Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressed Israel and the Palestinians today to accept a compromise proposal over who should monitor the passage of potential extremists in and out of Gaza, but she failed to achieve a breakthrough to end a bitter two-month-old impasse on the issue.
Between the failure of the recent Latin America adventure and the Middle East Democracy Conference , it looks like Amercian diplomatic efforts by Rice and Bush are batting 0.
I wonder why? Surely they’re not mistaking the moral superiority of American values for unbridled, dangerous arrogance. I mean, it’s so obvious we’re the best and everyone in the world envys us and wants to be an American or live like an American. What is their problem?
Via Talk left, I see that Murray Waas is reporting that Richard Shelby has been cleared by the Senate ethics committee of leaking classified information to the press. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, merely that he didn’t break any Senate ethics rules. Of course, if the Shelby Amendment had not been vetoed by President Clinton, Shelby would have likely faced serious jail time for what he did.
I wrote a long post about Shelby the leaking Republican hypocrite a year or so ago. During the Clinton years the Republicans were all hopped up about leaking classified information. Today, not so much.
In today’s LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez says “Blame it On The Boomers” hypothesizing that we boomers have been arguing amongst ourselves since we were kids and are responsible for the polarization of American politics:
While it is amusing to caricaturize all boomers as pot-smoking, free-loving veterans of Woodstock, one only needs to glance at Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s 1971 Princeton yearbook photo to recall that there were plenty of clean-cut young people who preferred to lead traditional lives.
As in any revolution, the values revolution of the 1960s propelled Americans into two different directions. While many embraced the new values of the era, just as many preferred the old ones. Then there were those, like President Bush, who indulged in the permissiveness of the times only to reverse course later and champion the virtues of tradition.
[…]
Clearly, the boomer generation is not the first to divide over conflicting political visions. But unlike others, boomers cannot look to a shared sacrifice or experience that provided them with a sense of common values and shared purpose. On the contrary, the political consciousness of the boomers was forged by terribly divisive battles over Vietnam, the civil rights movement and Watergate.
If the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush taught us anything, it was that the wounds of Vietnam and the 1960s have still not healed. As a result, the 1960s generation has come to power remarkably split, and this division has paralyzed American politics
Rodriguez also says, “perhaps the most profound political division in the country is generational. No, not young versus old this time, but rather baby boomer versus baby boomer.”
It’s still about Young vs Old — young boomers vs old boomers.
It’s not just that liberals and conservatives of my generation preferred to live different lifestyles. It’s that the largest age cohort in history had some choices to make — and those choices shaped our leadership class in very different ways. The young liberals were combative and revolutionary in their zeal — idealistic and naive also. The conservatives were those who identified with the conformity of their elders, withdrawn, inward and repressed. They have devolved into revolutionary zeal as they aged.
I am very interested in this topic and took a stab at writing about this a while back:
We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing — the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost.
And I think there is an even deeper layer to this as well and one which is vital to understanding why the right wing baby boomers and their political offspring are so pathologically irrational about dealing with terrorism. Vietnam, as we were all just mercilessly reminded in the presidential election, was the crucible of the baby boom generation, perhaps the crucible of America as a mature world power.
The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60’s leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin — he was both virile and heroic.
The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight. This, I think, is deeply understood by people at a primitive level and all cultures have some version of it deeply embedded in the DNA. It’s not just the willingness to die it also involves the willingness to kill. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.
And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. Indeed, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight it here.
These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate. (Bill Clinton was able to thwart this image because of his reputation as a womanizer. You simply couldn’t say he was effeminate.)
Now it must be pointed out that there were many men, and many more women, who didn’t buy into any of this “manhood” stuff and felt no need to join in tribal rituals or bloody wars to prove anything. Most of those men, however, didn’t aspire to political leadership. Among the revolutionaries, the warriors and the chickenhawks, there were many who did. Indeed, these manhood rituals are more often than not a requirement for leadership. (Perhaps having more women in power will finally change that.)
The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove
.
I agree with Rodriguez that the boomer cohort bears some responsibility for the polarization of America. The liberal boomers are responsible for the polarization of the first 20 years of our generation’s adulthood — the last 20 years are the responsiblity of the conservatives.
We liberal baby boomers were massively full of shit in many ways when we were trying to change the world. But then we were young. The conservative boomers have no such excuse. Last night I heard Tony Blankley on the Mclaughlin report say something like “we needed to completely dismantle the middle east in order to remake it.” I haven’t heard a liberal spout such crazed revolutionary crapola since Jimmy Carter wore sideburns. I have a feeling that if Tony had spent a little more time in dorm room bull sessions drinking Gallo and smoking pot instead of nursing his rightwing resentment, he might have gotten over such hairbrained notions sometime before he turned 50.
Back in 1998 and 1999, it seemed a day didn’t go by when the Washington punditocrisy didn’t tell the American people that the American people were appalled by Bill Clinton’s lying, skirt chasing ways and that he would never survive and that the impeachment was a result of a national disgust with his behavior. If the news media had a vote, George Stephanopoulos,Bob Barr, Tim Russert and Henry Hyde would have marched down to the White House to demand Clinton’s resignation for the good of the country. Even today we have David Brooks and countless other gasbags still selling the hogwash that Clinton was enormously unpopular during Monicagate, despite the fact that his approval ratings consistently hung around 60% throughout the scandal and actually increased after he was impeached. It was the Republicans who lost seats during this period.
It’s this kind of thing that proves that the beltway courtiers truly live in a bubble. Politicians and strategists simply have to stop listening to them and listen to the rest of the country.
For the second day in a row, National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition misrepresented Virginia Governor-elect Timothy M. Kaine’s position on abortion. On November 10, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson falsely described Kaine — who supports legal access to abortion — as “pro-life.” On November 11, NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty drew a false dichotomy between Kaine’s position on abortion and that of the Democratic Party. Bradley labeled Kaine “an unusual candidate,” claiming that “he opposes abortion in a party that supports it.” In fact, while Kaine has expressed opposition to abortion as a matter of personal faith, he made it clear during his campaign that he supports legal access to abortion and highlighted the issue as one distinguishing him and his Republican opponent, former Virginia attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore.
Bradley went a step beyond Liasson, asserting that Kaine’s position on abortion was the opposite of his party’s position. Bradley’s and Liasson’s mischaracterization has the effect of advancing the notion, promoted by Republicans, that Kaine won because he ran on a “strategy sharply at odds with the approach of leading national Democrats.” That assertion — which is The Washington Post’s paraphrase of RNC chairman Ken Mehlman’s characterization — may or may not be true as a general matter, but what is not true is that Kaine’s position on abortion is the opposite of his party’s. The Democratic Party supports access to legal abortions; Kaine supports access to legal abortions. While Democrats may differ over the degree to which they think that abortion should be regulated, they belong to the party that supports abortion rights, while the GOP opposes them.
Kaine’s position on abortion was also John Kerry’s position on abortion. There are many pro-choice Democrats, a lot of them Catholics, who would not personally have an abortion or want one of their loved ones to have one but they are pro-choice because they believe that this is a personal matter and that abortion should not be illegal. That is the very essence of the pro-choice stance — being allowed to make your own decision free of state interference, subject to certain agreed upon, constitutional restrictions. Why the pundits don’t understand the meaning of the word “choice” is puzzling considering how hilarious they found it when Clinton parsed the question about the meaning of “is.” Choice is a pretty clear cut concept not subject to tense or time.
These reporters mischaracterize not only the position of the Democratic Party, but they mischaracterize the position of the American people. If you watch the bloviators on any given show or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers, you would think that all Democratic politicians must be personally for “abortion on demand” and that the majority of the country disagrees with them. Being pro-choice is spun as a dramatically unpopular position that is costing the Democrats elections. And just as the punditocrisy was completely out of step with the country on the Lewinsky matter, they are out of step with the country on this:
It’s Definitely a Pro-Choice, Pro–Roe v. Wade Country
Lest we harbor any doubt about that, as debate on the Alito Supreme Court nomination heats up, consider these data.
1. In a SurveyUSA fifty-state poll, 56 percent nationwide described themselves as pro-choice, compared to 38 percent who said they were pro-life. Only thirteen states were pro-life; the rest were pro-choice and include Pennsylvania (+7), Michigan (+13), Montana (+11), Ohio (+10), Iowa (+15), Arizona (+17), Minnesota (+17), New Mexico (+17), Wisconsin (+18), Florida (+22), Colorado (+27), Oregon (+29) and Nevada (+32).
2. In a recent Gallup poll, the public, by 53 percent to 37 percent, said the Senate should not confirm Alito if it was likely he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
3. The Pew poll cited above asked two slightly versions of a question on whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned. The replies averaged 61 percent to 29 percent against overturning Roe v. Wade.
4. In Washington Post/ABC News poll cited above, 64 percent said that, if a case testing Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, the Court should vote to uphold it, compared to just 31 percent who believe the Court should vote to overturn it.
30% believe that Roe should be overturned! Ferchistsake, why are we even talking about this except to say that our politicians should run as supporters of Roe vs Wade, period. It isn’t even controversial.
Yet, if you listen to Cokie and Monsignor Tim and read the various scribblers on the op-ed pages around the country you would think that this is the Democrats’ biggest problem.
The allegedly liberal beltway gasbags and stenographers are being spun just as they were spun by the Republican establishment back in the Clinton era. We must get our politicians and strategists to stop listening to them. They are killing us.
In the post below I write a little bit about how the Nixonian politics of resentment are at the heart of the Republican electoral success these past 35 years. I mention the fact that it is crippling oppugnancy that is their achilles heel. Here’s an article in this week’s LA Weekly by Lou Dubose the author of “Boy Genius” in which he speculates that Rove got himself in trouble before the Grand Jury because he is an arrogant prick. He bases this on Rove’s past performance the few times he’s ever allowed himself to go under oath. It seems that he always lies:
In the course of questioning, Rove told the attorney representing the trial lawyers that he had a firm agreement with the governor to recuse himself from anything having to do with tobacco. A “Chinese wall” separated his tobacco consulting from his work for Bush. The lawyers knew the answers to some of the questions before they asked them. They knew that Rove had been involved in polling funded by the tobacco lobby. One of the polls was a piece of political trash, a push poll asking respondents how they would vote if they knew the Democratic attorney general had provided financial support to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — which he never had. The day the results were released, Rove attended a tobacco-lobby meeting and immediately took the poll to Bush chief of staff Joe Allbaugh.
Caught in a lie about keeping Bush and Big Tobacco separate, Rove retreated. Rather than give it to Bush, he delivered the poll to Allbaugh, he said, knowing Allbaugh would throw it away without looking at it. The answer didn’t wash. Rove was not a party to the lawsuit, so he faced little immediate risk. But the trial lawyers had what they wanted. When Bush, acting in his capacity as governor, set out to take their fees away from them, they could stand before federal Judge David Folsom in Texarkana and point to the intellectual author of a lawsuit that would ultimately embarrass Bush.
There was a second case in which Rove was under oath before the Texas State Senate when he was appointed to a University Board of Regents:
Appearing before the Senate Nominations Committee, Rove again was both unprepared and dishonest. Since 1986, Rove had been providing tips and information to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was conducting serial investigations of the finances of statewide Democratic officeholders. On one occasion Rove even announced in Washington the coming indictments of two lieutenants of Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in Austin — more than a week before the Department of Justice unsealed the indictments.
Rove had met Rampton under unusual circumstances. In 1986, as a Democratic opponent was closing in on Rove’s candidate, the incumbent governor, Rove held a press conference to announce that a bug had been planted in his office. It was a brilliant tactic, pointing to the Democratic challenger’s desperation. Special Agent Greg Rampton investigated the bugging and no charges were filed. A source close to the Travis County district attorney told me they investigated before the FBI and concluded it was a political stunt. Rove or someone working for him had had his own office bugged. Five years later, stumbling under questioning from a Democratic senator, Rove said he didn’t exactly know Rampton. When pressed, he resorted to a Clintonesque parsing of terms: “Ah, senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?” He then qualified his response, saying he wouldn’t recognize Rampton “if he walked in the door.” His dishonest response provided Senate Democrats a sufficient pretext to deny Rove his university board position.
I remember when I read Murray Waas’ report of Rove’s testimony to the grand jury thinking that he was incredibly obtuse if he behaved as arrogantly as it seemed he had:
… Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
In Rove’s world this is normal behavior. In the real world, disseminating derogatory information about a man and his wife for political purposes is something that even if you do it, you do not argue that it is “legitimate.” Normal people would have the decency to be a little bit chagrined by these actions, even if what they did was not strictly illegal.
I wonder if he had the nerve to repeat to the middle aged African American women of the DC Grand Jury that he went after Wilson purely because he was a Democrat. I wouldn’t be surprised. That powerful Nixonian ressentiment almost surely came through in any case. It’s who he is. To a group of average citizens serving on a Grand Jury, this powerful man serving in the white house describing such behavior as being perfectly normal must have sounded terribly distasteful.
Fitzgerald, of course, has seen it all before. But he had to have hated seeing this powerful jerk admit that this government believes this behavior is business as usual. Plame was, after all, a CIA employees and these powerful politicos at the very least, acted with a total lack of responsibility or integrity in trafficking her name around for political purposes. And he knew from the get, of course, that Rove was one of Novak’s sources. If he said all that stuff as clearly and as obviously as the Waas article says he did, then Patrick Fitzgerald had no problem figuring out Karl Rove’s motive.
I read this morning that Warren Beatty is “taking credit” for Schwarzenneger’s defeat last week:
Warren Beatty, the veteran Hollywood actor who helped to deliver the first big blow to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, said last night that the Terminator star had got his come-uppance for fooling voters.
Four days after California voters rejected a series of reforms put forward by the Republican governor, Beatty boasted that his own high-profile eve-of-poll campaigning had helped to save America from the ripple effect of Mr Schwarzenegger’s “reactionary measures”
He also said,”Actors do not necessarily make good politicians.” That’s certainly true, but you have to wonder sometimes whether actors even make good activists.
I have always had a soft spot for the earnest do-gooding that leads famous entertainers to potentially derail their carefully crafted images by getting involved in partisan politics. It’s much safer to become the spokesperson for a popular cause like literacy or fundraise to find the cure for a dreaded disease. Hollywood executives are notoriously gun shy when it comes to any controversy other than the tittilating “bradnangelina” style tabloid gossip that entertains the masses. If someone becomes too unpopular or controversial he or she can lose work and money. It’s risky.
Beatty was always the most savvy of Hollywood activists. He used his celebrity to glamourize politics and used his activism to make him something more than just a pretty face in Hollywood. The glamor project didn’t do much to help the cause (in fact it probably hurt it), but the political activism actually helped his career immeasurably by giving him the substance and clout to do political projects, something that a good looking playboy would not normally be allowed. I think his contribution to progressive politics was far more substantial in the entertainment arena than in the political arena and ultimately I think that’s where show biz activists can really make a difference. It’s helpful that they raise money and awareness of partisan politics, but if you can make a musical recording, movie or television show that imparts liberal attitudes and philosophy, you have done far more long-lasting good than any rabble rousing speech could ever do. And it’s not something that anyone else can do — use art and pop culture to awaken people’s political instincts. That actually takes talent.
The most famous Hollywood activist, and the one who still creates hysteria on the right is, of course, Jane Fonda. In an era of liberal, even radical, show business activists, she was the living symbol of everything the conformist right hated about the left. Rick Perlstein reviews the new biography of Fonda in this edition of The London Review of Books in which we find that Jane was actually quite a serious, sedulous worker bee rather than a shrieking Commie Diva. But she became a very special, very famous object of ire for very complicated reasons. And she was the focusof some very special government treatment long before she ever went to Hanoi:
Another important detail: opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster.
[…]
The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military’, and ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’.
The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling – for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach ‘an anti-law enforcement attitude’?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy. Supposedly asked – it isn’t clear where or by whom – how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: ‘If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure.’ A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda’s house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. ‘The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks.
The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. On 9 May, Nixon’s enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. ‘What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,’ an aide later recalled.
Perlstein goes on to ask “why the obsession?” He answers by noting that this happened in 1970 a “moment of maximum danger” just as Nixon was revealed to have expanded the war into Cambodia, and that it was through heretofore loveable figures like Fonda and Dr Spock that the public and, more problematic, soldiers themselves would be turned against the war. This is surely true. Tom Joad’s daughter coming out against the war had to feel threatening. (The blacklist, after all, had only broken 11 years before. This played into their darkest paranoid fantasies about Hollywood.) But I think a great part of it was simple sexism and confused sexual feelings. As Perlstein points out, Barbarella was a favorite GI pin-up girl. As the US showed itself impotent in Southeast Asia, the jerk-off fantasy of millions of young men was basically calling them losers to their faces. I’ve long thought that the irrational anger at Jane Fonda, then and now, has had the character of some sort of primal hatred that cannot be explained by politics alone. I think she’s seen by certain American males as a female praying mantis.
However interesting all this psychological and political deconstruction of the Jane Fonda phenomenon is (and it’s fascinating) what Perlstein nails in this piece is something that is overlooked and terribly important if we are to understand modern politics:
It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.
That is the nub of Republican success, whether it was exploiting the sexual anxieties of displaced insecure males in a newly feminized workplace, or convincing conservative evangelical voters that “liberals” were trying to repress their religion and force them to adopt lifestyles they found repugnant. Nixon wasn’t the first dirty politician in American history, but he was the most successful at discerning the churning undercurrent of fear and anger in a rapidly changing society and using his personal brand of dark political arts to exploit it. The conservative movement of Barry Goldwater made a Faustian bargain with the Nixonian black operatives more than 35 years ago. The natural result of that soul selling deal is George W. Bush and Karl Rove.
Until we recognize that the modern Republican Party is the party of Richard Nixon and that the allegedly masterful Rovian vision of a permanent political majority is a rather simple outgrowth of Nixon’s uncanny understanding of how to exploit the dark side of populist fear and loathing, we will continue to be stymied. It won’t be enough to discredit George W. Bush and his cock-up of an administration. They will simply say he wasn’t the “real thing” and move past it like rapacious sharks, doing what they’ve been doing to the last 35 years. We have to come to grips with the fact that they have built their party by wrangling a free-floating resentment and anxiety and turning it into a political formula. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t the result of peering into a crystal ball. It was the result of counting the votes available and developing a strategy for getting enough of them to gain power.
And they were very successful at doing it. They are great at campaign politics. The problem is that they built a political machine so captive of business interests and so bereft of pragmatic policy acumen that they are unable to govern. And like the great Godfather of the modern Republican party, their propensity for crude revenge and crippling oppugnancy tripped them up.
I urge you to read Perlstein’s entire review. Jane Fonda is more than gal with a good figure and a good haircut. And she’s more than a radical Hollywood activist, work-out goddess or trophy wife. She’s the quintessential sin-eater who absorbed all the seething animus toward the agents of change in latter 20th century American society. She was the perfect target of Nixon’s seething resentment strategy. It’s a testament to her strange power that they still hate her so, even today.
A U.S.-backed summit meant to promote political freedom and economic change in the Middle East ended Saturday without agreement, a blow to President Bush’s goals for the troubled region.
A draft declaration on democratic and economic principle was shelved after Egypt insisted on language that would have given Arab governments greater control over which democracy groups receive money from a new fund.
[snip]
The White House had hoped the conference would showcase political progress in a part of the world long dominated by monarchies and single-party rule, and spread goodwill for the U.S.
[snip]
The disappointing outcome at the conference followed a rocky summit a week ago in Argentina, when Bush got a cold shoulder from some Latin American leaders, failed to win consensus on a free trading bloc for the Western Hemisphere and endured biting criticism from anti-U.S. protesters and Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez.
This is Rice’s failure, as well as Bush’s. Something to remember as the myth of Condi the Competent remains uncontested in the msm.
The dominant theoretical trends in the international relations field have been strikingly absent from the mountains of paper expended on analysis of al-Qaeda, Islamism, and the war on terror. Most of the dominant theoretical approaches were not so much wrong as irrelevant.
[SNIP]
But is that true? Has IR theory been irrelevant to the debates? To find out, I just spent a few hours looking at the contents of the last four years of the six leading journals for International Relations theory (International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies – see the end of the post for discussion of these choices), along with the American Political Science Review. I used an exceedingly loose definition of “about al-Qaeda” – i.e. I included everything about terrorism and counter-terrorism, even if it barely touched at all on al-Qaeda or Islamism itself; and I included review essays, even if they did not include any original research.
The results were even more striking than I expected. All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That’s just over 3% of the articles. Now, there’s lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there’s no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still… 3%?
[SNIP]
One obvious objection [to the methodology used in the review of IR literature] would be that I excluded policy-oriented journals such as Foreign Affairs, International Security, and The Washington Quarterly, which do tend to publish much more on the topic. I did that intentionally, because that best captures the prestige value within the field of International Relations. The policy journals are generally undervalued within the International Relations profession, to the extent that many top Political Science Departments wouldn’t even consider a Foreign Affairs publication suitable for a tenure file. In other words, the fact that there is a lot more on Islamism and al-Qaeda in those journals only strengthens my claim – even though political scientists have a lot to say on the subject, they can’t or don’t say it in the most prestigious, theory oriented journals.
Oh, and I didn’t even say anything about the quality of those 25 articles… all I’ll say is that of them, I would count about 7 of them as actually useful in any meaningful way…
Hmm.
Now, the good Aardvark also makes the point that the reason that al Qaeda has been ignored is that the theoretical paradigms which prevail in International Relations, like “realism,” “idealism,” “liberalism,” and “constructivism” are not terribly conducive to analysing a non-state Islamist super-terrorist organization. Who knew?
Adherence to any ideological position, especially ones as crude as “realism,” “idealism,” “isolationism,” or “Jacksonianism” is a mistake. In fact this kind of terminology obscures the necessary complexity of decision making in foreign affairs.
Far more sophisticated and flexible models within which to discuss foreign affairs decision making are desperately needed.
I suppose I should make these recent thoughts apply in a more general way to the American foreign policy/international relations discourse:
[While liberal interventionists] have been discussing ever so “reasonably” how best to adjust the “calculus” of America’s Manifest Destiny so “we” will continue to be a force of good in the world, they have, almost to a person, demonstrated their profound inability merely to look outside their own goddamn windows and respond with simple human decency and commonsense to the real world. And once again, they’ve demonstrated how alarmingly limited American foreign policy discourse has become.
In any event, I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice how poorly adjusted to reality most American intellectual debate on the world has become. And I’m very glad this is being quantified by scholars like AA.
[UPDATE: An interesting reference in the comments to the field of comparative politics jogged my memory regarding another bete noire that hounds my thoughts, namely the lack of a truly compelling translation of either the Qu’ran or the hadith. I would assume that since this is the case (or was, the last time I checked), many other texts of vital importance to undertstanding the various Islams are also unavailable, or available only in bad editions (the assertion that the Qu’ran can never be translated is a religious belief, not an intellectual claim, and must not be permitted to stand in the way of making the fundamental documents of Islam available to non-Muslims in the best possible way). Now even if one assumes that the finest scholars are honest and they actually can read the Qu’ran in the original – not an entirely warranted assumption – the lack of a good English Qu’ran translation is as telling a symbol as I can imagine of the epidemic level of stultifying mediocrity that permeates international studies regarding Islam, Islamism, and related areas of politics and culture in the Middle East and other states where Islamic belief wields enormous influence.
One can only hope that truly excellent scholars, like Juan Cole who is well-known in the blogosphere, soon become the rule. But right now, they are not only exceptional, but the rare exception.]
*You can look up Struthio camelushere, and so endeth my dabbling in Latin. For now.
I blogged about this last night when I first read Jeralyn’s shocking post but Blogger ate it. Anyway, the attack on habeas corpus is extremely serious in more ways than I can count, so go read TalkLeft’s latest and it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to write your congresscritters and point out that habeas corpus is, you know, kind of a bedrock principle for civilized jurisprudence.
The Los Angeles Times announced a major shake-up of its op-ed page today. Gone are cartoonist Michael Ramirez and liberal columnist Robert Scheer.
In their place, you won’t find any committed progressives like Scheer. Instead, L.A. Times editors chose National Review contributing editor and “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg. Below, some of our favorite Jonah jems, coming to a “liberal media” near you:
On McCarthy’s wisdom:
What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. [False: McCarthyism is easy to discuss: It’s bad. False: McCarthy behaved far worse than a jerk knows how to behave. False: he was also wrong. ]
Banning books:
Now, I’m not in favor of pulling Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from libraries, but let’s at least give a small nod to the fact that some material actually can be banned from libraries without the sky falling. [Note to librarians: Mr. Goldberg is not suggesting you ban his own book. That would be…censorship.]
[SNIP]
In praise of “The Bell Curve”:
[Charles Murray crunches] the numbers with the sort of élan and sophistication we’ve come to expect from the author of “Losing Ground” and coauthor of “The Bell Curve.” [Ah yes, I can see Dr. Murray right now, elegantly crunching those numbers with one hand, swirling a snifter of rare brandy in the other, all the while his colored valet anxiously hovers over the great man, ready to light a superb Cuban cigar for him when his master so signals. The height of sophisticated élan.]
[SNIP]
And, of course, Goldberg’s explanation for why he can’t be troubled with serving in Iraq:
As for why my sorry a** isn’t in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give — I’m 35 years old, my family couldn’t afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few — ever seem to suffice. [“I’m a hypocrite” would, in fact, cover it, Jonah]