Category: The Dish

The final tally.

A reader writes:

I’m currently reading this collection of the correspondence between two of my favorite writers, "Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz," that spans the last 10 years of Merton’s life.  It’s a fascinating read that for some reason is not currently in print (though used copies can be found quite easily online).  When I read the following from Merton I had to chuckle.  I guess people are people, whether it’s 1960 (when this letter was written) or today:

"It is quite true that I ought to speak more with the accents of my time. They are serious, they are not just a pose, the bitterness of people is not just something to be dismissed. I detest the fake optimism that is current in America, including in American religion. I shall continue to think about these things."

Judah Grunstein questions Petraeus’s credentials:

I’m surprised that, so far, no one’s had the temerity to point out that compared to his CENTCOM predecessors, Gen. Petraeus’ credentials are underwhelming for such a strategically vital regional command. Admiral Fallon’s prior regional command experience was too deep to count. Gen. Abizaid did prior staff tours in the Office of the Army Chief of Staff, the Southern European Task Force, and the U.S. Army Europe HQ. Gen. Franks commanded the 3rd Army for three years prior to taking over CENTCOM, and Gen. Zinni was CENTCOM Deputy C-i-C for nine months before assuming the top spot.

The bulk of Petraeus’ experience, meanwhile, has been in operations and training (which is what you’d expect for someone who has demonstrated such tactical brilliance). Challenging as it is, Commander MNF-I is his broadest command to date. Now it could be that Petraeus is, in addition to being a tactical genius, a strategic genius as well. But a case could be made for the argument that, in leapfrogging Adm. Fallon through his personal relationship with President Bush, Petraeus has essentially served as de facto Commander of CENTCOM for the past year and a half. And in that time he has put the Iraq theater ahead of our broader regional interests, and according to many, ahead of the health of the Army.

John Harris urges restraint:

Contrary to the idea that the F and C words have lost their impact, they seem to me to still have the power not necessarily to shock, but to render the atmosphere charged and discomfiting. Couple them with an insult, and the point becomes even clearer. Far from believing that 21st century swearing is all but meaningless, I’d wager that we all know this: to swear is still to ramp up the force of what’s said, and its potential to offend. In short, in the right (or, rather, wrong) context, swearing can still be brutal and non-empathetic – verbal violence, if you will,…

Apply that to the ever-increasing flood of swearing on post-watershed TV, or the ubiquity of the words in your average town and city, and you might arrive at the following conclusion: to take umbrage at all that profanity isn’t to ally oneself with the Daily Mail and the successors to Mary Whitehouse, but to understand that vocabulary speaks volumes about prevailing social conditions, and that all our swearing says something very powerful about what a mutually contemptuous, atomised, inarticulate society we’re becoming.

 

A commenter at TNR nails it:

For all of Hillary’s brand recognition, institutional advantages (including the ferocious support of a former president), fund-raising head start and inherent appeal to the party’s core constituency (working class white women), she finds herself on the ropes, in debt and having to go hugely negative just to stay alive. Does any sane Democrat really think that this is a viable alternative to Obama?

A symbiosis of sorts – and a return to their roots. A fascinating interview with Matt Stone.

Charlie Cook:

If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.[…]

As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.

Increasingly, I think this is going to the convention. The Clintons will use Michigan and Florida to argue that they have won the popular vote, that Obama cannot win the general, and that if he is the nominee, they will switch their support (unofficially, of course) to McCain and prepare for 2012. That’s who they are. They will never willingly relinquish their power.

Four random observations to counter the gloom that many of us are now feeling.

1) Even though we are witnessing a historically bitter and nasty and divisive fight for the Democratic nomination, both Clinton and Obama are currently competitive with McCain nationally. That has got to worry the GOP.

2) One explanation for the Clintons’ suicidal behavior (apart from the fact that we have two sociopaths on our hands) is that they believe that the real struggle for the White House is now. They believe that the GOP is doomed this fall and so the prize really is worth risking the implosion of the Democratic party, and alienating an entire generation and most African-Americans for the foreseeable future.

3) I wonder if many in the Rove wing of the GOP (those who supported Romney and Giuliani earlier in this cycle and who want a kind of authoritarian, Christianist conservative politics that McCain actually resists) wouldn’t actually prefer a Clinton presidency to a McCain White House. I mean: consider the two likeliest major legislative initiatives of McCain’s first year: immigration reform on the Bush model and climate change legislation. Both will drive the Limbaugh-Hewitt base nuts. But a Clinton presidency allows the GOP to regroup around Clinton hatred (they’ll get over their temporary love-affair once Obama is destroyed and she’s back in power), and unify around an even more extremist platform. 

4) It’s still very hard to see how Obama loses the nomination. In the end, the Clintons, with any luck, will both expose themselves for what they really are and thereby self-destruct. Know hope.

Megan says that I have misunderstood her:

I did not say that what the Bush administration has done is no different from what any other president has done. I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)

What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn’t stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don’t. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.

I am arguing that it is dangerous to attribute war crimes to the type of war you are waging, because the implication is that when you fight a "good" war, you won’t have war crimes. That tilts the calculus too heavily in favor of future wars.

She says that Larison has mistaken her as well:

I am not arguing that what the Bush administration did was inevitable, only that at the point when you decide to commit atrocities, the nation is almost never thinking of how the war started, but of the suffering that has come since. We did not firebomb Germany because "they started it"; we firebombed them because they’d killed a lot of people since then.

Larison responds here, while John Schwenkler outlines some of the passages open to misinterpretation.

Scott Adams on film:

As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane. I feel I have a sense of where those plots are heading.

The award-winning film I just watched could be described as “A bad guy chases another bad guy and kills him.” There were other elements of the movie, but I’m pretty sure they were irrelevant. Admittedly, there was great artistry in this movie, on many levels. But I don’t think it is fair that no one warned me how it would make me feel.

He recommends adding a few elements to reviews. I still like an idea Mike Kinsley once had. Instead of the star system, or the thumb system, reviewers should simply calculate whether it was worth the price of the ticket. So a decent $9 movie would get a $9.50 rating. A fantastic movie would get a $20 rating. And some movies would be so bad you would actually have to be paid to watch them: – $6.