Despite serious misgivings about the current state of the GOP, David Frum hasn’t given up on the party. But he understands just how big the GOP’s problems are:
Three big trends have decisively changed the Republican Party over the past decade, weakening its ability to win presidential elections and gravely inhibiting its ability to govern effectively if it nevertheless somehow were to win. First, Republicans have come to rely more and more on the votes of the elderly, the most government-dependent segment of the population — a serious complication for a party committed to reducing government. Second, the Republican donor class has grown more ideologically extreme, encouraging congressional Republicans to embrace ever more radical tactics. Third, the party’s internal processes have rigidified, in ways that dangerously inhibit its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The GOP can overcome the negative consequences of these changes and, in time, surely will. The ominous question for Republicans is, How much time will the overcoming take?
Why he still believes conservatism will be reborn:
For every action, whether in physics or in politics, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The liberal surge of the Obama years invites a conservative response, and a multiethnic, socially tolerant conservatism is waiting to take form. As the poet T. S. Eliot, a political conservative, once gloomily consoled his readers, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The message reads better when translated into American vernacular: “It ain’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over.”
The Republican Party constructed a geriatric trap for itself. Just how it will escape is hard to see. It is a small-government party whose base is wedded to the programs that constitute a large and growing share of government. The inability to touch the benefits of any old person, in combination with its still-extant support for defense and fanatical opposition to tax hikes in any form, have driven Republicans to propose massive cuts to the small share of government that benefits struggling workers. This priority has, in turn, saddled the GOP with the (correct) image of hostility toward the unfortunate.
The IDF assassinated three Hamas commanders in a strike on a building in Gaza yesterday:
Israeli forces had a day of successful air strikes Thursday, killing three senior Hamas officials just a day after the organization claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of three Israeli teens. The strikes targeted leaders of Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades. According to Hamas, the strikes killed Mohammad Abu-Shamalah, Raed al-Attar, and Mohammed Barhoum, all highly sought by Israeli forces. The IDF initially only confirmed the deaths of Abu-Shamalah and al-Attar, but later confirmed that Barhoum had been killed as well. … These triumphs against the Qassam Brigades leadership came just a day after Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and deaths of Israeli teens Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel.
Morrissey thinks these assassinations are particularly significant:
The target selection sends a big message, too. For the past several weeks, the Israelis had for the most part resigned themselves to a continuing Hamas presence, in part over fear of what might follow in its place. One need look no farther than the northern Iraqi desert to contemplate the answer to that question. Now, though, Israel seems more committed to decisively breaking Hamas rather than the “mowing the lawn” strategy early in this war. The tunnels may have convinced them, or more likely the large plot for a coup against the Palestinian Authority, but either way the specific targeting of top leadership sends a message that Israel has dispensed with worrying about the pessimistic options and now want Hamas out of the way entirely. The futility of the latest round of talks can’t have helped, either.
But Rami Khouri argues that Israel’s strategy of assassinating Hamas leaders has always been counterproductive and remains so today:
Palestinians have responded to the loss of their militant leaders by developing much more secure, smaller and more secretive leadership structures that cannot be easily penetrated by Israeli intelligence agents. Groups such as Hamas have established more decentralized and localized operational units that continue to function in war or peace if the leadership is hit. More sophisticated command-and-control systems have evolved that don’t rely on a single decision-maker. Support among the Palestinian community for the long-term struggle has increased. And the resistance itself has turned to technologies and strategies — such as rockets and tunnel-building — that are more deeply embedded in Palestinian communities than reliant on the skills or charisma of a handful of individual commanders.
In an apparent response to the assassinations, Hamas executed 18 Gazans suspected of being informants for Israel:
One witness said masked gunmen lined up the seven men in a side street and opened fire on them. He spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for his own safety. Other witnesses told AFP that six of the victims were grabbed from among hundreds of worshipers leaving the city’s largest mosque, by men in the uniform of Hamas’s military wing. They were pushed to the ground. One of the masked men shouted: “This is the final moment of the Zionist enemy collaborators,” then the gunmen sprayed them with bullets.
On Friday morning, a Gaza security official said that 11 suspected informers were killed at the Gaza City police headquarters, noting that they had previously been sentenced by Gaza courts. The killings of the first 11 were also reported by al-Rai and al-Majd, two websites linked to Hamas.
(Photo: Palestinians carry the body of Mohammed Abu Shammala, one of three senior Hamas commanders during his funeral in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. By Ahmed Hjazy/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Beinart blames the Clintons’ tendency to hold grudges:
The winning-by-losing strategy works best when it gains you some influence over the person who defeats you for the nomination. Sometimes that means earning a place alongside them on the presidential ticket, as Edwards did in 2004. Sometimes it simply means convincing their supporters that you have a bright future and may be worth supporting down the line. The strategy works less well if the person who defeats you becomes your sworn enemy, committed to doing you political harm. It’s the fear that the Clintons may do exactly that that is limiting the pool of willing challengers.
And for good reason. Throughout their careers, Bill and Hillary Clinton have shown a willingness to remember, and punish, political betrayals.
Pivoting off Beinart, Carpenter worries about Hillary’s “self-formulated bubble”:
Histories of her healthcare fiasco are fraught with tales of insider paranoia and Gothic intrigue; her Iraq war vote was cast in willing ignorance of contrary or at least questioning national-security briefs; and her 2008 campaign was a superlative study in managerial cluelessness–all this, in large part, because aides were afraid to tell “her early and bluntly enough that things were veering badly off course.”
Well, that is indeed history; a rather harmless history of when Hillary was just a candidate, or First Lady, or merely one of 100 senators. Which is to say, she wasn’t president of the United States, with countless executive agencies and all of America’s firepower at her bubbled disposal. Yikes.
The border between Iraq and Syria is meaningless to ISIS, and may soon become meaningless to the US as well, with administration officials dropping hints right and left that the air campaign against the “caliphate” might eventually cross it. The hints began with deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes on NPR early yesterday morning:
“We don’t rule anything out when it comes to the protection of Americans and the disruption of terrorist plotting against the United States. So we would not restrict ourselves by geographic boundaries when it comes to the core mission of U.S. foreign policy, which is the protection of our people.” … When Kelly McEvers floated an idea put forth by Ryan Crocker, former American ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq, that the U.S. work with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad against ISIL, Rhodes dismissed the idea out of hand. Citing a “vacuum” caused by Assad’s policies and “barbarism against his people,” Rhodes explained that ISIL was able to grow because of Assad, not in spite of him.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey rounded out the suggestion in a press conference:
So far the airstrikes against ISIS have been successful, but the New York Times notes that the military’s current strategy is to contain the group, not destroy it. ISIS has been building up its base in Syria for more than a year, and General Dempsey said the threat would eventually have to be “addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border.”
That isn’t necessarily happening anytime soon. “That will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time,” Dempsey said. “ISIS will only truly be defeated when it’s rejected by the 20 million disenfranchised Sunni that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.” When pressed on whether the U.S. is considering conducting airstrikes in Syria, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would only say “we’re looking at all options.”
Allahpundit wonders exactly what options they’re looking at:
A year ago at this time, Obama was getting ready to bomb Syria to weaken Assad; a year later, here’s his deputy National Security Advisor refusing to rule out bombing Syria to weaken Assad’s chief opposition. Droning jihadis in places we don’t have boots on the ground is SOP for Obama, though. How big this news is depends on what sort of air assets Rhodes imagines us using in Syria and what sort of ISIS targets Obama’s willing to engage. If all he means is droning jihadi terror camps, that’s no great shakes. Why would we hold off on doing that in Syria when we don’t hold off in Pakistan and Yemen, two nominal allies of the United States? If he means using more muscular — and manned — aircraft, though, and if he’s imagining bombing ISIS’s front lines, that’s more significant. (It would also kinda sorta make us Assad’s air force, wouldn’t it?)
The Economistsuggests that an air campaign over Syria would be an easier sell if regional leaders were on board with it:
Assad has previously tended to leave IS alone, happy to let it hurt the more moderate rebels. But recently his air force has struck the group’s base in Raqqa. The Americans have so far decided that they cannot do likewise, deeming that they must not be seen to operate on the same side as the man whose overthrow they have repeatedly demanded.
But they may be persuaded to change their mind if the most influential governments in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and even Iran, were able in joint or parallel statements to endorse the bombing of IS in Syria—or at least to abstain from opposing it. So far the West has lacked a policy that spans national borders. Yet [Atlantic Council analyst Fred] Hof points out that “IS is a problem that transcends national boundaries and has to be approached as a problem that transcends nationalist boundaries.”
Rosie Gray takes up the question of whether striking ISIS in Syria would entail an alliance with Bashar al-Assad:
“What if, due to a deal [Assad] stopped slaughtering his own people?” former CIA analyst Nada Bakos said on Twitter on Wednesday night. Journalist Michael Weiss had asked, “To those advocating a deal with Assad to defeat ISIS, explain how this is any less barbarous” with a link to an article about new evidence of regime atrocities. Bakos said in an email to BuzzFeed that the goal should be to stabilize the situation in Syria, giving actors in the region a better chance at vanquishing ISIS.
“I don’t believe Assad’s forces can achieve that single-handedly and we aren’t about to partner with him, nor should we,” Bakos said. “However, arming the rebels at this point just means a longer, protracted war that is already full of proxies. It would be almost endless. If we can identify why we are taking action, we can then decide on our best course of action (which is likely still pretty awful). Our goal should be to stop the chaos, but sometimes all we can do from the outside is just help contain it.”
But at least for the moment, the administration is vociferously denying that such an alliance is in the offing:
“The Obama administration can’t partner with Assad overtly at this time, but the logic and trajectory of White House policy in Syria leads in that direction,” Tony Badran, a research fellow specializing in Syria and Hezbollah at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News. “White House policy in Syria is predicated on preserving so-called regime institutions.”
In public, the administration is not changing its position on Assad. And State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf disputed that the U.S. and Syrian governments share a common goal in defeating ISIS. “I would strongly disagree with the notion that we are on the same page here,” Harf said on Monday, while later admitting to Fox News, “We may be looking at some of the same targets.”
Even if the U.S. doesn’t coordinate with Assad’s government—the White House position as expressed by Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is still that he’s “part of the problem”—the shift in priority to ISIS does make it more likely that the American government is going to accept Assad remaining in power. Or at least it makes it less likely that the U.S. will take any major steps to remove him.
Assad played the long game with a pretty weak hand and now appears to bewinning. Meanwhile, the death toll in his country just passed 191,000.
(Photo: A Syrian woman makes her way through debris following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo on July 15, 2014. By Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images)
Steven Chapman admits that “rates of violent crime are far higher among blacks than among whites” but he wants more attention to that fact that “these rates have dropped sharply over the past two decades”:
There’s another, bigger problem with the preoccupation with “black-on-black crime.” The term suggests race is the only important factor. Most crimes are committed by males, but we don’t refer to “male-on-male crime.” Whites in the South are substantially more prone to homicide than those in New England, but no one laments “Southerner-on-Southerner crime.” Why does crime involving people of African descent deserve its own special category?
The phrase stems from a desire to excuse whites from any role in changing the conditions that breed disorder and delinquency in poor black areas. It carries the message that blacks are to blame for the crime that afflicts them—and that only they can eliminate it. Whites are spared any responsibility in the cause or the cure.
Yglesias applies the language usually reserved for black-on-black violence to white-on-white violence:
[T]he disturbing truth, according to the FBI’s most recent homicide statistics, is that the United States is in the wake of an epidemic of white-on-white crime. Back in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow Caucasians.
So it won’t surprise anybody to learn that I really, really don’t like Buzzfeed.
Sometimes, when I consider the Buzzfeed phenomenon, I think I’m living in some sort of fictional satirical world where Buzzfeed is a symbol of how far media can fall. It’s like living in a Douglas Copeland novel. Buzzfeed’s particular brand of lowest common denominator clickbait, their “14 Giraffes Who Totally Look Like Steve Buscemi,” their “25 Things Only People from [Insert Geographical Area Here] Understand,” their “Which of Fat Cat’s Minions from Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers Are You?” quizzes, their corpsefucking glurge, sitting side-by-side with their “branded content” like “12 Most Crunchtastic TV Moments Brought to You by Frito Lay,” subsidizing imperial stenographer Rosie Gray’s smears of Max Blumenthal (an actual journalist), powered by an aggregation model that comes pretty close to plagiarism even when it doesn’t devolve into the serial copy-and-pasting of Benny Johnson (thanks BlippoBoppo and CrushingBort), in an environment where they can memory hole 4,000 posts and think they don’t have to say anything in particular about it publicly, all lorded over by dumb-faced Ben Smith’s dumb face…. It’s bleak, man. I mean, I can see somebody getting a job offer from Buzzfeed and trying to rationalize it, telling themselves, “well, they’re not so bad….” Yes, they are. They are exactly that bad.
The thing is, I don’t know if there’s some more ethical path writers these days can walk and still end up being able to support themselves. It’s looking pretty grim out there for our professional online writers.
I’m someone who writes a lot of what I guess you would call media criticism. And that means that I’m frequently in the position of saying some not-very-nice things about people who write professionally online. But I criticize because I think that job is important; I happen to have some old-fashioned, corny ideas about the role that journalism and political commentary have to play in a democracy such as ours. We need professional writers– not just dedicated amateurs– to observe and comment on our society and our government, in order to ensure that both are functioning the way that they should, and to give our people information they need to make rational political choices. The problem is that the basic economics of that work have become so threatened that I don’t know what independent writers are supposed to do. I hate when talented people join up with outfits like Buzzfeed, which I think are genuinely making our country a stupider place. But I don’t see any clear path that people can take to preserve both their integrity and their ability to eat.
I could, if I was feeling masochistic, run down some of the publications that have recently shuttered or dramatically restructured in a way that has trimmed a lot of talented writers from their payrolls. Sports On Earth, for example, was a bright spot in the shouty, gimmicky world of online sports coverage, a place that provided steady work to talented writers like Tomas Rios and Jeb Lund, and which was willing to take a chance on genuinely unique work in a media world growing ever-more homogenous. Or look at the uncertain fate of The American Prospect, for decades an incubator of young liberal writing talent. TAP has prestige and it has a legacy, but you can’t pay the bills with either of those. NSFWCorp was always controversial, but everyone has to recognize that it was a bold attempt at producing real journalism with a new and unique funding model. But that model fell through. For awhile, there was a lot of hype about how hyper-local reporting would be the next wave in web publishing, but AOL’s massive Patch effort crashed and burned. Well, Patch is now a “new, nimble company,” and profitable– thanks in large measure to laying off 85% of its news staff. Even that mild success stems from putting a lot of people out of work.
There are way too many great writers– people like Lund and the brilliant and provocative Yasmin Nair and others– who don’t have a steady, secure gig that can keep them doing what they do best.
The basic economics of all of this are truly discouraging. Many people who are able to scratch out a living as professional writers have to do so with content mill writing, churning out four or five or six or more posts a day, sometimes for as little as $15 a post. Many have their pay tied to performance incentives, based on clicks, essentially mandating that people play the clickbait game if they want to pay the rent. The importance of Search Engine Optimization may be fading but the days of Please Facebook Favor My Post in Your Algorithm are in full bloom, and if anything that master is even less knowable than Google ever was. Freelancers might get $500 or $1000 for a strong, researched, reported story. That might sound like a lot, but when you’ve spot months conceiving, researching, reporting, and writing that piece, the math is dismal. Clearly, getting a job as an editor or staff writer at a deep-pocketed publication is best, and there’s no substitute for that kind of security. But I think people would be amazed at how little those positions sometimes pay, and they often require living in New York, DC, or Los Angeles, three ludicrously expensive places to live. I know people who work for well-known, national magazines, the kind of jobs thousands of young journos and writers want to work for, who still have to work on the side doing copy writing to make ends meet. And they’re the lucky ones.
There are some people who enjoy the blessing of working under a patronage model, where someone or some institution with deep pockets can afford to subsidize work that isn’t meant to pay for itself. But most writers simply have to chase clicks if they want to survive. What that means is that even the most independent writers tend to chase the same stories, writing post after post about Robin Williams or the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, knowing that those stories can succeed because they have succeeded already. That makes online writing a brutally homogeneous affair. Choire Sicha– who I think has as much integrity as anybody, although I’m sure he’d roll his eyes at that– made the case recently, saying:
I do not read a lot of things anymore. A lot of us don’t, we sort of go where the tide takes us. I feel weird about that. I opened up my Digg reader the other day, because I was on blogging duty at work, and everything was so duplicative of each other. I was like, yeah, okay, there’s that piece of news filtering through all these different websites, all the same things… no wonder I don’t go to them. I need to make a new folder in my Digg reader, I guess, that’s “Things That Are Surprising and Interesting and Maybe Weird.” It’s sort of… it’s not… I don’t know, something’s wrong.
That is hardly an experience unique to him. I posted a photo of a cluster of Slate stories about Robin Williams to my Facebook, a half-dozen different angles from the same website about the same dead celebrity. But I could have done the same thing with any number of other websites.
You probably know the causes by now. Even if you don’t believe in the Peak Ad thesis, you’ve got the essential problem that with so many websites and the ever-growing number of ads on social media like Facebook and Twitter, all competing with the Google behemoth, you’ve got a nearly limitless supply of online advertising, inevitably pushing down the value of ads. Sites have responded by coming up with new and innovative ways to fool readers into thinking ads are legitimate stories. We laughed at the Atlantic Scientology fiasco, but they were just a little ahead of the curve. We’re starting to see more and more attempts at direct monetization, with paywalls and subscription services, which is great. I hope they succeed. But the idea that online content has to be free is so deeply baked into the culture that it’s going to take great effort to get people used to the idea of paying. I think that the widespread mockery of the New York Times Times Select experiment was a major failure by the industry to think long-term. Sure, it was a failed experiment, and there’s nothing wrong with saying so. But the deep mockery of the very idea of a paywall helped contribute to a precedent that is still alive today. I clicked on a Haaretz link yesterday and was deeply annoyed to find that it was paywalled. It took me a little bit to realize that, when I get angered by the idea of a newspaper asking me to pay for its content, I’m part of the problem.
The sad fact is that there may just be too many mouths to feed, right now, and not enough money to go around. But even so, I don’t know how you solve this problem on the supply side. People are either going to be willing to pay for what they read or they aren’t.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. There’s lots of great stuff getting written out there. And I’m hoping that a combination of various models and formats can sustain the industry moving forward. Paid, niche-audience newsletters like Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, the patronage model of Pierre Omidyar and First Look Media, porous paywalls and gated content like at The New York Times, and hybrid models like this very website– these can all work alongside sites paid for by advertising. There are some great new independent publications out there, like Jacobin Magazine or Rachel Rosenfelt’s The New Inquiry, although I have no idea if they are self-sustaining or close to it. I’ve come to a point where I recognize that universal condemnations of clickbait content simply aren’t fair, if I want to continue to enjoy lots of free stuff to read online. The question becomes what the clickbait is subsidizing, and who, and what the percentages are. Under the steady leadership of Max Read, I think Gawker has done a good job with achieving that kind of balance, for one example, but it’s always going to be a negotiation, and a struggle. And while I admire what Andrew has built here, this is a model that simply can’t be replicated by most people. It’s a functioning, self-sustaining website, but it isn’t a model or a plan.
We’ll have to see where this all goes next. For myself, I am merely trying to be more understanding and less quick to judge, while remaining adamantly opposed to PR and advertising masked as journalism. I used to mock people who spent their lives writing the same “Top Ten Dumbest Things Said on Faux News This Week” piece over and over again, but I don’t anymore. I don’t bring my online life into my day-to-day life; I think a majority of my classmates and professors have no idea I write online. But I still get undergrads who seek me out on campus, who come to me looking for advice on how to break into online writing as a profession. I never know what to tell them. I have always written from the position of privilege of not needing to write to live. Sometimes I give them advice, sometimes I put them in touch with editors I’m friendly with. But for their basic questions about how to make it, I don’t really know how to respond. It’s a tough business, and an essential one, and I genuinely don’t know if it’s going to survive.
(And for Christ’s sakes, if you like a site, whitelist it on your AdBlock, OK?)
A Russian aid convoy bound for eastern Ukraine crossed the border today without the permission of the Ukrainian government, which is calling the act an “invasion”:
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday morning that Moscow had run out of patience with “delays” and other “excuses” from Ukraine. It charged that Ukraine’s leaders were deliberately trying to slow-walk the delivery of aid to the war-torn region of Luhansk until “there is no one at all to provide help to.”
The decision to send in the aid without the consent of the Red Cross or Ukrainian authorities marked a dangerous new step in the four-month conflict. If Ukrainian forces fire on the trucks, they could trigger an all-out invasion by Russian forces that have accumulated by the tens of thousands across the border from eastern Ukraine. If they allow the trucks to disperse across the Luhansk region without any Ukrainian controls, Russia in effect will have imposed a cease-fire in the fight against pro-Russian separatists without Kiev’s permission.
That’s precisely what Ed Morrissey suspects the Kremlin is trying to do:
Russia tried a direct invasion last week in what appeared to be an attempt to start a shooting war. Although Russia later denied it, at first they confirmed the incursion, but didn’t follow up with military action when it came under Ukrainian fire. Prior to that, I warned that the aid convoy could be used to force the Ukrainian military into a unilateral cease-fire to prevent any Russian retaliation for convoy losses in potential firefights, and that seems to be at least one of the motives for running through the border now. Otherwise, why not wait for the inspections? …
Until the rebellion gets settled one way or the other, peace will not be forthcoming. The aid convoy only delays that resolution if Russia plans to use it as a barricade for the rebels, or as a beachhead for an occupation.
The Interpreterlive-blog passes along a report that most of the trucks had not been inspected by Ukrainian border guards:
“In total, 34 people and 34 vehicles were processed. The total weight was 268,020 kg. Vehicles were loaded to two thirds of their capacity. The average weight of one vehicle was 8,375 kg. 32 trucks carried food products (buckwheat, rice, sugar and water), 2 trucks carried medical supplies,” report border guards. … Andrei Lysenko, the spokesman for the Ukrainian National Defence and Security Council (SNBO), has told reporters at a briefing today that more than 90 trucks (note that only 34 passed customs clearance) have set off into Ukrainian territory today.
Jonathan Cohn reminds us that “this is how Democrats usually win on Medicare and Medicaid—by reminding voters of what they have to lose from proposed Republican attacks on the programs”:
This isn’t just some ad the Pryor campaign posted online, in order to gin up donations from liberals. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports that it’s airing across the state, at a cost that runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And while one ad does not a political trend make, you don’t have to squint to see signs that the politics of Obamacare are shifting. Bloomberg News just did a study of Republican television ads and discovered that mentions of Obamacare are way down from where they were a few months ago. Meanwhile, as Sargent has pointed out several times, Republican Senators and Senate candidates are struggling to explain their opposition to the law, even in conservative states.
First, he hones in on the most popular aspect of the Affordable Care Act: coverage for those with preexisting conditions, which has support across the aisle.
“We all agree that nobody should be denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition,” David Ray, a Cotton campaign spokesman, told TIME in an emailed statement.
Second, Pryor’s ad doesn’t use the term “Obamacare,” the Affordable Care Act’s nickname first coined by its critics. AKaiser Health Tracking poll released August 1 found that a little over half of the public—53%—have an unfavorable view of Obamacare. But when referred to by a different name, the law’s negative ratings can decrease, polls show.
Republicans are attacking Pryor for not mentioning Obamacare by name. Buetler scores that fight:
Republicans working to defeat Pryor … criticize Pryor for eschewing the label, because the label’s just about the only thing they’re comfortable assailing. In this way, they resemble Democrats six and eight years ago, running against the Bush tax cuts (for the rich), knowing that they had no intention of letting anything but the most regressive of those tax cuts expire.
In that sense, the GOP’s obsession with the moniker, and only the moniker, is excellent news for Obamacare’s political durability.
Pakistan may be on the brink of a political crisis after opposition leader Imran Khan suspended talks with the government in response to the appointment of a new police chief in Islamabad:
Khan, a famed cricketer-turned-politician, and fiery cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri have led massive protests from the eastern city of Lahore to the gates of parliament in Islamabad to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, accusing him of rigging the vote that brought him to power last year. The protests have raised fears of unrest in the nuclear-armed US ally with a history of political turmoil, and after a request from the country’s powerful military the government convened talks with Khan and Qadri’s representatives early Thursday. Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a senior leader of Khan’s party, told reporters that the opposition presented six demands, including Sharif’s resignation. …
Later on Thursday, Khan told his supporters that the government had removed the Islamabad police chief for not using force against him, and warned that the new police chief, Khalid Khattak, would follow orders to disperse the protests, which have thus far been peaceful.
The army’s growing role in containing this crisis makes Michael Kugelman very nervous:
With Islamabad increasingly on the defensive, the military is gaining an upper hand. Consider Sharif’s decision last week to make the armed forces responsible for security of sensitive facilities in Islamabad during the protests. This can be interpreted either as a sop to the military or as an acknowledgment that the government can’t protect its own people — or itself. Additionally, Sharif’s Independence Day speech on Aug. 14, the first official day of the protests, was rife with praise for Pakistan’s military. That such praise came from a civilian leader as combative as Sharif is quite telling. Most significantly, on Aug. 19, as marchers entered the Red Zone, the government ceded full security of the area to the military. The government gave the military carte blanche to do what it so relishes: serve as the nation’s protector and savior.
Furthermore, with many Pakistanis cheering on a countermilitancy offensive underway in North Waziristan, the military’s star could continue to rise in the coming weeks. Possible retaliatory terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities could prompt more calls for the military to provide security, which would further embolden Pakistan’s most powerful institution.
Videos of masked militants beheading captive Westerners were a common feature of jihadist propaganda in the early years of the last decade, but such videos had scarcely been seen in a decade when the video of James Foley’s murder came to light this week. Katie Zavadski explains why:
According to University of Massachusetts, Lowell, professor Mia Bloom, the videos faded because they were frowned upon by higher-ups in organizations like Al Qaeda. Although Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a high-ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq operative, was said to have personally executed Americans Nicholas Berg and Eugene Armstrong, Bloom says superiors, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, looked down on the practice. “AQI got into a lot of trouble for those public beheadings,” she says, because they did more to alienate potential supporters than to recruit them.
“What’s interesting is that you saw a drop-off of these videos because they provoked somewhat of a backlash,” agrees SUNY Albany professor Victor Asal. While everyone knew these groups were doing horrible things, including beheadings, there was something particularly distasteful about videotaping their executions. By returning to these videos, ISIS is saying, “We will do what we want, how we want,” Asal says. “Be very, very scared of us.”
Adam Taylor explores ISIS’s macabre devotion to this particularly bloody method of murder:
The Islamic State may justify its beheadings with theology and history, but the use of the tactic is probably driven by more immediate factors. “I don’t think there’s anything inherently Islamist to these beheadings,” Max Abrahms, a Northeastern professor who studies jihadist groups, told The Post. “It’s important to recognize where Islamic State is coming from historically, in order to understand why it is beheading people — and why it’s using social media to broadcast it.”
In particular, Abrahms argues, the Islamic State may be seeking to differentiate itself from al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group he notes was “widely seen, even among jihadists, as a failure.” With high-profile beheadings, the Islamic State could be attempting to link itself to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Guantanamo Bay detainee and alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who is now thought to have killed Pearl.
The Dish 