Month: September 2011

Matt Steinglass joins the debate over Palestinian statehood:

The PA move to ask for statehood may be a mistake. The Israeli move to reject it may be a mistake. But if the UN votes to recognise statehood, the American rejection of that result will also be a mistake. It will severely damage America's aspirations to improve its standing in the perhaps-democratising Arab world. It will undercut America's ability to broker an eventual stable peace deal. It will delay Israel's necessary acknowledgment that it cannot hold out against the Palestinians forever. It may provoke a new intifada. It's conceivable that it could incite terrorist attacks and cost American lives. And if Congress does cut off American aid to the PA, it will yank the rug out from the president and State Department and call into question whether America can live up to its promises, or conduct a coherent foreign policy on this issue at all.

Larison is still against the idea:

Millman is probably right that Palestinians in the diaspora won’t be materially harmed by recognition, but for many of them that it isn’t the point. This might remove an obstacle to a negotiated settlement, but the statehood bid is itself an acknowledgment that such a settlement is not forthcoming. In this case, it is the abandonment of an important symbolic position in exchange for nothing. Maybe somewhere down the road it “opens the path to actual, material progress,” but that must seem to be almost as much of an illusion as the “right of return” is.

James Wimberley differs:

The new state will continue to have a bitter dispute with its neighbour Israel over borders, settlements, Jerusalem as the capital, free movement, water, and refugee return: exactly the same disputes that the Palestinian Authority has now. Can anybody explain to me why Palestinian statehood makes these disputes more intractable? And it would clear the air by removing the non-issue of state recognition from the table.

Yglesias doesn't understand Israel's myopia:

Ever since the unilateral declaration issue was floated, I've been gobsmacked by the lack of Israeli creativity around this issue. Why not spend the past year seeing this as an opportunity to force the Palestinians to make a clear statement of what borders they're claiming? Or to try to get the United States to forge a compromise in which we agree not to veto a resolution if the Arab League will agree to finally extend diplomatic recognition to Israel, thus turning the Palestinians into lobbyists for a pro-Israel measure?

Goldblog seconds him:

A creative Israeli prime minister could have jiu-jitsued this resolution, and turned it into a call for the members of the United Nations to formally declare their understanding that Israel, within its 1967 borders, is the nation-state of the Jewish people. But Netanyahu is a prisoner of a minority of the Israeli polity that has made continued possession of the West Bank more important, in some ways, then the preservation of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Chart from Erik Voeten, who captions:

[D]isagreements [over Palestinian issues] have been a structural feature of global politics for some time. What has changed then, are not so much the preferences of states but the relative power and resolve of those states most supportive of Palestine. States like China, India, and Turkey have grown much more powerful in relative terms over the past decade. Moreover, domestic changes in Turkey and much of the Arab world have given leaders greater incentives to take more risky actions in support of the Palestinian cause.

Golnaz Esfandiari skewers Ann Curry's fluff piece (which you can watch here):

NBC fails to ask why a president who is so committed to human values didn’t speak up against the documented torture and rape of young people who were jailed for peacefully protesting his reelection. The NBC reporter also doesn't ask the Iranian president whether, in his daily reading, he looks at the countless letters from political prisoners and their families detailing the horrors they have to endure in prison.

Gene Zitver feels similarly. The fellatial interview seems to have been part of an effort to hype an exclusive "Hikers Are Free!" story. Good grief. An Iranian reader unloads:

Ann Curry was a total embarrassment. A softball interview that was orchestrated so they can be the first one that gets the "Hikers will be released" line. But look how she went "behind the scenes" in a day of President's life!! Even Iranian State TV couldn't pull off such a PR job for this monster. She even says, "Why do you work so hard Mr. President?" … VOMIT.  And then goes on to tell us that "even the supreme leader has told him to slow down"!! Um … The supreme leader is a murderer who went to Friday prayers on 19th of June 2009 and ordered the guards to shoot people!! So somehow quoting him on how hard he works might be a little INSANE!

Megyn Kelly dismantles "Medical A-Team" psychiatrist Keith Ablow:

I think [viewers] get that our children are no more likely to turn transgendered from watching Chaz Bono than they are to turn gay from watching 'Will and Grace.' You either are or you're not…There's so much hate for gays and lesbians and transgendered people…You seem to be adding to the hate.

Jon Stewart accuses her of "post-partum compassion" (she won a Yglesias Award nomination last month for a valiant and personal defense of maternity leave). Jacob Bernstein recently interviewed Bono about the stir he's causing by appearing on Dancing With The Stars.

And Jennifer Rubin takes him to task after a Wednesday appearance at the nation's biggest evangelical university: 

Perry, apparently deciding to make ads for the Obama campaign, came out with a series of "See how dumb I am?" one-liners. He observed that he needed to pull out a dictionary to see what "convocation" meant … And then the real howler: He was in the top 10 in a high school class of 13. …[W]hat Perry is doing here is telling moderate Republicans and those voters genuinely concerned about his electability to buzz off. He doesn’t need them, and he doesn’t intend to make it easy for them to vote for him. He’s telling them he is happily impervious to mainstream sensibilities. It’s the sort of thing that a Texas pol, not a presidential candidate, would do.

I can't see him winning a general election, but he's doing just fine with Virginia Republicans.

"To sum up, Perry's rules of rhetorical engagement boil down to 1) constantly impugn your opponents' motives by insinuation; 2) shamelessly misrepresent their policies; 3) tag existing federal programs and functions with inflammatory and manifestly inaccurate labels; 4) eschew presenting any specific reform programs for "broken" programs; and 5) when you do offer policy prescriptions, ignore any likely obstacles to their success. A democracy that allows such a candidate to get anywhere near consideration for its highest office is in danger of not remaining a democracy for long," – Andrew Sprung, analyzing Perry's latest interview with Time magazine.

A reader writes:

Surely you noticed that right beside the beaming face of the young man in yesterday's face of the day is THE FRACKIN' TARDIS.  Just sitting there. Chilling out.

Another:

I don't normally comment, but I presume you have noticed that the young lady in the photo has a TARDIS skin for her smart phone!  (The TARDIS, of course, is the timeship from the television series "Dr. Who.")  

I think this is an elegant statement on the class of voter that President Obama attracts.  Dr. Who is cool.  President Obama is cool, even after everything that has happened during the course of his administration.  Do you think any of the Republican candidates rate the attention of Dr. Who fans? Not hardly! (Although, be sure to let me know if you spot any Dalek memorabilia at the GOP presidential candidate debates.  Or perhaps Cybermen would be more appropriate?)

P.S.  Where can I get a TARDIS skin like that for my smart phone?!

How-to here.

I never thought I'd read that phrase in the New York Times but this morning, there it is:

Mr. McGinniss puts forth a provocative case for doubting Ms. Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, which involved a round trip between Alaska and Texas while she was supposedly in labor.

Even Janet Maslin, who appears to have read the book with a giant set of tweezers, is unable to dismiss the legitimate questions that Palin's story begs. But she insists that the book cannot be trusted because … well, its tone is harsh and unsparing:

The “Rogue”-related controversy has escalated this week with the news that some newspapers have declined to run installments of the comic strip that incorporate excerpts from the book. But what exactly is stopping them? Is it the book’s intrepid reporting, or its questionable tone? Mr. McGinniss’s most quotable, inflammatory lines call Ms. Palin a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer — and those aren’t the parts that assail her as a wife and parent.

Well, the Doonesbury strip only included nuggets of reporting, the kind of thing that NYT reporters are above, i.e. reporting fully on the life and background of a former vice-presidential candidate. The only relevant question is: are these assertions true? Maslin offers no rebuttal to any of them. The raciest one so far – the one night stand with Glen Rice – is fully on the record. But Todd is mad as hell:

"This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife. His book is full of disgusting lies, innuendo, and smears."

This has been the line from the Palins from the very beginning: that McGinniss is a pedophile/pervert who wanted to get his jollies from watching the Palin kids and his wife in the backyard. So it's ok to call someone a creepy stalker with no evidence at all, but not ok to have countless newly unafraid people on and off the record talking about who Sarah Palin really is?

Again: what matters is whether the book is accurate in its reporting. So far, no hits. Meanwhile, the Beast is serving up tidbits.

But it's not even formally released yet.

Thomas Dinham chillingly describes how he escaped a terrifying assault in Egypt.

A showdown at Vanderbilt.