Month: November 2012

A reader writes:

Reading the accounts, especially the detailed ones in the NYT, in the background another narrative emerges in the Petraeus-Allen saga, one which is getting much less attention. That is how Obama is dealing systematically with the highly politicized military brass that was one of the seedier legacies of the Bush years.

The GOP loved to tout the glories of the military leaders it created, and to trot them out like so many sock puppets to embrace the GOP defense strategy of the moment. We must all fall in line behind our generals and pay them homage – we can't have a discussion about it. The generals have spoken. Now silence.

Of course, the generals, being generals, were merely doing the bidding of their civilian Pentagon masters. It may be that such glorification of military power is a natural part of right-wing politics. But it bears some real dangers for democracy, precisely because it short-circuits democratic dialogue and process and elevates the role of career military over elected and accountable officials.

As Tom Ricks points out, quite compellingly, in the first chapters of his new book, The Generals, what we have witnessed since Vietnam is a slow, steady, deconstruction of accountability mechanisms for the military that reached its high point under Bush. Now one of the distinguishing features of Obama is his subtle, skillful reversal of these precedents – in a way which was at once non-confrontational and beneath the radar of political Washington. The Petraeus case is an excellent example – he was denied the post he most cherished (chair of the JCS) and instead given CIA. But he was required to set aside his uniform and give up his entourage of 50 (amazing!) who followed him in his final appointments. He was denied "special" access to the White House and the president while he ran CENTCOM and Afghanistan. He and other generals were told to treat the chain of command seriously.

Obama also has become the biggest general slayer since Harry S. Truman. He fired Stanley McChrystal and now David Petraeus, the man who flogged rumors about his own suitability for high political office. I don't see anything remotely Machiavellian about this. It was all rigorously application of good governance principles and rules of command authority. But the result we are now coasting towards is an unwinding of the distortions introduced by Bush and a restoration of America's historic notions of civilian-military relations – under which the generals are to be kept firmly out of politics and clearly accountable to elected civilian authority.

This may well be one of Obama's major legacies. And no one is talking about it in the Beltway chatter room, which is intent on giving us another episode of The Real Housewives of Tampa. By contrast, I bet most of the brass understands what Obama is up to, and most of them are approving, even as they express regrets about the fall of Petraeus and McChrystal.

Until we can get new videos processed in spite of the damage from Sandy, here's another video from the archive, originally aired on January 11:

I remain grateful to John Podhoretz for giving me the opportunity to write for Commentary; I wish him and the magazine nothing but the best.

— D G Myers (@dg_myers) November 11, 2012

A reader writes:

While I am not really up on the personalities here, I found Podhoretz’s case more compelling than Myers’. Commentary did publish Myers’ piece on their main blog talking about gay marriage. If he was allowed to post on his own blog there without editing or supervision on the condition that it remain apolitical, he didn’t follow through with that agreement.

Another:

Please please please don’t apply the “free speech under attack” canard when a private entity fires someone. It drives me nuts when Palin & Co. do it. Don’t be that guy.

Yep, this is not about government policing speech; it’s about an editor entirely within his rights deciding to publish or not publish what he thinks fit. I’m sorry if that important distinction was elided.

But I still find it troubling that a magazine polices its writers in this ideological way – you can write about literature on your blog, but don’t ever mention politics. But what can “apolitical” mean when reviewing books of all kinds, even fiction? Can you imagine what Orwell would have made of such a direction from an editor? Or Hitchens? But they were writers, engaged in an open discourse with readers. Commentary is a propaganda sheet, directed, as degenerate movements often are, by a beneficiary of nepotism, in order to advance a moribund ideology and the interests of one faction in a foreign country. It’s an almost text-book case of intellectual decline and fall.

But I linked to everyone’s point of view in this, and urge you to make your own mind up.

“Observe the process by which we remove some of the most essential American figures of the last century for having failed to corral their sexual organs in the marital bedroom: Roosevelt, gone. Eisenhower, gone. Kennedy, gone. Lyndon Johnson, gone. Clinton, gone. Martin Luther King, Jr., gone. Edward Murrow, gone.  Follow the gamboling penis to an arid expanse of sociopolitical wasteland, where many of the greatest visionaries and actors can never tred, a desert in which the Calvin Coolidges and Richard Nixons stand as the tallest totems. Anyone who looks at the history of mankind and thinks that private sexual fidelity exists in direct proportion to political greatness or moral leadership is either a chump or a liar,” – David Simon, on the Petraeus affair.

What he said to Sean Hannity, regarding his landslide prediction for Romney:

I called it as I saw it from the polling, and I did the best I could – and I also worked very hard for Romney. … I spoke about what I believed, and I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory. And I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said. And at the time that I said it, I believe I was right.

Duty? As what? These charlatans posing as pollsters are now admitting they felt they had a duty to spin the reality because, under the guise of being experts, they were "working very hard for Romney." Well, at least this election has helped expose the vast gulf between "news" and "Fox."

A reader writes:

I'm a little tired of the fawning over General Petraeus and I appreciate your reluctance to anoint this man the savior of Iraq, Afghanistan and America in general.  This is anecdotal, but I wanted to share a soldier's experience with this man.

I was in Iraq from 2009-10.  Yes, the war was obviously winding down, but soldiers were still dying in Iraq and of course in Afghanistan.  It was a usual night when we got the task.  We were asked to set up a direct video feed (I worked in public affairs and broadcasting) to an event in Washington, DC. We weren't sure exactly what it was for, but we naturally obliged the command. Well, turns out it was a black tie Gala in honor of none other than General Petraeus.  There he was, schmoozing with some yuppie DC folks while we were in the desert.  The entire event was in his honor.  He had requested soldiers in Iraq "be apart of the event."  This included us sitting in some chairs and the screens in DC eventually panned to us and the crowd cheered.  We shut it down and, I assume, the event continued.

I couldn't believe it happened.  During a time of war, a 4-star has a black-tie event in HIS honor?  We all walked away shaking our heads.

A reader writes:

Colorado is not only turning blue, but has experienced rapid change in its support for marriage equality. Twenty years ago the state passed Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment preventing any city or county from recognizing gays as a protected class. It was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1996. In 2006, Colorado passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. But last year, there was a fight in the legislature to implement civil unions, which is as far as the legislature can go because of the constitutional amendment. It nearly passed, but Republicans blocked it.

Last Tuesday, Democrats won the State House, giving them control of the House, Senate, and Governorship. Then they selected Rep. Mark Ferrandino, the author of the civil unions bill, as Speaker of the House. Ferrandino is a remarkable man and openly gay. So, six years from passage of an amendment banning marriage equality to an openly gay Speaker of the House and an almost certain passage of civil unions soon. Wow.

(Photo: Contestants from Colorado march in a procession at the third annual National Beard and Moustache Championships in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 11, 2012. By Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

ESPN:

The cable channel doing most the heavy lifting for Disney is ESPN, which along with a contribution from the Disney Channel, generates more profits than the rest of Walt Disney combined. … The reality is that there is not another media property in the world worth as much as ESPN because no media asset delivering content generates close to as much money. [Research firm Wunderlich Securities] pegs the value of the Disney Channel, which is one of the most valuable channels and has the third highest affiliate fees, at $10 billion. It is even uglier in print. The current market value of the New York Times is $1.3 billion. The only media companies in the world worth more than $40 billion are News Corp. ($58 billion) and Comcast ($96 billion). The value of News Corp. is spread out among dozens of media assets, while Comcast derives most of its value from being a cable provider.

(Hat tip: Cowen)

Andrew Freedman reviews 2012:

With about six weeks remaining in the year, there have already been 11 natural disasters that have cost $1 billion or more in damage, bringing 2012 to second place on the list of top billion-dollar disaster years. The current record-holder is 2011, when there were 14 billion-dollar disasters. The widespread and intense drought — which as of Nov. 6 still covered at least 60 percent of the lower 48 states — and Hurricane Sandy are expected to go down in history as two of the most costly weather-related disasters since 1980.

Jeff Masters runs through a series of superlatives on Sandy's "truly astounding … size and power." A new study suggests that what fueled Sandy, global warming, may also wipe out our coffee supply:

The prospects are "profoundly negative," the study concluded. Even in a best-case scenario, two-thirds of the suitable growing locations would disappear by 2080—and at worst, nearly 100 percent. And that's factoring in only climate change, not deforestation.

Phillip Bump adds another milestone to the year:

2012 has been, to date, the hottest year on record. Again, we must note: This record is almost certainly only temporary. Do not read this fact and then spend the next three decades telling everyone about how 2012 was the hottest year ever; by then, it will probably rank somewhere around 30th.

(Top image of Sandy, bottom image of Katrina, both from NASA, to scale. A GIF comparing Sandy and Irene is here.)