Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

I was in Afghanistan in ’05 and Iraq in ’06 with the 82nd Airborne.  We all loved Team America, occasionally referred to ourselves as such and although I thought it was a bit offensive — and made my views on it clear — from time to time “durka durka” and “Mohammed jihad” were used by my soldiers on mission.

In yet more evidence that the American public just doesn’t understand its military, I’m disappointed to read that people are shocked that American soldiers a) liked Team America and b) have assumed some of its best jokes into their daily banter.  Contrary to what some of your readers may believe, the irony is absolutely not lost on the troops. 

And I doubt that, as one of your readers notes, Parker and Stone would be shocked at the running jokes their film has inspired.  Parker and Stone, you’ll remember, did a whole episode on using the word “gay” to describe Harley-Davidson riders, all the while claiming that it had nothing to do with homophobia.  While I found the episode funny, I’m not surprised that those who have been and continue to be hurt by the term “gay” being used as a derogatory adjective did not agree with them at all. Just as language is an organic feature of human life, so is humor and both evolve and change constantly.  American soldiers and marines are smart enough and tuned-in enough to know when they — and their country’s foreign policy — are being made fun of and have flipped the joke on its head. 

Did I ever refer to us guys out on mission as Team America? Fuck yeah, but that doesn’t mean the complexities of the mission or the problems of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were lost on us.  Give the troops some credit.  The movie was funny and we get it.  We also made it our own, much like many ethnic and racial groups have taken derogatory and stereotypical terms for themselves and made such terms a badge of pride.

A must-read. Money quote:

In the excerpt above, Mr. Goldberg quotes an anonymous Washington Post staffer who, it should be noted, spoke disparagingly of his or her own newspaper in a conversation with a journalist from a competing media company. This source disparaged Dave Weigel, The Post, and the people responsible for hiring him, anonymously. In other words, this source's very actions imply that he or she knows The Washington Post would look unfavorably on the public airing of this opinion, but decided that lack of discretion isn't the problem so much as being stupid enough to get caught. Do journalists really want to help establish a standard whereby "stupidity" equals transparency?

— Firing Dave Weigel incentivizes more digging into the personal opinions of journalists, and validates the idea that they should be judged on the basis of those opinions, rather than the content of their work. What's next? E-mails sent to a few people and leaked? Opinions offered at a bar over beers and surreptitiously recorded? Can I reiterate how glad I am to have moved away from Washington DC? (You should hear what I say about De Beers in private!)

— Mr. Goldberg suggests that this episode might "lead to the re-imposition of some level of standards" at The Washington Post, suggesting that the newspaper's problem is that it employs people like Ezra Klein and Dave Weigel, who've exercised poor judgment in writing intended for a private audience. I submit that seeing these two staffers — who are intellectually honest and talented, whatever their flaws — as the problem at The Post is to miss the Mark Thiessen for the trees.

More fodder for Zach Anner's growing army of fans here and here. Add to his nearly 8.5 million votes here.

Avent studies the GDP revision:

Not only was growth revised downward. In addition, what growth occurred was more dependent on transitory factors and less dependent on the underlying economic fundamentals than earlier seemed to be the case.

This isn't a complete travesty of a GDP revision, but it does suggest that recovery is weaker and less well established than was previously believed. Which makes sense, against the rest of the statistical landscape, including weak job growth and a surprisingly market vulnerability to European crisis.

And the Post accepts. A sad day for journalism. Ben Smith claims Dave is a liberal. Not from where I sit. He's a sane libertarian, which means he understood just how completely nuts the conservative movement and Republican party now are. But Ben is right about this:

There's no sign the Post really thought this through. Even as old-timers rankled at the new hires,  the paper — scrambling for relevance on the Internet — seems not to have considered what the buzzy personnel moves would mean for the paper's longstanding principles of detachment and neutrality in reporting.

One thing nobody argues is that publications should misrepresent and misidentify their own reporters. The Post set Weigel up for a fall, and themselves for embarrassment, and that's what they got today.

Goldblog relays anonymous gripes from the old WaPo guard – on Weigel's apparent "lack of toilet training", on his behaving "like an idiot", on the awfulness of "untrained kids" like Ezra Klein, and on the appalling idea that bloggers call themselves reporters. Goldblog remains, however, a believer in the value of "temperance in the expression of personal views." 

There is a war going on within American journalism. All I can say is that I have learned more from Dave Weigel's brilliant, obsessive, accurate and first-hand reporting – yes, old-fashioned, grass-roots reporting – on the conservative movement than I ever have from the pompous dinosaur "journalists" at the WaPo.

Copyranter comments on this award-winning campaign:

Fucking old people, just die already, so that we young UK fauxhemians can waltz into the London Shock and Soul vintage clothing shop and scoop up your discarded duds, wash the fucking disgusting old smell out of them, and then wear them, ironically, to the next Japanther show.

Daniel Berman tries to find lessons from the remarkable demise of the Australian prime minister:

In many ways Rudd’s election and subsequent problems mirrored those of another candidate of change, and his difficulties may well preview the challenges Obama would have faced had he buckled and failed to pass health-care in February, as many observers urged him to do. And the lesson from Australia seems to be a reinforcement of the axiom that “one who stands for nothing, is nothing.” …

Kevin Rudd took over as one of Australia’s most popular politicians, but things seemed to move much less rapidly than many of his supporters had hoped. Rudd reiterated his determination to keep Australian troops in Afghanistan, and went so far as to block a number of progressive policies, intervening to invalidate a law passed by the local government of the Australian Capital Territory legalizing Gay Marriage.

On the major issue, global warming, and its policy heart, the Emissions Trading Scheme or ETS, effectively identical Obama’s proposed “Cap and Trade” system, the government seemed in no hurry.

Geoffrey Aronson writes that Gaza's humanitarian crisis began long before Hamas's victory:

Draconian restrictions on the entry of Palestinian labor to Israel, the failure to establish a reliable export/import regime through Karni and other crossings, and the stillborn safe passage route linking Gaza with the West Bank–all signature elements of policy before June 2007 and indeed before Hamas' parliamentary victory in January 2006–are the product of this strategic re-evaluation of Israeli interests. As such, the policies that have so stirred the international community in recent weeks are not incidental byproducts that can be solved by technical fixes of the kind now being proposed, but rather are integral to Israel's strategy. Even before June 2007, this system resulted in the creation of a "soft quarantine" that created substantial economic dislocation in Gaza and led to widespread flight of Gaza's manufacturing base.

Brian Ulrich nods.

A reader writes:

In keeping up with the bear thread, here is an actual sign (from Canada, of course) that you may like.  Read the whole sign to enjoy.