A Grand Illusion

Iranian Student leader Majid Tavakoli:

“I have spent ten exhausting days on the road with more than 100 hours of driving and now I have to leave for Tehran. Looking at my mother’s tearful eyes and father’s anxious glances and despite all the difficulties only the true wish for freedom can maintain my drive and steadfastness. And so once again I welcome and accept all the dangers, standing next to my friends with whom I am honoured and proud to be on 16 Azar shoulder to shoulder we will shout against tyranny. For Freedom.”

James Fallows takes the media to task (well mostly The Washington Post) on their aversion to taking a stance.

This is good stuff that he has touched upon earlier. More people should be speaking out against the CNN-ization of journalism in general; give a platform to the right, give a platform to the left and then say nothing. No real information given, no news work done.

Also at the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder rips apart the laughable Sarah palin op-ed.

Kathleen Parker really really likes Rick Santorum:

“Santorum also may be viewed as the nation’s superego, reminding us of our moral charge at a time of swift cultural change.”

Well yes. Undoubtedly this is true but doesn’t it go a little bit deeper than this Kathleen? Flesh it out more:

“It is human nature to resist those perceived as morally superior”.

Ah there it is. Now that we’ve accepted that he is morally superior we also have to realize that a lot of people don’t like others who are better than them.

Any opposition to him has nothing to do with the fact that he actually wants to build a fence along the US-Mexico border or that he blames the Catholic sex scandal not on the Catholic church but on the “liberal” culture in Boston.

Sarah Palin has an op-ed in the Washington Times which is, not surprisingly, equal parts parts self-aggrandizement and nonsense about what she thinks is good policy.

If you read it then you’re going to have to sit through sentences like these:

“This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen.”

Obviously.

The rest of it is mostly about how she saved the planet during her governorship of Alaska (I think a pronoun count might be in order George) and how she does not deny “the reality of some changes in climate” which she saw firsthand as Governor except that these are naturally occurring “cyclical environmental trends”. I guess this means that she accepts the science on the seasons changing.

Hey, it’s a start.

The Afpak channel worries about the victims of militant violence in Pakistan and what it could mean for United States foreign policy:

“There are no candlelight vigils, no Facebook groups, and no Fareed Zakaria specials for Pakistani victims of militant violence. To some extent, this is the result of image problems. Pakistan is a “bad actor” in the international system, and as such, deserves little sympathy. After all, wasn’t it Pakistan itself that gave rise to these groups in the first place? Indeed it was. But it is a strange moral and strategic compass that blames women and children shopping at Moon Market for the sins of GHQ and the ISI.”

He seems confident in some sort of victory, which makes me feel better. It also makes those on the right wing who criticized Obama for “not listening to his generals” look ridiculous.

McChrystal:

“My confidence derives first from the Afghan’s resolve, since it is their actions that will ultimately matter most in ending this conflict, with their interests – and by extension our own ‐‐ secured.

Second, we do not confront a popular insurgency. The Taliban have no wide‐spread
constituency, have a history of failure in power, and lack an appealing vision.

Third, where our strategy is applied we’ve begun to show that we can help the Afghans
establish more effective security and more credible governance.

Finally, Afghans do not regard us as occupiers. They do not wish for us to remain forever, yet they see our support as a necessary bridge to future security and stability.”

This is all very heartening though it doesn’t seem to answer the criticism that the surge is essentially a face saving political maneuver. The article makes the point that the Taliban is not well loved in Afghanistan because they’ve showed their incompetence when they’re in power. That the population is more motivated by a weariness of the international community’s commitment to Afghanistan than by anti-invader nationalism. If that’s the case it still seems implausible that by 2011 the Afghan government will be strong enough to push back the Taliban when U.S. forces begin to draw down.

Dahlia Lithwick at Salon:

“Evidently it was too much law that got us into the war on terror, and yet there’s too little law to get us out of it. Apparently, one cannot operate within a legal framework in wartime because the laws are too constraining and vague. Yet using an unambiguous criminal justice system to try the 9/11 terrorists in peacetime is dangerous because the system is untested and untrustworthy. Any way you slice it, the conclusion is inescapable: The real danger facing America is the law. It’s always going to be either too outdated or too untested; it’s inevitably characterized as too ambiguous or too rigid; too forward-facing or too past-focused. The legal system is too hard on good patriotic Americans and too soft on our sworn enemies.”

“Anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be “deniable”) to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.”

For the rest of the article you can click here.

To read why Hitchens considers her populism to be somewhat of a sham, and to see Hitch warn her not to “cock-tease the rabble”, click here.

Only 11,000 jobs were lost in November.

He’s not too hot on him:

“Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy”.

Not serious like, you know, counting pronouns.

Jon Stewart’s anger is palpable but it makes sense. The reasonable people who believe that man influences climate change were never able to put it into a context that made sense.

I wanted scientists to tell me: “The greenhouse effect is real. It affects climate. In a lot of places this climate change causes natural disasters that wouldn’t normally happen. It creates situations that negatively affect the health of the populace. It also kills off many species that would have otherwise survived. This is reason enough to try and curb it”.

Instead we got: “Holy shit we’re all going to die”!

Now to conform to this Day After Tomorrow scenario these pricks go and do this.

And now these other pricks feel justified (they also did so before this scandal though) in gleefully proclaiming this is proof that man does not influence the climate.

Sigh. What a bunch of assholes.

I saw the speech last night but don’t really know what to think. I agree with a lot of the things said on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I like the fact that we seem to have a very serious man for president. I like the fact that it seems that he carefully considered many options with regards to Afghanistan even if it meant taking longer than some would like.

It also looks like this is now fully Obama’s war. Now the success and failure in Afghanistan will be laid at his feet which I’m fine with. Of course, the right will try and spin it negatively regardless of the outcome but there is no way this administration will bungle this war as bad as the last and I hope smart people will see that.

Where I disagree with Andrew Sullivan is his complete faith in Obama’s tactical cunning:

“As always with Obama, look a little deeper. He has made the very best of a very bad situation. And he is playing a long game for a win or a necessary withdrawal or both. I retain all my doubts; but I give him and Gates and McChrystal and Clinton and the troops all my support for the two years ahead. This much he and they deserve”.

I don’t share this faith, not because I don’t think Obama is smart but because the GOP seemed for so long to be so adept at controlling the narrative in their advantage even when the odds seemed against them (see Max Cleland). Granted, the GOP is looking wounded now but I find it hard to believe that they forgot all that in the 9 months of Obama’s presidency.

I’d like to think that come 2012 unemployment will be lower, the health care bill is passed and beginning to be put in place and that some sort of success in Afghanistan is achieved but I still have a bad feeling this is too much to wish for. I’m not even sure what the latter would look like.

Oh well. I guess I just have to keep the faith.

Check out Desde la Habana to hear about a young Kendry Morales becoming a baseball sensation on the island. Apparently, poster Iván García saw Morales play as a young phenom on the island:

“Kendry sólo tenía 15 años. Ya era uno de los grandes talentos del béisbol en la isla. Cuando estuvo en las categorías juveniles, también brilló. Era el cuarto bate del equipo Cuba y su primer pitcher. En un Panamericano Juvenil, efectuado en la provincia de Camagüey, a casi 600 kilómetros de La Habana, fue nominado el jugador más valioso.

…

Pero llegó 2009, el año mágico de Kendry Morales. Desde el inicio de la campaña, fue un pelotero clave para su equipo. Mi pronóstico: Morales se convertirá en el mejor jugador cubano de todos los tiempos en las Grandes Ligas”.

Kendry was only 15 years old. He was already one of the great Baseball talents on the island. When he was at youth level, he also shone bright. He was the fourth batter in the line up of the Cuban team and its starting pitcher. In a Panamericano Juvenil that took place in Camagüey, almost 600 kilometers from Havana, he was nominated most valuable player.

…

Then 2009 arrived, the magic year for Kendry Morales. From the start of the season he was a key player for his team. My prediction: Morales will become the best Cuban player of all time in the Major Leagues. [My translation]

David Brooks:

“In 1997, Brooks wrote an influential article called “A Return to National Greatness,” for The Weekly Standard, the in-house newsletter for neo-con dicks. “National Greatness” is what results when unacknowledged feelings of sexual inadequacy manifest themselves as a theory of foreign policy. The ostensible theory is that the United States, at the time, no longer had the sense of large, unifying national purpose that it had during the days of the western expansion, the Cold War, and the space program. The remedy was for the government to create “a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation.”

Those behind this movement, including Weekly Standard editor and founder William Kristol, himself a second-generation dick, were the primary intellectual force behind the Iraq War, which has proven the theory to be a smashing success”.

From lawyers that worked in the Bush administration:

A trial in Manhattan will bring enormous media attention and require unprecedented security. But it is unlikely to make New York a bigger target than it has been since February 1993, when Mohammed’s nephew Ramzi Yousef attacked the World Trade Center. If al-Qaeda could carry out another attack in New York, it would — a fact true a week ago and for a long time. Its inability to do so is a testament to our military, intelligence and law enforcement responses since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In deciding to use federal court, the attorney general probably considered the record of the military commission system that was established in November 2001. This system secured three convictions in eight years. The only person who had a full commission trial, Osama bin Laden’s driver, received five additional months in prison, resulting in a sentence that was shorter than he probably would have received from a federal judge.

…

Holder’s critics do not help their case by understating the criminal justice system’s capacities, overstating the military system’s virtues and bumper-stickering a reasonable decision.