The Best Of The Dish Today

Wait for it …

Well, I enjoyed that.

Today, I kept being gobsmacked – smack, smack, smack, smack, smacked in the gob. By which I mean Rumsfeld – yes Rumsfeld! – and Cheney and Butters – yes, Butters! – are actually out there in public condemning president Obama for “weakness”. In an inspired moment of total lunacy, Butters even blamed Putin’s Crimea bullying on Benghazi! I know we all have to pretend that they have every right to speak their minds (and, of course, they do) – but really. The men responsible for the collapse of America’s military deterrent by losing two strategically catastrophic wars of choice actually have the gall to get up there and accuse Obama of weakness! The men who let Osama bin Laden get away; the men whose Putinesque derangement led to the total disintegration of Iraq; the men who presided over Iran’s achievement of nuclear infrastructure; the men who made a laughing stock out of US intelligence; the men who lost Afghanistan; the men who bankrupted the country by war and spending … these men now claim strategic prescience, manly foresight and a record of a “strong” America? There are times when the gob smacks itself.

And look at their role model, the man they think has run circles around Obama, the man they think is playing brilliant chess to our lame checkers. Or better still listen to him. In Ioffe’s memorable piece today,

Putin squirmed and rambled [at his press conference]. And rambled and rambled. He was a rainbow of emotion: Serious! angry! bemused! flustered! confused! So confused. … Today’s Putin was nervous, angry, cornered, and paranoid, periodically illuminated by flashes of his own righteousness. Here was an authoritarian dancing uncomfortably in his new dictator shoes, squirming in his throne.

This is the Metternich of our time? This is the model for running foreign policy? It tells you so much about the neocons that they have descended into this pit of ugly incoherence. And as for the American people, sick of a weak president, and eager to flex American military muscle again … well, it turns out only 18 percent believe the US has any responsibility to protect Ukraine. But the neocons have long since stopped looking at public opinion. For them, it’s always 1978. But Obama is no Carter; and they have no Reagan – a president, of course, they also excoriated for “weakness” in his time.

So let’s change the subject, as we did today, and note the humility of W H Auden’s quiet Christianity, the need for magnanimity in the culture wars, a Colombian window view, and the austere but deep conservatism of a great American patriot, hated (of course) by neocons: George F Kennan. And one more plug for the ever-vigilant Dish at 3 am this morning: coverage of live tweets of a military stand-off in Crimea.

The most popular post of the day was once again “In Another World?” followed by last night’s rant about the buffoon, John McCain.

See you in the morning.

Meanwhile, Back In Venezuela

VENEZUELA-POLITICS-OPPOSITION-PROTEST

Rafael Osío Cabrices, who lives near the epicenter of the protests in Caracas, describes his family’s day-to-day struggle:

Throughout these dark days, my wife and I had been trying to keep our baby girl safe. Every day there have been protests in Plaza Altamira. A few nights have been very violent, and two even nightmarish. Those evenings, we had to take refuge in my home office, which has no windows that look into the street. There, between jazz records, old magazines, and a messy desk, my wife and our daughter slept in the guest bed while the National Guard hunted down the students they had just expelled from the square with tear gas and plastic shotgun pellets.

The National Guard wanted to take the students back to their headquarters, where, according to many student accounts, some would be tortured and handed back to their parents for a ransom that could climb to as much as $10,000 per prisoner. In U.S. dollars, of course—not even the regime’s thugs have faith in their own currency.

So we shut all the windows and waited there, gunfire and sirens blaring around us like a flock of Furies.

Mark Weisbrot defends the regime and blames the US for encouraging the anti-democratic opposition:

Washington has been more committed to “regime change” in Venezuela than anywhere else in South America – not surprisingly, given that it is sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world. And that has always given opposition politicians a strong incentive to not work within the democratic system.

Jackson Diehl examines how Latin American countries are reacting to the crisis:

Countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Peru, which opposed “Chavismo,” keep their distance, leery of picking a fight with a regime known for its combativeness. More sympathetic governments, led by Brazil, cite high principle in refusing to intervene: “Brazil does not speak about the internal situation of any country,” President Dilma Rousseff declared recently. Of course, that is not true. When the left-wing president of Honduras was ousted by its supreme court in 2009, Brazil led the charge to have Honduras expelled from the OAS. When Paraguay’s parliament impeached its populist president in 2012, Rousseff went on a diplomatic rampage, forcing Paraguay out of the Mercosur trade bloc. The real reason Brazil won’t act in Venezuela is ideological. “For Brazil it’s very important that Venezuela always be looked at from the point of view of advances . . . in education and health for the people,” Rousseff said. In other words, intervention is called for only when it benefits the left.

Previous Dish on the unrest in Venezuela here.

(Photo: An opposition activist helps set up barricades during a protest against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on March 3, 2014. At least 18 people have been killed and 250 injured since a wave of protests began on February 4. By Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images)

Talking Sense Into Anti-Vaxxers

Chris Mooney reports on a new study that suggests it may be impossible:

The paper tested the effectiveness of four separate pro-vaccine messages, three of which were based very closely on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself talks about vaccines. The results can only be called grim: Not a single one of the messages was successful when it came to increasing parents’ professed intent to vaccinate their children. And in several cases the messages actually backfired, either increasing the ill-founded belief that vaccines cause autism or even, in one case, apparently reducing parents’ intent to vaccinate.

The findings deeply depress Aaron Carroll, who debunked anti-vaccine beliefs in the video seen above:

When they gave evidence that vaccines aren’t linked to autism, that actually made parents who were already skittish about vaccines less likely to get their child one in the future. When they showed images of sick children to parents it increased their belief that vaccines caused autism. When they told a dramatic story about an infant in danger because he wasn’t immunized, it increased parents’ beliefs that vaccines had serious side effects.

Basically, it was all depressing. Nothing was effective.

Marcotte asks how to combat the anti-vaccine trend if appeals to reason don’t work:

Mooney suggests that state governments should respond by making it harder to opt out of vaccinations. That would be helpful, but there’s also some preliminary research from the James Randi Educational Foundation and Women Thinking Inc. that shows that reframing the argument in positive terms can help. When parents were prompted to think of vaccination as one of the steps you take to protect a child, like buckling a seat belt, they were more invested in doing it than if they were reminded that vaccine denialists are spouting misinformation. Hopefully, future research into pro-vaccination messaging, as opposed to just anti-anti-vaccination messaging, will provide further insight.

Face Of The Day

New Orleans Holds Citywide Mardi Gras Celebration

Members of the Krew of Mondo Kayo Social Marching Club march through the rain during the Mardi Gras parade on March 4, 2014 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Fat Tuesday is the traditional celebration on the day before Ash Wednesday and the begining of Lent. By Sean Gardner/Getty Images. Meanwhile, Richard Campanella celebrates the city’s much-maligned Bourbon Street:

Las Vegas has been called America’s most honest city for its undisguised pursuit of profit. Perhaps Bourbon rates as our most candid street, for the clarity of its deal: accessible pleasures offered for a price to the passing parade. For all its flamboyance and swagger, Bourbon Street is one of the least pretentious places in town. It’s as utterly uncool as it is wildly successful, and in an era when “cool capital” is increasingly craved and fiscal capital increasingly scarce, there’s something refreshing about a place that flips off coolness and measures success the old-fashioned way: by the millions.

And authenticity?

Not only does Bourbon Street not try to be authentic, it doesn’t even think about it. If, as Sartre once said, “you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake, you are no longer authentic,” then perhaps the opposite is true as well. For all its ruses and illusions, Bourbon Street puts on no airs, requires no subsidies or handouts, has no need for the kindness of strangers, and lets the loquacious literati and the fuming fundamentalists fulminate alone. What you see when you peer past the neon is exactly what you get.

Why Doesn’t Aid Win Any Friends?

Noting that the US is decidedly unpopular in most of the countries that receive the largest tranches of aid money, Keating explains why that is and why it might be a problem:

On one level, this makes perfect sense. The U.S. doesn’t give aid to those countries as a reward for good behavior. To put it bluntly, it’s because we’re worried there are people in those countries who will try to kill us, (or kill our friends, or get their hands on nuclear weapons) and we want their governments to do something about it.

The problem is when this aid starts to look like a perverse incentive. An analysis by Navin Bapat of the University of North Carolina found that between 1997 and 2006, U.S. military assistance correlates with a 67 percent increase in the duration of terrorist campaigns in the country receiving the aid. This could suggest that governments like Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan actually need a certain baseline of militant activity to continue in order to keep the U.S. aid money flowing.

Meanwhile, Paul Brinkley thinks it was a mistake to put USAID under the State Department’s purview:

The verdict is now in on this transition. USAID is not effective in carrying out its principal mission: delivering cost-effective outcomes that advance U.S. foreign policy goals. In addition, the agency’s humanitarian mission has been broadened to encompass areas that are incompatible with its culture — including economic development.

The priority of the State Department — from staffing, to allocation of resources, to a forbidding security posture that inhibits local engagement of war-torn populations — is to fulfill a diplomatic mission. Not to run foreign assistance programs. Realigning organizations, like this move of USAID into State’s sphere, is a poor means of carrying out presidential policy.

The Economic Battlelines

Matthew Klein looks at Russia’s growing economic troubles:

Real gross domestic product growth has already slowed from 5.1 percent in 2011 to just over 1 percent in 2013. Car sales fell by 5.5 percent in 2013, despite the Russian government’s introduction of subsidized auto loans. If that weren’t bad enough, European demand for natural gas — about 30 percent of which comes from Russia — has been steadily falling since 2010. Additional supply could come on line in the coming years from the U.S. and Israel at the same time as Russia expands its own production capacity. The net effect could be a glut that would lower prices and further reduce Russia’s access to hard currency.

Its neighbor is much weaker:

To put the Ukraine’s economy into some perspective, let’s go to the CIA World Factbook.

The annual gross domestic product of the country is $175.5 billion. That is about 4 days of GDP in America. Indeed, the entire stock-market capitalization of the Ukraine is about the size of Walt Disney Company. Ukraine’s per capita income is a touch higher than Egypt’s. In other words, it is not very economically significant.

And for now, Ukraine relies heavily on Russia for fuel:

Ukraine depends on Gazprom for the vast majority—70 percent in 2011—of the gas needed to heat homes and keep its industry functioning. This is a matter of no small import given its usually harsh winters. “Ukraine just hasn’t paid attention to the gas problem at all,” [Fiona] Hill [of Brookings] said. “It’s had too many people getting rich acting as middlemen for Russian gas.”

It might take Ukraine three to five years to bring its gas sector up to speed, she added. But Clifford Gaddy, a Brookings Institution economist who specializes in Russia, pointed out that “Ukraine . . . has not found alternatives to Russian gas, and it will not be able to. They are too expensive. Gas is and will always be a Russian lever.”

Update from a reader:

I think it was very useful to present some quantification of the differences in the economies and militaries of Russia and Ukraine, but those numbers are quite misleading as markers for how a shooting war between Russia and Ukraine might proceed.

First, while the Economy of Russia is vastly larger, the Russian economy is freakishly reliant on the Ukraine. The modern economy of Russia is built primarily on the export of natural gas (e.g., oil and gas exports provides 50% of all government revenue) and 2/3 of their exported gas transships the Ukraine. The Russian economy that would be fighting a shooting war with Ukraine would be much weaker than the one assessed in 2013 because those gas lines would certainly be shut down, possibly for a protracted period. A true war with Ukraine … even one with a relatively quick “victory” for Russia, will result in a severe economic contraction Russia if the Ukrainian nationalists destroy pipeline infrastructure. Put another way, the value to Russia of the gas that transships Ukraine is worth more money than the entire economy of the Ukraine.

Second, while all of Ukraine’s (limited) military resources would be devoted to defending its territory, Russia has simmering territorial or political conflicts with nearly all of its neighbors, as well as a perceived threat from the United States. Russia may have 40,000 armored fighting vehicles, but it cannot use them all in the Ukraine without wars opening up on other fronts. Similarly, a large part of Russian military spending is for weapons systems that are designed for conflict with the US and could not be used against Ukraine (e.g., nuclear subs, ICBMs).

If Ukrainians chose to fight an invading Russian Army, they could extract a stunningly high cost both militarily and economically from Russia. My view is that Putin’s movement of unmarked troops and agitators into Crimea/Ukraine makes tactical sense only as a test to determine if Ukrainians would actually chose to fight an invasion by Russia. Putin is putting a toe in the water to determine the temperature. If he can get Ukrainian military commanders in to surrender without firing a shot, then an invasion is likely. If not, he has still not risked that much.

It’s The Combo That Kills

Keith Humphreys isn’t surprised by the results of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s autopsy released on Friday:

Hoffman’s tragic overdose was absolutely the norm: He died from a combination of drugs, not from impure or unusually strong heroin. The benzodiazepines may have been particularly lethal in that they, like alcohol, seem able to lower acute tolerance for opioids, thereby turning a user’s standard dose into an “overdose”.

Sullum has more on mixed-drug overdoses:

Drug combinations like this are typical of deaths attributed to heroin or other narcotics. Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) indicate that “multi-drug deaths” accounted for most fatalities involving opiates or opioids in 2010: 72 percent in surburban New York, 83 percent in Los Angeles, and 56 percent in Chicago, for example. Back in the early 1990s, the share of heroin-related deaths reported by DAWN that involved other drugs was even higher, 90 percent or more. (Note that the numbers in the table are misaligned and need to be shifted downward.)

In short, when someone dies from what is described as a heroin overdose, the actual cause is usually a fatal mixture of two or more substances, frequently including depressants such as alcohol or prescription tranquilizers.

Cool Ad Watch

Andy Cush captions the first mainstream TV ad for marijuana aired in the US:

The above minute-long spot for MarijuanaDoctors.com began airing yesterday on CNN, Comedy Central, The History Channel, and A&E in New Jersey, making it the first weed commercial to be shown on major U.S. TV networks. In it, a fast-talking faux drug dealer slings high quality raw fish in back alleys before a voice-over asks, “You wouldn’t buy your sushi from this guy, so why would you buy your marijuana from him?” Then, of course, you’re directed to check out the company’s site, which hooks up patients with medical cannabis doctors.

It isn’t the first weed commercial ever to air in the U.S., however: back in 2010, the Sacramento dispensary CannaCare ran a spot advertising its services on local Fox affiliate KTXL. And it didn’t even use the m-word.

Fighting Putin With Platitudes

James Mann tires of the administration’s rhetoric on Russia:

The administration loves to brand actions it doesn’t like as relics of the past. “It’s really nineteenth century behavior in the twenty-first century,” Kerry said of Putin’s Crimean gambit. A senior administration official who sounded like either National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Ben Rhodes told reporters on background, “What we see here are distinctly nineteenth- and twenty-first century decisions made by President Putin to address problems.”

Well, to start with, by definition Putin’s decisions are taking place in the twenty-first century. The administration here seems to be using the centuries like a teacher handing out a grade: twenty-first century is an A, twentieth century is a C, nineteenth century is an F. More importantly, talking this way raises an uncomfortable question: Does the reality of the twenty-first century conform to what Obama administration officials think it is?

Dmitri K. Simes makes related points:

We are speaking very loudly. We are carrying a small stick. We are not really disciplining the Russians. We are not clearly defining what is important to us. We are acting like King Lear. We are issuing pathetic declarations which nobody is taking seriously.

When I saw Secretary Kerry on television yesterday, I think it was a very sad performance. He was visibly angry. He was visibly defensive. He was accusing Russians using very harsh language of violations of international law. His description of the political process in Ukraine which led to this situation was incomplete and disingenuous at best. And then, after he said all of these things, he did not say, “Well, because of the Russians violating international law, threatening international security, that because of that the President of the United States is moving our naval assets in the Black Sea!” With the language he was using, that’s what you would expect him to do. But he was carrying a small stick.

Rhetoric is not policy and sounding tough doesn’t roll back Russia’s advances. The administration will have to do something that does not come naturally to it: think strategically. This means taking steps, preferably quietly, to demonstrate our commitment to the security of the Baltic States. It means considering strengthening the Ukrainian military if the conflict escalates. But it also means avoiding empty public threats, respecting Russia’s dignity and avoiding creating an impression that it’s our way or the highway.

The full Simes interview is worth a read.

Mental Health Break

Justin Page plugs a talented dude:

Los Angeles writer, comedian and “man of a kajllion voices” Brock Baker has released a new video where he does impressions of 33 characters from The Simpsons in five minutes. Previously, we wrote about Brock’s impressions of Spongebob Squarepants, The Muppets, and Family Guy characters.