Entries Tagged 'young 'uns' ↓

Spencer Ackerman attended the hearings of “war criminal” Doug Feith today and left deeply unsatisfied:

About an hour ago, I followed Doug Feith on his way out of the Rayburn Building as he tried to flag a cab down on Independence Avenue to escape the women of Code Pink. “Torturer!” they yelled. “War Criminal!” Feith had a small retinue of Capitol Police officers to protect him from the five or so ladies — one Hill cop instructed a Pinker that she couldn’t unfurl an anti-Feith banner in a Rayburn “vestibule” even though she was clearly outside — and they shrugged off suggestions that they should arrest Feith for crimes against the Constitution. Feith, for his part, bit his lip and tried to ignore the yelling. But the cab took forever to come. “War criminal!” “Torturer!” No response. …

Jesus, I thought. Isn’t that enough, ladies? The cab came. Feith got in and sped away. Code Pink dispersed. But I kept thinking about it. Good Lord. To be called a war criminal everywhere you go, for ever and –

Then I came to my senses. Yes, the yelling was obnoxious. But Feith shares responsibility for the most disastrous U.S. war in 35 years; for abandoning the fate of a different U.S. war far more central to U.S. national security; and for creating and implementing an architecture of torture. Over 4700 Americans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans are dead as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. al-Qaeda is materially stronger, as an organization and as a broader movement, as the result of policies Feith either partially designed or, in any case, fully endorsed. And the worst he’ll ever have to endure is five women in pink screaming at him the obvious truth about what he is? It doesn’t even out.

That, plus his book got no play in the media.

What were you thinking Feith should endure, Spencer? (Man up, man. You’re much, much smarter than this.)

Matthew Yglesias finds himself in the extremely awkward position of having to praise Tim Russert after having damned him mere months ago.

It’s a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn’t really care for passes. … Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. [Ooooh, they did "stuff" that "some" people "think" was "bad," so that "bad stuff" warrants articles by pompous whippersnappers titled "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert"?   ---ed.] Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert’s passing, I thought I’d take a mixed approach that doesn’t back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.

How very magnanimous from the deep new-media thinker (and, I can’t help but note) supporter of Barack “Mr. New Politics” Obama.

Yglesias’s commenters need to be dressed down, says Ann Althouse, who isn’t normally given to policing.

I think the whippersnapper should produce a respectable body of work before he casually slings arrows at writers whom he attacks as somehow unfairly privileged [e.a.]:

Similarly, given Packer’s dystopian vision of American discourse, it’s hard to understand how Packer’s book, The Assassin’s Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country – a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.

But there are peasants with pitchforks everywhere we turn these days.

Joseph Epstein was raised in blissful freedom in the Midwest, by parents who tended to their own lives—and to him and his brother—without making much of a fuss:

When I was a boy my parents might go off to New York or to Montreal (my father was born in Canada) for a week or so and leave my brother and me in the care of a woman in the neighborhood, a spinster named Charlotte Smucker–Mrs. Smucker to us–who was a professional childsitter. Sometimes an aunt, my mother’s sister who had no children, would stay with us. We seldom went on vacation as a family. When I was eight years old, my parents sent me off for an eight-week summer camp session in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I learned all the dirty words if not their precise meanings. None of these things made me unhappy or in any way dampened my spirits. I cannot recall ever thinking of myself as an unhappy kid.

Not surprisingly, little Joseph became quite sturdy and self-sufficient:

After the age of ten, I made every decision about my education on my own. The one I didn’t make, at ten, was to go to Hebrew school in order to be bar-mitzvahed; this was a decision made for me and was nonnegotiable. But my parents felt no need to advise me on what foreign language to take in high school, where I ought to go to college–though my father paid every penny of my tuition and expenses–or what I ought to study once there. …

When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.” …

I did not seek my parents’ approval. All I wished was to avoid their–and particularly my father’s–disapproval, which would have cut into my freedom. Avoiding disapproval meant staying out of trouble, which for the most part I was able to do. Punishment would have meant losing the use of my mother’s car, or having my allowance reduced, or being made to stay home on school or weekend nights, and I cannot remember any of these things ever happening, a testament less to my adolescent virtue than to the generous slack my parents cut me.

Now, having retired from teaching at Northwestern University, Epstein reflects on the “Kindergarchy”—the well-meaning but toxic child-rearing style which has produced the many insufferable students he has known. His (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion? Too much love in the home:

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn’t become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint–and maybe a touch of the fear, too–that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were. [Could this account for the vociferous and influential Irish Catholic "mafia" in the MSM? Just wondering.---ed.]

So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.

Then Epstein lowers the boom [e.a.]:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Uncharitably, I can’t help but think that a lot of whippersnapping Obama lovers are going to learn that lesson in the coming months. And Paul Krugman, for one, isn’t above advising BHO on that score:

Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

We are tough, capable, high-achieving, well-adjusted, and secure baby boomers! Hear us roar!

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.

One of Kevin Drum’s e-mailers writes in to ask whether it isn’t time to rehabilitate Pollack and O’Hanlon:

A member in (extremely good) standing of the VSP community emails to suggest a delicate topic for the liberal blogosphere to take a second look at:

One thing you might write about — if only because nobody else has, I think — is how that whole dust-up over the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed looks in retrospect. I mean, clearly they were on to something — the relative quieting down of stuff that has taken place in Iraq over the last several months, etc. Completely debatable whether that was due to the surge, or is sustainable, or is deeply significant, etc. etc., but it’s not like the caricature of them put forth in the blogosphere at the time — as paid lobbyists for the Bushies, reporting back what they were told to after checking out a Potemkin village — holds up, does it?

Hmmm. Yes. Seems like I was pretty skeptical of the O’Hanlon/Pollack report myself.

Let’s just take a walk down memory lane and see what the self-assured whippershapper Matthew Yglesias had to say at the time the op-ed was published:

I think the evidence that O’Hanlon and Pollack are wrong here is fairly overwhelming. Statistics don’t really corroborate what O’Hanlon and Pollack say, there’s no particular reason to privilege “on the ground” knowledge if it was just fed to them by official sources (which appears to be the case), and, most of all, the point of the surge was to change the political situation in Iraq, and they concede it hasn’t done that.

Now, in response, Yglesias concedes nothing except that perhaps he should have been more optimistic that things could get better in Iraq. As for Pollack and O’Hanlon, he suggests they were lying at the time and totally in the tank for Bush:

It remains unclear whether or not they actually visited any portion of Iraq that wasn’t a “Potemkin village” of sorts. For some reason or other, for example, they seem to have not noticed that Baghdad had become a network of walled-off ethnically cleansed cantons.

Clearly, though, the summertime decline in violence has proven more sustainable than I thought it would at the time. Equally clearly, Pollack and O’Hanlon have a good relationship with General Petraeus and came back from Iraq speaking from a set of misleading talking points designed to advance the political sustainability of the Bush administration’s policies.

Only a twentysomething think-tank wonk wannabe would use Middle East-themed buzzwords like “ethnically cleansed” and “cantons” and believe that he was fooling people into thinking that he was making a serious argument.

Drum’s commenters, on the other hand, offer the full spectrum of views on the left—from continued assertions that Pollack and O’Hanlon were tools to more forgiving ones.

The most incisive and intellectually honest assessment is this one:

It was the timimg of the op-ed, coming just a little over two weeks before Petraeus’ report, that helped enable the spin doctors to establish the meme “The surge is working.”

O’Hanlan and Pollack were more cautious in their actual assessment than the ensuing spin, but the combination of suggesting some “success” and being presented as “two prior critics of the war” gave the opening.

Now we’re stuck with military success being the metric for “The surge is working.”

All of this is true. Pollack and O’Hanlon, well-known for their knowledge about Iraq, took a trip to there, met with Petraeus (whom O’Hanlon knew from graduate school), and wrote an op-ed that said, essentially: Things might just work out in Iraq after all.

They didn’t make the most convincing case of it, but they did lay the groundwork for a more hopeful view of the eventual outcome—something that Americans wanted then and still want now, so that our sacrifices will not have been in vain.

At the end of July 2007, the leftosphere was unprepared to hear any Democrat offer even such a weak ray of hope and attacked the messengers, especially their fellows on the left (a favorite pastime ever since there has been a left). Some parts of the leftosphere are still in an unforgiving mood.

I don’t know the ways of Washington in particular, but I like to think that I know a thing or two about the ways of the world. Election 2008 is (incredibly) still a year away. The future is unpredictable. It’s not a good ideas to make enemies for life when you’re in your twenties.

And, electorally speaking, I will repeat what I said during the General Betray-us scandal: If the hard left—accompanied by the bleeding-heart left, whose HQ is in Hollywood—thinks it can win electoral victories by offering a narrative about bad Americans (and an evil American hegemon) not worthy of redemption, it will encounter rough seas ahead.

Ezra Klein’s latest attempt to lay blame for the war in Iraq won’t wash:

Lots of people, ranging from Paul Wolfowitz to Paul Wellstone, believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and a far-from-completion nuclear program. The difference came in how you imagined the war would go, how difficult, and bloody, and expensive, and long, it would be. You could convince the American people, particularly after our illusory win in Afghanistan, that a short victory would be good all around. But no one would have signed up for this mess. And that’s where we needed our analysts to interject a dose of reality, a grounded take on how hard this would be, not a heap best-case, wishful thinking. And they failed us.

It pains me to have to remind the young Mr. Klein that people are responsible for their own “doses of reality.” If they fail to inform themselves—especially in a country where we can find things out for ourselves, where we have all the information available to us at the click of a mouse—it isn’t the fault of the many marketers (from every walk of life, not just politics) who are endlessly trying to sell us stuff, including ideas and images.

Don’t blame others for the fantasies that you believe in.

And while you’re at it, try to avoid denial, too.

Faced with the high odor of real perfidy [which leaves them unable simply to deny the truth], people unwilling to risk a break skew their perception of reality much more purposefully. One common way to do this is to recast clear moral breaches as foul-ups, stumbles or lapses in competence — because those are more tolerable, said Dr. Kim, of U.S.C. In effect, Dr. Kim said, people “reframe the ethical violation as a competence violation.”

She wasn’t cheating on him — she strayed. He didn’t hide the losses in the subprime mortgage unit for years — he miscalculated.

Klein doesn’t want to accuse liberal hawks like Ken Pollack of an ethical violation. He wants to cut them a break. He is still blaming them, not himself, and is barking up the wrong tree. He is still in denial.

Back in the 1960s, we seemed to understand that war is … war: not healthy for children and other living things.

Not for the first time, Matthew Yglesias throws out a typical insouciant comment on his Atlantic Online blog. Also not for the first time, he gets his ass chewed out by a commenter:

We invaded Iraq “for no real reason”? This has to be the stupidest remark printed in The Atlantic in 150 years. Yglesias should stop posting until he’s at least able to pass a Jr. High current events quiz.

Besides murdering God knows how many Iraqis with routine police-state methods, Iraq killed about a million people and created a world recession by invading Iran, using wmd’s liberally (including to help kill about 250,000 Kurds), rocketing supertankers, etc in the process.

Hardly pausing for breath afterwards, Iraq then invaded, raped, and annexed Kuwait, a charter member of the UN and a US ally, killing about 300,000 of its citizens and dragging us into a war, firing missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, and torching the oilfields for good measure.

Given this history, and the fact that we discovered a nuclear program mere months away from producing a viable weapon, strict terms on this and other matters were included in the ceasefire agreement. It was comprehensively violated by Iraq, as were the subsequent 16 Chapter VII UNSC Resolutions. Further efforts to control Iraq’s behavior made us complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Shi’ia who rose up at our behest, the near-total destruction of the Marsh Arabs and the ecosystem that had sheltered them for millenia, and the deaths of perhaps a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis by means of sanctions. By 2003, we had an army of nearly half a million perched on the edge of the Arabian desert with summer coming, and Iraq still, according to Hans Blix, in blatant material breech of its obligations, leaving us with the choice of keeping our word about “serious consequences”, or surrender. This amounts to “no real reason”?

You must be out of your mind.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 19, 2007 3:37 PM

The Sun’s Eli Lake is content merely to question Mr. Yglesias’s logic:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he’s a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to.

Eli

Posted by Eli Lake | November 19, 2007 3:36 PM

Don’t expect any fireworks, or any additional expenditure of brain cells from Mr Yglesias. He never answers such inconvenient questions—especially one that would acknowledge the case against Saddam that Democrats were making during Clinton’s regime, long before 9/11.

These questions expose Yglesias’s blind partisanship, the incoherence of his political arguments, and his intellectual dishonesty. Mostly, though, they expose his peace-at-any-price foreign policy instinct.

That instinct is going to be tested again and again in the coming years. The dangers beyond the water’s edge are real. We want a secretary of state, not to mention a president, who gets that.

They’re under-30 strongly partisan Dems with a big voice in the blogosphere and with a troubling inability to step outside their own shoes and their own cocoon. Plus, they know little about the world beyond. It makes them utterly blind to reality.

Case in point, MYDD’s Matt Stoller, who bases an entire argument for what Dems should hope for in Colorado on a pitiful lack of imagination.

I can’t find any Iraq polling that’s specific to Colorado, but I also can’t imagine that the Iraq war is very popular in Colorado.

He actually believes that Colorado, whose suburban population one of the most staid, conformist, and conservative in the nation, is fervently against the war.

What to they teach those young ‘uns at Harvard, anyway? Certainly, Stoller didn’t learn to think critically.

[NYT columnist Thomas] Friedman holds a special place in my development.  I took a class from him at college on ‘globalization’, and read most of his books.  In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq.  I trusted him.  I believed in him.  

Matt Stoller relied on the guidance of others before deciding where he stood on the war. That was his first mistake. Then he believed in Thomas Friedman. Why? He allowed his heart and mind to be won over to a hawkish position, and now he blames the believers who made him believe.

My mistake in looking at the Iraq war still pains me, and though I was a 24 year old kid with no experience in foreign policy or politics, my gullibility and the betrayal from my former guides still colors my thinking.  For someone like Friedman, who should know better and occupies the most valuable opinion space in the world, it’s stunningly immoral to pretend to having no responsibility in this quagmire.  All of us are responsible, and the first step is to admit error.  

Oh, you were only 24. That’s a great explanation.

Knock yourself out with the self-criticism, dude. The only people who care about it live alongside you in progressiveland.