Month: February 2013

Quote For The Day

“Think about it: We have a sequester looming, one that could wreak havoc at the Pentagon; a coming series of budget confrontations that create real challenges in the management of the Defense Department; and an ongoing war.

And a little group of willful men and women, including those who have been the loudest critics of the sequester, are keeping the next head of the department from getting into office and beginning the hard job of managing the turbulence ahead.

That’s only the first on a list of irresponsible acts. If National Review is accurate, the unanimous Senate Republican response to deal with our debt problems and immediate budget crises is a constitutional amendment to balance the budget with a cap on spending at 18 percent of gross domestic product and supermajorities required to raise revenues or the debt ceiling. If I were al-Qaida and looking to destroy America from within, I would love to see this amendment added to the Constitution,” – Norm Ornstein, AEI.

Will Hagel Make History?

Only if he isn’t eventually confirmed. Sarah Binder explains:

[T]here’s been a bit of confusion in the reporting about whether filibusters of Cabinet appointees are unprecedented.  There appears to have been no successful filibusters of Cabinet appointees, even if there have been at least two unsuccessful filibusters against such nominees.  (On two occasions, Cabinet appointees faced cloture votes when minority party senators placed holds on their nominations—William Verity in 1987 and Kempthorne in 2006.  An EPA appointee has also faced cloture, but EPA is not technically cabinet-level, even if it is now Cabinet-status).  Of course, there have been other Cabinet nominees who have withdrawn; presumably they withdrew, though, because they lacked even majority support for confirmation.  Hagel’s situation will be unprecedented only if the filibuster succeeds in keeping him from securing a confirmation vote.

Jay Newton-Small provides more details:

Filibustering a cabinet nominee is rare: it’s only happened twice in Senate history. The first time was in 1987 when Ronald Reagan nominated C. William Verity to be Commerce Secretary. He eventually passed 84-11. And the second came when George W. Bush nominated former Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne to be Secretary of the Interior in 2006. He was ultimately confirmed by voice vote – meaning no one opposed him. That said, more often Presidents withdraw a nominee who’s in trouble, as has happened 11 times in Senate history. Nine presidential nominees have been brought down by failed voted in the Senate, the last being John Tower, George H. W. Bush’s nominee to be Defense Secretary in 1989 by a vote of 47-53. Tower had an abysmal confirmation hearing, which lost him support.

Is The Dish A “Community”?

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A reader writes:

I’ve known since the day you announced the change that I was going to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”], because there is no single thing on the Internet that has enriched my life more than The Dish in the past six years. But because I’m extremely broke, and saving up for an engagement ring to boot, I’ve been waiting to subscribe, thinking that at some point it would become inevitable because of the meter and then I’d be able to justify my spending to my inner voice of frugality.  But after reading the obnoxiously condescending dissent you aired, claiming that I must be a really sad person to feel a sense of community around the Dish, I can’t help but subscribe right this minute.

I’m really surprised that this reader has never felt any sense of kinship with someone merely because they share some intellectual interests. I won’t stoop to his level and call him sad, but I do pity him for never experiencing, for example, the fun of being in an elevator with someone carrying a copy of your favorite book, and exchanging knowing glances about the cliffhanger at the end. We are all part of many, many wordless communities. Has he really never seen someone else wearing a jersey from his favorite sports team on game day and shared a brief but powerful connection because of it? Has he never chuckled at an inside joke on a stranger’s bumper sticker or vanity plate?

But there’s an even more important reason I want to subscribe: yours ISN’T a wordless community at all, and your airing of his dissent (and other reader responses) proves that. I’ve never encountered any media outlet or quasi-public figure who so often acknowledged criticism and attacks on him and on his ideas. I hope some day to be half as comfortable as you hearing people say that I’m an idiot.

You get used to it after a while. And sometimes they’re right. Another reader is on the same page:

I consider myself American, that is a member of the community called “America.”  Does that identity become invalid simply because I don’t interact with the overwhelming majority of them?  I also don’t happen to interact with almost anyone in my neighborhood beyond my roommates, but I’m still considered part of that “community.” On the Dish, I’ve had e-mails posted, read threads that have led to many interesting conversations with others, and been exposed to the experiences and viewpoints of a diverse array of individuals I couldn’t hope to replicate myself.  In my opinion, the VFYW contest alone invalidates their point.

On that note, another writes:

I don’t bother joining in on the View From Your Window contests, preferring to read the guesses of others who have more time than I to figure those things out. But I was surprised when I read one of this week’s entries from the woman who sent in the picture taken by her fiancé of her looking out the window of the Puerto Rican fort. I’m not sure I would have recognized her from the back, but her description of being in San Juan in December and traveling on to Vieques to celebrate their engagement made me gasp. I received a note from a former student of mine in early January telling me that he and his wife-to-be were vacationing in Vieques over the holidays. And this young couple will be coming up to visit us on Thursday. We consider them dear friends, but we didn’t know until I wrote them a few minutes ago that we both follow your blog. Small world in more ways than one!

More small-world moments from our contest here and here. Another reader dissents:

You asked, “Why else would so many people send us links or write emails like yours or send in their window views or vote for awards and so on if they were not part of a community?” I will never regard the Dish as a community while you insist on running reader contributions anonymously. As far as I know, none of the media outlets you worked at prior (and during) your time at the Dish remove the attribution of the people who contribute letters and other forms of feedback. I don’t begrudge your newly independent site its success, but I would never pay for it while that policy is in place. It seems like an attempt to downplay the fact that a lot of what makes the Dish interesting is written by people who are not named Andrew Sullivan.

There are reasons for that. First, if we identified every reader by name, we would feel obliged to run our edit of their emails for their permission first. The time that would take back and forth would be enormous, and the conversation would have moved on by then. The second is that this blogazine has a single voice and it is a mixture of individual – me – and collective – my colleagues and you. Keeping that intact and integrating the readers into the product in the same voice keeps the place coherent, and doesn’t separate us from you. Third, we want the arguments to count, not the egos. And we want to create a safe space for people to say things they might feel uncomfortable saying under their own name. I do not think we would have been able to collect the breadth and depth of our testimonials on the “Cannabis Closet”or the extraordinary stories in our thread on late-term abortion without providing a safe space as free of ego and comments-section-bile as possible.

Another dissenter:

“Because we are a community.” No we’re not. We are something, but not a community. Who is gonna give me a job? Or be a really nice person and give me $1,000 dollars to get me through the next month and fix the car along with it? Or drive me to the doctor since the car isn’t running?  None of you come over and hang out on my back porch. And I don’t run into any of you in the supermarket, even though two of us might be in the supermarket at the same time.

I don’t have time to read all of the sources. You and the rest of you are a great bunch of editors. Someday, when I have a job, it’s worth 20 bucks a year to have you around.

Several more readers share their thoughts on the Dish community:

I’m a new father of a baby daughter, who just moved his family into an apartment, and the money is extremely tight right now. But once I get the extra scratch I am going to 1) subscribe to The Dish and 2) donate to my local NPR station. Both of which I heavily rely on for news, information and intelligent discourse. What I get from these sources is well worth my money and, when the time comes, I expect to feel a little ping of pride in being a subscriber to The Dish.

The thing is, even without giving dollar one, I still feel a sense of community. The vast and diverse segment of the population that are Dish readers is constantly astounding to me. Whether or not I agree with a reader whose email you showcase, I know that at the very least they put some thought into it and are sincere. Thinking and sincerity isn’t something you would normally find in a comments section.

Another:

I probably send more emails to the Dish than to any one person I know outside of work, other than my close relatives and girlfriend. To the extent that “community” and “communication” have a shared root (which they do),qm The Dish is a community to me. And in any community, there are those who get a thrill up their leg being an active member (your “dorky” subscriber), and those who keep their distance from any displays of affection (your dissenter). And there are those who simply appreciate the stimulation the community provides and find it occasional cathartic to throw in their two cents (or pence in my case) by shooting of an email.

The Dish is not Oprah. It is that rare thing on the Internet: a place for intelligent discussion that wears itself lightly. Most of the web communities I’ve seen are populated by either emotion-infused screeds or dispassionate analyses that betray nothing of the writer’s bias. The Dish is the only place I find commentary that doesn’t pander to either extreme. In part because reader feedback is moderated. But largely because, while biased, the editing is, as you claim, remarkably balanced.  The attitude that led you to publish dissents of the day is I think the most compelling reason for the blog’s enduring success.

Another:

On whether the Dish is a community, I never gave it much thought but that’s besides the point. My main draw is that there are no comments. I see real discussions, not the mutated form that passes for “debate” these days, saturated with ad hominem and strawman attacks. I want to read comments to see what people think and use those thoughts to build, strength or reconsider my own ideas, but it’s disheartening (and time consuming) when the vast majority of comments I see on news-related sites contribute so little, and all they do is get my stress up.

I think part of this is not the inherent nature of comments itself, but our failure to teach people about real discussions. I admit there was an aspect of The Dish that made me uncomfortable, which was this very fact that we are at the mercy of you and your staff to judge which of our emails are worthy. It took some time to build that trust but now I now trust your abilities as our filter and to present a range of informed opinions. I don’t agree with everything I read, but I think it’s a mark of a good discussion when I can disagree without feeling like I was personally insulted.

In typing this email, it made me realize how much I’ve come to love The Dish, so I just subscribed.

You can join him and 21,387 other founding members [tinypass_offer text=”here”].

Party First, Ctd

Larison was disappointed that Rand Paul voted against Hagel:

Sen. Paul could have been the deciding vote to clear the way for Hagel’s confirmation, but instead he opted to vote the other way, and the justification he gave may have been the worst of all. If Paul had some irreconcilable disagreement with Hagel on principle or policy, it would have at least made sense to vote as he did. Instead, Paul endorsed one of the worst, least credible anti-Hagel arguments of all, which is essentially the Ted Cruz argument that Hagel needs to “prove” that he is not in league with foreign governments or sympathetic with terrorists.

Daniel McCarthy puts Rand’s actions in context:

Since he first won the Kentucky GOP Senate nomination in 2010, Rand Paul has set out to become the Republican’s Republican—not in the sense of being the most loyal party trooper, but in the sense of being its most ideologically committed leader. So when other Republicans propose cutting government, Rand urges deeper cuts. When Marco Rubio gives the party’s official State of the Union rebuttal, Rand gives the Tea Party response. The brand he cultivates is that of the antithesis of the RINO Republican. He takes the party’s core rhetorical concerns—taxes, states’ rights, smaller government—and pushes them farther. Quite probably that reflects what he really believes; it also aligns him with the party’s activist base ahead of the 2016 presidential contest. When he goes up against Rubio, his argument will be, “I’m more Republican than he is.”

But when it comes to defense, Paul’s policy legacy has been realism and non-interventionism and cuts in defense spending. He actually has a chance to get a Republican in the Defense Department who will be prepared to be skeptical about future interventions and austere about future spending. And yet Rand follows the Cruz McCarthyite line. That tells me a lot both about Rand Paul and the movement he is trying to lead.

Party First

Senate Luncheons

“To be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there’s a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people — people don’t forget that. You can disagree but if you’re disagreeable, then people don’t forget that,” – John McCain, still a douche.

Do you think he might have given his own vice-presidential nominee a sliver of the enhanced confirmation techniques he has applied to a fellow Republican with two Purple Hearts? A Republican who told the truth about the Iraq War when it mattered, who was dead right about the surge (and all the neocon bullshit about it), and who served honorably in the Senate and won two Purple Hearts for his country in Vietnam. McCain never ceases to tell us about his own war experience as a core insight into his character while he and his fellow tools among the neoconservative dead-enders try to destroy the character of a real war hero by McCarthyite smears, lies and innuendoes.

Let’s vent this the way McCain would: Senator McCain, you are a victim of torture who acquiesced to the CIA’s use of torture (often by the exact same techniques) on others; you nominated the least qualified and psychologically stable candidate to be a potential president of the US without even a cursory vetting. You’ve lost every campaign you ever fought for the presidency. You made a catastrophic error of judgment on Iraq and still refuse to show even a minimum of grace toward those who got it right. And yet you preen about putting “country first” which was your slogan in 2008. Why don’t you actually put your country first and allow the Senate to vote on a nominee for defense secretary? Or are you too bitter about the past and too petty in the present to give US troops an actual leader when they are putting their lives on the line for the rest of us?

(Photo: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., talks with reporters before the senate luncheons in the Capitol, on February 12. By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Poseur Alert

“I had a theory once, which I also put in a novel, that many nightmares were caused by a common physical need: the need to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom. Out of the stochastic stew that sits cooling on the stovetop of our sleep-softened consciousness, a couple of images would be ladled out in a bowl and sprinkled with a special neural Pickapeppa Sauce that made them seem frightening, so as to wake us up,” – Nicholson Baker.

The War In Mali Isn’t Over

David Axe checks in on the country:

When militants in northern Mali attacked towards Bamako on Jan. 11, France’s response followed the Somalia model. French armored vehicles sped north under intensive air cover. Special Operations Forces organized Malian battalions and led them into combat. The U.S. offered intel; sent transport and aerial refueling planes for support; and laid plans for a drone deployment to the region. In less than a month, French-led forces liberated all of the north’s major cities, reportedly killing hundreds of militants at light cost to themselves. Paris is now planning to pull out its troops as early as March.

But if Mali continues to echo Somalia, the real nasty fighting is only beginning just as France plans to pull out its forces. The corrupt, undisciplined Malian troops and unproven West African peacekeepers who will remain behind might not be up to the task of defeating an entrenched insurgency. Suppressing Somali militants took another five years of painful effort after the invasion phase. Does Mali also face years of bloody irregular fighting before it can declare peace?

Indications are, yes.

Burma vs Myanmar

A reader pushes back on my “personal note of thanks [to Obama] for using the words Rangoon and Burma” in his SOTU address:

I also used to make a big deal about using the terms “Rangoon” and “Burma”.  That was before I actually had been there. On each visit, I found that everybody in Myanmar says they live in Myanmar and that their capital is Yangon. Foreigners don’t get to decide that for them; they declare it stoutly, even if those changes were made by their despicable military regime.  We can all mourn the lost years in Myanmar, but we don’t need to fixate on the linguistics of their own place names. Several people, certainly not military sympathizers in any way, will point out that Myanmar is the country’s original name, that the Brits changed it to Burma to reflect the overweening power of the majority Bamar ethnic group in civic life.

One of the uses of the label Myanmar is to indicate inclusion of all the numerous ethnic groups as equal citizens.

Certainly it can be argued that that inclusion is by and large mere wallpaper, but what is also true is that little by little, many of the ethnic uprisings are quietly ending by treaties and peaceful means. Significant exceptions to that remain, such as the Kachin factions still boiling near Bhamo. (Apparently the old-school military fellows are continuing the battle despite orders from Naypyidaw to knock it off already.)

For what it’s worth, this appears to be the most exciting time to be a citizen of Myanmar in generations. One Burmese academic that a friend of mine interviewed said very eloquently that in the past, people in Myanmar “shuffled around” but now they are striding into the future. Even their gait and demeanor expresses that. Some of our American friends were cycling through Myanmar this winter and happened to be in Yangon when Obama arrived and witnessed thousands of people lining the streets thrilled to their bones at the ending of this long, brutal isolation. It’s beyond remarkable what has happened there in the last two years.

I think it’s fine to call it Burma or Myanmar, and certainly folks there wouldn’t bother to correct you.  I just think it’s time to stop being smug about using the term Burma to indicate a political viewpoint that in Myanmar itself is pretty irrelevant.

I wasn’t intending to be smug. I was resisting the re-naming of the country by a fascist junta. And the truth is that Burma and Myanmar are closely related and both exclude the long-brutally oppressed ethnic minorities:

Both these names are derived from the name of the majority Burmese Bamar ethnic group. Myanmar is considered to be the literary form of the name of the group, while Burma is derived from “Bamar”, the colloquial form of the group’s name.

The question of whether we should call foreign countries the same names they call themselves in their own language is a separate one. I’ll agree when my reader is fine visiting München and Москва with me. Till then I’ll call it Burma – which is an anglicized version of what Brits heard when they listened to the locals.

Letters From Iraq

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As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the invasion, Peter Maass views on-the-ground accounts as possibly the best way “to remember and explore the still-painful aftermath”:

[Lt. Tim McLaughlin] shared his war diaries with me, and I realized, when I thumbed through the first pages and sand fell from them (Tim had not touched them since Iraq) that I was holding an amazing document. I had been a foreign correspondent for many years, and had seen lots of documentation about war, but this was the most original and emotional — war as seen by the combatant, in the combatant’s handwriting, written in his downtime between battles. It wasn’t filtered by the media, by politicians or generals, and it didn’t even suffer the visual flattening of a computer font.

The content stunned me. Tim was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and was a tank platoon commander in his tip-of-the-spear battalion in 2003. His diaries contain raw descriptions of everything from the smoke-filled corridors of the Pentagon on that tragic September day to the violence of the Iraq invasion and the craziness of the toppling of the iconic statue. The agony of firing too soon and shooting civilians, and firing too late and losing a fellow Marine to enemy bullets, as well as the boredom and humor and exhaustion of the invasion–these searing things are in the diaries, in addition to Tim’s evocative maps and pictures. While the diaries are remarkably personal, they reflect multiple facets of the combatant experience of war.

An exhibit centered around the diary will open at the Bronx Documentary Center in NYC on March 15. Above is a video from the project’s Kickstarter page, which is still taking donations.