Month: August 2012

Daria Iushko and Kseniya Sydorenko of the Ukraine compete in the Women's Duets Synchronised Swimming Free Routine Final on Day 11 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre on August 7, 2012. By Clive Rose/Getty Images.

– C.B.

by Chas Danner

A new book from Defense Deptartment historian David Crist about the America's relationship with Iran contains new information about how the Bush administration may have missed an opportunity to strengthen the countries' ties:

The George W. Bush administration considered cooperating with Iran over removing the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but opposition from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, torpedoed a draft proposal by then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Instead, Rumsfeld’s office advocated getting rid of the Iranian government, too, in part by supporting an “Iranian National Congress” of exiles on the model of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. At loggerheads internally, the Bush administration failed to approve any policy toward Iran in its first term. Iraq became a quagmire and Iran-backed militias killed hundreds of Americans.

by Patrick Appel

Gopnik ponders the question. His conclusion:

Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer. Most of what is distinct about him seems specific to the rich managerial class of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and is best explained so—just as you would grasp more about Jack Kennedy from F. Scott Fitzgerald (an Irish and a Catholic ascending to Wasp manners) than from St. Augustine.

In another way, though, this is precisely where faith really does walk in, since commerce and belief seem complementary in Romney’s tradition. It’s just that this tradition is not merely Mormon. Joseph Smith’s strange faith has become a denomination within the bigger creed of commerce. It’s unfair to say, as some might, that Mitt Romney believes in nothing except his own ambition. He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.

by Zoë Pollock

Physicist Francis Slakey explains the body's response to climbing Mount Everest in his new book To The Last Breath:

As a climber goes up even higher in altitude, into the so-called death zone, the dangerously thin air above 26,000 feet, there is so little oxygen available that the body makes a desperate decision: it cuts off the digestive system. The body can no longer afford to direct oxygen to the stomach to help digest food because that would divert what precious little oxygen is available away from the brain. The body will retch back up anything the climber tries to eat, even if it’s as small as an M&M.

The consequence of shutting down the digestive system is, of course, that the body can no longer take in any calories. Lacking an external fuel source, the body has no choice but to turn on itself.  It now fuels itself by burning its own muscle—the very muscle needed to climb the mountain—at a rate of about two pounds per hour.

The climber’s body is now in total collapse. The respiratory system is working way beyond its tolerance at roughly four times above normal; the circulatory system is pumping at only 30 percent capacity; the digestive system has completely shut down; and the muscular system is eating away at itself. In short, the body is dying. Rapidly.

by Chas Danner

Pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA has introduced a new and ruthless angle for its continued Bain attacks on Romney: a former GST Steel employee connecting his wife's cancer and quick death to Bain Capital's closing of GST Steel:

It's running in five states as part of a previously announced $20 million buy. Tommy Christopher can see the ad's logic:

From a strategic standpoint, this ad is risky, but clever. Priorities’ biggest handicap is that they’re being badly outraised by Republican SuperPACs, but a controversial ad like this will surely get tons of free airtime on cable news programs, and drive discussions about political ads, but also about Romney’s record at Bain. It’s also a tough ad to respond to if you’re a Republican, because any counter-argument hits the tripwire that is health care policy. Romney can argue that he had “left Bain” when Soptic’s plant closed, or dig up someone with a similar story to hit back at President Obama, but the fact is that, no matter who is responsible for this guy losing his health insurance, only one of these candidates has a health care plan that would have helped.

Paul Waldman concurs about the health care angle. Looking at the larger strategy, last week John Ellis made the argument that Obama and his allies were using "chemical warfare" on Romney's record inorder to disillusion potential Romney voters:

The 2012 president election, boiled down to its remaining variables, is about two things: (1) white voters who voted for Barrack Obama last time and have since grown disillusioned and, (2) white voters who stayed home in 2008 rather than vote for John McCain but may vote this time. The Obama campaign's goal is to make both groups stay home rather than vote. It's not a "negative campaign" they're running. It's purposefully toxic.

Ross Douthat observes that Obama's recent emphasis on social issues is not likely to appeal to these voters. He suspects that the Obama campaign's "goal isn’t to win disaffected working class whites so much as to render Romney sufficiently radioactive that they mostly just sit things out in disgust":

Obama doesn’t need these voters to like him, so he can afford to direct his policy pandering elsewhere; he just needs them to dislike his opponent enough to declare a plague on both houses and stay home.

So far the Romney campaign has only issued a boilerplate response to the ad. Meanwhile Alexander Burns points out that the man's wife died in 2006, years after the plant's closing, which at least somewhat muddles the ad's desired implication. Still, as pointed out above, the Romney campaign making that distinction would lead it into the murky health care waters.

by Chas Danner

Talkin' turkey:

(Hat tip: ★Interesting)

by Patrick Appel

Politifact claims Reid is lying about Romney's taxes:

Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up. Pants on Fire!

Yglesias objects:

Politifact hasn't seen Romney's returns. Politifact doesn't say they have a source who's seen Romney's returns. Maybe Reid or his source is lying, but maybe they're not.

Kevin Drum disagrees:

Reid didn't say I'll bet Romney didn't pay any taxes. He didn't say he talked to someone familiar with high earners who told him Maybe Romney won't release his returns because he didn't pay any taxes. He made a flat statement of fact. He said he has an "extremely credible source," which in this context means someone with direct knowledge of Romney's taxes who decided to pick up the phone and dish about it to Harry Reid. Does anyone really believe this? Really?

Glenn Kessler, the WaPo's factchecker, gives Reid Four Pinocchios:

Without seeing Romney’s taxes, we cannot definitively prove Reid incorrect. But tax experts say his claim is highly improbable. Reid also has made no effort to explain why his unnamed source would be credible. So, in the absence of more information, it appears he has no basis to make his incendiary claim. Moreover, Reid holds a position of great authority in the U.S. Congress.  He should hold himself to a high standard of accuracy when making claims about political opponents.

Jonathan Bernstein takes both Reid and Politifact to task:

Reid may be simply flat-out making stuff up, or he may "only" be behaving irresponsibly by being deliberately naive about what someone tells him, and at any rate what he's doing is not how people should conduct politics. But Politifact doesn't really know how to sort that out, and it's not their job to judge political ethics.

Brendan Nyhan suggests a solution:

[Politifact] is right to hold public figures like Reid accountable for making such claims, but the standard to which they are held does not easily map onto a scale of truth and falsehood. For instance, it is impossible to prove that a “Pants on Fire” rating for Reid is merited. As a result, critics can divert attention from the substance of PolitiFact’s analyses and turn the debate into a referendum on the epistemological flaws in the site’s ratings, which force complex issues into arbitrary and subjectively determined categories. … A better approach would consider whether claims can be supported and whether they are consistent with the best available evidence without assigning labels to them.

Earlier Dish on Reid here and here.

by Gwynn Guilford

Spencer Ackerman explains how Putin's persecution of the band has backfired:

Pussy Riot has skewered Putin on the horns of a dilemma: Either his government convicts the band and martyrs it even further, or it backs down and concedes that prosecuting the masked trio for a cacophonous musical protest at Christ the Savior Cathedral that called attention to the Russian church's alliance with the Putin regime was always a mistake. Three of the five band members now face the prospect of seven years in prison, which has prompted an unlikely international outcry. On Thursday, Aug. 2, ahead of a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Putin indicated he'd prefer to back down.

Previous coverage of Pussy Riot here and here.

(Photo: Members of the all-girl punk band 'Pussy Riot' Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (L), Maria Alyokhina (R) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (C), sit behind bars during a court hearing in Moscow on July 23, 2012. By Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images)

by Patrick Appel

Pareene places Jennifer Rubin on his hack list:

Before Romney’s trip to London, Rubin wrote, in a post hilariously headlined “Obama team nervous about Romney overseas trip” (half her campaign posts are variations on this headline — Obama is ALWAYS panicky in the face of the brilliant, canny, ascendant Romney campaign), “The Obama campaign can’t bear the thought that the well-traveled Mitt Romney will make a nice impression on his overseas tour.”

They needn’t have worried! We remember the impression Romney made in the U.K., at least, where the nation’s two most prominent Conservative politicians ended up publicly denouncing him. The result: Rubin decided that she hated David Cameron and his stupid Olympics. She never actually mentioned what happened with Romney in London. Reading her blog you’d assume he had a brief layover at Heathrow before flying off to Israel.

Along the same lines, Chait masterfully dissects Rubin's attempted defense of Romney's tax plan.