David Boaz asks:
1. Would you support a presidential candidate who is divorced, has estranged relations with his children, never sees his grandchildren, rarely attends church, strongly opposes a law to ban gays from teaching school, and as governor signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law?
2. Would you support him if you knew his name was Ronald Reagan?
Fact One: The U.S. military is unable to sustain its current surge in Iraq past next March, regardless of policy decisions. Fact Two: the "Iraqi" "government" has failed to meet any of the benchmarks for political progress we were told should be a criterion for continuing to police Iraq’s civil war. This was another lie, of course. Bush never had any intention of actually framing the military strategy according to Baghdad’s political process. But it’s a lie that will now be usefully exposed, along with the others. Just for the record:
This spring, Congress agreed to continue funding the war through September but demanded that Bush certify on July 15 and again on Sept. 15 that the Iraqis were living up to their political promises or forgo U.S. aid dollars.
The official said it is highly unlikely that Bush will withhold or suspend aid to the Iraqis based on the report.
Of course, Dick Cheney’s response to seeing the edge of a cliff approaching is to accelerate.
The scientists have done a study. Money quote:
These results clearly suggest that yawning regulates the temperature inside your head, and that perhaps we yawn to cool our brains. What we don’t have here is any biochemical cause-and-effect, but this is an incredibly interesting theory all the same.
The findings, if valid, draw a few unexpected conclusions about yawning. First of all, rather than stimulating sleep, a good yawn should fend off falling asleep. And secondly, far from being an indicator of boredom, yawning would appear to be a mechanism for maintaining attention.
So be sure and remember this for your next staff meeting — it’s an excellent excuse, and possibly even a valid one!
A personal fave: "I love my dead gay son."
Matt Yglesias pursues the logic and balks at "a terrible set of forward-looking incentives."
Maybe 5 millimeters smaller in diameter than we thought. That might have an impact on measuring climate change.
Gloria Steinem proposes a new genre for movies. They sound fucking awesome, man.
Danny Finkelstein provides a guide for goyim. The following may be most pertinent to the blogosphere:
Broyges: This word is ideal to describe arguments between friends and relatives that turn into long standing rifts and feuds. Often the parties don’t talk. Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy reached that state. Breugas is one of Gordon Brown’s favourite conditions.
And mine.
A conservative intellectual asks:
Does victory mean toppling Saddam? Done. Does victory mean ensuring Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction? Done. Does it mean a stable and Western style democracy in Iraq? Good luck with that. Does it just mean a stable but perhaps not democratic Iraq? Good luck with that as well. Does it mean modernizing and westernizing all of the Middle East? Does it mean stamping out all vestiges of "Shari’a-observant Islam" or more crudely put, wiping out "Islamo-fascism." Most War on Terror supporters I have talked to cannot give a coherent answer.
This is how Bill Kristol describes the view of those who have followed this war closely for four years of drift, mishap and recklessness and concluded that some kind of withdrawal or redeployment is now our least worst option. It is based on Kristol’s judgment that, for reasons unspecified,
"the offensive is working better than expected."
Than who expected? The day after the most fatal bomb yet in Iraq? As the maximal troop surge in Baquba still saw up to 80 percent of the insurgents flee to fight another day? Kristol’s objective analysts, of course, the ones who see the true picture … are the very people – nepotistic neocons – who designed the offensive (and its p.r.) in the first place. Kristol’s assessment of Iraq now is as rigged as the WMD evidence many of us foolishly took on faith. Three words: fool me once. Kristol, of course, favors political counter-attack in Washington. We know what that will mean: an attempt to blame those who have had no influence on this war for its baleful consequences and to exonerate the egotists and liars who have perpetuated it.
Kristol’s real rationale, of course, has less to do with Iraq and much more to do with the collapsing coalition has been trying to hold together for quite a while:
Why on earth pull the plug now? Why give in to an insane, irrational panic that will destroy the Bush administration and most likely sweep the Republican party to ruin?
Ah, yes, the Republican party. The real prize, the real issue. It’s worth reiterating: The main reason to withdraw and redeploy now is because no sane observer believes that continuing to ineffectively occupy a Muslim country against the will of the Iraqi and American people is in the national interest. The surge will end next March, regardless. Whatever slivers of success it has achieved cannot work against the overwhelming fact of Iraq’s sectarian disintegration. The "country" cannot be put together again under unending U.S. occupation. And sending more young Americans to die for a sectarian war that is actually increasing the risk to the U.S. and the West as a whole is immoral and strategically foolhardy.
But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines. That, now, is what young Americans are dying for. Increasingly, it’s all they’re dying for. Enough.
