Month: August 2011

by Zack Beauchamp

Responding to Jonathan Alter's question/provocation (“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?”), Pete Wehner lists a bunch of facts about how bad the economy is. Well, yes, Pete, but is that the President's fault? Obama conspicuously lacks the ability to snap his fingers and make the unemployment rate go down. The much more interesting question is whether Obama could have been doing better. Wehner's answer to this obvious point reveals the depressing thrust of his argument:

What makes this record doubly horrifying is rapid growth is the norm after particularly deep recessions — but under Obama, our recovery has been historically weak. President Obama (and Alter) can blame his predecessor, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, events in Europe, ATM machines and even athlete’s foot for his predicament. It doesn’t really matter, as even Obama conceded during the early months of his presidency, when he declared, “One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable.”

So, for Wehner, the question of what actually screwed the economy is besides the point. Because Obama acknowledges that he's held responsible politically, any and all problems may be legitimately blamed on his actions. Substantive questions about what caused any such problems are fundamentally irrelevant, as the metric of whether "Obama has been a such bad President" has nothing to do with actually assessing the consequences of his actions, and everything to do with what charges might stick politically. Thus, in what appears to be an attempt to reductio his own argument, Wehner counts low home values as evidence that Obama has failed (how could anyone think otherwise?) By Wehner's metric, as long it's happening under Obama, it's evidence Obama is a bad president. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

But substance appears not to matter here, despite Wehner getting that "[Alter] wants to know on a substantive basis why Obama should be judged to have failed so far."  The entire exercise is brazenly, nakedly political. It makes a mockery out of Wehner's claim to give a fair hearing to his opponents' arguments. He ought to be embarrassed.

by Patrick Appel

Howard Kurtz claims Irene was overhyped. David Kurtz explains the limits of weather forecasting and defends the government's preparations:

The bottom line is we have a lot better idea where a hurricane is going to hit than we do how strong it will be when it gets there. That uncertainty creates risk. How do you prudently address that risk? It's really simple. You have to be more aggressive in your disaster preparation. That means getting people out early, while the getting is still good. It means closing flood gates, securing property, shutting down mass transit systems, and prepositioning first responders and relief efforts.

Doug Mataconis supports the media's coverage of the storm. Nate Silver says that, compared to other hurricanes, "the coverage was quite proportionate to the amount of death and destruction that the storm caused":

 Irene right now ranks as the 10th-deadliest storm since 1980, with some possibility of that number going higher. And it ranks as the 8th most destructive storm economically, give or take. Meanwhile, it received about the 10th-most media coverage.

Joyner doubts Silver's numbers. Earlier thoughts on the politics of Irene here.

by Patrick Appel

Irene's artsy side:

Irene NYC from Buffalo Picture House on Vimeo.

by Zack Beauchamp

Nikolas Gvosdev (free subscription required) sees Libya as proof-of-concept for low-cost intervention:

The course of events in Libya over the past months validates what I have termed the "just enough" doctrine. The Obama administration successfully resisted pressure — from Libyan rebels, European allies and domestic critics alike — to increase the U.S. role in order to achieve a faster outcome in Libya. If that doctrine takes on greater coherence, it could strengthen the arguments for limited, targeted assistance in other such situations. In other words, it may present a way to square the growing demands for fiscal austerity with the ongoing challenge of maintaining America's position as a global leader.

Stewart Patrick largely agrees. Chris Rawley thinks the conventional Army won't have much to do in this new type of war:

There is little role for a large standing army in supporting the national security of the United States once we have pulled out of our manpower-intensive counterinsurgency fights. What does an armored force give us against an opposing armored force when air dominance allows us to slice and dice enemy armored divisions? (And if we didn’t have air supremacy, we wouldn’t commit large numbers of conventional ground troops to be slaughtered by an opposing air force anyway). How often do we use artillery to suppress threats in a collateral damage adverse world now that we have on call ISR over-watch and precision guided munitions? And why on earth would we deploy a large conventional infantry force for constabulary duty in another protracted ground war given the lessons (relearned) in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I don't know about "protracted" or "large," but some humanitarian interventions might require conventional infantry units. Rwanda is a good example (pdf). That's the nub of the argument for caution about generalizing from Libya – yes, we may have found a model that succeeded in toppling Qaddafi, but there's no guarantee the same conditions that made that success possible will attain in the next humanitarian emergency. If heading off another catastrophe seems like it would require a significant troop deployment, we should debate it on those terms, weighing the real costs and benefits rather than blithely invoking Qaddafi or Milosevic.

by Zoë Pollock

Brian Thill dissects the imagery and fonts choices of the campaigns thus far:

We recognize in Perry’s iconography the pharmaceutical sheen of a throat lozenge, as if Perry held out the hope for us of serving as a blue Pfizer pill against the impotence of secular, post-industrial America.

… Where Bachmann needed to remind the world that the office she is seeking is indeed that of the presidency (meaning she could not get away with proclaiming her name alone), that otherwise innocent third line of hers, “For President,” heretofore largely ignored, now becomes critically important. Perry’s version elides the preposition altogether, and offers us instead the stark, alliterative “Perry President,” situating his name in perihelial proximity to the presidency. This is a man with no patience for prepositions, or propositions. It is a rootless, Manichean syntax, one that even the Incredible Hulk could love.

by Chris Bodenner

In the wake of the new study supporting the existence of truly bi guys, Tracy Clark-Flory talks to several:

Simon, a 26-year-old living in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells me, "Whenever, say, some prominent heterosexually married male public figure has a same-sex affair, literally everyone rolls their eyes at the 'closeted homosexual,'" he says. "I'm not sure I remember ever hearing someone seriously entertain the possibility that the philanderer was bisexual." 

Tracy's broader point: "Despite enormous strides made in the past decade for LGBT rights, male bisexuality remains a challenging idea and a unique taboo, even within sexually progressive circles."

by Patrick Appel

Building off Patricia Turner's op-ed, TNC identifies The Help's biggest problem, perpetuation of the myth that racists are evil through and through:

It's worth [remembering] that people brought their spouses and children to lynchings, that they kept gory reminders of the work on store counters. I'm sure many of these people were good parents, good spouses and deeply committed to their society. But it's much more comforting to imagine them racists as Lex Luthor evil and Jeffrey Dahmer depraved

For if we admit that racists–and by extension homophobes and misogynists–are not some alien species, but that they walk among us, then we must also admit that we are subject to looking past their flaws, and that we, ourselves, are subject to the same impulses. And then finally we must begin to see how easily we could have lived, in that time, and done nothing. Or done something horrible.

Harold Pollack makes related points. The film begins to address the complexity of racism when likeable characters, such as Skeeter's mother and Skeeter's boyfriend, enforce racist norms, but the movie does generally paint racism as one-dimensional and of the past. Earlier thoughts on the film here, here, and here.

by Zoë Pollock

In the midst of a vegetarian rebuttal to the arguments of carnivores, David Sirota attempts to shut down the libertarian angle:

A number of commenters have said what commenter Jeffrey P. Harrison said: "I am a carnivore [and] it's none of your damned business." This is usually where the conversation with angry, over-aggressive carnivores ends up — with the carnivore going libertarian, refusing to discuss the substance and science of food decisions, other than to declare it an entirely "personal choice." The problem, of course, is that these decisions are everyone's business when they threaten our collective air, water and ecosystem, as meat eating disproportionately does…

His earlier column, which prompted the above, explored why vegetarian cuisine glorifies meat-eating with all its fake meat products.

(Photo by Flickr user D.L.)

by Zoë Pollock

“My brain is like a chicken pot pie. His is like a refrigerator that is all very organized — pickles here, salad there," – Rick Perry on his consultant Karl Rove in 1994, when Rove helped him become agriculture commissioner.

by Zoë Pollock

Peter Beinart sounds it:

Undergirding post-9/11 neoconservatism was the assumption that the money for a quasi-imperial foreign policy would always be there, and that, if necessary, domestic spending could always be slashed—and perhaps even taxes raised—to make sure the Pentagon was spared the ax. But that assumption no longer holds. Forced to choose between health-care spending and military spending, as they increasingly must do, most Democrats will choose the former. And forced to choose between military spending and tax hikes, Republicans in this Tea Party era will throw the Pentagon under the bus as well. Post-9/11 neoconservatism was a doctrine that rejected limits. Now that limits are becoming, painfully, the centerpiece of American political debate, it’s no longer a plausible vision of America’s relationship to the world.

Greg Scoblete disagrees with one element of Beinart's argument:

[N]eoconservatism doesn't rise or fall on a particular set of enemies, it's a way of thinking of the world and America's role in it (which, incidentally, has an endless capacity to identify enemies abroad). Agree or disagree with it, it's not going anywhere.

(Image via Ben Dunant's take on the Heritage Foundation's new report)