Small d democrat

Fundies will forgive Romney

2006-12-12T09:26:00.000-05:00

Dumb reasons

2006-11-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

I wanted Jim Webb to prevail, but this was a dumb reason for Allen to concede (and not just because the math is ridiculous):

There's no question what the will of the American people is with respect to
the Senate: a big majority of the popular vote went to the Dems.

The "will of the American people"? They don't vote for Senators. The voters of individual states vote for Senators. If the nationwide popular vote is your yardstick, you should be demanding that Dems get a lot more than 51 seats.

The voters of Virginia get to decide who represents them in the Senate, not Andrew Sullivan and not the voters of the rest of the country. This from a self-professed federalist?

This kind of argument was pernicious in 2000 -- when Republicans repeated ad nauseam that Bush had won 'a majority of voters in a majority of states', and that if you set up-in-the-air Florida aside Bush had clearly won, so Gore should step aside -- and it's pernicious now. You don't let national CW decide individual local races. Otherwise why have individual local races? Insane.

Sullivan's come around to smart positions lately, but somehow he's about the only blogger who riles me up enough to make a separate post. Probably because he doesn't allow comments.

So learn, you clown

2006-09-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

Trent Lott:

'It's hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what's wrong with these people,' he said. 'Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.'

Trent Lott has been a U.S. Senator for how many years? He's got a certain access to information -- books (I hear the Library of Congress has a few), government-produced studies and reports, interns to do research, etc. This war in Iraq has been going on for a while now, and the leader of his party says it's the Most Important Thing Ever. You'd think, then, that Trent Lott might feel some inclination -- dare I say some duty, as a public servant? -- to, you know, learn about that country and the political and religious forces at work in it, the better to do his job of crafting and voting on legislation related to it.

But no, Trent Lott's idea of serving the public is to tell Americans he's ignorant but that it's OK, because in so being he's just like them.

UPDATE: The Carpetbagger echoes my point.

Conrad Burns

2006-09-29T09:47:00.000-05:00

This guy sure likes the ethnic humor.

Whether he intends insult or not, there's just something deeply creepy about a guy for whom ethnic quips slide off the tongue as easily as they do for Conrad Burns. It doesn't mean he's necessarily mean or hateful, it just suggests that the first thing he sees about a person he meets is their ethnicity. And that he's deeply familiar and comfortable with stereotypes about, apparently, every ethnic or national group there is. That's creepy. I've known people like that, as have most people I suspect. I don't necessarily think they're racists or what have you. Just a little simple-minded and petty-mean, too enamored of the cheap shot.

Conservatives like to toss around the "political correctness has run amok" line, but when liberals (for whom I nominate myself spokesperson for purposes of this paragraph) highlight comments like Burns', it's not because we think he's violated some iron rule that should instantly disqualify him from anything. It's just because it reveals something about the guy, something about his character that might make you not want to have him, you know, representing you in the United States Senate.

It's OK if you're Chris Hitchens

2006-07-06T15:26:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan, earlier today, responding to a John Derbyshire piece on Bush's incuriousness:

This is the Tory version of the left's obsession with Bush's "stupidity."

Andrew Sullivan, later today, endorsing the use of the 's' word by his friend Christopher Hitchens:

Out of a thesaurus of possible nominations, one would have to select George Bush's remarks about Vladimir Putin as the stupidest utterance of his entire presidency.

Calling Bush stupid: Brilliant if you're Hitchens. A mark of "obsession" if you're on "the left".

Sigh.

Andrew Sullivan can't help himself

2006-03-24T10:40:00.000-05:00

He's allowed himself to be grudgingly persuaded that the President he once worshipped has made a hash of the Iraq war, but he'll still grasp eagerly at any evidence which discredits prewar antiwar arguments -- even when said evidence doesn't, you know, actually do that:

"[N]ew documents", he writes, "seem to me to blow a big hole through the arguments of those who believe that "secular" Saddam would never cooperate with Osama bin Laden's Jihadists[.]"

What those documents say:

Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam's presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995, and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation.

Surely we're past the point where speculations on what Saddam Hussein, if left in power long enough, might someday, conceivably, hypothetically done in concert with Al Qaeda matter at all. The fact (according to our current state of knowledge) is that all tentative probing efforts toward such collaborative actions had fizzled out long before the U.S. decided to depose Hussein -- something like 1999, I believe. That there were feelers sent out in 1995 is not news.

Too bad

2006-03-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

Wow, again with the wishing bodily harm on opposing politicians' children.

Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe says it's "Too bad" Bush's daughters aren't serving "on the frontlines"; "Perhaps if one ... had died in Iraq or lost their legs" he'd see his own folly and we'd all be better off.

I realize we're all supposed to love Larry Johnson now, because he's a Republican ex-CIA agent who's now holding Bush's feet to the fire, but this sort of thing is why he's always creeped me out a little.

History News Network

2006-03-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

This so-called review of David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is a shining example of why History News Network is an embarassment to the profession.

Look, I haven't read the book, and you can color me agnostic on the larger question which I gather it raises: namely, whether higher education in the U.S. is dominated by some America-hating, left-wing clique more interested in political indoctrination of students than in honest instruction and scholarly inquiry. I suspect I'd paint the picture quite differently, but I haven't done anything like a careful study. Got more important things to do.

But come on, have you ever seen a more substance-less review of a book? There's no judgment whatsoever. We're simply given a capsule version of Horowitz's argument, liberally sprinkled with long quotations.

At the very end, this is the closest we get to evaluation of the book's worth:

It seems increasingly unlikely, however, that the critiques leveled by Dr. Horowitz will simply go away. The book is endorsed by Rep. Jerry Lewis (chairman of the House Appropriations Committee), Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom (Professors at Harvard University), Laura Ingraham (host of the Laura Ingraham Show), and a slew of state senators and representatives. With such politically and intellectually powerful backers, and a public increasingly aware of issues relating to academic freedom (a number of court cases and legislative acts have recently captured media attention), it appears possible that academia may soon be forced to take David Horowitz as seriously as he would like.

Yes, but does he deserve to be taken seriously, on the merits of his case? That's the question that needs answering. On this, though, the HNN reviewer punts. Moreover, in a review of a book which apparently purports to expose the real, hidden motives of dozens of academics, and attacks their credentials, the writer appears utterly uninterested in Horowitz's own motives or credentials.

Oh, and by the way, on the latter score, unless all of the on-line bios of Horowitz I found chose to omit it, he hasn't earned the title of "Dr." Sounds to me like he wouldn't want it.

UPDATE: HNN confirms my suspicion, and says it will remove the "Dr." references.

Pot, meet kettle

2006-03-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

Via Sullivan: Tom Friedman about Lou Dobbs, "blithering idiot."

I'll take this opportunity to re-post a link to Matt Taibbi's breathtakingly funny review of Friedman's last book. And this one which I somehow missed until just now.

Elitist ethics

2006-02-23T14:26:00.000-05:00

The allegedly-hateful Eric Alterman makes a good point:

I did a profile once of Alan Dershowitz. ... I do remember that the guy refused to talk about where he lived for security reasons. ... This didn’t bother me. And it doesn’t bother me that William Bennett has the millions not only to gamble on blackjack but also to pay for his own private extensive security arrangements. And so I think it would be the better part of valor for both of these multimillionaires to shut up about the working stiffs in the media being cowards for not risking life and limb to print a bunch of cartoons.

The Bennett-Dershowitz column is here. They're not so much hypocrites, as Alterman calls them, as ethical elitists, looking down disapprovingly while safely perched atop large piles of money.

I've nothing in particular to say about the cartoon riots (or about much of anything here lately, of course). Obviously violence as a response to offending speech is insane. (As a student newspaper editor I was once threatened with violence by a Muslim radical for refusing to print an opinion piece -- not, I should say, because of its point of view but because at 20,000 words it was 19,000 words too long for the space allocated.) And clearly some Middle Eastern governments have played a big part in whipping up the violence. But I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for the publishers of the Danish paper, if what I've read is true -- namely that they actively solicited cartoons which would mock Mohammed in the context of an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims in Danish society.

It Matters!

2006-02-09T16:42:00.000-05:00

I had a conversation last night in which it was agreed that Media Matters sometimes gets excessively nit-picky. Such was my reaction when I first saw this item. So CNN (without acknowledging it) cut 23 seconds of applause down to five, in a clip of Rev. Joseph Lowery criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy at Coretta Scott King's funeral. Who cares, right? So what if they edited down the applause?

Well, shame on me. Turns out Fox News later did the same thing and one of its pundits took advantage of the trick to spin the crowd's reaction in such a way as to make Bush look good -- "it wasn't exactly uproarious in its response" to Lowery's criticism, said Mort Kondracke. Well, sure, not if it only appauded for five seconds.

Sorry, Media Matters, I take it all back.

Fun with zygotes

2006-01-06T12:20:00.000-05:00

I favor pro-choice policies but I'm a little in awe of how elegantly Ross Douthat is wiping the floor with Andrew Sullivan and other pro-choicers over at the latter's blog, on the question of what the low natural survival rate of human zygotes says about the moral coherence of arguments in favor of criminalizing abortion.

Freebies

2006-01-05T15:20:00.000-05:00

OK, this is a really small thing but I dearly wish the press would stop giving Bush undeserved credit for stuff -- in this case bipartisanship.

He held a confab at the White House today. As AP's Jennifer Loven reported it:

The president invited more than a dozen foreign policy leaders from previous administrations, split nearly evenly between Democrat and Republican, to the White House for a detailed briefing on Iraq.

At the end of the article she lists the participants: eight former servants of Republicans presidents and five former servants of Democrats -- one of the latter of whom (Clinton's defense secretary William Cohen) was himself a Republican. So depending on how you count, it's either 8:5 or 9:4 in favor of Republicans. That's not even counting the five current administration officials who are mentioned as having been there.

Of course Bush can invite anyone he darn well pleases but come on: "Split nearly evenly"?

Sad but true

2005-12-20T11:43:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, Ross Douthat is right about this. Americans will always prefer a party that goes a little too far trying to protect us than one that doesn't go far enough. Democrats, if they ever regain power, need a muscular foreign policy and yet one that reflects the more edifying strains of this country's traditions of internationalism.

By the way, Ross was a student of mine for one semester. He's apparently smarter than I recall giving him credit for.

Frist AIDS Charity shenanigans

2005-12-18T10:27:00.000-05:00

The AP story is here. Briefly, the upshot is that newly released tax returns for the Senate Majority Leader's charity suggest that some of the charity's disbursements had politically inflected purposes. A significant portion went to consulting and law firms connected with members of Frist's political staff (including one whose wife is raising funds to run for public office) and with another Republican senator.

How significant a portion? Here, the AP seems to understate the scope of possible shenanigans by not correcting some funky math offered by Frist's lawyer. Consider these passages and tell me if I'm wrong:

The returns for World of Hope Inc., obtained by The Associated Press, also show the charity raised the lion's share of its $4.4 million from just 18 sources. ...

World of Hope gave $3 million it raised to charitable AIDS causes...

The rest of the money went to overhead. ...

Alex Vogel [Frist's lawyer] said Frist picked people to work on his charity whom he trusted and knew, such as Vogel's wife, and was proud that overhead costs mounted to less than $1 of every $5 raised. "It's leaner than the average charity," Vogel said.

$4.4m less $3m given to charities leaves $1.4m spent on overhead. That, by my reckoning, is $1.70 of every $5 raised.

To what end indeed?

2005-12-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

OK, serious for a second. I really don't see what's gained by this sort of determined, unfocused pessimism about Iraq. (Title: More Purple Fingers. To What End?) Not even the adminstration is claiming that this week's elections will instantly solve all the country's problems, so to argue with that position is, well, to argue with pretty much no one.

I'm not advocating a cult of optimism, as if thinking good thoughts will help make good things happen. And I don't think anyone significant on the left is actually wishing for U.S. failure. But I do think they're setting themselves up for a domestic backlash when they persistently offer the gloomiest forecasts. There are a very, very wide range of possible outcomes for Iraq, some significantly worse than others. It seems to me that pretty much any conditions -- short of a Saigon-style rooftop evacuation -- under which the Bush administration manages to draw down the U.S. troop presence in Iraq over the next couple of years, most Americans will be prepared to view, with relief, as a victory. Sure, maybe if Iraq collapses into full-on civil war after a couple of years, the Cassandras will look vindicated, but it's the short run -- the 2006 and 2008 elections -- that should be foremost in Democrats' minds (since they can't actually, you know, do anything about U.S. foreign policy in the meantime). And a record of having predicted a worse outcome for Iraq than actually happened won't win you many votes. Rather, it'll just underline the already widespread perception that Democrats have unsound foreign policy judgment. Those are the kind of impressions that don't easily get revised, even if the long-term trajectory for Iraq turns out to be downward -- people will blame the incorrigible Iraqis rather than credit war critics for having seen it coming.

Clement Moore would be proud

2005-12-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

The meter could use a little work, but the sentiment: outstanding.

Speech police run amok

2005-12-16T09:53:00.000-05:00

You know, O'Reilly's right. When the President of Iran feels compelled to back off statements denying the Holocaust, this political correctness speech-police thing has gone too far.

Thievery

2005-12-15T14:34:00.000-05:00

Eric Alterman highlights a screed by wingnut Michael Savage denouncing a suit filed last year by Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Richard Cohen to remove that Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama courthouse. Savage writes that anti-Semitism "comes from situations like this, when you have a New York Jew like Cohen going down South into the heartland of Christianity and stealing the religious symbol from Christians."

My question (besides Isn't it time someone upped that man's dosage?) is: Since when do the Ten Commandments belong to Christians? In fact, didn't Christians more or less, er, steal them from the Jews?

"Conceding mistakes"

2005-12-15T11:06:00.000-05:00

That's what Sullivan calls what Bush did the other day. But actually, what he conceded was that other people had made mistakes. Not him, the intelligence services.

And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq -- and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. ... Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision.

You can't really concede someone else's mistake, can you? That'd be like me, when I was ten, conceding that my little brother had broken the kitchen window.

It's remarkable, really: Greg Sargent at TAPPED predicted that the press would get snowed by this little piece of "rhetorical hocus pocus". And they were. As so often, it was left up to Knight-Ridder (via Kevin Drum) to supply the necessary context:

"It's true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush admitted -- omitting that he and top aides had ignored warnings from midlevel intelligence agents that some of the evidence was suspect -- then quickly added that he has no regrets about his decision to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Look out for Romney

2005-12-14T18:46:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney won't run for Governor of Massachusetts again in 2006. That's today's word out of Boston.

If he decides to run for the Republican presidential nomination (which seems a sure thing), he has to be considered the favorite. The math seems pretty straightforward to me. What are the GOP's most influential constituencies? Fundamentalists and capitalists. Fundamentalists will like him because he is one. Capitalists will like him because he's one of those, too. What other major Republican figures can claim both labels?

Plus I do think the 'I fought liberals in the most liberal of places' shtick will carry him far. It even carries its own built-in excuse for not having accomplished much while Governor. A recent effort by a Boston Phoenix reporter to undercut this 'believer among the heathens' theme of Romney's recent heartland speaking tour was singularly unpersuasive, essentially conceding that Massachusetts voters elected him because they didn't trust Democrats to run the government.

He's got a respectable family pedigree in politics, and he's got executive-branch experience. Plus he's a handsome, charismatic man. And as for the Mormon thing: while I don't exactly have extensive sources among religious conservatives, allow me to go out on a limb and predict that they'll come around to him pretty easily. Leaders of that movement seem perfectly able to live with large amounts of cognitive (or should I say doctrinal) dissonance when it comes to political strategy -- raging against abortion on 'culture of life' grounds while ignoring capital punishment and endorsing war, making all sorts of noise on various Third World relief issues while remaining silent about cuts to domestic anti-poverty spending, etc. If they pronounce him acceptable, most of the rank-and-file -- who know little about the LDS church -- will go along. And it seems likely they'd embrace him if the alternative looked to be that gay-loving Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, whom movement insiders have a long history of not really trusting.

The only glitch might come if the Bush people decide to anoint a successor early, perhaps by retiring Dick Cheney and filling his job with an heir-apparent. (I said before that this is unlikely, but I'm reconsidering.) Anyone behind whom they throw their weight would be a formidable obstacle. Of course, they could well settle on Romney as their crown prince. He's already come through big-time for Bush once before (remember the Salt Lake City Olympics). And the Bushes do prefer their fundamentalists to be blue-blooded like Romney rather than heartland like, say, Sam Brownback. Plus smart Repubicans know that governors make better presidential candidates than senators (sorry, Brownback; sorry, George Allen).

Lots could still go wrong for him. Right now, though, it's his to lose.

Useless parallels

2005-12-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

I know that digging up historical quotations can seem like a super-clever way to lend weight to one's present-day policy judgments, but I’m sorry, I don’t see that this (via Digby) proves anything, least of all whether Howard Dean was full of baloney when he claimed that the Iraq War is unwinnable.

The logical approach being employed here amounts to this: A bunch of government officials in the 1960s made claims that the Vietnam War was going swimmingly. We now know they were deluded. Today, a bunch of government officials are making strikingly similar-sounding claims that the Iraq War is going swimmingly. Ergo, they must also be deluded.

Sounds great, except that it doesn’t follow. Try this one: Some opposition politicians in the 1930s U.S. claimed that Adolf Hitler posed no great danger. We now all agree that they were wrong. Before 2003, some opposition politicians in the U.S. claimed that Saddam Hussein posed no great danger. Ergo, we can all agree that they must also have been wrong.

Not so fun anymore, is it?

The problem with this little rhetorical trick (and I should say that it was Dean who first used it in this instance; the blogger cited above just backs it up with some actual quotations) is that it begs the question. It assumes that which it purports to demonstrate -- namely, that the Bush administration is just as wrong about prospects for success in Iraq as the Johnson and Nixon administrations were about prospects for success in Vietnam. Absent that assumption, the similarities between the ways in which the two sets of leaders talked about their respective wars gets you precisely nowhere.

Historical parallels are great. But let’s draw them between past events and circumstances, not between what people said about those events and circumstances. People can say anything at all. We still have to investigate empirically whether or not what they say is true, by looking at facts on the ground. The fact that Robert MacNamara was delusional really does nothing towards proving that Donald Rumsfeld is, too.

I, for one, am not yet convinced that the current policy in Iraq has, in fact, already failed, though if it hasn't it's not for lack of trying by the Bush administration.

More dominoes

2005-12-07T11:51:00.000-05:00

I caught the very tail end of Hardball yesterday (not a usual stop of mine -- I blame it on cold medication) and was glad to see Richard Cohen of the Washington Post making a point I made the other day, and that I really think needs making more often: namely, that all this talk of Islamic calipates from Indonesia to Spain is patently (in Cohen's words) "preposterous" and "ridiculous". None of which, of course, stopped Dick Cheney from sounding the theme again yesterday.

Not only is such a pan-Muslim empire not going to happen -- doesn't the fact that it's not going to happen sort of undermine the administration's "stay the course" message? If the enemy's objective is utterly unattainable regardless of what we do, why should we even bother trying to stop him? If you want to convince me, at least, that it's necessary to keep fighting, you've got to frame it in terms of some bad outcome that might actually conceivably happen if we stop.

Again, it's like those old claims that if we didn't stop the Communists in Vietnam, we'd be fighting them in the streets of San Francisco. Laughable, and thus not terribly effective as propaganda aimed at bolstering home-front resolve.

UPDATE: A day later, Atrios agrees, and cites Cohen's new column on this subject.

The Mouse, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2005-12-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

I tend to agree with the chilled-out secularist view of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books. As Christian propaganda tracts go, they're pretty weak beer. I was brought up heathen and enjoyed the first few books very much as a kid, oblivious to the allegory. (My interest stalled, though, with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. What's a "dawn treader"?) It's sensible, in these times, to keep one's antennae alert to this stuff, but it seems to me that from a church-state point of view there are much more worthwhile hills to die on than this one.

But surely church-state concerns are not the only reason one might feel qualms about the state of Florida's decision to add the Narnia books to public school curricula this year. With the movie about to come out, doesn't that amount to a gigantic marketing gift to the Disney Corporation, the film's distributor? Yeah, I'm sure the state of Florida is already well in the pocket of Disney. But did we really need another instance?

Really, the whole squabble nicely encapsulates the scam that is modern Republicanism: a nice, big culture-war kerfuffle providing smokescreen for yet another corporate give-away.

Sen. Clinton pushes flag-burning law

2005-12-05T22:45:00.000-05:00

What a shameless display of kiss-ass politicking. Does she really think this will make conservatives like her? She just lost my primary vote (not, in fairness, that she was ever likely to get it).