Posts Tagged Under ‘U.S.’
Biden
We’re now up to three Democrats who’ve dropped out — Bill Richardson having dropped yesterday, who was preceded by Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. So, I thought I’d state my preference now for Biden as Secretary of State should the next administration be Democratic.
Biden is pretty high on himself — note how often he appears on TV — and he did vote for that 2005 bankruptcy bill that helped out the always-needy credit-card companies. (Looking at the voting list, I note that Clinton didn’t vote one way or the other on that highly controversial bill. Interesting!)
But the thing is, every time I see Biden on TV, I find myself agreeing with nearly everything he says. The guy clearly knows his foreign-policy stuff, and assuming he actually means it, I like that he’s made noise about sparking a constitutional war-powers crisis should the President attack Iran. He also is down for a federalized pseudo-partition of Iraq, which I still think is the best hope for a settlement.
Biden would make an excellent Secretary of State. I think he probably ran for President for that exact reason: he’s got to be self-aware enough to know that he wouldn’t match up with the heavy hitters, but he got his name out there in the public eye as someone who’s serious about the executive branch. So let’s get all up on it.
New Hampshire
- Clinton’s win today is supposedly a shocking victory, but I had called that one in my work primary pool. (I also called Obama winning Iowa. What.) I think the “crying” episode put her over the top: humanization was clearly exactly what she needed.
- Speaking of that video, am I the only one who doesn’t think she actually cried? The commentary I read made it sound like she pulled a “Leave Britney alone!”, yet after watching the video three times I still can barely discern the parts where her voice supposedly breaks:
I did find it to be strikingly emotional and personal for her, and that’s true whether you believe it was staged or not. (My vote: not staged.)
- And how stage-managed do people really have to believe you to be when there’s a big debate as to whether you genuinely show emotion or not? If I got up on stage and punched a dude in the face, I’m pretty sure you all wouldn’t be like, “Well, did he actually not like the guy, or did he just do this as a ploy to show his fist-forming abilities to the masses? It’s hard to say!”
- And did you know the “Leave Britney alone” commentator is a dude? I think I was the last person in the country to learn this.
- McCain won. Good for him. And where is Giuliani? He seems to have assumed the Fred Thompson role of just hanging out and figuring he’s cool enough to get votes anyway. I know he’s gunning for later states, but completely ignoring the first two primaries is pretty weird.
I predicted in my pool that the two winners today will be the ultimate nominees. But, we’ll see.
Clever Photo Essay
I’m not into pushing work projects on this site per se, but this photo essay is clever on the for real. Be sure to check out Darren Garnick’s effort to get his baby photographed with all the presidential candidates.
Drugs
One of my favorite movies of the past few years is Traffic, which gives a multifaceted look at the drug problem in the U.S. and all the complexities of tackling it. This article from Rolling Stone has the same effect. It’s long but great:
Very Moving
I just read this piece by Christopher Hitchens from Vanity Fair and thought I should post it:
It hit a little close to home, I think. I come from a liberal Irish family too and have a brother in the military, and as a result I really got the part about the existence of pure motives in a world of cynical sloganeering.
It’s a very serious responsibility to have to put guys like that in the midst of mayhem, and it’s a leader’s role to make sure that attitude is honored and used wisely. But lost amidst the yelling and screaming on both sides of the aisle, there are still people who take a position because of reason and good intentions. The hope that people like Mark Daily will get to positions of power is the only thing that keeps me believing in politics.
“Moral Vacuum”
This column was deeply unsettling and thought-provoking:
For a President who believes so deeply in good, evil and the need for justice, why does he think a situation with no consequences isn’t going to bring out the worst in people? And for those who argue that counterinsurgencies—from the American West to Ireland to Malaysia to Kenya—have always involved (or even “require”) violent excesses by the occupiers, I think it’s obvious who deserves the blame for failing to learn that and promising the opposite in Iraq.
Iraq
Understanding the logistical impossibility of maintaining the troop surge, and disregarding whether or not you really believe that the past few months’ effort has worked, I can’t quite wrap my head around this one.
When you say spend months arguing that a certain strategy will work, then you believe that the strategy does indeed work, why then do you abandon the strategy for the very reason that, well, it worked? Apparently the President is assuming the troops’ presence allowed some other societal facet to bloom that will provide ongoing stability. But it seems to me that other than the troop level, there aren’t other variables that have changed from spring 2007 to now: even if violence is down, we haven’t seen a big Iraqi government breakthrough (ask the White House), nor is there any kind of factional reconciliation to speak of.
This is like when a patient takes medication for a chronic condition, then after realizing he feels better, says, “Man, I feel great–looks like I no longer need to take my medication.”
I Got One For Ya
This morning I was on the subway thinking about the Korean War, just on the DL as usual, when it occurred to me that President Bush could learn a lesson from his professed exemplar, Harry S Truman. (No period after the S.)
People in the Administration and the military have regularly accused Iran of aiding Iraqi Shi’ite militias in their attacks on Americans. I don’t know if Iran is actually building the IEDs, but they certainly have a sympathetic Shi’ite proxy in Iraq, and it’s unlikely that they aren’t somehow involved. Whatever the nature of Iran’s help in the mayhem, this assistance is one of the leading casus belli (plural of that?) for a potential strike on Iran. (For a level-headed assessment of what would likely happen in that event, you can read this.) Here’s where history offers some perspective.
In October 1950 the U.S. and its United Nations allies were, by all measures, winning the Korean War, having pushed to the Yalu River and taken the majority of what is now North Korea. It was then that Mao Tse-Tung sent an army of Chinese regulars into Korea and pushed the United Nations halfway back into South Korea. Eventually the front lines stabilized around the 38th Parallel and stayed roughly there until the ceasefire in 1953, which obviously is still the border today.
What does this have to do with Iran today? Well, General MacArthur was loudly calling for a nuclear attack on China to punish them for getting involved in Korea, and with an entire Chinese army fighting directly against the Americans, China’s involvement was far more overt and deadly than anything Iran has done in Iraq. It also had a more direct cost, as North Korea would likely have gone down in utter defeat without Chinese help.
Truman, however, knew that the U.S. public–not to mention the military and America’s allies fighting in Korea–would not support a widened conflict that could easily turn into World War III only five years after the end of the biggest war yet, and an attack on China would likely have widened things a great deal. So rather than attack China directly, Truman fired MacArthur (hugely unpopular at the time) and kept the conflict limited to Korea, which eventually led to his leaving office at record low approval ratings. Was his decision unfair to American forces fighting in Korea? I don’t know, but I do know that he was smart to avoid a broader war that would have turned nuclear. (MacArthur could have even volunteered an attack on the USSR: Soviet pilots were flying North Korea’s jet fighters against the U.S. and UN. Imagine how an American attack on Vladivostok would have played out for the world.)
The Korean War was a mixed bag: the U.S. avoided a wider conflict and halted communism’s advance on the peninsula, but we’ve been stuck with Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il for 50+ years, and there was the fact that South Korea only became a real democracy in the 1980s after several awful dictators. The lesson here for President Bush is that his predecessor knew that he was playing with fire if he widened the war, fire that could quickly burn out of control and sweep the war-exhausted U.S. into a tremendous fight it didn’t want. Attacking Iran would be a similar regional tinderbox, no matter how grumbly Dick Cheney states otherwise.
I hope this is all overblown and the President’s team is just doing a “Look how crazy we are that we’d make it look like we want another war; you better not mess with us because woo! Crazy!” act to scare potential critics and enemies into keeping their mouths shut. (Kind of a stretch if true.) But, either way, the President can learn from all those historical biographies he’s supposedly reading and gain some valuable insight.
Ego
A good one from Iowa:
BETTENDORF, Iowa - Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by “helping me get elected.”
I have no beef with the civilian sons part; they can do whatever they choose with their lives. That said, is it really a good campaign move to imply that aiding one’s personal ascent to power is comparable to a soldier or sailor risking life and limb? I’m sure that many national politicians think thusly, but most of them are at least savvy enough to lie about it on the campaign trail.
Things
- For a heavy but very good read, check out this New Yorker article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (h/t Mark.) For some reason we haven’t seen many big pieces mentioning the impact of extra-tough interrogation tactics—the euphemism bell just went off—on the interrogators themselves, but this piece notes that it’s not just the bad guys suffering psychological damage.
- On another note from the article, it seems that one argument for putting the detainees through a regular trial is the simple need to be able to put them somewhere. In the meantime, the best the government can do for the “What do we do with these guys once they’re not as immediately useful?” question seems to be a big shrug. If there’s not a court record of a trial and later sentencing, thirty years from now we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Why exactly are we still hiding a bunch of dangerous Arab and Pakistani guys in Poland when it would have been a lot easier to have just tried and sentenced them to our supermax in Colorado?”
- As much as today’s political climate can be depressing, it’s a lot easier to be 27 in 2007 than it was in 1917.
- One easy way to make your online comment / argument look less intelligent and original is to post song lyrics along with it. I was reading a dude’s critique of the media in some comments section recently and he posted the refrain to “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, as if the creative effort of an artist who isn’t you is a good stand-in for using things like applicable facts, reason and logic to show that you know stuff.
Nope.
- This past week saw a mild embarrassment for Rudy Giuliani’s campaign thanks to his daughter’s Facebook membership in “One million strong for Barack”. Meanwhile, it seems that every editor I know from either TIME or Slate (I just gotta use internal title style—force of habit) got together recently and agreed to set up profiles, so now I’m Facebooked in with all the work peeps. So, just a friendly reminder that you never know who’s checking your stuff (probably me, because Facebook is great), and then sometimes you do know, and that person’s kind of a big deal.
“What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”
Peace, I’m out.
Required Campaign Reading
All Democratic strategists need to read this article and memorize its every word:
It should really be an incredibly simple premise, but I can’t figure out why some Democratic dudes just can’t grasp it: Joe Average doesn’t have the time or the interest to read your policy papers; he has his family, his job, his mortgage and his favorite sports team to worry about, with maybe some free time for TV or radio. As a result, when elections come around, it’s unfair to expect that Joe magically found the time to read Congressional Quarterly and to pick up an M.A. in foreign relations. (Assuming he got an undergraduate degree in the first place; it’s still only 39% of the population.) Joe’s drawing on a few catch phrases, names and perhaps feelings that came up during the campaign, and casting a vote for “someone who gets it”.
In conclusion, being a political nerd is good because it means you might actually have an idea how to govern, but you better learn to hide that nerd side and get your average dude on for the campaign.
Obama
Barack Obama’s comments about talking directly to Iran and North Korea is a great example of just how narrow our political debate really is: the guy’s talking about doing exactly what the U.S. did for 40 years during the Cold War (which we won), and somehow taking this stance means he supports Iran and North Korea. It’s a lot like the time Obama acknowledged that the Palestinians are suffering, which has long been another truth that must not be spoken. Luckily we have Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney to save us. When I think Hillary and Mitt, I think of things like “conviction” and “short-term political considerations having absolutely no effect on what one says or does in regards to our nation’s well-being.”
If Barack wants to fit into the American political establishment, he clearly needs to learn the arts of ignoring reality and lying to the public, and fast.
Quick Hits
- Back in my New York days, it seemed that every time you turned around, someone was praising the independent, gritty spirit of 1970s-80s New York, the culture that produced hip-hop, tagging, Reggie Jackson, Taxi Driver, CBGB-OMFUG, The Warriors and other art inspired by the city’s crushing, nigh-bankrupt bleakness. While I acknowledge the period as one of the truly great creative eras in the American scene, one that I think I can explore forever, the nostalgia to me seems to overlook the big, fat suckitude of crime, urban decay, poverty and a general pessimism that pervaded New York in the 1970s and 80s. Does anybody really miss this? John Carpenter didn’t make Escape From New York because it was a great logical leap from reality. People suffered greatly in those days.
But let’s assume that you believe despair breeds the greatest art (I tend to agree), and you’re an urban hipster who craves the dangerous, anything-goes spirit of the 1970s. There’s another town out there for you long past its mid-century glory days; one with miles of burnt-out dwellings, a suburban population that’s afraid to go downtown, weak political leadership and an economic death spiral to boot. Plus, it’s been this way for a good three decades, so it’s not likely to have changed by the time you arrive.
So what I really want to know is, why isn’t Detroit seeing a nostalgia-driven hipster influx?
- Esquire magazine (to which I have a subscription; I hit my news/business base with The Economist, my sports base with SI, and my man-of-the-world, well-read, how-to-buy-suits-I-will-never-afford base with the big E) had the cover line this month “Can a white man still be elected President?”
Sometimes, one can take provocative cover taglines a little too far from reality, to the point that the reader says, “Man, they are trying way too hard to get my attention.” Then, to take a journey of rhetorical absurdity that’s hemispheres beyond that, one can write, “Can a white man still be elected President?”
- The more President Bush’s approval ratings drop, the more I fear what the government might do in the name of “Hey, we’re hated lame ducks anyway.”
Out.
They Seem Made Up, And Yet They Aren’t
As my friend Steve put it, “these sound a lot like people doing imitations of him”:
I’m particularly fond of Nos. 50, 44, 39, 35, 26 and 14-13.
Why Do Special Olympic Athletes Hate America?
Today’s testimony from the outgoing Surgeon General is probably the best one yet in the never-ending parade of scientists who don’t like the current government. Not only did your man Dr. Carmona (dude has one hell of a c.v., btw) testify that administration officials suppressed his reports on stem cells, contraception, global health and secondhand smoke and asked him to mention the President three times on each page of his speeches, but he also said that senior officials actually asked him why he would support the Special Olympics when the Kennedy family is involved in that charity.
I think that all future “The Administration is politicizing [x]” testimony has jumped the shark, because after the idea that it’s a worthwhile thing to diss mentally disabled people just so you can stop your ideological opponents from scoring points, where do you go from that?
This is an example of how far one’s leadership culture should extend. The President, spiteful and unsympathizing as he is, would not have given anyone specific orders to go and hate on Special Olympic athletes and families so the Kennedys would miss out on added support. The problem is that he seems to have let the suck-up culture run wild underneath him to the point that staffers would think, “Hey, dissing Special Olympics is a great idea,” and carry it out. I think we’ve all encountered the in-your-face, unprincipled one-upping type of staffers we’re talking about here—they’re a chance to use the awesome word “sniveling”—but it’s the leader’s job to set the tone and smack those people down so the honest people can be heard.
Meanwhile, only 19 more months!
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