October 8th, 2008
Holy crap! Who’s been putting what in Tom Friedman’s Wheaties?
After years of self-congratulatory “big idea” drivel and smug sooth-saying, I’ve noticed that Friedman seems to have been returning to real, thought-out, argumentative analysis lately. And today he apparently woke up with whatever strange, crippling monkey he’s been carrying around all this time finally off his back and decided to take a full cut at the ol’ pill, one time. He starts by treating Sarah Palin like a big fat teeball, but that’s just a warm-up swing. By the time he gets around to how taxes “buy civilization”, and whose interests, exactly, are served by the GOP continually stoking our oil addiction, he’s fucking Babe Ruth.
Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But . . . there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.
Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” . . .
[P]utting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.
And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?
And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. . . .
At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil.
Damn. I haven’t heard such a clear or uncompromising statement about what taxes are for since I can remember. And selling America to China and Saudi Arabia? About time someone said it.
He hit that one out of the park. Hope somebody notices.
Categories: Culture, Economics, Energy, Foreign Policy, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Taxes |
4 Comments
September 11th, 2008
Man, I wish he’d tell us how he really feels:
That interview confirmed what’s become even more clear in the past few days — McCain’s selection was a joke. She (like me) has absolutely no business being a vice-presidential nominee.
Let’s start with the interview, and then I’ll make some more general points about why this is all such a farce (to borrow from Andrew).
Hilzoy has already established that she’s not exactly up to speed on preemptive war (a pretty important point for a president). But to make a more general observation, it’s fairly clear that she’s either never engaged these issues or that she simply doesn’t read the news. Anyone with passing familiarity with the news could have winged answers better than she did.
But the point is not so much the answers, but the more general ignorance (not lack of intelligence) on display tonight. It reveals that she’s never really thought about any of this stuff — she’s never engaged it at the level that presidents should have engaged it. For instance, she apparently contradicted McCain’s position on Pakistan by leaving a unilateral strike on the table. McCain, remember, ridiculed Obama earlier for taking that same position. Second, she had clearly never heard the term “Bush Doctrine,” which means she follows the news on only a cursory level. I’m not saying every member of the public should know — but vice presidential candidates should. Third, she was way too specific on the Russia-Georgia stuff — good politicians and diplomats never say so specifically that we would go to war with . . . RUSSIA!
But even beyond the specifics, the entire interview was like watching a bad actor spit out memorized lines that she had learned only a few nights ago. You could almost hear her mental gears grinding, trying to retrieve the talking points and forcing them into her answers. Nothing came from her — or if it did, she certainly fooled me. Reagan and Clinton — governors both — would never have appeared that ignorant, largely because they weren’t. They were engaged with the issues of their day and wrestled with them intellectually. Today’s interview reflected an unprepared, uninformed person cast into the spotlight far before her time.
And that’s what’s so absurd about the whole thing. The Palin selection is, above all else, a reflection on John McCain’s willingness to let the country be run by an unvetted and woefully unprepared person. And if she’s that uninformed, it means that someone else will effectively be running the country if she’s president — just like Bush and Cheney.
…snip…
The Palin craze is also a poor reflection on the social conservative base, which has so uncritically embraced her. They embrace her not because they know anything about her, but because they think the world is out to get them, and that Palin is “one of them” who also faces liberal attacks. The truth, though, is that they’re just projecting their preferences onto a blank canvas. At the end of day, they’re apparently not all that interested in qualifications or ability to govern.
Hell, McCain might as well have campaigned over the past 2 weeks with a cardboard cutout with a wind-up string that gave the same (dishonest) speech every time. It’s just a joke — no interviews, no engagement with the issues, no qualifications whatsoever. Can you imagine what Drudge/Hannity/et al. would have said if Kaine had been picked and gave that blabbering interview? They’d talk about it for a month.
Quit pulling your punches, dude!
Categories: Foreign Policy, News & Current Events, Politics |
19 Comments
July 25th, 2008
According to former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, not so much:
When it comes to Iraq, the surge is a great success, right? Well, according to Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s former prime minister, that depends on what you mean by “success”.
In a briefing before members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, Allawi answered questions from members of he subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight. When asked by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, for Allawi’s “assessment of of what’s come of the surge,” Allawi all but said, not much.
Reminding Rohrabacher that the original objective of the surge was to create a safe environment for a process of national reconciliation, Allawi said, “Now, militarily, the surge has achieved some of its goals. Politically, I don’t think so.”
Allawi rattled off a laundry list of perils that still confront the Iraqi people: internal displacement of large numbers of people, millions of refugees outside Iraq, security forces he described as sectarian militias dressed in national uniforms, no enforcement of the national constitution, which he described as a “divisive” document.
The former prime minister, who is now a member of the Iraqi parliament, also alleged that the process known as “deBaathification” is “being used to punish people.” Originally designed to purge Saddam Hussein’s loyalists from the military and security forces, Allawi said the process has become politicized and can be used against virtually anybody, since Saddam Hussein’s “Baath party ruled for 35 years, and every individual had to join…”
“So, if you measure the surge from a military point of view, it has succeeded,” Allawi said. “But I don’t think this was the [prime] objective, because soon you will have reversals. Security has not prevailed, and the key element in security is reconciliation, and building national institutions for the country. If this does not happen, then the surge will go in vain.”
Which is what most of us who opposed the surge have been saying all along. The surge is only “succeeding” according to a definition of “success” that dramatically moves the goal posts from its originally stated objectives.
Link via Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings.
Categories: Foreign Policy, Iraq, News & Current Events, Politics |
8 Comments
July 21st, 2008
According to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama is the “conservative” when it comes to foreign policy, and McCain is the “liberal”:
Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.
…snip…
Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn’t divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.
Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda, preferring instead to talk about enhancing people’s economic prospects, civil society and—his key word—”dignity.” He rejects Bush’s obsession with elections and political rights, and argues that people’s aspirations are broader and more basic—including food, shelter, jobs. “Once these aspirations are met,” he told The New York Times’s James Traub, “it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes we want.” This is a view of democratic development that is slow, organic and incremental, usually held by conservatives.
Obama talks admiringly of men like Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were imbued with a sense of the limits of idealism and American power to transform the world. “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative,” wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in her profile of him for The New Yorker. “There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.”
…snip…
Ironically, the Republicans now seem to be the foreign-policy idealists, labeling countries as either good or evil, refusing to deal with nasty regimes, fixating on spreading democracy throughout the world and refusing to think in more historical and complex ways. “I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush told many visitors to the White House in the years after 9/11. John McCain has had his differences with Bush, but not on this broad thrust of policy. Indeed it is McCain, the Republican, who has put forward some fanciful plans, arguing that America should establish a “League of Democracies,” expel Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries and exclude China from both groups as well.
The whole thing is worth the read. Cross-posted at SayUncle and TennesseeFree.
Categories: Foreign Policy, Politics |
93 Comments
