Category: The Dish

The always-subtle Ian Buruma summarizes and debunks opposing viewpoints on America’s foreign policy future. 

A reader writes:

Regarding this entry on taxes: the inherent problem is that if you start comparing taxes to the value of the government services received, it invites comparisons of who receives the services to who pays the taxes.  When the bottom 50% of the country doesn’t pay much in income taxes, do Democrats want that kind of discussion?  Yes, the wealthy may receive more benefit (just through preservation of law and order) than the poor overall, but still not in the same proportion as the taxes paid.  And when you discuss a specific program for which you want to raise taxes, someone will point out that you’re increasing taxes on the top 10% (or 1%) in order to fund services aimed at the middle (or lower) of the income distribution.  Klein’s suggestion isn’t the "strongest argumentative ground" either.

I would love an honest discussion, one that focused on the benefits and the potential unfairness of asking Peter to pay for services to Paul — and then had the guts to say "the benefits are so great that it justifies doing that to Peter."  If they did, they might lose out on some specific tax increases but there would be greater acceptance of the rest as more than just soaking the rich.

The Democrats traditionally have not had the guts to make that argument.  If Obama is really a new kind of politician, he will.  I’m waiting.

Daniel McCarthy defends Matt’s suggestion that the GOP would be better off in the Senate races if its candidates opposed the war:

That strategy didn’t seem to work too well for Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Antiwar House Republicans John Hostettler and Jim Leach also lost their seats. The Chafee example doesn’t disprove Yglesias’s point, however. What it shows is lone dissenters have a hard time escaping from the downward drag of the party line: Lincoln Chafee did lose in large part because the Republicans were pro-war, even though he wasn’t. As long as the GOP is committed to the war, outlying dissenters risk getting shot by both sides: antiwar voters blame them for their party affiliation, while the party base may reject them for deviating from the Republican line.

An entertaining defense of poetry.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

The Onion gets it, as usual.

Michael Hirschorn has a fantastic article in this month’s Atlantic on the campaigns’ digital personas and the increased value of genuineness for the YouTube generation:

McCain understood this new culture of authenticity intuitively even during the 2000 election, when he branded his campaign the “Straight Talk Express.” In this endlessly mediated age, even authenticity is a form of branding. Indeed, precisely because we live in an era of endlessly manipulable images, authenticity is the most truly prized brand attribute. But McCain, 100 percent authentic or not, has compellingly sold realness, and may do so all the way to the White House.

This is why an Obama-McCain match-up would be the most engrossing in recent memory: not only an opportunity to see two master communicators go at each other but a chance to alter political discourse for good. The old political speech has started sounding so canned that we literally cannot hear it. I could listen to Hillary all day without really understanding a word she says. It’s not just the unearned intimacy; it’s the way everything seems manipulated and focus-tested by teams of professionals to the point where it becomes a kind of elision, a non-speak.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?

Continued here. Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems can be bought here.

In what is the first of several explosive installments of "The Torture Team," Philippe Sands reveals that the torture advocates in the White House, including the president, vice-president, defense secretary, Powell and Rice, deceived the senior military into believing that the Geneva Conventions were still in force. Myers’ defection is a critical break in bringing these war crimes to light. Money quote:

The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands’ book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.

Myers was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done. Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, says he was "confused" about the decisions that were taken.

Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantánamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.

"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled," writes Sands. "Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him."

Myers and his closest advisers were cut out of the decision-making process. He did not know that Bush administration officials were changing the rules allowing interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, amounting to torture.

In the end, the full truth will come out.

From by J. Bottum’s 2000 article, an enjoyable enough diatribe against needless music:

…the truth is that we all are terrorized by music nowadays. It’s not so much the high school kids parading down the street with boom boxes, or the college students partying away a Saturday afternoon, or the insomniac in the next apartment pacing up and down to Beethoven at 3:00 a.m. It’s, rather, the merciless stream of 1960s golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi all the way to the airport, the tinny Muzak bleating from storefronts as you walk along the sidewalk, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from recessed speakers above the urinals in the men’s room. America is drowning in sanctioned music — an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space. There’s hardly a bar in which to nurse a quiet drink or a café in which you don’t have to shout your order above the upbeat swing of 1940s big-band standards.

Perhaps it was Hollywood that taught us to expect life to come with background music, a constant melodic commentary on the movie of our lives. But we are soundtracked nowadays with relentless demands for only the most obvious and officially appropriate emotions.

In case you missed the worst song of all time, you can find it here.

You won’t forget this rendition of "Amazing Grace."