Holder’s Civil Rights Legacy

African American Activists Call For Justice In Shooting Deaths In Ferguson And NYC

Jeffrey Toobin declares that after Obama was reelected, “Holder found himself—or rediscovered himself”:

He decided to embrace civil rights as his cause. His civil-rights division filed lawsuits against the voting restrictions imposed by the legislatures in Texas and North Carolina. He began the process of reducing the number of nonviolent offenders in the federal prison population. He went to Ferguson, Missouri, to assure its citizens that there would be a full and fair investigation into the death of Michael Brown, a teen-ager shot dead by a police officer. It is tempting, even hopeful, to believe that this was the real Eric Holder.

Michael Scherer also reviews his record on civil rights:

Holder also spoke multiple times about the discrimination he believed he had experienced as a black man.

“I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” he said during a visit to a community meeting in Ferguson, Mo., this year, where he recounted his anger at being stopped by police while running down the street in Washington, D.C., and while driving on the New Jersey turnpike. “I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”

Like many other efforts, he spoke these words not just as a cabinet secretary but as a social activist, urging the country to be better. “The same kid who got stopped on the New Jersey freeway is now the Attorney General of the United States,” he said in Ferguson. “This country is capable of change. But change doesn’t happen by itself.”

David Graham adds:

With Holder’s departure, Obama will lose a close friend—an apparently rare breed—and an essential ally on issues close to the president’s heart. Who Obama nominates to succeed him, and whether the nomination is successful, will offer some hint of how the president intends to close out his term in office. But the new attorney general is unlikely to have as eventful a term as Eric Holder.

But Eric Posner argues that Holder’s record is not one “that a civil-rights-promoting attorney general can be proud of”:

But two things can be said in Holder’s defense. First, the attorney general just doesn’t have much power to compel a president to comply with civil rights. The attorney general is merely the president’s legal adviser; he doesn’t have any authority to force the president to obey the law. In principle, Holder could have resigned in protest of these civil rights violations, but he surely thought that he could do more for civil rights by staying in office and picking his battles, and rightly so.

Second, while Holder’s decisions disappointed civil libertarians of all stripes, they were not obviously wrong. Indeed, they were mostly right. “In times of war, the law falls silent,” said Cicero. This is something of an exaggeration in the United States today, but it remains true that the rights of people considered a threat to a country tend to diminish as the magnitude of that threat increases, for good reason. Holder, like his Bush administration predecessors Alberto Gonzalez and John Ashcroft, adopted a pragmatic rather than rigidly legalistic position on civil rights, human rights, and the laws of war. That pragmatism will be his legacy.

(Photo: Michael Brown Sr., father of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, wears a tie with his son’s image on it during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on September 25, 2014. Rev. Al Sharpton called for federal review of racial violence and discrimination in the law enforcement community. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The State Of The Secret Service

Peter Grier looks ahead to next week’s Oversight hearing on the Secret Service, scheduled soon after an intruder dashed across the White House lawn and made it into the building:

Among the questions sure to arise: Why wasn’t the White House front door locked? Why didn’t the uniformed Secret Service agents on the grounds unleash their trained defense dogs, or fire at Mr. Gonzalez before he reached the White House threshold? Had the Secret Service heard about Gonzalez beforehand? After all, he’d been arrested in rural Virginia on July 19 for erratic driving. In his vehicle, law-enforcement officials found three rifles and two handguns, ammunition, and a map of Washington with a circle around the White House grounds.

Ambinder says the Secret Service’s problems run much deeper than unlocked doors and text-happy agents:

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Secret Service found itself overburdened, under-resourced and undermanned. Agents who might not have passed muster in previous eras – including several involved in the recent alcohol-fueled scandals overseas – not only survived, they became supervisors. Ignoring, for the most part, the Secret Service, the government focused instead on building the Transportation Security Agency and the Federal Air Marshal Service, added thousands of agents and officers to the Border Patrol and to the Immigrations and Customs and Enforcement service, and dumped it all inside the new Department of Homeland Security.

And last year’s budget cuts have had consequences:

The current White House Security Plan, which is supervised by the Presidential Protective Division and executed by the Uniformed Division, is based in large part on a classified 2010 study of the complex. Its results were shared with congressional overseers, and appropriators programmed more money for specific functions: counter-surveillance, technical counter-measures (such as infrared cameras) and better barricades. But most of the money to fund those enhancements and to staff the White House security apparatus at an appropriate level did not survive the automatic budget cuts of 2013. The Uniformed Division is now short at least 100 sworn officers. Officers work overtime. Perhaps that much overtime stretches them thin and dulls response time.

Meanwhile, Ronald Kessler contends that “while agents are brave and dedicated, Secret Service management perpetuates a culture that condones laxness and cutting corners”:

Under pressure from White House political staffs or presidential campaign staffs, Secret Service management tells agents to let people into events without magnetometer or metal detector screening. Assassins concealing grenades or other weapons could theoretically enter an event and easily assassinate the president or a presidential candidate. When it comes to firearms requalification and physical fitness, the Secret Service either doesn’t allow agents time to fulfill the requirements or asks agents to fill out their own test scores. All this has led to poor morale and a high turnover rate. Tired agents and officers are forced to work long overtime hours, contributing to the sort of inattention that took place when Gonzalez scaled the White House fence.

Jeffrey Robinson traces the cultural shift back to the George W. Bush’s first term, “as leadership changed and institutional memory of the Reagan assassination attempt faded”:

The first sign of this came in 2003, when Bush became the first president in history to land on an aircraft carrier in a fixed-wing plane. The president’s entry by Navy jet provided a flashy visual opening to his “Mission Accomplished” speech. But it was a very dangerous maneuver and an unnecessary stunt made simply for the sake of becoming the lead story on the evening news. A person close to the agency told me that the Secret Service originally objected to the plan, but eventually relented, given an agent would be in the plane with Bush – even though, if something had gone wrong, the agent couldn’t have done anything.

Under Reagan, the Secret Service never would have permitted it. Former agents told me they would have fought the idea tooth and nail. They would have thrown their Commission book on the table, refused to take responsibility and resigned.

But Matt Farwell suggests that the Secret Service deserves credit for its restrained treatment of a man who by all accounts struggles with mental illness:

Of all law-enforcement agencies in the United States, members of the Secret Service are among the most experienced at dealing with mentally ill individuals – because they have to as a routine part of the job. Mentally ill individuals come up to the gates demanding to speak to the president on a near daily basis. …

Agent training in Beltsville, Maryland, features classes in psychology and role playing various scenarios agents might encounter in the course of their duties. These lessons are derived from an exhaustive longitudinal study of assassins and near-assassins completed in 1998. The study focused on the thoughts and behavior of suspects before their attacks and near misses. It found that more than one-third of those assassins and near assassins appeared to hold delusional ideas (the atmosphere collapsing, covert spy satellites beaming signals directly into the brain, or a nonexistent relationship), three-fifths had been evaluated or treated for mental illness, and two-fifths had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.

Romney 2016: Greater Than Zero

Will Mitt take another run at the White House? According to Byron York’s reporting, the answer is absolutely yes – uh, maybe! “Definitely more than zero.” Larison somehow managed to type while banging his head on his desk:

If it was Romney’s “turn” in 2012, he has had it and squandered it, and there won’t be many interested in giving him another one. Indeed, almost every faction of conservatives would be unhappy with another Romney campaign.

For reformist conservatives, Romney’s last campaign was the embodiment of the party’s complete failure to adapt to the present. Romney’s agenda was the antithesis of almost everything libertarians and small-government conservatives support. Republicans that are concerned primarily with winning elections can’t be pleased by the idea of a Romney return, since he represented everything most non-Republicans loathe about the party between his corporate business background, his condescending attitude towards working-class and poor Americans, and his outdated economic agenda. He topped that off with a foreign policy worldview that was by turns ignorant and frightening. His supporters have desperately been trying to rehabilitate Romney’s foreign policy over the last two years without success, but nothing would be worse for the GOP’s foreign policy than to accept the false notion that “Romney was right” about anything in 2012.

Finally, it doesn’t make any sense for Romney to do this. He is a terrible politician and he isn’t well-suited for what presidential campaigning requires. There must be things that he would rather spend him time and energy on than mounting a third failed bid, and he has no good reason to undergo the scrutiny and mockery that he would inevitably face if he ran again.

Suderman piles on:

[T]he case for Romney in 2016 is rather like the case for Romney in 2012: Romney, who was in the GOP primary fray in 2008 as well, would still like to be president, there are some party bigwigs who see him as their best shot, and some campaign professionals would like to cash in on yet another sure-to-be-pricey run. That’s not an argument for why Romney should run. It’s an argument for why he shouldn’t.

A reluctant Drum takes the bait:

[A]s long as we’re supposedly taking this seriously, let’s put on our analytical hats and ask: could Romney beat Hillary Clinton if they both ran? On the plus side, Hillary’s not as good a campaigner as Barack Obama and 2016 is likely to be a Republican-friendly year after eight years of Democratic rule. On the minus side, Romney has already run twice, and the American public isn’t usually very kind to second chances in political life, let alone third chances. Plus—and this is the real killer—Romney still has all the problems he had in 2012. In the public eye, he remains the 47 percent guy who seems more like the Romneytron 3000 than a real human being.

Still, snark aside, if you put all this together I guess it means Romney really would have a shot at winning if he ran. We still live in a 50-50 nation, after all, and for the foreseeable future I suspect that pretty much every presidential election is going to be fairly close. And Romney certainly has a decent chance of winning the Republican nomination, since he’d be competing against pretty much the same clown show as last time.

Beutler argues that Republicans could do worse than Romney:

Conservatives can be forgiven for being sick of Romney and wanting fresh blood. But they should hope (perhaps quietly hope) that someone like Romney throws his hat in fairly soon. Otherwise they’ll be stuck with a candidate who carries all the baggage of the congressional party, and a down-ballot catastrophe. A Romney-ite would have a hard time beating Hillary Clinton, but a much better chance than any of the conservatives who have all but declared their candidacies already.

Looking to history, Kilgore wishes Mitt luck:

Three losing major-party nominees have managed to win a second nomination the next cycle: William Jennings Bryan (1896-1900), Thomas Dewey (1944-48) and Adlai Stevenson (1952-56). Bryan and Stevenson were beloved figures among their party’s activists. And so we come to the obvious analog to Mitt, Tom Dewey. Like Romney, he ran unsuccessfully for the presidential nomination the first time out (in 1940), and lost to an incumbent president second time out. His 1948 campaign was a struggle, as he lost a couple of primaries to Harold Stassen (don’t laugh—Stassen was a real force that year) and only overcame Stassen and Robert Taft on the third ballot at the convention. Dewey did, however, have something going for him in 1948 that Mitt could not match: he won landslide re-election as governor of New York in 1946.

The rest, of course, is well-known history, as Dewey managed to lose what was considered a huge lead over Harry Truman, whose Democratic Party had fractured to the right (via Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign) and the left (with Henry Wallace running on the Progressive ticket).

Dissents Of The Day III

US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds

The fisking from readers over my Bush-Obama comparison continues:

“But we are going to war despite the fact that ISIS is no more a direct threat to the United States than Saddam was – arguably much less, in fact.”

Really? And exactly how did Saddam threaten the U.S.? I’ll give you the reported attempt to kill George H.W. Bush in 1993, though that was never proven true. But there was no serious threat after that. Saddam did not conduct any public executions of U.S. citizens, and he did not threaten terrorist attacks against the U.S. There was no threat beyond the hysteria promoted by you and the neocons.

If you dismiss ISIS as a threat, you are surely hiding your head in the sand. That does not necessarily mean our incursion is the proper course, but your decision to equate Obama with Bush is more than a little depressing.

Another quote of mine:

“And it’s much smaller than George W Bush’s coalition in 2003.”  

Size matters?  You might want to revisit that Coalition of the Willing list; not a single Arab or Middle Eastern country signed on.  Most of the countries enlisted contributed nothing (if you discount that infantry division from Micronesia).  And most of the rest made a token contribution.  GW Bush‘s coalition was pure PR.  And how many American chits got pushed across the felt to obtain that “coalition”?

Whatever contributions the Gulf States, the Saudis, and Jordanians make, they made their commitment public, and that’s not nothing in this region.  Truth is, Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces did very little in Gulf War I.  But the public alliance was deemed necessary for legitimacy in the region.

And another:

“I can’t imagine [Obama supporters] downplaying the folly of this if a Republican president were in charge.”

Umm … seriously?

Do you not recall that Congressional Democrats did in fact acquiesce like little lambs when Bush was president, and they also did the same when any Republican launched military action in the past, be it Papa Bush and Panama, Reagan in Lebanon, Grenada, etc?

Another, from our Facebook page:

“This comes perilously close to proving that our democracy doesn’t really have much of a say.”

Not really, does it? I mean, sure, Obama was America’s choice (twice!). But the elected Congressfolk were their constituencies’ choices, too. And in both cases, most people share some of their president’s priorities, but not all, and share some of their congressfolks’ priorities, but not all. This is simply the result of a mixed government, which democracy, flawed as our version may be, has brought us. The democracy does have a say, and it seems to be saying that we elect these people for the promises *we* want them to keep, not the ones *they* want to keep.

Another:

“This is an illegal war …”

I’m not in favor of the bombing in Syria, but not for legal reasons.  The Authorization for Use of Military Force (S.J.Res.23) specifically states:

the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Note the specific words “he determines”.  These words delegate to the president all of the power to decide to whom the resolution applies.  No one else needs to agree with his determination, because under the law passed by Congress, the determination is his alone to make.  President Obama has decided it applies to the organizations the US is currently bombing.  Therefore, the action is authorized by Congress, and no further authorization is required.

If Congress wants to rescind or amend the AUMF it has the power to do so, but until then, Congress delegated authority to President Obama, and he is The Decider.

Another piles on further:

“This is an illegal war, chosen by an unaccountable executive branch, based on pure panic about a non-existent threat to the United States, with no achievable end-point.”

I must disagree on almost all counts.

First, Congress has willingly abdicated its war-making responsibilities in this instance, largely for political reasons. For Republicans in Congress, the calculation is particularly crass. By refusing to accept the responsibility of taking the reins on this action, they are free from any responsibility for outcomes – except, of course, for their certain continuing ability to criticize Obama no matter what he does. If he takes no action, he is aiding and abetting our enemies; if he acts strongly, then he was too slow and too timid to act in the first instance.

So, please, spare us the “illegal war” hyperbole – it would be illegal only insofar as Congress wanted to exert its authority, but to the contrary, Congress has willingly waived it.

Second, there has been no rush to war here, no fear-mongering, and most notably, no lying about the cause and purpose of this action – in other words, the antithesis of the snake-oil sales-pitch of the Bush Administration.  You call that a small matter.  I think most rational people would find Obama being honest, forthright, and direct to be a sea-change from the fabrications and evasions of the previous administration.

As for the claim that the threat is “non-existent,” well, I suppose that depends on whether one is willing to abandon any and all responsibility for the mess caused by the Bush invasion of Iraq and walk away entirely.  The problem, of course, is that walking away and doing nothing has consequences – for the Kurds, for Iraqi moderates, and for Iraq’s new government.  Do we turn our back and close our eyes to the slaughter?  Do we abandon the Kurds yet again?  There are no easy solutions, nor any certain outcomes. But doing nothing is neither helpful nor moral.

To paraphrase Colin Powell, we broke it, we bought it.  Obama didn’t choose this mess. He is merely struggling to try to clean up a nearly intractable mess.  So, yeah, targeted air strikes are the worst option … except for everything else.

The rest of the reader dissents here and here.

(Photo: US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. Powell urged the UN Security Council to say “enough” to what he said was Iraq’s 12 years of defiance of international attempts to destroy its chemical and biological weapons. By Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

To Have And To Put On Hold

The proportion of unmarried Americans has reached an all-time high, according to a new Pew report. Clare Cain Miller looks at a major reason why:

Though marriage was once a steppingstone to economic stability, young adults now see Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 4.53.25 PMfinancial stability as a prerequisite for marriage. More than a quarter of those who say they want to marry someday say they haven’t yet because they are not financially prepared, according to Pew.

“If you go back a generation or two, couples would literally take the plunge together and build up their finances and nest eggs together,” said Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew. “Now it seems to be this attitude among young adults to build up households before they get married.” In other words, marriage has gone from being a way that people pulled their lives together to something they agree to once they have already done that independently.

Kat Stoeffel remarks, “It’s not that we forgot to get married. We’re just being nominally picky”:

According to Pew, 78 percent of unmarried women “place a great deal of importance on finding someone who has a steady job” — a population in decline. The number of employed men ages 25 to 34 per 100 women of the same age “dropped from 139 in 1960 to 91 in 2012,” says Pew, even though there are more 25- to 34-year-old men than women. So, no, you are not imagining it: There is a quantifiable shortage of eligible men. [As Pew puts it,] “If all never-married young women in 2012 wanted to find a young employed man who had also never been married, 9% of them would fail, simply because there are not enough men in the target group.”

Jordan Weissmann adds, “A dearth of eligible bachelors isn’t the only reason marriage has been on the wane”:

Young people are getting married later in part because they spend more time in school. … Oh, and then there’s birth control, changing social mores about sex out of marriage, etc. But economics are an obvious and unavoidable dimension of the issue. That’s why it’s far-fetched to think we can revive the institution of marriage in a meaningful way without addressing the underlying forces that have left young men in such shabby financial shape.

Update from a reader:

The way Pew presents this data only shows half the story. Specifically, it only shows the 2nd half of the 20th century. If you look at a wider range of data, a different story appears. It’s not covering the exact same data, but this table shows the wider story. The year 1960 was a low-point for the percentage of population that’s unmarried. Before and after, the % of the population that was never married was much higher. At the turn of the last century, it was much higher than today. In many ways, the 1950s and ’60s are proving to be the aberration, not the rule. (See also: Political partisanship – can’t find a reference at the moment, sorry- and income inequality.)

Francis Acts

This is a BFD in my opinion:

This morning the Holy See press office announced that Pope Francis has removed Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, who had been bishop of the diocese of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. According to the statement, the decision was made “for the greater good and unity” of the local church and episcopal communion. But the move follows a July investigation of the diocese, following complaints from local lay Catholics and clergy, including an archbishop, about Livieres’s style of governance, and his decision to bring on and then promote to vicar general an Argentine priest who has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct—dating back to the late 1980s. (The Holy See’s announcement says nothing about the accused priest.)

For more details on the case of the Argentine priest, see this piece from Commonweal’s Grant Gallicho. The bishop had already been barred from ordaining any new priests – but his removal is a watershed. It suggests there may be some welcome bite in the Pope’s dealing with sex abuse in the church. It also suggests to me that Bishop Nienstedt, who has admitted lax oversight of child abuse, and is busy purging the church of gay people (while being accused of sexual impropriety with several men), should receive from Vatican scrutiny. Removing the Paraguayan bishop was preceded by a papal investigation – something that has only happened in America when it comes to the nuns who favor universal healthcare. But it does suggest procedure that the Pope could use in removing bishops credibly accused of covering up child abuse as recently as 2013 in Nienstedt’s case. Here’s hoping for a breakthrough.

Dissents Of The Day II

But first, a reader “couldn’t resist making a few alterations to ‘Bill O’Reilly’s Dumb Plan to Defeat ISIS’”:

oreilly

But many readers think I’m the one being dumb by comparing Obama to Bush:

Andrew, you really let your emotions dictate your judgement.  I mean REALLY. Let’s start by clearing something up, this isn’t a war.  It is a military operation.  There is a difference. You wrote: “It is true we are not sending in 140,000 troops into another country. We are sending almost none…” Ok cool, so can you stop calling it a “war” please?  You’re sensationalizing this in the same manner Fox News does.

To my more important point, the first time I heard the name ISIS was on The Dish earlier this summer.  Those early stories you posted were about ISIS killing thousands of people and burying them in mass graves.  You remember that right?  If so, then what the fuck is the problem?  Dude, they’re killing shitloads of people and they’re not going to stop.  Ok?  Can you please stop acting like some Ron Paul college kid?

It’s not a war; it’s just a kinetic military operation that just dropped a huge amount of bombs on another sovereign country! It’s not dead; it’s just pining for the fjords! Dude, of course it’s a fucking war. Sometimes I wonder if Americans would regard it as a mere “military operation” and not a “war” if another country started carpet-bombing Atlanta. You think? Another reader:

That headline – Is Obama Pulling A Bush? – is a tremendous insult to your readers. Obama isn’t embarking upon regime change; he’s hoping to tamp down a rogue organization through airstrikes. That’s a compelling difference. We’re not completely destabilizing an existing government and forming a new one from scratch; we’re providing cover while an effete government refreshes itself politically.

If that were all the differences, it would be enough to find the equating of these wars insulting. But also, the White House isn’t using The New York Times, the Secretary of State and the United Nations to employ a bait-and-switch this time. There’s no setting up of an all-powerful bogey man to discredit rebuttals. This time, the ISIS situation is pretty clear to anyone who can tune into 60 Minutes or Newshour.

Let me take those points one by one. Obama did explicitly callfor “regime change” in Syria, the country we are now President Obama Marks Anniversary Of September 11th Attacks At The Pentagonbombing, and is now training and arming some Syrian rebels who are the dictator’s foes. As for the notion that we are “providing cover while an effete government refreshes itself politically” – really? The core problem in Iraq is that we replaced a Sunni minority’s despotic rule with a Shiite government backed by militias after a period of extraordinary sectarian blood-letting between the two. Despite a new prime minister, there are very few signs that the government in Baghdad has achieved anything like a “refreshing”.

It still does not command the trust of the Sunnis, cannot fill its interior and defense ministries because of sectarian division, and its army, after huge sums spent on it by the US, turned and fled when it came to operating in Sunni areas. This is the core issue – and we have not resolved it, and we have gone to war without settling that core question. I don’t know how many times the US is going to support a counter-insurgency campaign by a government without broad legitimacy and still hope for success. But at this point, one might have a smidgen of hope that we have learned something from the past. But it appears we haven’t.

Another reader:

I wonder how you can veer between Obama’s Nobel comments you posted the other day and your desire to criticize this campaign against ISIS as a panicked fool’s errand. There is evil in the world. ISIS planned a genocide of an ethnic minority in Iraq, kills en masse (villages, police cadets), rapes and enslaves young women, beheads innocent journalists, an aid worker and now a hiker – but this is none of our business. When does it become our business? What about that Nobel speech and evil that cannot be negotiated with and tramples our most cherished values? What country is still the most admired in the world because of those values? And if we don’t act on them, what does it say about us?

Ah, but that is sentiment and we’re dealing in hard realities here. This is not our fight. They are not an imminent threat, you say. How far do you let these people go and grow before it qualifies as your “imminent threat”? I’d like to see the punditry offer constructive solutions instead of constantly criticizing.

You’ve never underestimated Obama. Why begin now?

The Syrian war killed 200,000 people and we stayed out – for good reasons. Why was my reader not demanding a new war in Syria before now? The only answer is the rise of ISIS, and its grotesque media strategy. And my deeper point is simply this: even if we should do something to counter this kind of evil, what if there’s nothing we can actually do that doesn’t make the situation worse in the medium and long-term? What if we are indeed helpless to do anything other than direct Jihadist terrorism more squarely at the US and the West? Another points out:

Look at what Obama’s already accomplished.

Avoiding the slaughter of thousands of innocent Christians who were stranded with almost certain death at their doorstep, but for our air strikes. Of course if he was 100% determined to wipe ISIS out, then he’d have to send in troops, but my thinking is that by kicking things off in this manner, he’ll massage the other countries in the area to actually provide the ground troops. He realizes the US doesn’t support sending troops in – yet – so is doing what he can with air strikes.  Maybe with a few more American beheadings they just might support them. And I would too.

I still hope the other countries figure out a way, since they’re more directly involved, but if they don’t? You’d be fine with just sitting back and watching ISIS keep up their derangement?

In a word, yes. I do not believe ISIS can sustain itself for very long. No such group has managed to do such a thing before without its own insanity and brutality creating a backlash. We have just swallowed their hype – and elevated them in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world. You have to remember: however disgusting ISIS is, the Arab-Muslim world will always regard the US as worse. Always. Another sees a long game:

How exactly do you ask someone to fix a problem that cannot be fixed?  You buy time.  And that is precisely what Obama is doing. He is slowing the Islamic State, stopping their forward movement, and spending his time behind the scenes working with all the nations in that area to get them to deal with it.  Because that is the only solution that works.

It is messy.  It is not clear.  It is not guaranteed in any way to be successful.  But it is responsible, and what a clear thinking leader does when there isn’t a better option. Isolationism is no better than neoconservatism or being an interventionist; they are all extremes and wrong.  Reality requires, in my view, the ability to modulate between the two poles when assessing and dealing with current circumstances.  A “doctrine”, as Bush had, is the scariest and worst possible method of dealing with this as it implies that there is a universal strategy that will fix the situation … like when you heard that we would be greeted as liberators – because the doctrine says so.

That’s by far the most potent criticism I’ve yet read. I can only say that I hope my reader is right. Another puts me on the couch:

Your rhetoric on this “reckless” war and implicit and explicit suggestions that what’s happening now is no better or different than 2002-03 all over again have mostly been off-base at best and an embarrassment at worst, and if I was an armchair psychologist, I’d say it’s some weird attempt at atonement for your (admitted) idiocy with respect to the invasion of Iraq. Oops, too late.  I said it.

In any event, stop, breathe, and try to take a more balanced look at what’s going on.

Another adds:

I read the e-book collection you put together – “I Was Wrong” – and it was hysterical between 2001-2003. Don’t fall into that rabbit hole again.

Earlier dissents here. And more to come.

(Photo by Getty)