Month: August 2011

Rick Mereki's gastronomical version of MOVE (a must-see if you haven't):

A reader writes:

The crux of Romney's problem is that, as a candidate, he embodies every single thing the GOP told us was wrong with both John Kerry and Al Gore. I know they want us to forget the eight year of George W. Bush – now they're expecting us to forget both campaigns as well …

Another:

The entire idea of Obama planning to attack Romney’s Mormonism is a creation from the minds of two Politico reporters (who’d have thought?).

No one from the Obama camp ever said that was part of the plan. See Steve Benen for how this idea typifies Washington’s incestuous story-line production. Douthat is just picking up the meme from others. And really, his religion is the weakest line of attack any mainstream opponent could choose.

Another:

His cool calm demeanor reminds me of the classic working middle-class fathers on TV in the 1950s  -  Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson.

Dan Drezner gets scared about the global economy:

The start of the Great Depression is commonly assumed to be the October 1929 stock market crash in the United States. It didn't really become the Great Depression, however, unti 1931, when Austria's Creditanstalt bank desperately needed injections of capital. Essentially, neither France nor England were willing to help unless Germany honored its reparations payments, and the United States refused to help unless France and the UK repaid its World War I debts. Neither of these demands was terribly reasonable, and the result was a wave of bank failures that spread across Europe and the United States.

The particulars of the current sovereign debt crisis are somewhat different from Creditanstalt, and yet it's fascinating how smart people keep referring back to that ignoble moment. The big commonality is that while governments might recognize the virtues of a coordinated response to big crises, they are sufficiently constrained by domestic discontent to not do all that much.

Charles R. Morris has similar thoughts. Drezner promises a less terrifying follow-up later in the week, if that helps.

Just a heads-up that I'll be liveblogging.

Chait defends them as a democratic exercise:

My view is that the recall elections played the role here that proponents of the Senate filibuster once claimed on its behalf — a rarely-used tool of strong minority dissent. The governor and his majority took office and quickly enacted legal changes they did not campaign on and which were designed in large measure to create a permanent partisan advantage. The Democrats responded by targeting Republican legislators who supported Walker.

Shikha Dalmia thinks the results are very bad news for Dems. E.J. Dionne is more ambivalent. I remain uninterested.

That's how Celeste Ward Gventer describes Obama's new Atrocities Prevention Board:

It risks becoming little more than the latest justification for continual U.S. interventionism. The country is entering a difficult period of austerity, and the president has called for a focus on "nation-building here at home." America's real and enduring financial woes are obvious; even China is taking this moment to lecture the United States on its "addiction to debts." A vanishingly small segment of the population has been deployed to two wars for nearly a decade at a cost of more than 6,000 dead, more than 42,000 wounded, and somewhere north of $2 trillion spent. The results of this investment are, at best, mixed. Now seems like a good time for "bringing our foreign policy home."

Jay Ulfelder, who had supported the Board's creation, counters. But you'd think after the Libya debacle this kind of liberal utopianism might be waning. Sadly, it isn't. By the way, heard from all those pious neocons lately on their latest little war? Radio silence from Wieseltier and Kaplan. But they were in a win-win position, because they can always blame Obama for not being more interventionist.

Peter Berger, reviewing Leila Ahmed's book on the veil and Islamic revival, notices a startling omission:

Nowhere does Ahmed mention beards!

Luckily, Mark Oppenheimer has her covered.

(Photo: Kenza Drider addresses the media as she demonstrates against the ban of the 'niqab' or full-face veil in public places, outside Notre-Dame cathedral on April 11, 2011 in Paris, France. By Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

Do you even have a category for dissents of dissents? In any case, I'm a southern man. Like another dissenter, I've loved and hated the South in predictable cycles and spent much of the last decade elsewhere. Now I'm home to stay in Louisiana. When I read the comments on the Southern, "planter class," I was infuriated. Whoever wrote that was a smug, narrow-minded jingoist in their own right, conveniently ignoring facts of history like the wholesale lynching of emancipated slaves during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, the racism at the heart of the Detroit Riots a century later, and the on-going hyper-segregation of many Northern cities.

That being said … those words hit me right in the gut.

There are reasons why, since President Obama's election, I've celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas exclusively with my wife's Northern family. And, I need to admit to myself that I've been avoiding certain relatives and friends for fear of being drawn into a political argument. We Southerners who don't fit the reader's hateful categorization (the vast, vast majority) need to start actively confronting the bigotry of our friends and family when they try to hide behind words like, "radical," "terrorist," and "Muslim."

Another writes:

The letter was describing the Tea Party as representative of "the rump south". Which they are. To be clear, I found these definitions of what it is to be "the rump" courtesy of the Free Dictionary (the first one I grabbed in a google):

5. The last or inferior part.
6. A legislature having only a small part of its original membership and therefore being unrepresentative or lacking in authority.

The reader was not describing the entire South. He/she was referring to the last and definitely the inferior part, which are, as definition 6 there phrases it "a small part of the original" and "therefore unrepresentative".  And that small inferior part of the Republican party comprised of an unrepresentative part of the south as a whole is indeed the rump. The rear end.

Another:

I've read you for years going back but never felt compelled to write in before reading these dissents, particularly the second one. Never does the reader to whom he or she was responding say that all Southerners fit the mold he described. Yet the dissenter immediately takes it personally and describes the attack as being on "all of us." A state, nation, or group can rightly be described in terms of the majority of its members with the understanding that each individual is different. To say the the South is the rump of the Republican Party is not to say a Southerner is a Republican.

The first reader is factually correct that a very large voting bloc in the South has voted along racial lines since our nation's founding. The core of the Tea Party today is the children of the people who enforced Jim Crow and owned slaves. To ignore where they're coming from is to ignore who they are. Not all or most Southerners are racist and not all racists are Southern. But without that core, the Republican Party simply does not have the political power that it has today. The Republican "coalition" (if any diversity of ideas among its members exists at all anymore) is built on the back of this rump. The GOP cannot exist without the type of people your first reader described and that is a big factor in why they've drifted so far right.

Another thing: When was the last time you heard a prominent Democrat claiming the South wasn't "real America"? The idea that coastal and urban voters are illegitimate and harmful to America is practically the official stance of the GOP. People like your dissenting reader of course shouldn't feel guilty about things they've never done wrong, but they could use a thicker skin when people point out the worst habits of their neighbors. Imagine if every Northern reader threw a tantrum like that every time we were described as Un-American.

Our reader writes:

This is the first view from any window as seen by our son, Andrew Michael Combs, born on August 4. (I'm sure you approve of the name, though I must admit it was not intentional.) The photo was taken at Awali Hospital, a little hospital near the desert (and away from Manama) in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

In the latest installment of this meme, Ira Stoll highlights the fact that record numbers of US troops have been killed since Obama took office:

Already, hundreds more American troops have been killed in Afghanistan during the less than three years of the Obama administration than during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

According to the iCasualties.org Web site, whose count more or less tracks that of other  sites devoted to these statistics, 630 American soldiers died in the Afghanistan operation in the years 2001 through 2008, when Mr. Bush was president, while 1097 American soldiers have died in the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. Even if you allocate the 30 or so American soldiers killed in January 2009 entirely to Mr. Bush, who was president until the January 20 inauguration, it is quite a record.

Include Iraq, and the comparison tells a similar story: about 1,300 Americans killed in operations related to Iraq and Afghanistan combined during the first two and a half or so years we’ve had of the Obama administration, versus less than 600 American casualties in the first full three years of the George W. Bush administration.

Well, for almost the first year there were no troops in Afghanistan at all, so that's a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, I think Stoll is onto something, especially with respect to civilian casualties which, though unintentional and dwarfed by the Taliban's extremism, have been awful in Af-Pak.

But it also seems to me that Obama is ending the war in Iraq (even though we may need Moqtada al-Sadr to prevent a semi-permanent US presence) and has finally engaged and won the Afghanistan battle, which Bush mishandled and lost. By win, of course, I mean simply get out with the least loss of face and the decimation of al Qaeda, including its leader. That counts for something.

The flipside, of course, is also: where are the neocons celebrating Obama's succcessful prosecution of the Afghan war and the astonishing act of perseverance and courage that ended with Osama's death and a treasure trove of fresh intelligence? Somewhat muted, I'd say. And the beat goes on …