Category: The Dish

"I still hear it often said, including by liberal-minded people, that all serious experts agree that we need to stay in Iraq, or even that the consensus on this score is so overwhelming that it’s inevitable that we’ll stay. Neither is true. Quite a lot of who’ve thought deeply about this problem have concluded that the best thing to do is simply to cut our losses and leave, focusing our remaining Iraq-related energies on doing what we can for refugees and to improve the broader regional diplomatic situation," – Matt Yglesias, reading Steve Simon’s CFR booklet on the surge.

Ambinder has the crack – for the Dems. Hillary’s bringing them home.

Here’s a movie-week blast from the archives of the Atlantic: the first take on George Lucas and his Star Wars franchise. Money quote:

[Lucas] does not tell a story. This is the basic failing of the film. It lacks true narrative drive and force. It is a void, into which any mystic idea can be projected; entertainment, brilliantly confected, which is quite hollow. Its only idea is individualism – that a man must take responsibility for others, even at great personal cost and peril. Its idea is, in classic form, "A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do."

You can vote for Star Wars here, if you like. Its entry in the contest is: ""I have a bad feeling about this."

The born-again are often more insistent on religious purity than those who have been born only once and still have faith. The same is true with Islam, it seems, except the consequences of that fanaticism can be far, far worse than enduring piety at full-blast. In Germany conversions to Islam have gone from around 300 a year in the late 1990s to 4,000 in 2006, the WaPo reports. Some have become religious murderers. One blogger wants to know more:

Here are some big questions that are left unanswered and would probably take more than three reporters a couple of weeks to figure out: Why do these people convert? Why the increasing numbers? And what are they converting from? Christianity? Agnosticism? Atheism?

Why would any of these converts turn radical? For the purposes of a story like this, it doesn’t matter if 95 out of 100 converts stop at the madrassas. All we’re talking about in this story is a handful of converts who have since been arrested for being involved in terrorism. This rough spiritual timeline from the so-called experts is nice, but we need more.

A designer assesses the posters and logos of various candidates in the presidential race. Obama doesn’t get high grades:

Beautiful but empty. Tries hard to avoid the traditional vocabulary of political design but ends up using the same familiar tropes—patriotic colors, red and white stripes, heavy handed Steinbeckian symbolism, and even a font named Perpetua.

Rudy does better:

A simple and confident creation for the candidate so often described as a political Oreo cookie: hard Republican-red cookie outside, soft Democratic-blue cream-filling in the middle.

For African-Americans, it’s the subtle kind that drives them crazy:

As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, black volunteers who had witnessed unfair but ambiguous hiring decisions did much less well on the Stroop test, suggesting that they were using all their mental resources to make sense of the unfairness. Interestingly, white volunteers were more impaired by overt racism than by the more ambiguous discrimination.

Salvatore and Shelton figure this is because whites rarely experience any racism; they do not even notice the subtle forms of racism, and are thrown off balance when they are hit over the head by overt acts. Many blacks, by contrast, have developed coping strategies for the most hateful kinds of racism; it’s the constant, vague, just-below-the-surface acts of racism that impair performance, day in and day out.

That makes sense to me. I have no problem with overt, blatant homophobia. I can laugh at it. It’s the kind you can feel but not see explicitly that gets under your skin.

T. A. Frank expends a lot of ink/pixels trying to explain away the fact that no one bothers to read Bob Herbert. Jonathan Zasloff comments:

Frank asks: why don’t people read or talk about Bob Herbert’s column more? He notes 1) that Herbert’s judgments have been very accurate; 2) he’s not a knee-jerk liberal; and 3) he writes about issues of poverty that most columnists ignore. Then he goes through a series of interesting speculations about why some columnists are influential and others aren’t.

Except the one most obvious potential explanation: Bob Herbert is an African-American journalist who writes about issues of poverty and race.

My two cents: once I know the topic of a Herbert column, I can predict every single self-satisfied, self-righteous platitude that is about to come. He’s also a terrible writer – there’s no character to his prose, never a felicitous turn of phrase. He’s the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards. Even when he’s right he’s so insufferably self-righteous and humorless it’s a pain to read him. So I don’t.

Maybe you tried his moral liberal-conservative test earlier today. Will Wilkinson, rising blogospheric star, has written about his fascinating research before – in a 2006 Reason essay. Subtitle: It’s religious emotion, not language, that dooms Democrats. Check it out.

My intemperate language earlier today is informed by my seeing "No End In Sight" last night. Day after day of observing the inexcusable can render one numb after a while. You can forget the trajectory of the deception and incompetence and recklessness of the last six years, and focus, as we should, on what can be done now, how to make things better in practice, how to rate the options in front of us. But at times, it’s worth looking back in anger.

The documentary is not perfect; it is not as polished as, say "Taxi to The Dark Side"; it gets bogged down in a few places. But it is worth seeing again what Baghdad was the morning after it was liberated: still a viable city, still a place where sane, non-sectarian Iraqis with education and decency could see, if only dimly, a way forward. You see and hear also from the many good people who did their best in this effort across the government and, of course, in the military; and the many Iraqis who were eager at first to join hands and build a new country. Even then, it would have been very, very hard. We’ll never know for sure if it was going to be impossible. But we do know that, with this president and vice-president and defense secretary Rumsfeld, what chance we had was consciously, arrogantly, recklessly, criminally thrown away. The toll in human life, in American honor, in American power, in financial waste, and in the war on terror will be up to historians to measure. But it is immense.

For the United States to invade a country and then allow it to be destroyed – against our interests, against their interests – remains one of the more unforgivable acts of governmental negligence in modern times. It is unthinkable that a group of men with this record should have been re-elected to a local school-board, let alone the leadership of the free world. But, of course, they were. We can pray that somehow, out of this dark, long tunnel, something might be salvaged. But even if it is, it will never detract from the fact that this administration made the most colossal intelligence mistake since Pearl Harbor, ended two centuries of moral leadership by the United States on the treatment of prisoners of war, sunk what may soon be more than a trillion dollars into creating anarchy in a region where vital interests are at stake, and cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children in an occupation of such fathomless negligence it is close to a war crime in itself.

This coming election is about the candidates, the issues and the parties. But it is also a verdict on these past six years. Was it a mistake? Or was it a catastrophe? How far do we need to go to expunge this deep stain on the reputation and honor of the United States? That, for me, is the primary question. Everything else is a function of willful amnesia.

Now imagine this 15,000 times smaller. No wonder it won a prize. More amazing micro-photos here. (Hat tip: Presurfer.)