Entries Tagged 'ideology wars' ↓

Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

Glancing at Memeorandum this morning, these two entries caught my eye:

International Herald Tribune:

U.S. says exercise by Israel seemed directed at Iran  —  WASHINGTON: Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  —  Several American officials …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Buck Naked Politics, Danger Room and Pat Dollard

–

Discussion:

Damozel / Buck Naked Politics:   Is Israel Gearing Up for an Attack Against Iran?

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:   Iran Attack ‘Rehearsal’ in Israeli War Game

Drillanwr / Pat Dollard:   Israel Is Drilling … Its Military … For Someone

ABCNEWS:

EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah Poised to Strike?  —  Officials Say “Sleeper Cells” Activated in Canada  —  Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against “Jewish targets” somewhere outside the Middle East.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Hot Air, The Jawa Report and Counterterrorism Blog

And it underscored the importance of  this point made by Jennifer Rubin [e.a.]:

John McCain amidst the turmoil of Barack Obama’s public financing reversal is trying to make sure voters don’t forget Obama favors habeas corpus rights for Osama bin Laden. Today he put out a statement castigating his opponent for not coming clean on whether he favors executing bin Laden and what type of proceeding he would favor. …

I suspect if McCain is going to make any headway here he will have to make a major communications push, with speeches and ads, to explain why Obama’s position reveals him as unfit on national security. The media is already turning to other issues and is not inclined to spend the time to explain to the American people what parade of horribles will occur now that we have terror suspects flocking to federal courts.

The media is indeed turning to other issues, as is its wont. And we are being anesthetized—or, rather, are choosing to anesthetize ourselves—by a “news” diet that entertains us by constantly giving us new stories (rather than important news) to focus on for a while.

And if you’re Barack Obama, you take this as an opportunity to distract the media (and its easily distracted audience) with a makeover for your wife while you prattle on in an unclear and inconsistent way about national security…emphasizing punishment over crime prevention.

This didn’t get much play, did it?

Rudy Giuliani: Obama Wants USA to Be on Defense Against Terrorism

On a conference call this morning Rudy Giuliani continued his attacks on Barack Obama’s national security policy.

“I describe the difference as one being on offense and the other wanting to be on defense,” former New York City mayor and one-time GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani just said on a conference call with reporters.

It should get a lot of play, because it’s the fundamental issue of our time—how to provide national security while preserving our freedoms and our way of life (as a symbol and model for other nations to emulate).

Don’t be misled: Distractions can be useful for Mr. Obama, as they can for all politicians—including his hard-to-warm-up-to opponent.

If I were in the Obama camp, I would quit trying to sell the idea that the “change” he’s offering is generational, because, as I recently noted, the Clinton generation (of which I’m nominally a part) is not exactly ready to hand over the reins (and Obama’s tendency to talk like a punk doesn’t help matters).

But generational change is how some Dems are painting the “differences” between the Clinton and Obama camps—differences that are being elided as Obama “Moves to the Center,” claims Thomas Edsall in the HuffPo [e.a.]:

In the international relations policy arena, sources in and out of the Obama camp described a more subtle process taking place, as Obama is forced to decide which Clinton experts to add to the team, and at what level in the hierarchy.

“While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences,” one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. “In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisers came of political age during the Cold War, in many cases during in the Carter administration, and tend to see the world in terms of states and state conflicts, this source said. In addition, many of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers “spent eight years dealing with Saddam [Hussein's] intransigence in the 90s,” making them more receptive to the arguments for invading Iraq.

Conversely, this expert argued, many of the Obama advisers are post-Cold War theorists who tend to see the world in terms of failed states, the influence of technology, food crises, non-state actors like Osama bin Laden, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization.

Another way of seeing this “generational difference,” of course, is this: having experience (aka coming of political age is a form of experience, which the Clintonistas have) versus having smart-(ass) ideas (aka being post-Cold War “theorists”—which the Obamabots think they have).

Meanwhile, one prominent California family lives out a different kind of drama at home, where it’s not a left-sectarian fight but rather a GOP-vs-Dems debating (sorta) society:

Of all the supporters behind the two presumptive nominees for president this year, none are quite as intriguing as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has thrown his support behind Senator John McCain, and the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat and vocal backer of Senator Barack Obama.

The lawn of their Brentwood home has dueling campaign signs. The breakfast table has become a casual debating society. Ms. Shriver is even threatening to bring a life-size cutout of her preferred candidate into the house, something the governor has seen her do in other elections. “When one of the candidates screws up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the cutouts, “the kids carry them outside.”

And to my great relief, the Dem side in this battle is represented by a fair-minded person—a “little-d democrat” [e.a.]:

“I think there are great benefits to having kids grow up understanding that we do not live in a one-party system,” Ms. Shriver said. “That there are two ways at looking at an issue. To be patient, and to compromise, those are good lessons not just in politics but for life. I grew up believing there was only one way to think. There isn’t.”

All hail the friendly enmity between people with different politics!

Is it me, or is the whippersnapper Ezra Klein sounding prematurely world-weary (at age 23 or 24; I’ve lost count)?

There’s a difference between being pro-war, anti-war, anti-this particular war, and anti-this kind of preventive war. Opposing our continued presence in a hellish quagmire, in other words, is different than actually articulating your philosophy on the use of force and the point of foreign policy. Which is why Matthew Yglesias’ new book Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats is actually that rarest of election-year tomes: A useful intervention into the debate. (Full disclosure: Yglesias is a contributor to this site and a friend of mine.) Rather than simply re-litigating the argument over the Iraq War, Yglesias situates the war, and the debate that led to the invasion, in the context of longer-running arguments about the proper direction of U.S. foreign policy. In particular, he laments the relative abandonment of the vision liberals have held dear since World War II — that of a rules-based international order in which America sacrifices a certain amount of autonomy in order to gain a greater measure of legitimacy, and works mightily to create, preserve, and strengthen international institutions that let other countries do the same. Those who would promote liberal values, in other words, need also submit to them.

The lamentably pompous Klein then goes on to elaborate Yglesias’s thesis [e.a.]:

The rhetoric of international affairs has long had a militaristic and even self-consciously heroic character. The “Greatest Generation,” after all, is remembered for bravely saving the world from the menace of Hitler, not for the U.N. and Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan, initiatives that ushered in an era of international cooperation and created structures that largely headed off further violent conflict between great powers. The moment was popularly defined by its heroism, even if its lasting legacy would be the work that went into preventing the necessity of such dramatic interventions in the future.

It’s a neat trick to simply skip over the inconvenient parts of history—like the fact that it was necessary to utterly destroy the enemy on several continents in order to lay the foundation for the rosy post-war “consensus“— in order to make your “argument.”

Klein then goes on to explain history by tracing the arc of comic book heroes:

This came out in the cultural products of the moment. Superman, created in 1938, appeared on the cover of his comic book shaking Hitler and Tojo by the scruff of their necks. Similarly, his patriotic contemporary, Captain America, was originally portrayed clocking Hitler in the jaw. Neither one received cover art that depicted diplomacy. [really? how odd that a diplomat wouldn't get the cover treatment! ---ed.]

Yet the internationalist vision was more deeply interwoven into our cultural fabric than we often realize. Superman and Captain America were superheroes of an odd sort: tremendously powerful beings whose primary struggle was often to follow the self-imposed rules and strictures that lent their power a moral legitimacy. Neither allowed themselves to kill, and both sought to work within the law. Given their strength, either could have sought world domination, and even if they didn’t, they could have been viewed with deep suspicion and even hatred by those who were convinced that they one day would seek world domination. It was only by following ostentatiously strict moral codes that they could legitimize their power and thus exist cooperatively with a world that had every right to fear them.

I don’t read comics, but I suspect that this last bit was a post-1980 ethos for the superheroes—it sounds kinda politically correct to me. But never mind. What’s really funny is that Klein levels the playing field between fictional protagonists in pop culture and people in real life with actual power:

This, fundamentally, is the foreign-policy debate in our country. Liberals see America possessing tremendous power that must be tempered and legitimized by the rules we choose to follow and the restraint we choose to apply. Conservatives see great vulnerabilities that can only be assuaged through sufficient application of violence and will. And that’s the choice: Do we want the foreign policy of Jack Bauer and John Yoo, or of Clark Kent and George Marshall? It’s a question that Gen. Petraeus, sadly, has no answer for.

And what’s even funnier is that Klein, perhaps the silliest member of the new circle-jerk brigade, regularly appears on “cable news” as some kind of “expert”!

Now, that’s infotainment!

The divisions on the left have left some people feeling smug and self-satisfied.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is “a f***ing whore” and the second is “David Duke in drag” merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. …

There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs.

I can see why Steyn would be comforted to know that his critics are irrational by definition and not just mad at him. But that doesn’t help us, as a country and as a society, deal with the dime-store demagoguery that now characterizes our public “discourse.”

Demagogues of all stripes should be discouraged, marginalized, de-fanged, deligitimized, and brought down. They’re dangerous in any society, because they stir up mob sentiment.

Whether the Dutch politician Geert Wilders stumbled into this tactic or meticulously planned the maneuver, he seems to have found a way to challenge both Islamist extremists (of all denominations: Sunni and Shia) and complacent Westerners, who seem not only willing but eager to give up the freedoms their forebears fought to attain for us all.

Der Spiegel describes how one man has been able to spark a “global panic.”

In late November 2007, Wilders announced that he was working on a film that would depict “the intolerant and fascist nature of the Koran.” Spokespeople from the Dutch interior and justice ministries expressed their concern about the project, but they also stressed that they had no power to dissuade the parliamentarian from going through with his plan or to prevent the film from being broadcast.

Since then, a film that no one has seen and of which no one can say that it will ever exist has become a daily topic of discussion and speculation in the Netherlands. Wilders is fueling the debate by occasionally announcing how far along the project is.

Predictably, this roused the ire of those it was intended to provoke—first of all the Dutch establishmen:

This triggered a panic in the Netherlands that could only be likened to the dread leading up to a massive storm. The Dutch ambassador in Malaysia warned that protests could lead to “dozens of deaths.” Dutch ambassadors in Islamic countries were instructed to increase security measures and distance themselves from the Wilders film, while counterterrorism experts at home began making preparations for the day of the broadcast. …

In early March, a few hundred Afghans demonstrated against the Wilders film in the northern Afghani city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where they burned Dutch flags and called for the withdrawal of Dutch NATO units from Afghanistan. This prompted NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to express his concern that broadcasting the film could have an “impact” on the troops stationed in Afghanistan.

It was when the fear had spread from the Netherlands and into the heart of the EU that Wilders struck his first rhetorical blow [e.a.]:

[T]he Dutch foreign minister asked the EU to support the Dutch position. He said that the Dutch believe in freedom of expression, but are against portraying all Muslims as extremists. At the same time, the “terror alarm” in the Netherlands was raised to its second-highest level. The government of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende appealed to Wilders to abandon his plan to broadcast the film. On the one hand, Balkenende said, “constitutional freedoms must be defended, while extremism and terrorism must be fought.” On the other hand, he continued, “we must consider the consequences of our actions and may not endanger the things that are valuable to us all.”

Wilders reaction was clear. “The cabinet is falling onto its knees before Islam and capitulating,” he said, characterizing Balkenende as “an anxious man who has chosen the side of the Taliban.”

But the fear of Islamist retaliation—blowback—had taken hold in the EU [e.a.]:

Hans Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament … called upon the media to impose a “code of behavior” on itself and not to publish anything that could be perceived as “derogatory” by members of religious groups. He also warned the Dutch not to “make a contribution to violence because of our freedom.” These clear words of appeasement, which the chief EU parliamentarian directed against the victims and not the perpetrators of violence, urging the former to be on their best behavior, were – as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote — the result of “anticipated fear” and sounded “dangerously like self-censorship.”

Wilders, who lives with around-the-clock protection because Islamist websites have called for his beheading, hasn’t yet released his film, and the internet is the only channel left open to him. Nevertheless, he has achieved one goal [e.a.]:

The truth is that the “provocateur” has already achieved his goal. Wilders has managed to portray the Dutch and the Europeans as cowards, shouting “we capitulate!” before the battle has even begun. …

They behave as if they want to protect the members of all religions against insults and abuse, all the while overlooking the fact that it is usually the members of one religion who respond aggressively whenever they are accused of having a propensity for violence.

Wilders could not have achieved more if his film had been shown.

Indeed.

And I note that Osama Bin Laden—remember him?—has been inserted into the global conversation again. This time he’s threatening the Europeans:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden denounced the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad and warned Europe that retaliation would follow in an audio message released late Wednesday.

Even if the message is canned, as all the reports suggest, it’s a timely reminder.

Whatever you think of him and his methods, Geert Wilders has exposed the West’s vulnerability to (and seeming desire to capitulate to) blackmail through Islamist-extremist terrorism.

I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feet at the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.

And, lo and behold, what did I find? That Yglesias’s man Barack Obama went wild at the SOTU last night when Bush put Iran on notice:

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.

One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:

I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.

But can someone tell me what to make of this?

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.

Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.

Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM

A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.

I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)

The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.

But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:

The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.

DIVIDED WE FALL.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM

That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.

Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.

Mike Huckabee is the new master manipulator, according to two versions of the same story (both by the same writer, Kit Seelye) in the New York Times. Here’s the one that was printed in the dead-tree paper that arrived on my NYC doorstep early this morning [e.a.]:

 In a bizarre bit of political theater, Mike Huckabee told news outlets on Monday that he was not going to broadcast a negative commercial against Mitt Romney, his chief rival in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Then he showed that advertisement to the news media, which in reporting the announcement went on to give his anti-Romney message free publicity while he claimed the moral high ground.

This version—quite negative in tone, no? Note that the political theater is said to be “bizarre” and that Huckabee was “claiming” the moral high ground while rolling around in the mud—also suggests, albeit very tangentially, the author of the successful tactic (Ed Rollins, “the Brawler,” who recently signed on with the Huckabee campaign).

In the Times, Seelye notes, at the end of her piece:

There appeared to have been some dissent in the Huckabee camp over whether to attack Mr. Romney. In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee’s longtime campaign manager, Chip Saltzman, insisted the campaign planned to maintain a positive tone until the end. But on the same day, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican consultant and Mr. Huckabee’s new national campaign chairman, said he expected to begin firing back in a few days.

The other version of the Kit Seelye story, which you can find here (I got the link via Ann Althouse), made no specific mention of the fact that the strategy worked but made it abundantly clear that it had worked:

In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Mr. Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.

The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the journalists who watched Mr. Huckabee’s legerdemain even as they became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.

At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed. It criticized Mr. Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, saying he supported gun control, allowed a co-pay for abortions in his health plan, raised taxes and ordered no executions.

This version is a lot softer in tone. For example: “political jujitsu,” like its martial-arts namesake, is an art—something to be admired rather than loathed (like a “bizarre bit of political theater”; see above).

Kinda makes me wonder what happened between these two versions of the story. In any event, however, the strategy worked. 

Huckabee made the news, and the media carried his anti-Romney message. 

In a rare moment of self-reflection from a member of the MSM,  Seelye explains (in the more negative piece) how this happens [e.a.]:

The circumstances of the commercial and the nature of free media, particularly now with YouTube, make it likely that the advertisement will be viewed far more often than if it had simply run. There is a long history of news coverage guaranteeing a commercial publicity that money could not buy.

In 1964, the “daisy” spot, which suggested that Barry Goldwater’s election would lead to nuclear war, was broadcast on television just once. And in 2004, advertisements by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s military record, had a limited run in a few small markets before being widely covered in the press.

If I had one wish for 2008 (and forward), I would wish that everyone in the American media—reporters, pundits, columnists, bloggers, and news and entertainment executives—would get wise to how they always risk being played not just by political enemies at home but also by those abroad: the world’s bad political actors.

I’ve said it before, in “the new season from Al Qaeda Productions,”and I’ll say it again:

 Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co.  … I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage-you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us.

Since our media-saturated world is here to stay, it only makes sense to focus attention on the sophisticated media strategies, PR initiatives, and PRopaganda narratives of any player (whether domestic or foreign) who would make a claim on our attention (which is itself increasingly fractured by the many channels and niches available to us—but that’s a subject for another day).

Players who seek the attention of the media—including especially the world’s bad political actors— have all  learned to market themselves to us as if we were potential fans and customers, and a lot of naive but influential people fall for their act.

We Americans need to be alert to the absence of truth from much of that kind of advertising—particularly as more and more celebrities, who often have a deficit of political sophistication and also have a disproportionate influence on the public, get in on the act.

Dan Drezner recently explained what celebs are up to [e.a.]. 

It sometimes seems as though celebrities today are obsessed with trying to move the global agenda. Like Angelina Jolie. Think of how she’s changed her image since her breakup with Billy Bob Thornton. In February, she published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur. …

Jolie is just one of many star activists. Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow — all have used their celebrity status to push their favored causes in an effort to affect what governments do and say. But why do they do it, and will it work?

Drezner’s focus is on the effectiveness of celebrities’ advocacy on policy decisions (mixed at best, since results—if any—take a long time to show up; change happens slowly in the real world). I’m more interested in their ability to influence public opinion. Drezner explains how they exert their influence—through us, their fans:

[T]he power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.

In Drezner’s formulation, cable TV (which is almost all views and no news), talk radio, and blogs are now news sources. I disagree: they’re spreaders of racy, juicy, dramatic, sensational headlines that provoke strong emotion. They are, in other words, infotainment. But I digress.

My point is that celebrities—because we fall in love with them so easily and can hardly ever fall out of love with them, because it’s their job to seduce us—have an outsize influence in this new universe  of infotainment-masquerading-as-news. We should all be more circumspect about our indiscriminate fandom.

Maybe in the new year I’ll have time to explore this topic some more.

The charge that the neocons are running foreign policy is past its expiration date, writes Michael Young:

Maybe 2008 will be the year when we will finally be rid of that vacuous belief that “the neocons” are in control of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Habits are hard to break, particularly lazy ones, but if anyone bothered to look more closely, they would see that the United States has not really engaged in what we might call a neoconservative approach to the region since at least 2004, when the situation in Iraq took a sudden turn for the worse.

Defining neo-condom, roughly, as unilateralist, preemptive, and aggressive on behalf of democracy and free markets, Young goes on to cite the specifics of Bush pulling away from that ideology in favor of seat-of-the-pants pragmatism:

[S]oon after the takeover of Iraq, the administration gradually began acting in the Middle East pretty much like its predecessors. It was compelled to rely on the multilateral institutions it had spurned in the run-up to the Iraq war, …

By 2004, the U.S. was resorting to the U.N. in other Middle Eastern crises as well. For example, the Security Council was the preferred route for U.S. efforts in 2004 to push for a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon. …

[T]he Bush administration only latched onto the democracy imagery [in Lebanon] after the anti-Syrian rallies had started,  …

Since 2006, the Bush administration has all but abandoned the democracy agenda to rally the despotic Arab regimes against Iran. Containment is the new catchword and, no surprise, it is pretty much what the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations spent two decades applying to post-revolution Iran. …

Similarly, the Bush administration now finds itself back in the oldest gig in town: the Palestinian-Israeli peace process … [which] was always rubbish to the neocons.

Conclusion [e.a.]?

So maybe it’s time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. … What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush’s domestic critics. He’s returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.

That’s true.

Speaking of which, I’ve been wondering why Walt and Mearsheimer haven’t stepped forward to congratulate the Bush administration for cutting Israel loose and seeing to America’s interests first.