From C&L:
George Stephanopoulos: How do you defend that gas tax holiday? I was talking to Senator Clinton last week. and asked her if she could name a credible economist who could support it, and she couldn’t. Can you?
Carly Fiorina: No, I can’t, but, you see, I don’t think it matters.
"Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world); and this immediately brings us up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff, but – just as worryingly – of non-functional joy: or, to put it less starkly, joy whose material ‘production’ is an embodied person aware of grace. It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in "his" attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…?"
Even Fred Barnes is beginning to worry that 2008 for the GOP seems a little like 1997 in Britain for the Tories.
Fallows’ take – with photos:
My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.
Another post-9/11 horror story:
Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken — or not taken — by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.
According to an analysis by The Post, most of the people who died were young. Thirty-two of the detainees were younger than 40, and only six were 70 or older. The deaths took place at dozens of sites across the country. The most at one location was six at the San Pedro compound near Los Angeles.
What has happened to America?
Still human, even in politics:
Though he’s given up journalism for politics, Johnson will always have the writer’s desire to narrate what he sees in the world around him. He has an internal monologue that can’t be shut off. Out campaigning one afternoon, a red doubledecker bus passes by. "Wave to the bus, Boris!" one of his supporters said. He waves and smiles. And then in a voice just faintly above a whisper, that only I can hear standing right next to him, he mutters, "London commuters. Doleful. Angry."
Thank God he didn’t say "bitter."
A military judge – with the backing of the military’s legal corps – acknowledges how rigged the Bush administration’s Gitmo "military tribunals" were designed to be. It’s encouraging that the decent men and women in the military are standing up to the Bush administration’s short-sighted, un-American notions of justice. Marty Lederman wonders why the NYT couldn’t provide the actual legal opinion.
This is a brilliant article, full of insight and humor, about the debate between liberal institutionalists, neocons and realists in foreign policy. And it’s all about "The Godfather", one of the greatest political movies of all time:
Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: “We oughta hear what they have to say.”
Sonny, the neocon: “No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. . . . And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up—just help me win alright?”
Enter Michael, the young son, the realist. McCain is still Sonny, of course. I don’t know whether Obama fits more the "liberal institutionalist" role or the realist, more Tom or Michael. I’m hoping for a Niebuhrian fusion, with the emphasis on Michael’s cunning. As I said: hoping.
My Sunday Times column is on the Clintons and race:
In the Clintons’ morphing into a crude version of racially angry Reagan Democrats, you can see an almost Shakespearian tragedy. Bill Clinton has a long and admirable record in civil rights; and was on the right side of the struggle in the South in his youth. He has an effortless rapport with black Americans, and they were his core final constituency of support in the darkest days of impeachment.
But like any southerner, Clinton also knew how to navigate racial resentment.
In 1992, he interrupted the primary campaign to return to Arkansas to sign the death warrant of a mentally retarded black man. He made a point of attacking the radical black hip hop artist Sister Souljah in his first campaign. He signed off on welfare reform. His genius was in holding together a coalition that included enough Reagan Democrats to win, while never losing wide and deep black support.
But he never ran against a black candidate and neither did his wife. They are used to loving and supporting minorities – as long as the minorities know their place and see the Clintons as the instrument of their salvation. Obama broke that dependency and that relationship. And that was why the Clintons had to do all they could to destroy and belittle and besmirch him.
But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy – and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably determined not to make their own.
(Photo: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty.)
A second campaign staffer turns out to be a lobbyist for the vile regime in Burma. The number of Washington loyalists among McCain’s staff is … well, more than his good government rhetoric would lead one to believe. And lobbying for these murderous, totalitarian creeps?
