He was born in a world without chocolate chip cookies. For more, check out Things Younger Than John McCain.
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Month: May 2008
[digg-reddit-me]Jon Stewart to Douglas Feith:
Just because your intentions are good and noble and you believe it to be the right move for the country doesn’t make this honesty. And I’ll why i think why – because you remove the ability for the American public to make an informed decision.
And once you have removed that then you no longer have the authority, because what you have done is you have told us what part of the argument you think it is appropriate for us to know about.
(Begins at about the 5:55 mark in the video.)
Thank God for Jon Stewart. I’m not sure what other media outlet would broadcast such a respectful yet challenging interview with one of the architects of this war, this national nightmare.
I’m not sure if it should be so cathartic to see one of the planners of this misbegotten gamble scolded by a comedian. But it was.
Now what’s next?
Glenn Greenwald has been one of the best – and most influential – voices in the blogosphere. Every day he writes an incisive piece exploring some hypocrisy within the Republican establishment and/or the press. He has been one of the few voices keeping alive such vitally relevant stories as the Pentagon propaganda scandal, the US attorney firings scandal, the many torture scandals, and the general media acquiescence to telling their stories on terms set by the Right. Greenwald’s writing does have a particular sense of continuous outrage that becomes off-putting. As serious as the issues we face are, outrage can become wearing. Despite this stylistic critique, I have found Greenwald to be one of the most insightful commentators on our current politics.
But since Glenn Greenwald has gotten back from his book tour, his writing has seemed off. Take these three lines from three of his latest blog entries:
They’re as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty.
The central truth of the 2008 election is that, with the exception of a few relatively inconsequential and symbolic matters, John McCain enthusiastically embraces the Bush/Cheney worldview in every way that matters.
John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America’s hoary, Vietnam era “stabbed-in-the-back” myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over “collateral damage” and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That’s how we could have (and should have) “won” in Vietnam and how we’ll “win” in Iraq. That’s why the central truth of the 2008 election is that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Kristol/Lieberman-supported John McCain is a carbon copy of the Bush/Cheney warmongering mentality except that he’s actually more extreme about its core premises.
With all of these, I agree with the basic points Greenwald is making – but he veers into the territory of unconvincing polemicism instead of the more nuanced yet strongly worded critiques that are his best. For me, even worse are the topical errors he has made.
In today’s piece about McCain embracing the “stabbed-in-the-back” narrative about Vietnam, Greenwald has to retract one of the more damning insinuations he makes – that McCain cares nothing for civilian casualties in war.
In another piece last week, Greenwald wrote about “The right’s selective political manipulation of Catholicism.” But instead of taking the arguments of his opponents seriously, he – whether through laziness or misunderstanding – simply ignores their points. Kathyrn Jean Lopez of the National Review is an extremely lazy thinker who Greenwald should be able to defeat handily in a blog-battle. Yet Greenwald’s response to Lopez ends up being wildly off the mark. He tries to attack her for hypocrisy for saying she wants to protect innocent human life while supporting Republicans. Republicans have started a war that has cost over a million lives, Greenwald rightly points out. What he fails to acknowledge is that Lopez would point to the hundreds of millions of “innocent lives” lost to abortion as a countervailing force.
She can – and should – still be taken to task for hypocrisy. Andrew Sullivan has been especially effective on this front. But Greenwald ended up seeming like a petty hack.
I know he’s better than that which is why I’m disappointed.
I have hope though that after some time to recuperate, the real Greenwald will be back.
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If we hired like we vote…
via reddit, by Wiley Miller in Non Sequitur.
A bit unfair of a characterization of Ms. Clinton’s position, but pretty damn close.
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Gaming the System
[Photo by joshp over at Flickr]
[reddit-me]Terry McAuliffe of the Clinton campaign on Meet the Press this morning described Barack Obama’s campaign as one of “gaming the system” which is something he says Senator Hillary Clinton would never stoop to:
Listen, we have played hard and we didn’t want to game the system.
The statement is one that doesn’t ring true on several levels and is certainly an odd way to describe the Obama campaign – and an odd way to excuse the total lack of preparation or foresight that has characterized the Clinton campaign. I don’t mean to use the phrases “lack of preparation” and “lack of foresight” as weapons here – but as objective descriptions of the campaign. Her campaign simply assumed she was going to sweep the early primaries and even now still lags behind the Obama campaign in organization in the remaining states, months after the nature of this campaign became clear.
Yet McAuliffe used the phrase “gaming the system” to describe the Obama campaign winning by every available measure – the popular vote count, the number of contests won, and especially the delegate count.
Gaming the system has been defined as “using the rules, policies and procedures of a system against itself for purposes outside what these rules were intended for.” By implication, Obama – by playing by the rules, and winning – is using the rules against the Democratic party itself.
This whole reading makes sense, of course, only if the Clintons are the Democratic party.
McAuliffe’s comments also called to mind the Susan Faludi piece in the New York Times a few days ago in which she described the appeal of Ms. Clinton’s campaign:
…our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action…
Faludi insightfully, and perhaps even accurately, described the gender and competition-related stereotypes at play – and how these stereotypes which were once used against Ms. Clinton are now working in her favor:
Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.
For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?
The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America….While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.
I think this helps explain why the figure of “Hillary the bare-knuckle brawler” is so much more attractive than “Hillary, the inevitable”, or indeed, many of the other “Hillary Clintons”. It helps her to play against type – including certain elements of her own reputation.
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When Obama wins…
A list of the things that will change when Obama wins…
When Obama wins…
- People will have more picnics in the park.
- No one will block the subway doors or stand on the left side of the escalator ever again.
- Skynet will be destroyed at last.
I think many of the cynics and the older people who criticize Obama’s supporters for thinking he will “change!” everything don’t understand the irony and pragmatism that is inherent in Obama’s support.
We all know he’s not perfect. We know there are many things he won’t and can’t change. We know he is a politician. We may put more hope in him than is appropriate, but it is balanced by our inherent cynicism and ironicism.
We don’t believe that “war is over” or might soon be – but we need the Iraq war to be over. We know that idealism has led to many evils and even more disastrous mistakes. We can see how the naive belief in some charismatic leader can – and has – led nations into stagnation and much worse. But we also can see that the tawdry politics of the past decades has distracted people from the more serious issues we face; we have felt disengaged from power; we have watched as politicians threw pander after pander at us, and used their words as weapons to position themselves and to bludgeon one another rather than as tools to educate.
We know that we’re not perfect – but to impute some naive idealism to us is to misunderstand where we are coming from – and probably, to see within us, a reflection of the mistakes that the sixties generation made.
We know that when Obama wins we will not all have bicycles; but we also know that his victory is an essential first step to allow us to engage with power – an engagement that has seemed less and less possible over the past few decades, but that Obama somehow, in some way, has made possible again.
Obama’s victory is not enough. He will not usher in a new Camelot. But it is the essential first step to improving our nation, to engaging with power, to beginning to tackle the longer-term problems we face as a nation.
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A great idea for a house
In Antwerp. Only 8 feet wide. Yet elegant.
Make sure to check out the tub.
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Some quick things…
Via reddit, I just read this story.
Sometimes, it’s really amazing how the world works…
***
George Will on Obama’s candidacy today:
McCain’s problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats’ Reagan. Obama’s rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan’s ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness – the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.
I think Will misses the way Obama is re-shaping the political conversation with his inspirational and often-times vague sounding pronouncements. (Would Will call the Gettysburg Address “rhetorical cotton candy”?) But he senses Obama’s toughness in a way that others – for example, Maureen Dowd – does not.
***
And Ms. Clinton has apparently launched her strategy for the coming weeks – claiming Obama can’t win. So far today, her campaign has said:
- White people support her.
- Democrats can’t win with just “eggheads and African-Americans.”
- Obama is a “sure loser.”
Coming up next (or again):
- Can’t win without old people.
- Obama is a girlie man.
If Mr. Koch was speaking out of turn – as opposed to as part of her plan – than it could be plausibly said that she is still trying to get the Vice Presidential slot.