Month: October 2011

One sign of a scam is that instead of transparency, the perpetrators resort to character assassinations of their critics. I'm biased, of course, by friendship, but I'd be outraged if any organization set up investigative files on any social critics, plundering their trash, following their cars around, casing their offices, investigating their friends … in order to destroy their reputations. And then there are the digusting investigations into individuals because of their association with Matt and Trey. Anne Garefino and David Goodman, friends and Dishheads, are two of these – wonderful people targeted by this creepy organization. These are the kinds of things that criminal enterprises do – not churches.

Kudos to former Super Adventure Club member, Marty Rathbun, for exposing this. Check out his blog here. No surrender. And, by the way, Tom and John, it really is ok to come out of the closet now.

Jim Antle is disappointed that Romney's campaign for a new American century has effectively ended the meaningful foreign policy debate happening within the party:

The former Massachusetts governor seems … to have considered the case for foreign policy restraint. Alone among the top-tier GOP presidential candidates in 2008, he refused to say whether the decision to invade Iraq was correct in hindsight. Romney drew a rebuke from Sen. John McCain for seeming to equivocate about the success of the surge. McCain chastised Romney again just this summer for appearing too willing to exit Afghanistan. It seems that Romney has since decided to move in the opposite direction. He now resists further cuts to the defense budget, arguing instead that military spending should be increased. He argues for a larger role for the U.S. military on the world stage. He warns against “isolationism” — though the country is now engaged in three wars.

It is indeed the least-remarked upon development in this campaign. As the GOP field began to tackle the consequences of the Iraq catastrophe with some actual candor, Romney smacked the debate down with a pure reprise of Bush post-9/11. One critical question in this coming election is whether the US is going to back West Bank settlements and bomb Iran (the Likudnik policy platform). Romney insists on no daylight between the US and Israel (meaning Israel's interests will always trump the US's) and the threat of military action against Iran. What would Romney do in office? On his own, anything that might win support. But with his neocon brigade of advisers? The mind boggles. Mark Krikorian holds out hope for 2016: 

[T]he good news (if you can call it that) is that three of the stars who sat out this time (and may be in the running either for veep or for president in 2016 if Mitt Romney blows it) have all expressed skepticism about continuing our hyperactive and unaffordable foreign policy. Haley Barbour has opposed nation-building and acknowledged that there is a lot of fat in the Pentagon budget. Chris Christie has gone further in stating that “the United States must also become more discriminating in what we try to accomplish abroad.” And Mitch Daniels seems to have gone the furthest, by saying: “What size and kind of military is absolutely essential to preserve the physical safety of Americans? What, very strictly defined, are the national interests of our country?”

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.) 

Sam Biddle thinks so: 

Facebook is a self-worship that we've never known, a means of satisfying primal urges through the LCD. We want to be seen, be liked, be loved, gain attention. The joy of the shining Facebook presence knows no limits, and gratifies our biological necessity to be liked and gazed upon. And if we run into any problems, we can fix them ourselves. Can you say the same thing about sex? Of course not—it's the most complicated, convoluted thing we can do with our brains and bodies. Sex is a serious, serious hassle. … It feels good, but it's complicated. It's an old way of feeling good. We have new ways of feeling good.

“It’s just a stimulus, one that is targeted to underwater borrowers, and I can think of worse targets,” – David Dayen, in a very helpful post on the administration’s mortgage offensive.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com

My Occupy Wall Street reflection is now online. A snippet:

There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic life, when the majority suspect that a tiny minority has fixed the system beyond repair through the existing institutions, and when the powerful minority begins to think of its own interests as distinct from the interests of its compatriots. That moment is one of real danger, especially when those elites can move themselves and their money more easily across the planet than ever before, and it is a sign of responsibility, not irresponsibility, to focus on it. 

Those readers furious at me for some mockery of the counter-cultural hippiedom of the Occupy Movement might notice some mellowing. Or not.

"We'll repeal Obamacare and get rid any idea that you have to have abortion coverage or contraceptive coverage. One of the things that I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It's not OK because it's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," – Rick Santorum, taking the Christianist war against individual freedom back to contraception.

Fearing the "'Palinization' of the political right," Andrew Pavelyev says Rubio's "enhanced" biography matters: 

At the time his parents came to America, Castro was living in exile in Mexico. He had not even started his takeover yet. In his counter-attack Rubio suggests that he made an honest mistake rather than lied: “My understanding of my parents’ journey has always been based on what they told me about events that took place more than 50 years ago — more than a decade before I was born. What they described was not a timeline, or specific dates.” With all due respect, this tortured explanation is itself a lie. …

[T]he Cuban revolution was the central event for his family and families all around him when he was growing up. That event was constantly talked about, and Rubio himself admits that when he claims having a deep understanding of what it means to lose one’s country (never mind its total irrelevance to American politics). Yet he never asked his parents what it was like to live under Fidel Castro, or how long they lived under him, or what it was like to leave Cuba at that time, or any other question that might possibly give him a clue that his parents never actually lived in Communist Cuba?!

I've also re-thought this a little after reading more about the timeline. Rubio's family moved to the US two and a half years before Castro came to power:

“Every Cuban-American knows when their parents arrived and the circumstances under which they arrived,” said George Gonzalez, a Cuban-American political science professor at the University of Miami. “That’s part of the Cuban exile experience, the political and psychological trauma of it. So the idea that he was murky on those does not cut ice.” And while some Cubans do not draw a distinction between those who fled Cuba after Castro took power and those who left before that date, others do. “To my father and grandparents, if you came before the revolution, it puts you in a different category,” Dr. Gonzalez said.

Pretty obviously. I'm not saying this is a major gaffe, but it's more troubling than I first realized.

Hitch is not thrilled by what went down:

Note some other troubling signs. The first decision by the NTC is to allow polygamy and ban usury. Here's a Human Rights Watch report on the scene of Qaddafi's execution.

At the site where Muammar Gaddafi was captured, Human Rights Watch found the remains of at least 95 people who had apparently died that day. The vast majority had apparently died in the fighting and NATO strikes prior to Gaddafi’s capture, but between six and ten of the dead appear to have been executed at the site with gunshot wounds to the head and body.

Then we have the discovery of a mass grave of 53 alleged Qaddafi loyalists:

The bloodstains on the grass directly below the bodies, bullet holes visible in the ground, and the spent cartridges of AK-47 and FN-1 rifles scattered around the site strongly suggest that some, if not all of the people, were shot and killed in the location where they were discovered, Human Rights Watch said.

All the bodies were in a similar stage of decomposition, suggesting they were killed at the same approximate time. Some of the bodies had their hands tied behind their backs with plastic ties. Others had bandages over serious wounds, suggesting they had been treated for other injuries prior to their deaths.

David Bosco thinks Qaddafi's death was probably a war crime:

The question of whether Qaddafi's execution constitutes a war crime that falls under the ICC's jurisdiction. To be a war crime, there's got to be a war (or state of armed conflict). Here, there's no doubt that there was an armed conflict underway when Qaddafi was killed. Does killing a combatant who has surrendered constitute a crime? Quite clearly.

Of course. But, tragically, American moral standing on the treatment of POWs remains stained with the ink of Cheney.

(Cartoon "Qaddafi falling" by Yara Kassem)

Perry's latest gambit.