are you sure that Tobin isn't just following along?

Not sure. Some neocons are still more anti-anti-Palin than anti-. Once she dissed Krauthammer, the dye die was cast. But point taken.