Month: September 2012

So many of us are divorced from the extraordinary sacrifices US servicemembers and their families are still making in a war that continues. Jim Webb reminded us yesterday of that sacrifice which is often life-long. Every now and again, it is worth seeing the reality of it: the pride, the fear, the love. The video below is self-explanatory. It made me weep:

And exactly the same policies.

Goldblog says Bibi's bomb drawing was "the Middle East equivalent of Clint Eastwood's chair" – and likely almost solely intended for American audiences. His take on the main message:

Benjamin Netanyahu's speech today before the U.N. General Assembly was many things. It seemed to be a concession speech (no attack until at least the spring). Unless, of course, it was a bluff designed to make us think that there will be no attack (in other words, a reverse bluff). The only reason I suspect that this could be true is that no sane prime minister would order Israel's Air Force to attack Iran at a moment Iran is expecting such an attack, unless of course Israel has developed a means of completely neutralizing Iranian air defenses. Remember that the previous two Israeli attempts at nonproliferation-by-force — in Iraq and Syria — were preceded by zero public discussion, and certainly not by cartoons. 

Bob Wright's view:

Without quite saying so, he has now backed off of the limb he had gotten himself out on. Whereas only weeks ago he was suggesting that Israel might bomb Iran before he finished his next sentence, the upshot of today's speech was that Israel won't bomb Iran before spring. At least, that's the only plausible interpretation of the speech that I can find. 

Jay Newton-Small looks at the campaign angle, figuring Bibi knows he's now stuck with Obama:

Netanyahu’s speech on Thursday didn’t leave much for Romney to put in a press release. So, what changed in the past week that led Netanyahu to back off of Obama? Perhaps he got a look at recent polls showing Obama pulling ahead in key swing states and increasing his lead nationally. It’s one thing to put a finger on the scale when a race is close and quite another to flat out provoke the man he’s likely going to have to spend the next four years working with. Especially when Israel is due to hold elections next year. As the scripture says and Netanyahu well knows: "An eye for an eye."

But Uri Friedman thinks the diagram might actually be effective in forcing a response from the candidates:

In the days and weeks ahead, the indelible image of Netanyahu drawing a thick red line on his crude diagram could compel Romney to offer more specifics about his red line, and Obama to explain how and why his stance differs from the Israeli prime minister's, if at all.  

Harriet Sherwood points out another motivation:

According to Haaretz, Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told reporters after the speech that the bomb ploy was aimed at the general public, not world leaders. In that respect, it achieved at least part of the goal: it was very memorable and very clear. Any talk in the coming hours and days will be of this, not of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's exposition of life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Indeed, ridiculed or not, the image has already been widely seen. Joshua Keating places Bibi's diagram in the historical context of UN prop use, while Ali Gharib notes that Netanyahu didn't even draw the red line in the right place. Gharid updates his post with a correction; he misunderstood the metric that Bibi was using but nevertheless finds fault:

Uranium spun in centrifuges to a purity of 90 percent makes for weapons-grade stuff. Since Netanyahu was discussing Iranian uranium enrichment, I mistook his chart for referencing these levels. In fact, Netanyahu's chart wasn't about anything technical, anything clear. Instead, Netanyahu's chart used an invented metric: the degree to which Iran had moved along the continuum to producing a nuclear weapon, where things go bang at 100 percent.

So the diagram had a Seinfeldian twist: it was about nothing. It's as if he just needed to make up his 90 percent metric because, well, above 90 percent sounds very dire—it's almost there!—and he wanted to give the sense of desperation and exacerbation that things had gone so far without any action.

Many of Israel's top analysts were also confused [NYT] by Bibi's contrived metric. Juan Cole sees the whole thing as "psychological warfare": 

The Iran bogeyman is Netanyahu’s way of changing the conversation, of making sure that his Occupation of the Palestinian territories is never brought up. The US and Europe, who pay lip service to a ‘peace process’ in actual fact go along with the continued Occupation and ongoing expropriation of the Palestinians, and seem to fall for the Iran misdirection.

Laura Rozen rounds up more analyst reactions here. Meanwhile, The New Yorker responds with a caption contest.

Dina Martina is currently performing at the Laurie Beechman Theater in NYC through the 30th. Details here:

DINA MARTINA: AMPLE WATTAGE, like all of Martina’s surreal shows, is a nearly indescribable night of unique entertainment that assaults the senses like no other show. Perhaps the best description of Dina comes from a glowing review in Seattle’s famed alternative weekly The Stranger: “Her voice sounds like a cat having an epileptic fit on a chalkboard, her body moves like two pigs fighting their way out of a sleeping bag, and her face looks like the collision of a Maybelline truck with a Shoney’s buffet. But Dina redefines what it means to be a star.”

Buy tickets here. I’m a hardcore fan – and saw her show eleven separate times this year in Ptown (and it’s the same show with only minor tweaks every night). Dan Savage was her lighting man in her early Seattle shows. Previous videos of Dina here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

“If President Barack Obama is trying to spread the wealth, he doesn’t have much to show for it. Republican Mitt Romney has attacked the president for supporting the use of government programs to redistribute income and for a free-spending response to the 2008 financial crisis. Yet since Obama took office in January 2009, wealthy Americans have continued to pull away from the rest of society. In the aftermath of the recession, income inequality in the U.S. reached a new high in 2011, Census Bureau data show. Even as the president has decried the hollowing out of the middle class, the fortunes of labor and capital have diverged on his watch. Quarterly corporate profits of $1.9 trillion have almost doubled since the end of 2008, while workers’ inflation- adjusted average hourly earnings have declined,” – David J Lynch, Bloomberg, via Taegan.

Not only has Obama managed to turn the GOP's advantage on foreign policy into a disadvantage (although the neocons get much of the credit), the Republican candidate now gets slammed by a former Republican Navy Secretary and actual maverick, Jim Webb, on his commitment to the men and women of the US military. The Obama campaign would be smart to get this into a few ads for areas with high numbers of veterans. Money quote:

Governor Romney and I are about the same age. Like millions of others in our generation, we came to adulthood facing the harsh realities of the Vietnam War.

2.7 million in our age group went to Vietnam, a war which eventually took the lives of 58,000 young Americans and cost another 300,000 wounded. The Marine Corps lost 100,000 killed or wounded in that war. During the year I was in Vietnam, 1969, our country lost twice as many dead as we have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over the past 10 years of war. 1968 was worse. 1967 was about the same. Not a day goes by when I do not think about the young Marines I was privileged to lead.

This was a time of conscription, where every American male was eligible to be drafted. People made choices about how to deal with the draft, and about military service. I have never envied or resented any of the choices that were made as long as they were done within the law. But those among us who stepped forward to face the harsh unknowns and the lifelong changes that can come from combat did so with the belief that their service would be honored, and that our leaders would, in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, care for those who had borne the battle, and for their widows and their children.

Those young Marines that I led have grown older now. They’ve lived lives of courage, both in combat and after their return, where many of them were derided by their own peers for having served. That was a long time ago. They are not bitter. They know what they did. But in receiving veterans’ benefits, they are not takers. They were givers, in the ultimate sense of that word. There is a saying among war veterans: “All gave some, some gave all.” This is not a culture of dependency. It is a part of a long tradition that gave this country its freedom and independence. They paid, some with their lives, some through wounds and disabilities, some through their emotional scars, some through the lost opportunities and delayed entry into civilian careers which had already begun for many of their peers who did not serve.

And not only did they pay. They will not say this, so I will say it for them. They are owed, if nothing else, at least a mention, some word of thanks and respect, when a presidential candidate who is their generational peer makes a speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander-in-chief. And they are owed much more than that — a guarantee that we will never betray the commitment that we made to them and to their loved ones.

Some unfinished business delayed by moving. Last week, I took Jeffrey Goldberg to task for claiming that Maureen Dowd was "peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews." Jeffrey first responded by taking offense that I'd slandered him by implying he'd blogged on Rosh Hashana. My apologies if I was misunderstood. All I clumsily meant is that he was taking time out from celebrating the New Year to berate Maureen for something he even conjectures was inadvertent. I didn't even know that blogging is forbidden on Rosh Hashana.

 In a later post, he fleshed out his actual disagreements:

Andrew neglects to characterize my criticism fairly — I wasn't complaining about Maureen's focus on Romney's association with neoconservatives, I was complaining about her use (however inadvertent) of an anti-Semitic stereotype. Andrew decided not to tell his readers about my actual objection. Not cool.

Also not true. I wrote: that Goldblog had decided to "consign yet another member of the thinking classes to the ranks of 'something much darker.'" I can see why this may be elliptical and so it is my fault for not being clearer – but it is a reference to Leon Wieseltier's unhinged rant against me as worse than an anti-Semite. But back to Goldblog:

And then there's the accusation that I'm the "would-be policeman" of Washington discussion on Israel.

I understand his motivation for making the charge — he doesn't like to be criticized by me for what I think are his wrongheaded observations about the Middle East — but policing? Really? There's no policing going on here — I often post my opinions about what other people are saying about the Middle East, and I'm often critical in these posts. What Andrew calls policing most other people call blogging. I would only note that, by Andrew's own definition, he "polices" discussions of homophobia, and, from my perspective, more power to him.

Of course I will occasionally note homophobia – but usually of the obvious, fanatical, religious kind, not parsing metaphors of fellow columnists for "dog-whistles" and "code". And I have a long record of exactly the same for anti-Semitism. But in general, I am more pro-freedom than anti-bigotry. I wrote an essay once called "What's So Bad About Hate?" for Pete's sake. I have also long opposed hate crimes law, have defended the Boy Scouts' and the Saint Patrick's Day Parade's right to discriminate against gays, and in Virtually Normal defended even workplace discrimination against gays in terms of human freedom.

I examined as disapassionately as I could the arguments of reparative therapy in Love Undetectable and have defended men like Larry Craig and even Ted Haggard as sad rather than wicked. I have long, relentlessly lambasted the main gay rights lobby, HRC, while Goldblog is always anti-anti-AIPAC, just as he is always anti-anti-settlements.

I have also published an anthology on marriage rights (now, like VN, on Kindle) that includes pieces by Stanley Kurtz, Maggie Gallagher, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Bennett, Hadley Arkes, and other marriage opponents. I gave Maggie a platform on this blog day after day to make her case, without any interference. I have debated her civilly many times. Let me just say that when Goldblog treats John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Kenneth Waltz, Phil Weiss, or Daniel Larison in the same way I treat my opponents on the issue of marriage rights, I will agree that he is not a member of the thought-police. But here's an almost text-book case of policing discourse:

There's no doubt in mind that the term neocon is very often used as a dog-whistle by people who are signalling their distaste for Jews, or at least their distaste for Jews with political power. And there's no doubt in my mind that accusing Jews of puppet-mastering goyim is an ancient anti-Semitic trope. Combine them, and you're entering into nasty territory (which doesn't mean, of course, I think Maureen did it advertently).

Why do I say that "neocon" is often used as an anti-Semitic dog-whistle? Because anti-Semites of the hard left and the extreme right have long made the connection between Jews and neoconservatism hyper-explicit. In non-polite company, "neoconservatism" is openly synonymous with "traitorous Jew." In semi-polite company, where it is preferable to speak in deniable code, the connection between Jews and neoconservatism is signaled through dog whistles.

So we are not even allowed to use the term "neoconservative" any more without being under the threat of being called an anti-Semite? How very convenient as the next neoconservative war to stop non-existent WMDs in the Middle East approaches in earnest.

Dylan Byers does.

Following a flap about the political leanings of Dos Equis's "The Most Interesting Man in the World," Mike Shannon and Will Feltus chart the political leanings of beer drinkers:

As the bubble chart shows, Dos Equis is a bipartisan brew – Republicans and Democrats both like to drink it…. Ironically, this is in contrast to its corporate sister Heineken, which as it turns out is the most Democratic beer of all. On the other hand, Republicans love their Coors Light and favor Sam Adams, which is brewed just a few miles away from Romney campaign headquarters and whose namesake was an original tea partier.

Ackerman nods:

The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan ended last week. Conditions in Afghanistan are mostly worse than before it began. That conclusion doesn’t come from anti-war advocates. It relies on data recently released by the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, and acquired by Danger Room. According to most of the yardsticks chosen by the military — but not all — the surge in Afghanistan fell short of its stated goal: stopping the Taliban’s momentum.