Month: May 2012

Chait's reaction to Ric Grenell's resignation:

The imbroglio … shows that Romney remains beholden to his base — that he is, or feels, unable to weather even modest levels of heat over what was a purely policy-free concession to the center. Romney just isn’t going to be able to anger any portion of the Republican coalition.

Weigel agrees:

You certainly can't look at this and think, "There's a campaign that's confident of holding on to evangelical voters."

Allahpundit has questions:

If Romney was worried about how Grenell might be received on the right, why not turn him loose as a critic of Obama’s OBL-related attack on Mitt? That would have gotten conservatives on his side.

Josh Marshall thinks Romney looks weak:

In the face of attacks meant to show he can’t stand up to Osama bin Laden, Romney shows he can’t stand down the far-right homophobes in his own party. The two things are worlds apart. Literally. But they put Romney in the same place.

The Romneyites are busy spinning that Grenell's concerns were all in his head. But the vicious attacks from the far right, the total silence from the Romney camp, and his own absence from a week of intense foreign policy debate sealed it for him. Grenell – who once worked for John Bolton – is not a wilting flower. He'd have toughed it out if his political mentors had quickly backed him. They could easily have used this as a pivot for the general election, showing that while they oppose civil rights for homosexuals, they don't actually want to remove them purely for their sexual orientation.

The trouble is: a huge swathe of the GOP base does want to remove these people purely because of their sexual orientation. When you listen to Fischer above or read Matthew Franck, you see a visceral notion that any public embrace of an openly gay person in a relationship who supports his own equality is anathema. It doesn't matter that his brief is foreign policy. I recall in the 2000 GOP Convention that Jim Kolbe, an openly gay congressman, gave a speech about free trade. The entire Texas delegation literally turned their backs on him – purely because he is gay.

But we are twelve years on, a majority of Americans now back marriage equality, including a tsunami of the under-30s. Many moderate middle class suburban voters don't like the idea of a campaign that cannot include anyone openly gay – especially when that person is about as neoconservative as you can get. The military issue has been resolved – and far from the calamity of a radical social experiment, it has been close to a total non-event. And yet the GOP – because of its fusion with Christianist fundamentalism – cannot have a single openly gay person out front. In Britain, there are now 19 openly gay Tory MPs, and the prime minister is backing marriage equality in a parliamentary vote this year. That's the difference between a sane and inclusive conservative party – and a reactionary rump of religious fanatics.

This much we already knew. What we know now is that Romney is helpless in the face of such pressure. In office, he will be a tool of the furthest right in his party. In fact, he has much, much less space to maneuver in than any president since George H. W. Bush. Because the base doesn't trust him, he has to be super-right-wing on issues like homosexual equality, climate change, more tax cuts, more defense spending, abortion, and birth control.

But allow me to end this sorry tale with a quote from a sane conservative at NRO, Kevin Williamson:

As Haley Barbour observed: “Purity in politics is a loser; unity in politics is a winner. . . . If you had to agree with Haley Barbour on every issue, it would be a mighty small party. That’s just a fact, and we need people to understand that at the end of the day, Reagan was right: A person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your friend and ally, not some 20 percent traitor.”

I suppose Haley Barbour forgot to include the no-homo caveat.

Yossi Klein Halevi makes the case:

[T]he cruelest blow to Benzion came from his son. A political rift between them opened during the election campaign of 1996, when Bibi declared that he would accept the Oslo Accords, while insisting on Palestinian reciprocity. Benzion was outraged. Bibi tried to explain that his endorsement of Oslo was only tactical. Benzion countered: What begins as tactical ends in a betrayal of principle. Benzion was right. In his second term Bibi became the first Likud leader to accept the principle of a two-state solution, the possible withdrawal from the second bank of the Jordan. While most of the international community missed the significance of Bibi’s historic concession, his father surely did not. Under Prime Minister Netanyahu, Revisionist ideology was buried in a state funeral.

So why are the settlements continuing to be built? And why did Netanyahu balk at the best chance for a two-state solution after Obama's election? My thoughts on Benzion's passing here.

In a new book, Michael Lind attributes America's economic dominance to a "collaboration between the government and the private sector and, increasingly in the 20th century, the nonprofit, academic research sector":

It’s quite a different story in reality from the tale that is sometimes told of how capitalism grew up without controls in the United States, and then with the New Deal it came under regulation. In fact, the government both at the federal and the state level was deeply involved with projects for promoting the industrialization of the United States and the creation of a capitalist market from the administration of George Washington onward.

One of the ways it did so was through investing in infrastructure. We’ve had a series of ambitious infrastructure projects – the early canal system and then the transcontinental railroads that were funded by the Lincoln administration and Congress at the beginning of the Civil War, through to the interstate highway system. But government contribution to economic growth wasn’t just limited to that – it included funding basic research. For example, Congress gave a grant to Samuel Morse, who developed Morse code and the first American telegraph [in the 1840s] … 

Are getting harder to find for teens:

In 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available, less than half of the nation’s youth (16–24) were employed during the month of July, traditionally the peak of summer employment, the lowest percentage since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948 and almost 20 percentage points lower than the peak in 1989. There’s little indication of that number improving. Teenagers and twentysomethings are the least skilled and most expendable members of the work force, so it’s not surprising that they would be edged out in a recession by more reliable full-time workers such as senior citizens, immigrants, and other adults who need those jobs.

Alyssa Rosenberg compares two summer blockbusters, The Avengers (premiering this week) and The Dark Knight Rises (July 20):

I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between [The Dark Knight Rises] and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman’s movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. … The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. Tony Stark stops cackling over his power to kill and begins craving the approval of those around him, a selfish motivation that ultimately teaches him to engage with their needs.

Using Ayn Rand as a jumping-off point, Ari Kohen casts a critical eye on the practice of philosophizing through fiction:

[N]ovels present their commentary and their conclusions without argument. Philosophy, conversely, is built on argument rather than simple assertion. Whether or not you ultimately agree with them, philosophers from Plato to Rawls make arguments in order to sway the way a reader thinks. Novelists, on the other hand, craft characters and situations that are intended to play on readers’ emotions. My problem with Rand is that she attempts to shape the way that people think about and interact with the world around them — to do political philosophy — without actually making any arguments for what are, ultimately, policy preferences with serious personal and societal consequences.

Will Wilkinson makes a related point:

This guy, who complains that the contemporary Anglophone novel fails to combat injustice, is the enemy of art. The story may well be the most powerful weapon in the propagandist’s arsenal, but it is rarely to the aesthetic credit of a piece of fiction that it functions as propaganda. Stories don’t need non-aesthetic justification, even if it turns out there are moral dimensions to literary quality. “Art is good for you” arguments almost always get my hackles up. Because what if it isn’t? 

A case is coming down the pike:

[I]t would not be surprising if the Court sent affirmative action to its doom. No figure in public life, including President Obama, has made a full-throated defense of the practice in years. On an aggressively conservative court like the current one, that relative silence could well be seen as an invitation to dismantle the practice. In today's political environment, a decision in favor of [plaintiff] Abigail Fisher would generate as much praise as criticism. For the Roberts Court, that makes for a relatively risk-free license to follow its inclinations. 

Winslow Wheeler spotlights it:

The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion — making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain. And that estimate is wildly optimistic: … It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper.

One reason it doesn't work very well:

[W]hen asked to identify the political leanings of several companies—Coors, Costco, Domino’s Pizza, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Hilton, and Marriot—few people had a clue.  Just 11% of respondents correctly guessed Domino’s Pizza leaned Republican, 10% correctly identified Costco as Democratic-leaning, and fewer than 9% thought Wendy’s was Republican-leaning.  Starbucks was the most likely to be correctly identified, with a still-paltry 26% saying it was Democratic-leaning.   According to the Center for Responsive Politics, each of these companies or their owners gave more than 90% of their political donations to one party or the other between 2004 and 2008.