The Dish

Before the speech tonight, these words are worth recalling:

In addition to freeing up resources to take the fight to al Qaeda, ending the war in Iraq will allow us to more effectively confront other threats in the world – threats that cannot be conquered with an occupying army or dispatched with a single decision in the middle of the night. What lies in the heart of a child in Pakistan matters as much as the airplanes we sell her government. What's in the head of a scientist from Russia can be as lethal as a plutonium reactor in Yongbyon. What's whispered in refugee camps in Chad can be as dangerous as a dictator's bluster. These are the neglected landscapes of the 21st century, where technology and extremism empower individuals just as they give governments the ability to repress them; where the ancient divides of region and religion wash into the swift currents of globalization.

Jean MacKenzie traces Karzai's rise and fall from grace. On the present moment:

“Karzai knows very well that the United States is not going to pull out its troops,” said Afghan political analyst Waheed Mojda. “He does not have to comply with their demands; there is nothing they can do. They are in Afghanistan for their own strategic interests, not for him.”

Those strategic interests are coming under increasing scrutiny, but the administration, and numerous commentators, are bending over backwards to make the case for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. They conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda and argue confidently that a loss in Afghanistan could trigger a regional collapse. Those who remember Vietnam and the Cold War experience a shudder of recognition. “It’s called ‘the domino theory,’” said one expert on Pakistan, speaking privately.

Greenwald unpacks justifications for Obama's troop escalation:

 The most bizarre defense of Obama's escalation is also one of the most common:  since he promised during the campaign to escalate in Afghanistan, it's unfair to criticize him for it now — as though policies which are advocated during a campaign are subsequently immunized from criticism.  For those invoking this defense:  in 2004, Bush ran for re-election by vowing to prosecute the war in Iraq, keep Guantanamo opened, and privatize Social Security.  When he won and then did those things (or tried to), did you refrain from criticizing those policies on the ground that he promised to do them during the campaign?  I highly doubt it.

A reader writes:

Your sixteen theses are compelling individually and damning in aggregate. But wouldn't it be simpler just to say: 'I cannot support a movement'?

Earlier this year, you noted that the "really interesting conservative icons I revere – Hobbes, Hume, Burke, Oakeshott and Hayek come to mind – show that liberal strains are intrinsic to sophisticated conservatism," praised "their lack of political monochrome," and wrote of your own desire to "embrace these various strains, sometimes one, sometimes another, in response to a fluid world and an evolving soul." That suggests, to your credit, that your disquiet with partisan loyalty and movement solidarity runs deeper than any particular policy disputes.

You list your choices in the last seven presidential contests – and six of them would have represented the defeat of the incumbent party. You illustrate the post with a pair of individual portraits, but they're not Reagan and Thatcher – they're Burke and Oakeshott. Your post, in short, makes the case for the integrity of principles and ideals, and for those who articulate them. And the history of your allegiances suggests that as parties and their leaders betray those ideals in the messy business of politics, you tend to hold them to account and join your voice to the opposition.

I agree with your theses. But I suspect that if you were to try, you could compile sixteen sins of the progressive movement. Which is not to suggest a mindless equivalence. After eight years of excess in one direction, a corrective is clearly needed. But in time, I suspect, the pendulum will swing. And I'll be disappointed and surprised if, within fewer years than might now seem likely, you're not declaring your general disgust with the Democratic Party and calling for a change in power. That's the nature of a fluid world, after all, and an evolving soul.

Yes, and that's also, by the way, why I have always felt very uncomfortable in a gay "movement". "Virtually Normal" was an attempt to apply an Oakeshottian approach to the emergent social reality of a large number of openly gay citizens. Only Kenneth Minogue understood this of the reviewers. And my own dismay at movement politics has made it impossible for me to really become a political actor in the gay community. A political writer and critic and speaker maybe. But I do not do campaigns or organize or fund-raise or seek coalitions or all the other necessary and useful tasks of movement politics.

Brace Bartlett highlights this CBO report (pdf) on the stimulus. The bottom line:

CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act]…Those ranges are intended to reflect the uncertainty of such estimates and to encompass most economists’ views on the effects of fiscal stimulus.

Wilkinson finds a silver lining:

Though I’m sure some ideologues will merely amp up their armtwisting thug tactics to protect the fragile perception of consensus they had achieved (precioussssssss!), I predict that the overall response from the scientific community will be healthy and invigorating. Climate science will become more transparent and more rigorously by-the-book because climate scientists are becoming more fully aware that the impulse to jealously protect a public perception of consensus can undermine itself by producing questionable science and a justifiably skeptical public.

A reader writes:

I found this statement from your dissenter mildly ironic:

Just like Europeans shouldn't extrapolate US views of people of color from things that happen in West Texas, please don't judge "Europe" based on what one country in it does. It's offensive and it obscures the much more nuanced truth.

As a Texan who has been all over Texas, I have to correct our Swedish friend and provide him with some "nuanced truth." West Texas is less racist than East Texas (think Jasper), and Texas as a whole is less racist than the Deep South. I have no idea why the guy went straight to West Texas to make his point. I know West Texas to be a very tolerant and easy-going place. Cowboys are that way – they live and let live, as long as you show common courtesy and mind your business.

It's funny – as soon as anyone tries to overlay a moral map on a place they know little about, they just ending up undermining their case and sounding like a fool. It's best to avoid even going there, whether it is Americans judging Europe, Swedes judging Texas, or Neocons making snap judgments about the Middle East. Your next e-mail will probably be from a Southerner who is up in arms about my views of the South.

As it happens, yesterday was the annual commemoration of 16th-century Swedish King Charles XII by skinheads in Sweden.  Another reader amends the history lesson of the earlier reader:

I just snorted my diet coke through my nose when I read your reader talking about how hunky-dory religious freedom was in Poland thanks to the wonderful Warsaw Confederation of 1573.

In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky massacred 100,000 Jews in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. While the Jewish population had the support of Poland's kings for a time, they were not liked by many of the lesser nobility and much of the peasantry; in time they lost even the support of Poland's kings. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth century Poland saw huge numbers of towns expel their resident Jewish populations, and merchants were in the vanguard of pogrom organization. Students regularly assaulted Jews in the major Polish cities, and police paid very little attention to these crimes.

So, I'd like your reader not to assume that because some document in the 1570s said something, that it meant a damn thing to the actual people who suffered violence, or to those people charged with enforcing that document against the vast anti-Semitism that characterized much of European society, and well, still does, but mainly in the form of a different Semitic people. It is, in your reader's own words, "offensive and it obscures the much more nuanced truth."

Go to the extensive Wiki entry to weigh the history for yourself.

A Lego Matrix!:

I'm not one for commemmorations; I am one for keeping HIV at the forefront of our consciousness as a serious threat to public health at home and a deadly killer abroad. And for doing what we can to mitigate its spread  – from safer sex to sero-sorting to abstinence to aggressive public education.

A friend of mine, on the other hand, just did his job. He worked in an ad agency and simply donated his time and his skills to hone a message to save his friends and people he never knew. Here's his

If you fear you have HIV, get tested and get treated.

If you know you have HIV, and are getting treated, live your life. 

Yglesias doesn’t understand how mutual funds continue to exist.