McCain’s Message Stepped On By Reality, Oil Magnates

It’s been a rough time for John McCain’s foreign policy message, what with Nouri al-Maliki endorsing a timetable for withdrawal along the same lines Barack Obama has proposed. But it’s also got to be a bit galling for McCain’s staff to find that their “Drill now to save you gas money–sometime!” message has likewise been deflated by wealthy oil man T. Boone Pickens’s ad which states outright “This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”  It also doesn’t help to put together bizarre attack ads like this one that blames Obama for higher gas prices:

As I said, it’s gotta sting a little when your message is “Some in Washington are saying no to drilling and independence from foreign oil” and it turns out those “some” include an oil executive from Texas:

This isn’t to say that either Maliki’s comments or Pickens’s ad has convinced the American people to sign on to Obama’s policies and vote for him, but they do seem to significantly blunt any impact McCain’s criticsms might have had.

It’s a Nice Day to Start Again

I hesitate to say that Brad DeLong is wrong–merely misguided, perhaps–in his advice to Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Marriage is good thing (There’s a drinking! And presents! All while in formal wear!) but I was reminded of a few lines from Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”:

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

Yes, Larkin was a dyspeptic and rather unlikable fellow, but he has a point; one must consider the entire affair, the sheer production of it all.  If the current arrangement seems to be humming along nicely, no need to trade it in just yet. To be honest, though, the first lines to pop into my head were from the, uh “poet”, Gordon Sumner:

No earthly church has ever blessed our union
No state has ever granted us permission
No family bond has ever made us two
No company has ever earned commission
No debt was paid no dowry to be gained
No treaty over border land or power
No semblance of the world outside remained
To stain the beauty of this nuptial hour

The secret marriage vow is never spoken
The secret marriage can never be broken

No flowers on the altar
No white veil in your hair
No maiden dress to alter
No bible oath to swear

The secret marriage vow is never spoken
The secret marriage can never be broken

I should also mention that Young Zeitlin rains on my “excuse to have a party” parade with a thoughtful post about marriage policy and the Democrats.

He Says, We Say: The Moves that Matter in Blogosphere Discussion

There’s been some recent discussion about male violence and the feminist response from Mike Meginnis, based in part on a discussion from Feministe that addressed the prevalence of male violence and how this is rarely discussed.  Today, Jamelle asks people to weigh in, so I figured I’d toss in a few thoughts instead of breaking up discussion between the comments section of two different blogs.

What’s interesting about this exchange is what it suggests about the limits (or starting points) of some forms of online discussion and within some online communities.

The biggest problem seems to be the way Mike framed his comments, as a quick reread of the comments section reveals commenter Anna brought up essentially the same observation a few comments before Mike:

Is it derailing too far to bring up how rarely we do talk about men as the victims of violent crime as well?

Because, as you say, there is no gender applied to “shooting victim” but there will be to “female shooting victim”.

We don’t talk a lot about violence this way so people arguing with me about feminism will often bring up “men are the victims of violent crime more than women!” without responding to the point of “and that violence is caused by other men”.

Leaving aside the last part (which is a bit awkwardly formed, but you get the gist) this is what Mike seemed to be addressing, except that he began his comment thusly:

Ashley, I agree with much of what this post is trying to do, but it also deeply frustrates me. You’ve noted correctly - and this is something I try to push myself - that men commit the vast majority of violence. But what you haven’t noted, whether because it would complicate your argument, you feel it’s irrelevant, or you simply don’t know (but I assume you do know), men commit the vast majority of violence *against other men,* even if we discount violence in war zones, which intellectual honesty would suggest that we shouldn’t.

Mike’s comment was directed directly at Ashley and began with a note contention (”it deeply frustrates me”).  From there the responses (while measured and civil) were easy to predict: some defensiveness and rhetorical moves that were dismissive of Mike’s concerns on the grounds that he was speaking from a position of privilege and taking a position that asked “what about teh MENZ?” This is a rhetorical move that you see in a lot of online discussions (and a not altogether illegitimate one either). There are lots of discussions where people in a community or with a certain familiarity with a topic will cut off further discussion along those lines because it’s a flawed or downright spurious argument they’ve dealt with before-it’s a kind of rhetorical efficiency (e.g. For many feminist discussions how often have you heard: “But why can’t we be humanists?”; for race, “Why can’t we just be colorblind?”).  But it also has its drawbacks, in the same way teaching people cognitive biases can lead people to easily dismiss the content of an argument once any sort of bias is identified.  Mike’s point-that the dominate conception of masculinity and the violence it promotes-is most often directed against men themselves isn’t really much of an issue, nor does anyone at Feministe really take issue with it.  Instead, the problem becomes the way Mike addresses the topic.  I think most of the disagreement could have be waived away by responding with something like “Fair enough, but in this discussion we’re going to focus on women as objects of violence (because that’s what we’re most interested in/that’s the implied focus of many of these posts/that’s just what we feel like right now).”

For my part, although I understand that a lot of these rhetorical moves are often are useful, from a stylistic (as well as argumentative) perspective, I’d like to see less of them.  Yes, some unremarkable conservative probably said something wrongheaded or guffaw inducing, but does every response have to be “WTFBBQ!1!11!!!!11!”?  Yes, yes, we get it; you’ve saucily mimicked someone’s digital overreaction or outrage-wonderful.  What’s that?  You have your own prepared word or phrase to describe a certain position or person that ends with (^TM)?  What a clever skewering of well-rehearsed debates and a trenchant critique of consumer culture and corporatism run amok!  At least read someone like Belle Waring who does this better than most and still manages to wrestle with content of the argument to get a sense of best practices.

Dept. of Weird Science: Second Hand Smoke Is Cool

I know lots of people harbor all sorts of folk theories about natural phenomena, but it’s always fun to watch someone play amateur scientist using an idea you’ve never heard of (courtesy of NRO’s The Corner):

But it has long seemed to me that one of the things that make cigarettes so dangerous to smokers is the high temperature of the smoke; the paper and the additives make it very hot. Cigars are just tobacco, and cigar smoke is much cooler…so it follows that second hand smoke, having cooled down significantly, isn’t as dangerous as the stuff cigarette smokers inhale.

What does “smoke temperature” have to do with anything? I could cobble together some amateur scientific speculation of my own to cover how temperature might affect things like smoke volume or the amount of chemicals you take in, but that’s not what Ledeen sees as the problem.  It’s the temperature of the smoke itself, which I would agree with if we were talking about a burning building and burns due to smoke inhalation.  Regardless of the temperature of the smoke itself, burning a cigar or cigarette (at whatever necessary temperature) and turning it into smoke is the problem–either way you’ve just created the delivery system for the nicotine and other chemicals.

Picture used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user neilbetter.

Buy This Book

Mike Scalise alerts me to the fact that Other Latitudes, the first book of poetry by Brian Brodeur, is now available for you to purchase.  I haven’t read everything in the collection, but having read Brian’s stuff before (and having been in a workshop with him) I’m pretty excited about this book.  Rather than butcher a description of the work based on ill-formed notions of the manuscript, I’ll let the ever articulate Eric Pankey explain it:

Reading Brian Brodeur, I am reminded of St. Augustine’s assertion that “To blame the fault of a creature is to praise its essential nature.” In the lyric narratives of his debut collection, Other Latitudes, which is urgent, evocative, and, at times, disturbing, Brodeur shows us that the wide expanse of the heart is rife with flaw and error and in showing us its flaw, praises it. Human relationships—the tragic and the comedic—are his subject and he testifies to their essential vitality and complexity with a capacious wit, a quick intelligence, and an enduring generosity.

And if that isn’t enough to sell you on it, Mike Scalise has more pithy take:

The best way I can describe Brodeur’s work is that it’s compulsively readable.

There you go, the essential quality for any book of poetry: it’s interesting.  So put the boring stuff down and read this instead.  You didn’t really want to read that other stuff anyway.

When Worlds Collide

There aren’t many instances where I get to write about the meeting of the literary and political worlds, but TPM’s book discussion of Philip Gourevitch’s Standard Operating Procedure is one of them.  Gourevitch has his feet in both worlds as both the editor of The Paris Review and a journalist who wrote an excellent book on the Rwandan genocide, and makes him well suited to flesh out the varied stories and narrative strains the make up the abuses at Abu Ghraib .

What makes this book discussion more interesting than the usual fare is the inclusion of poet/memoirist Mary Karr (of The Liars Club fame) as part of the discussion and that fellow poet/memiorist Nick Flynn shows up in the comments section to chastise Gourevitch for not including more Iraqi voices in his account.  Gourevitch responds that part of the reason for not explicitly including the words of those Iraqi’s tortured at Abu Ghraib was his focus on the events as a particularly American story–that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, as Gourevitch  argues, were not inevitable, and were the result of tacit (and sometimes explicit) support of American officials. This is a story about the policy of torture.

Flynn’s concern is common one among writers: who to include and how to tell the story without distorting the truth or privileging one narrative over another.  But it is, I think, a secondary concern here, and one too focused on the (laudable) goal of including voices that were silenced or otherwise appropriated in the media swarm that followed Abu Ghraib.  SOP’s major contribution seems to be the way it examines how the decisions and policy of the Bush administration translated to actions at Abu Ghraib, as Matt Steinglass observes :

What’s really powerful about this story is that it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever seen for examining the way that policy decisions translate into events. Think, for instance, of Jane Mayer’s amazing article for The New Yorker on Alberto Mora. The hardest thing to do in journalism is to draw connections between complex and fuzzy management and policy decisions, bureaucratic political maneuvering and the adoption of one or another document as official policy, and the consequences such documents and management tactics have for the accomplishment of an organization’s mission. The reporting that’s been done on how abuses at Abu Ghraib (and Bagram and Guantanamo) stemmed from the evolution of US torture policy has been probably the best, most gripping organizational reporting I’ve read.

I’m calling this one for Gourevitch because (as Karr also notes) a book that widens the narrative scope to all accounts is a different, though important, book.

Also in torture reporting: Spencer Ackerman goes to the Amnesty Guantanamo protest in DC and talks with former army chaplin CPT. James Lee, who was arrested, and eventually released, for suscpision of espionage.

Richard Cohen and the Amazing Disappering Bottom Line

Supposedly, everyone has a bottom line, an absolute limit past which we won’t go. First principles, perhaps, which can’t be compromised, or a sense of fairness that compels you to fight for certain ends. Richard Cohen has looked at both presidential candidates and finds that a bottom line is what separates them:

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama — and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are.

Cohen doesn’t actually say what that bottom line is, but it’s useful to know that McCain has a bottom line.  But Obama–not sure yet.  Except, wait:

McCain has a bottom line. Obama just moved his.

Obama just moved his–indeterminate–bottom line.  Oh, and Cohen admits that both candidates have changed their position on things, but this represents a bottom line change on Obama’s part, even though we don’t know if Obama has a bottom line.  Argumentative prestidigitation abounds.  Watch Cohen work but–ah!–not too closely becuase you’ll miss that the premise of Cohen’s argument–woosh!–has disappered!  Bottom lines comes and go in a puff magic smoke.  Thanks folks, Cohen will be back on the Post Op-Ed pages next week.

P.S. Publis at Obsdian Wings nominates this for Worst Op-Ed of 2008

Memo to Obama

In his latest article, Fareed Zakaria proposes some things Senator Obama should say about Iraq.  Key excerpts:

All today’s gains could disappear when American troops leave—and they will have to leave one day. The disagreement I have with the Bush administration is that it seems to believe that time will magically make these gains endure. It won’t. Without political progress, once the United States reduces its forces, the old mistrust and the old militias will rise up again. Only genuine political power-sharing will create a government and an Army that are seen as national and not sectarian. And that, in turn, is the only path to make Iraq viable without a large American military presence.[...]

[...]My objective remains to end American combat involvement in Iraq and to do so expeditiously. At some point we are going to have to take off the training wheels in Iraq. I believe that we must have a serious plan that defines when that point is reached. If we define success as an Iraq that looks like France or Holland, we will have to stay indefinitely, continue spending $10 billion a month and keep 140,000 troops in combat. And that is neither acceptable nor sustainable. We will have to accept as success a muddy middle ground—an Iraq that is a functioning, federal democracy with a central government and an army able to tackle the bulk of challenges they face.

Defining what victory looks like is the key policy metric here.  Any politician who won’t tell you what victory looks like (or what sort of state–roughly–Iraq should be when we leave) is asking for us to spend lives and resources based on vaguely defined goals like “security” and “stability”¹.  Loosely defined terms do not a foreign policy make.

¹ Or your personal (but not publicly defined!) concept of an ideal democratic state. Your actual Iraqi democratic results may vary.

Someone Get John Cain On the Phone…

Because apparently the definitive album of the 1980s is Van Halen’s 1984.  Really? As a fan of The Police and someone old enough to remember when Michael Jackson was almost bigger than Jesus, I object. I understand that the criteria isn’t the best album of the decade, but I’m thinking something a lot more New Wave as the definitive sound of the 80s.

John Cain, the internets needs your music wisdom!

Race & Media Matters

I kept hearing yesterday from some pundits and journalists that Obama’s Father’s Day speech was directed at “white, working class people”.  Whether or not that was true (or that white working class people were politically symapthetic to his calls for absentee African-American men to step up to their role as fathers) it struck me as both an extraordinarily dumb concern on the part of white people and an unexceptional speech to be giving in a black church.  Not surprisingly, Ta-Nehisi Coates is all over this:

But reporters need to stop acting like this dude is the only civilized black man in the world. I just came from the beautiful Real Men Cook event here in Harlem. This thing has been going for almost twenty years now, celebrating fathers who are doing right, and serving as rebuke (if I may) to the ones that are ghost. We don’t need Barack Obama to tell us to be fathers, though I’m glad he’s doing it. We need reporters to actively engage the people they claim to cover.[...]

But when this stuff is reported, it’s written as if it’s the first time anyone’s said this. The basic rule seems to be among white media–if we haven’t heard it, it didn’t happen.

Also, if white people are sitting around waiting for a series of “Sister Souljah” moments from Obama to prove his American values bona fides then I hope they’re kept waiting.  It’s a disingenuous and uniformed notion (”Oh, all those black folk who don’t have fathers! Won’t anybody do something?!”) as if, as Coates says, Obama was the first to raise the issue or white people are honestly waiting for someone to wag their finger at another racial or ethnic group so they can make up their mind on who to vote for.

Damn

Tim Russert Dies at 58.

There isn’t anything more to say except heartfelt condolences.

Allow Me

In order to alleviate any suggestion of concern trolling on Matt Zeitlin’s part, I’m going to take a shot at why this Naomi Klein piece on Obama’s economic advisers is such a mess. Klein’s continued obsession with Milton Friedman as a symbol of everything that is wrong with anything approaching a market solution causes her to not only flatten distinction between economists, but also miss a growing consensus among liberal economists that more has to be done to ensure social welfare and address inequality. First here’s what Klein has to say about Jason Furman:

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda.

In contrast to the Furman/Rubin position, Klein approvingly cites two economists:

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith.

So let’s turn it over to James Galbraith:

In a Washington Post essay published late last year, on the eve of the Democrats’ ascension to the majority, Senators Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown articulated a trade policy that typifies the consensus view of the party’s labor-liberal wing. They criticize “free trade,” call for strong labor and environmental standards in future trade agreements, and argue for aggressive policies to open foreign markets to American goods. Their critique reflects a genuine anger, and the concerns their piece embodies deserve to be met. Their program is populist, nationalist, muscular, and in tune with the mood of the Democratic base.

But it is not reality-based. As policy, it would not achieve the senators’ basic objective — namely, more jobs at higher wages in the United States. As politics, the danger is not that it will fail but that it might succeed. And then, progressives in power will repeat the pattern that conservatives set in 1981, pushing a program based on high expectations and illusions that ends in confusion, reversals, defeats, and an eventual lapse into incoherence and disrepute.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Klein’s anti-trade rhetoric. But what does the Rubin/Summers (and Furman, by implication) wing of economic centrists (part of Klein’s nasty Friedmanite cabal) think about the current economic situation? Here’s Larry Summers:

The domestic component of a strategy to promote healthy globalisation must rely on strengthening efforts to reduce inequality and insecurity. The international component must focus on the interests of working people in all countries, in addition to the current emphasis on the priorities of global ­corporations. [...]

While labour standards arguments have at times been invoked as a cover for protectionism, and this must be avoided, it is entirely appropriate that US policymakers seek to ensure that greater global integration does not become an excuse for eroding labour rights.

Let’s be clear: the “Wall Street” and “Main Street” sides of economic policy (represented by Robert Rubin and Robert Reich during the Clinton years, respectively) are closer now than ever before.  Naomi Klein’s picture of the global economy is a caricature, and one that fellow critics of the Washington Consensus reject.  Anti-market screeds might be a winner for populist-minded voters, anxious about their financial security and the turn in the American economy, but it won’t make for good economic policy.  There are people out there who are gripped with by a Friedmanesque “free-market-in-all-things” ideology, but economists like Furman and Goolsebee aren’t among them.  The truly problematic ideology is Klein’s own.

Young Blogger’s Media Domination Continues Apace

Matt Zeitlin has just joined a very formidable looking (and well designed) group blog called Pushback, part of Campus Progress Action.  And if Dylan Matthews is right (and I suspect he is) Pushback is also part of a very successful model for progressive activism developed by the Center for American Progress.

I’ve heard some complaints (mainly from the 40+ demographic and old-guard liberals) that young people don’t seem as politically active, at least when it comes to things like showing up to anti-war protest marches.  Part of the answer, as Pushback bloggers demonstrate, is that activism has moved elsewhere.  I also think that a large percentage of my generation feels that they can engage with the status-quo political order and affect change through traditional channels that baby boomers never felt were open to them.

Does That Make Libertarians Chaotic Neutral?

Tybalt christens this response to Alberta Law School post about a speaking engagement at a Canadian Libertarian Party conference the comment of the year:

Bring your twenty-sided dice!

I’d find this a funny non sequitur if it weren’t for this aside in a recent post by George Mason’s Bryan Caplan:

One of Milton Friedman’s most famous lines: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” He said it in a 1999 ISIL interview, and I’ve heard it quoted dozens of times. It even inspired me to write a Champions scenario, “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” (Want to play it? Email me for an invitation to Capla-Con, July 12&13!)

I hadn’t realized there was some sort of connection between libertarianism and role playing games (I had realized, however, that there is a strong correlation between blogging, comic books, wonkishness, and role playing games, insofar as I am representative of this trend).

And while I’m on the subject of D&D geekery, I might as well point out an interesting post by Tim Burke about the new 4th Edition D&D which was supposed to have integrated a new set of online tools, but has yet to actually make those tools available (and likely won’t for some time).

Also, this comment by Tybalt himself is pretty good:

I only find it believable because right now I find myself about 5 minutes of bullshit away from a half-hour rant about “whitey” myself… and I’m white.

And Yet the Democrats Aren’t Perennial Winners

I have to admit, not knowing statistics very well, this Op-Ed by Neil Degrasse Tyson made me nervous:

If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.

But, oh trickiness, the numbers take some turn in the light of historical context (it has graphs and everything):

As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.

I’m sure that Dr. Tyson means well, and I’m a big fan of Nova, but, really, he should talk with some political scientists before glibly writing about politics and concluding, “The political analysts need to take it from here.” We’ve taken it pretty far already, dude! Tyson has every right to speculate about politics–I wouldn’t claim that you need some sort of political science affiliation as a “union card” to do political science research–but it would make sense to ask around a bit, right?

(Hat tip: The Monkey Cage)