a different take on the news

Andrew Sullivan, who carelessly endorsed Joe Klein’s lashing out at “Jewish neocons,” is very easy on himself in response to being called out by Max Boot:

I can’t speak for Joe, but I obviously feel somewhat shafted by some neocon arguments before the war - arguments that I took in good faith and now suspect were made in bad.

What kind of lame excuse is that for jumping on Klein’s slime wagon? You feel “somewhat shafted” and so you lash out at the Jews once a “good Jew” like Klein has signaled to you that it’s okay to do so?

What a turd.

Russ Feingold—one of the most progressive members of Congress—on Heller:

I am very pleased the Supreme Court finally recognized that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. This is an important decision for millions of law-abiding gun owners. Public safety must be ensured without depriving our citizens of their constitutional rights.

The HuffPo notes:

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the early reaction to the Supreme Court decision is that it illustrates how non-partisan gun control debates have become.

At the beginning of this month, I started noting some of the positive news stories about improvements in Iraq and the apparent decline of al Qaeda. A lot has been written in this vein since then.

Most interesting of all is this op-ed from Daniel Kimmage in today’s New York Times, in which we find out that AQ, seemingly so far ahead of the technology (and media-saviness) game in 2001, is now eating the dust of Web 2.0:

The genius of Al Qaeda was to combine real-world mayhem with virtual marketing. The group’s guerrilla media network supports a family of brands, from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (in Algeria and Morocco) to the Islamic State of Iraq, through a daily stream of online media products that would make any corporation jealous.

A recent report I wrote for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty details this flow. In July 2007, for example, Al Qaeda released more than 450 statements, books, articles, magazines, audio recordings, short videos of attacks and longer films. These products reach the world through a network of quasi-official online production and distribution entities, like Al Sahab, which releases statements by Osama bin Laden.

But the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is about letting users run wild with self-created content and interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0.

In 2008, Kimmage points out, you’re at a sizable disadvantage if you’re that far behind the technology curve [e.a.]:

[A] more interactive, empowered online community, particularly in the Arab-Islamic world, may prove to be Al Qaeda’s Achilles’ heel. Anonymity and accessibility, the hallmarks of Web 1.0, provided an ideal platform for Al Qaeda’s radical demagoguery. Social networking, the emerging hallmark of Web 2.0, can unite a fragmented silent majority and help it to find its voice in the face of thuggish opponents, whether they are repressive rulers or extremist Islamic movements.

Of course, the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East are threatened by the notion that online communities could become powerful enough to challenge their authority, so it’s not exactly clear skies ahead for these dissident voices:

[T]he authoritarian governments of the Middle East are doing their best to hobble Web 2.0. By blocking the Internet, they are leaving the field open to Al Qaeda and its recruiters. The American military’s statistics and jihadists’ own online postings show that among the most common countries of origin for foreign fighters in Iraq are Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It’s no coincidence that Reporters Without Borders lists Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as “Internet enemies,” and Libya and Yemen as countries where the Web is “under surveillance.”

Still [e.a.]:

There is a simple lesson here: unfettered access to a free Internet is not merely a goal to which we should aspire on principle, but also a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos will not be to everyone’s liking, but it may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda’s totalitarian ideology.

I’m always saying that there’s nothing more important than freedom of expression. This is what I mean. It’s why we must stand behind people struggling for the freedom to express their thoughts, and thus challenge the status quo that oppresses them.

Channel-surfing last night, I happened upon Luke Russert, son of the recently deceased Tim Russert, discussing politics with Larry King, who was holding a “Rock the Vote” special. It was pretty astonishing to see his poise in the wake of the sudden death of his father, but I was soon taken with young Russert’s interesting (and politic) take on politics. He’s non-partisan—indeed, he’s an independent [e.a.]:

KING: Luke, why are you an independent?

RUSSERT: Well, I’m an independent because I believe it’s important to vote for politicians and not a party. I like to see what a politician’s going to do and what he says he’s going to do in Washington. Being here in the District of Columbia, we don’t vote for a governor or senator or congressional representatives. You pretty much vote for mayors, city council members and the president of the United States. And I just really like to wait on my vote until the last second to see what each politician has done, what they say they’re going to do, and what the media scrutiny reveals of each politician.

I think it’s very, very important to see how politician holds up to the questions the media asks. One of the things my dad always liked to say is, how are you going to make tough decisions as a commander in chief if you can’t answer tough questions from media. That’s why I’m an independent. I also think it’s kind of ridiculous how people in the United States, if they’re a member of the party, they don’t even listen to the other side of the issue; oh, the Democrats are voting this way, I agree with that; Republicans vote this way, I agree with that. I might be sounding a little Lou Dobbs, but that’s why I’m an independent in that sense.

Compare and contrast with the unappetizing spectacle I wrote about here. What a refreshing change.

Those mischievous folks at Gawker say that Obama is more popular than Jesus and Angelina Jolie, and they’ve got the evidence:

Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone again! So soon after the last one. And just one week after he showed up on the front of publisher Jann Wenner’s UsWeekly!

Well, I have it on good (perhaps!) authority that “Nothing sells like celebrity,” and Barack Obama is the Messiah of celebrities and all other correct-thinking Americans.

There is a sickness afoot in the land when a popular non-political blogger makes note of a politician’s lowering of his own standards and his commenters attack him for speaking his mind.

Jeff Jarvis:

Whenever you want to show how soft big media are on Barack Obama, refer back to Howard Kurtz’ column on their coverage of the candidate’s hypocritical flip-flop on campaign financing. Chapter and verse.

Some comments [e.a.]:

Just drop it. It’s clear you were a Clinton supporter, but if you want a Democrat in the White House in 2009, the political reality is that attacking Obama is the same supporting McCain.

Jeff, would you consider some even handed-ness in your political posts ? It makes your position on press bias seem fairly hypocritical.

Jeff replies:

I am likely to be an Obama voter but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold him to high standards. I am not a member of his cult so I can disagree with him. It’s allowed out here. No, I won’t drop it.

Commenter:

Jeff, you’re entitled to “hold Obama to high standards,” just like the rest of us. And I realize, in a post like this, you’re trying to expose the inherent bias of the media, not bash Obama. But that’s what you’re indirectly doing.

I realize you’re trying to change the media, but please don’t (conciously or unconciously) swiftboat Obama in the process.

Commenter Steve:

So, if I support Senator Obama, I am a cultist?

Jeff responds:

No, Steve, but I’m being told I can’t criticize him and hold him to high standards. That’s a cultist talking.

Last word (not on Jeff’s blog but here on mine, where I’m the editor) goes to this commenter from Jeff’s blog:

Obama supporters panic whenever a story appears to question, criticize, or point out the hypocrisies of their candidate.

Indeed! and get a load of this attack, published at the HuffPo, on Jon Stewart for—gasp!—making fun of the Obama Messiah. Joseph Palermo builds his case by accusing Stewart of having been complicit in selling the war in Iraq to the American people:

Slamming the UN weapons inspectors as ineffectual twits dominated right-wing talk radio at the time and The Daily Show was in effect regurgitating the talking points of those who wanted to bring the country to war. Dissing the UN’s efforts on Comedy Central inadvertently helped make the case for war. It is kind of like when Dick Cheney pointed to the New York Times to buttress his warmongering saying: “Hey, even the liberals agree with us!”

Then Palermo goes on to warn Stewart to watch his mouth when he’s making fun of Obama:

When Jon Stewart seeks “balance” for his targets of satire he can end up reinforcing the false impressions that the Bush Republicans want people to have. It’s unfortunate because political humor is a powerful force that can sway some of those “low information” voters the pundits have been flogging lately.

So too was the case last night when Jon Stewart ran a bit about Barack Obama’s decision to eschew public financing. The Daily Show seized the issue as an opportunity to display “balance” and to poke fun at the Obama campaign. But not only did the bit fall flat it played right into the Republican line, which is full of half-truths and outright lies about Obama’s decision.

During the primaries, Keith Olbermann attacked Stewart just for mentioning Obama’s middle name.

Here’s what I think: this attempt by hyper-partisan ideological enforcers to shut down the debate among Democrats about Barack Obama will backfire. Badly.

Intimidating people who are on your own side (Jarvis and Stewart are both Democrats, from what I can tell) is never a good idea, especially here in America, where, as Jeff said, we don’t—and won’t—shut up.

Undoubtedly, those trying to shut down the debate are the product (or the masters) of our elite universities, where diversity is god but where diversity of opinion is unwelcome.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten “minorities,” including women (the majority of students), about the “internalization” of their oppression (today’s equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Disagreement is at the foundation of human existence, and American democracy is successful (among other reasons) because it takes this fundamental fact of human nature into account.

Plus: If Barack Obama cannot stomach, answer, and withstand criticisms from his own side, he is unlikely to be able to withstand criticism, or attacks, from his political opponents.

It’s amusing to see America’s best-known pundits adjust course as they grapple with a new reality—namely, the unlikely improvements in Iraq.

The other day, David Brooks laid down the gauntlet, declaring that Bush was not only to be reviled for his stubborn insistence on doing things his way but also admired for that same trait, because it seems to have paid off in Iraq (despite his horrible bumbling).

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.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.

In response to Brooks’s challenge, yesterday, Joe Klein declared the surge a success, declared himself wrong for having opposed it, and declared himself a worshipper at the altar of counterinsurgency and “new Jesus” Gen. David Petraeus.

I happily acknowledge that I was wrong about the surge. As regular Swampland readers know, I was, and am, a huge fan of counterinsurgency doctrine, and an admirer of David Petraeus–but I doubted that the General would have the time, troops or a coherent local government–in other words, the metrics required by his own doctrine–to make it work.

He also declared himself one of the (few)”good Jews” (and distanced himself from a vast cabal of evil “Jewish neocons” who pushed Bush into war in Iraq to make the world safe for Israel):

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked–still smacks–of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

And to play it safe with the anti-capitalists, he also declared himself a firm “no blood for oil” guy:

And then there is the question–made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis–of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

We’ll see whether these self-declarations help or hurt Klein with the folks he’s trying to impress (his inside-the-Beltway crowd).

Today, Thomas Friedman adds his voice to those who are starting to acknowledge the improvements in the Iraqi landscape. He manages to credit them almost entirely to the Iraqis, giving Bush a scant mention and saying nary a word about Petraeus and the hundreds of thousands of or American troops who have worked to end the conflict[e.a.]:

One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them. It’s one reason they never threw flowers. When someone else has to liberate you in your own home, that is humiliating — and humiliation, I believe, is the single-most underestimated force in international relations, especially in the Middle East.

…What seems to have happened in Iraq in the last few months is that the Iraqi mainstream has finally done some liberating of itself. With the help of the troop surge ordered by President Bush, the mainstream Sunni tribes have liberated themselves from the grip of Al Qaeda in their provinces. And the Shiite mainstream — represented by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Army — liberated Basra, Amara and Sadr City in Baghdad from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads.

We may one day look back on this as Iraq’s real war of liberation. The one we led five years ago didn’t count.

Like Friedman, I also have thought about the notion of self-liberation. In October 2006, I wrote:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, during which students, patriots, poets, workers, and intellectuals tried to throw off the totalitarian Russian yoke and died in their thousands as they faced off against Soviet tanks, it’s a question I must ask as a supporter of America’s effort to liberate Iraq from Saddam:

Where are the Iraqi freedom fighters?

Well, those freedom fighters—or something an awful lot like them—have emerged … thanks to the protection, backup, encouragement, teaching, training, and moral support they have received from the American military, and thanks to the great sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of American troops who have given their lives, their limbs, their souls, and their hearts to the effort to help a beaten-down people liberate themselves.

It’s a thankless job, which is something that most people who sign up for the military know in advance: they won’t get glory, because in our culture we don’t glorify war, or even service to our nation. That’s the way it is, and everyone knows it. They sign up and serve anyway, each one for his or her own reasons.

Also, while I think Friedman is grievously callous wrong and ignoble to ignore the contribution of the American military (not to mention the American president) to the recent (fragile) successes in Iraq, he may in fact be right to give the Iraqis the lion’s share of the credit.

The whole idea of the undertaking in Iraq was that the country would eventually serve as a positive role model for what can happen for the Muslim Arabs (and Persians) of the Middle East if they sign on to liberating themselves. It will be a good long while before Iraq is considered any kind of success, but as the successes start to overshadow the images of blood and bombs and fires and panic and rage and unimaginable sorrow, there will be a lot of food for thought among the Muslim Arabs and Persians of the Middle East. Eventually, they’ll see free Iraqis electing representatives to manage the affairs of their state, and they’ll wonder why they allow religious and political tyrants or monarchs rule over every aspect of their lives.

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].

Before it disappears from the ether, I feel it’s my duty to save this bit of almost unimaginable stupidity, just for the record:

Last week, Barack Obama unveiled a new campaign seal — and not the kind that swims, barks and balances balls on the end of its nose. Rather, it was the kind that has a big old eagle on it and some Latin (Vero possumus, which translates very loosely to “Yes we can”). It’s also a seal that combined elements of Richard Nixon’s White House police uniforms and George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” And it went over about as well. Andrew Malcolm at the L.A. Times had some fun with it. And Mickey Kaus predicted it would be disappeared over the weekend. His exact words were: “But unless David Axelrod is insane, the thing will never be seen again.” Kaus was right.

The biggest Obama-maniacs are not among his fans; they’re right inside his campaign.

Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing his message to the world—for naught in Britain, where only a minority trust that he (among others) is telling the truth about global warming. Most people believe they’re being misled, and that it’s a tax scheme:

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Bjorn Lomborg took the opportunity to lay blame exactly where it belongs:

Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case.

Ya think?

I’m telling ya—influencing people to change their minds isn’t as easy as it appears. And the world ain’t what it used to be. I mean the guy won the Nobel Peace Prize and no one in Britain believes him!

Maybe George Lakoff is right after all, and only propaganda works.

I should probably point out that I wrote more than two years ago about the overhyping  of the urgency of global warming … but did anyone listen to me? Of course not!