I watched the Super Bowl the other night. I remain unimpressed. But not quite as unimpressed as Brian Appleyard:
American football is, basically, rugby for a legalistic, health and safety obsessed nation. It also seems rather girly in that teams dress up in shoulder pads and shiny, skin-tight trousers and compete for some kind of bowl. Never mind, it seems to make them happy and they are showing no sign of getting a grip a cricket.
Some Israeli soldiers get disciplined.
"Can a Jedi lightsaber cut through Superman?" Answer: here.
"Part of the primary story that has yet to be written is the secret sexism running rampant in progressive quarters and within our Democratic midst. I have never been so shocked as to see some supposed Democratic and progressive males react with such shameful sexist bias that is sometimes obvious, but also evidenced in unfair coverage of Clinton…These Democratic males have shown no respect whatsoever for what I’m fighting for, but instead simply warn that I will regret my position and should adjust to reality, which includes the unquestioning genuflection and worship of her opponent, because they will need my voice once he wins," – Taylor Marsh, Clinton fan.
Separated at birth?
Imagine you’re a Senate Republican. You think the health-care system is getting a bit out of control, and you find it unacceptable that 45 million Americans lack health insurance. So you’re thinking about signing on to Ron Wyden’s universal-coverage bill, as five of your GOP colleagues have already done. Then, along comes Krugman to tell you, oh, by the way, Kristol was right in 1993–if we get our foot in the door by passing health care, you can count on a broader Kucinichization of America. What are you gonna do? Chances are, you’ll be a lot less likely to support the bill. Krugman continually insists Republicans will fight universal coverage tooth and nail at every turn, and then frames the issue in such a way as to ensure that they will. […]
It always surprised me that Karl Rove would constantly brag about how privatizing Social Security was the first step toward a piece-by-piece demolition of the social safety net–and then he proclaimed himself shocked, shocked when Democrats showed no interest in helping Bush partially privatize Social Security. It would be a bitter irony if universal health care were to elude our grasp again because liberals made the same mistake.
Jen Rubin thinks there is one reason:
There are many reasons, but I would suggest an overriding one: the surge. Without McCain’s determination on the surge and its resulting success, the race would look quite different. In that effort, McCain did show his personal characteristics (tenacity and bravery, most clearly) and many Republicans, conservatives included, came to see him as a warrior in the toughest policy battle in recent memory. It was the means by which he distinguished himself from his competition and by which he could appeal to skeptics who came to see his past policy heresies in greater perspective. (Or it could just be that the competition was very, very weak.)
I think she’s right that his bravery and honesty are indeed signs of a remarkable character. The question, however, is still in front of us, and is currently unknowable: What if McCain was brave but still wrong last spring? Yes, the surge did much better in stabilizing Iraq than Petraeus’s metrics predicted. But we still do not know for sure why. We are not able to judge yet whether the extra troops were the key; or whether it was the switcheroo of the Sunni tribes; or the strange passivity of the Sadrite militias; or exhaustion; or Iran’s self-interest; or what exactly. I’m not sure even Petraeus knows for sure.
What we do know is that the basis for a serious and lasting political settlement in Iraq does not exist and has not come appreciably closer under the surge. Since this was the declared goal of the action, and since we all agree such a reconciliation is critical for an Iraq that will not dissolve into a hot civil war if we leave, we may have simply paused the centrifugal disintegration. We have done so by pushing the military to the brink. I seriously doubt if Bush will withdraw troops below the pre-surge levels before he leaves office. It’s not in his nature to take responsibility for his own errors. So McCain might inherit an Iraq in just as rough a shape as 2005, but with the delusion that keeping 130,000 troops in that country is getting us somewhere.
Worse: McCain has signaled that he believes that all those who are skeptical of this strategy are betraying the troops. He has said this time and again – disgracefully, recklessly, and dangerously. Why dangerously? Because if the surge is truly why he is winning the nomination, then his presidency will be wedded to maximalist objectives in Iraq and may even legitimize the notion that withdrawal is some kind of attack on the troops. To have McCain run an anti-Dolchstoss campaign this fall would be a nightmare for a country at war. Maybe his tone will change. Maybe he is privately shrewder about what the surge has – and has not – accomplished. But the current rhetoric is ominous for the country.
(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)
Richelieu games the day’s voting:
Obama is moving up and up, ever since South Carolina and Teddy K. He is now tied in most national polls. If he wins New Jersey in Hillary’s backyard, wins the popular vote in CA, and comes closer in NY than she does in Illinois – all likely in my view – he’ll be the new frontrunner…
Lots of talk in the media about McCain vs. The Mighty Wombats of Talk Radio. Ask President Tancredo about that one. The talkers can raise an issue to prominence, they can entertain, but they do not really deliver actual votes. Sorry Rush.
I’m sure Obama will do well – but I fear he cannot surpass expectations of a small national lead. The question today is whether her victories are too crushing for Obama to come back on February 12.
Fred Siegel is unimpressed with Obama:
Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office. The question that we need to ask is whether this man—who candidly admits, “I’m not a manager”—can manage the vast apparatus of the federal government. Will packaging be enough to deal with our problems?
In 1965, appalled by the unearned adulation for mayoral candidate John Lindsay (who was also considered a future president), Robert Moses warned: “If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you’re going to have a musical comedy administration.” And that’s just what New York got. Substitute “president” for “mayor,” and you can anticipate what might be coming.
This, I predict, will be the main line of argument against Obama in the coming weeks and months (if he wins the nomination). I think the attempt to define him as an old-style left-liberal will fail in the face of the practical difficulties – i.e. what the hell to do in Iraq – ahead of us. And because such lines of argument already seem as exhausted as the people making them.
While we essentially wait … MoJo’s blog has some interesting data on the strange delegate process in both parties. Among the Dems:
Districts which, through the quirks of state party rules, have five delegates will give three to the winner and two to the loser in even a 51/49 split of the popular vote.
Among the Republicans, the rules
put Romney at a severe disadvantage, primarily because Mike Huckabee is expected to contend strongly in the South. If Romney takes a close second to McCain in New York and New Jersey and takes a close second to Huckabee in Missouri and West Virginia, he will get zero delegates. Under the Democratic rules, he’d still be very much in the game.
And it reflects on the core traits of the parties: stupidly fair and aggressively macho.
A reader writes:
You’re right: the Grateful Dead just trumped your Atlantic cover essay – at least in part. You said in that essay that in electing Obama we will finally, thankfully, be leaving the stale culture wars of the Boomer generation behind. I get your point, but as one of those reviled Boomers, all I can tell you is: Wrong. Barack and Michelle Obama are the inspiration we horrible liberals had when we were young, the inspiration that was cut down in its prime and replaced with creeping mediocrity and worse (ever notice the cast of "Nixon" bears a remarkable resemblance to the cast of "Bush II"?)
I remember exactly where I was when I heard JFK had been assassinated: seventh grade, junior high school. I remember the desk, the room, the principal’s voice on the PA system. I remember nothing else about that year, but I remember that moment photographically, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Only now, looking back from so many years, and older now than my folks were then, do I realize what I subconsciously felt at that moment: it was as if my own father, a WWII vet and JFK’s age, and that entire generation, had somehow been assaulted, cut down in their prime. I still feel that way today. Something did happen to them, and to us, and to our country that day. It has nothing to do with party–Dad was a life-long Republican. It has to do with something deeper.
By the time Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was a senior in high school, and becoming socially and politically aware. King’s assassination seemed of a piece with Kennedy’s to me, the next ugly chapter in the reactionary response to the vast sweeping change they represented. I went to hear Robert Kennedy speak at our local University on April 29, three weeks after King was shot. Bobby was on a campaign swing through Indiana for the primary, but I neither knew nor cared about primaries. Something in my inchoate teenage mind simply wanted to hear that the dream was not dead. I was in the same shoes then that so many young people are today with Obama: insulted by years of moral and political abuse, lies and war and bigotry and shame for my country–and I wanted something better.
A month later, Bobby was dead too.
My nascent political worldview was formed by those experiences: there was a progressive force in our country, and a reactionary one. The forces of reaction would stop at nothing, including murder, to stop progressive change. Of course I realized there was no connection between the three assassinations–except there was. There was something in the air, or rather under the surface, some dark unconscious collective force–the American shadow. Read the history of that time as prose, and this take on causality seems ridiculous, if not paranoid: given the three completely unconnected assassins–two of whom apparently acted alone–you have nothing more here than random coincidence. Read it as poetry, though, with the heart, and you understand there is no coincidence. Both views, of course, are true.
What happened then–the decapitation of the progressive liberal force in this country, just as it’s next generation was reaching adulthood–has everything to do with Obama today. He’s the dream deferred, the inheritor of myth. So the Grateful Dead will play for him on Monday, and I will vote for him on Tuesday, not to bypass something we Boomers started–because believe me, we did not start the great divide–but to finish the battle we began then and fulfill what was always, always our dream–the same dream that we are dreaming today, and that Barack and Michelle describe so eloquently every time they speak: justice, unity, freedom–not as abstract principles, but as real, on-the-ground, shared American realities. It’s been a long time coming.
In fact, I will say it’s Barack and Michelle who are the real conservatives–the ones who are conserving the core American dream, the core American values. 90% of the crap that passes as "conservatism" today is nothing more than that same reactionary nightmare we suffered through in the 60’s, whose roots go back into the Civil War and beyond, and whose latest generations of practitioners have done all they could these past many years to quash the liberal impulse. The genius of Obama–and it is a spiritual genius–is he quiets that old nightmare. He lifts us beyond. He wakes us up, brings us together–the true opposite to Bush and Rove, who drove us deeper into drugged sleep and division, day by day. That was your point in "Goodbye to All That", and it was well said. But don’t blame the Boomers–left or right–for a war that’s been going on forever. And don’t underestimate the sleeping giant we Boomers–especially we liberal Boomers–represent. We have not forgotten our dreams.
(Photo: a still from the Zapruder video of the JFK assassination.)
