09.15.2011 - 9:16 PM
At his speech last night to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, President Obama repeated a line he’s used quite often lately. “But if we’re being honest, we know the real problem isn’t the members of Congress in this room. It’s the members of Congress who put party before country because they believe the only way to resolve our differences is to wait 14 months till the next election.”
This is supposed to be a sophisticated way of accusing your opponents of being unpatriotic.
09.15.2011 - 7:00 PM
Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote a fascinating column on young people’s moral lives, basing it on hundreds of in-depth interviews with young adults across America conducted by the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his team.
The results, according to Brooks, were “depressing” — not so much because of how they lived but because of “how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.” Asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life, what we find is “young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.” What Smith and his team found is an atmosphere of “extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism.” The reason, in part, is because they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to “cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading.”
09.15.2011 - 5:40 PM
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s special elections, Democrats are doing what many of us predicted: Panicking. And the leader of the pack is Democratic strategist James Carville, who wrote, “Today I was mulling over election results from New York and Nevada while thinking about that very question. What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.” Carville added, “The course we are on is not working. The hour is late, and the need is great.”
Carville’s counsel – that President Obama should “fire, indict, [and] fight” – is not terribly helpful. Like most Democrats, he (wrongly) assumes Obama’s main problem is messaging. But set that aside for the moment. What I wanted to call attention to is what Carville wrote two years ago.
09.15.2011 - 5:20 PM
The president of the world’s sole hyperpower, the United States, called up a state to which it gives military aid by the billions, Egypt, and insisted the state meet its Vienna Convention obligations to protect the embassy of an ally, Israel. For some reason, this minimal attempt to maintain global stability is being hailed by liberal Jewish groups – the Israel Policy Forum is a particularly eyeroll-inducing example – as an act of pro-Israel advocacy worthy of being inscribed into the rocks of the Sinai Peninsula itself. (The Peninsula, of course, having been given to Egypt by Israel on the basis of U.S. security assurances something like the embassy riot would never be allowed to happen.)
Today’s Gallup poll has Obama’s approval among Jews at 55 percent, which is a five-point drop from where it was last time Gallup polled the issue. So Obama’s Jewish defenders have some ground to make up. They’re already reverting to their 2008 rhetorical strategy, which involves giving supporters excuses to never tune in to criticism. This time though, their “only Republican smear artists say that…” shtick is going to be harder to pull off.
09.15.2011 - 4:58 PM
The left-wing Think Progress blog has an item today purporting to debunk the outrage expressed here and elsewhere in the civilized world about the comments of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States, in which he stated Jews would not be welcome in an independent Palestinian state. According to Matt Duss, the dustup over Maen Areikat’s remarks is just a neocon canard and shows the hypocrisy of pro-Israel writers rather than betraying the Nazi-like predilections of Palestinian nationalism.
But Duss’ apologia for the PLO rings false for several reasons.
09.15.2011 - 4:15 PM
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have come up with the perfect compromise to the standoff over the Palestinians’ attempt to get the United Nations to recognize a unilateral declaration of independence. In his capacity as the Diplomatic Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East, Blair has proposed the Palestinian Authority give their proposed resolution to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. Moon would then sit on it until the end of the General Assembly session on Dec. 28, when he would present it to the GA if peace negotiations hadn’t begun. This would allow the PA to put off the impending flare-up of violence in the West Bank and dampen the expectations of their people while presumably giving the United States and the Quartet time to jumpstart a new round of talks between the PA and Israel. It would also get the Obama administration off the hook in terms of having to veto the resolution in the Security Council.
But there are two big problems with this idea.
09.15.2011 - 3:51 PM
The Solyndra train wreck is hard to look away from, but there’s another White House scandal brewing that has the potential to be even more explosive. Eli Lake breaks the story of a 4-star Air Force general who was allegedly pressured by the White House to change testimony he was set to give to Congress, in order to appease a company owned by a major Democratic donor:
According to officials familiar with the situation, Shelton’s prepared testimony was leaked in advance to the company. And the White House asked the general to alter the testimony to add two points: that the general supported the White House policy to add more broadband for commercial use; and that the Pentagon would try to resolve the questions around LightSquared with testing in just 90 days. Shelton chafed at the intervention, which seemed to soften the Pentagon’s position and might be viewed as helping the company as it tries to get the project launched, the officials said.
09.15.2011 - 2:45 PM
In 1822, the Ottomans dispatched 40,000 Turkish troops to the Greek island of Chios with orders to kill all infants under three-years-old, all males over 12-years-old, and all females over 40-years-old, except those willing to convert to Islam. Some 20,000 Greeks were killed and the island was depopulated, eradicating a 2,000 year culture. Two years later, Ottoman soldiers burned the island of Kasos to the ground and killed 7,000 of its inhabitants. Eventually, Europeans navies dispatched by Britain and France, and a navy dispatched by Russia, intervened to stop the atrocities.
In 1876, 8,000 Turkish troops were dispatched to the Bulgarian town of Batak where, after promising to withdraw in exchange for the Bulgarians disarming, they beheaded or burned alive 5,000 of the city’s now-unprotected civilians. The massacre was part of a broader Turkish campaign in which 15,000 Bulgarians were eventually murdered, and which a British investigator described as “perhaps the most heinous crime” of the 1800s. Eventually, the Russians intervened to stop the atrocities.
09.15.2011 - 12:30 PM
Rasmussen has a new poll out showing only 26 percent of American likely voters believe the United Nations General Assembly should pass a resolution affirming unilateral Palestinian independence. Thirty-four percent opposed the resolution and 38 percent thought it would hurt peace talks. Respondents were evenly split on whether the U.S. should cut UN funds in the aftermath of a UDI resolution (35/34).
These numbers are roughly in line with last June’s CNN poll, which showed only 16 percent of Americans think the United States should side with the Palestinians against Israel. To put American feelings on intransigent Palestinian nationalism into perspective, here is a list of other things in which Americans believe:
09.15.2011 - 12:11 PM
In Shakespeare’s comedy, a shrew is known by her “impatient humour,” a “chattering tongue,” “scolding” and “waspish,” bandying “word for word and frown for frown.” She is “froward, peevish, sullen, sour,” and “not obedient to [her husband’s] honest will.” In the end, of course, the shrew is tamed. She places her hand below her husband’s foot.
On the literary level it would be a long time before women, in Gershon Legman’s phrase, carried the war into the camp of the enemy. In his foul-mouthed study of censorship Love and Death, Legman frankly calls the shrew, the “spirited” woman, by a different name:
The bitch has been here before. She was never gone. But, for our generation, first in Gone With the Wind in 1936 was she made a heroine. Margaret Mitchell did for bitchery what Edgar Allan Poe did for murder — she made it respectable.
David Plante suggested a less inflammatory term. His 1983 memoir of Jean Rhys, Germaine Greer, and Sonia Brownell Orwell was called Difficult Women. Whether a woman or man is doing the calling makes a difference. But given her literary pedigree, the not-so-nice woman (whatever she ends up being called) ought to be fair game for male authors as well as female.
When a man takes a shot at her, though, he is likely to be criticized. In a tweet this morning, Holly Robbins agreed with my assessment yesterday that Stoner is a great novel, but she added that “its depictions of the female sex are irritating.” The severe restrictions of a tweet did not give her the chance to elaborate, but Robbins is probably troubled by John Williams’s portrait of Edith Bostwick Stoner, the hero’s wife.
Deeply unhappy and “morosely withdrawn” in the early years of their marriage, Edith returns from her father’s funeral in St. Louis a changed woman. She declares war with her husband over the love of their daughter Grace. She removes Grace’s desk from Stoner’s study — the small desk that stood beside his, where they worked happily together every evening — repainting it a “pale pink, attaching around the top a broad ribbon of matching ruffled satin, so that it bore no resemblance to the desk that Grace had grown used to.” She throws out the clothes that he had bought and buys more “girlish” things. She arranges piano lessons and sits beside Grace on the bench while she practices. She supervises every moment of her daughter’s life. Stoner almost never sees her:
The enormity came upon him gradually, so that it was several weeks before he could admit to himself what Edith was doing; and when he was able at last to make that admission, he made it almost without surprise. Edith’s was a campaign waged with such cleverness and skill that he could find no rational grounds for complaint.
Edith is a moral monster, an infinitely subtle one, and the portrait of her is not demeaned by the fact that she is a woman and her author a man. She is, in fact, one of the greatest, um, difficult women in contemporary literature.
Who are the others? There are bad girlfriends (Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim), bad wives (Antonia Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head), bad mothers (Rosemary Porter in Francine Prose’s Primitive People), bad daughters (Ginny Smith in Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres), bad women to have as adversaries (Hester Lilt in Cynthia Ozick’s Cannibal Galaxy.
Easily the most brilliant portrait of a self-described “harridan” is Zoë Heller’s novel of three years ago The Believers. Audrey Litvinoff is described by her friends in New York as the “cute little English girl with the chutzpah and the longshoreman’s mouth.” Or at least she once was. Now 58, she has lost her cuteness — her friends now scowl behind her back — but she has not lost her “ugly view of the world.” She drops F-bombs in every other sentence, accuses everyone (but herself) of bad faith and shallow self-interest, disparages her daughters without letup or charity. She is unforgettable. But because of Audrey’s unflagging nastiness, her daughters’ independent decisions to go their own separate ways come off as acts of moral courage.
Even in fiction written by a woman, a wicked woman has her uses.
The Wall Street Journal has a great story today about the severe difficulties the military services face because of aging equipment. The lead anecdote says it all:
When Lt. David A. Deptula II, an Air Force pilot, climbed into his fighter plane at Kadena Air Force Base in Japan in 2008, it wasn’t the first time a pilot named David Deptula had been at the controls. Lt. Deptula’s father flew the very same F-15 when it was fresh off the McDonnell Douglas Corp. assembly line 30 years earlier.
09.15.2011 - 11:50 AM
Obama’s $38.6 billion green energy loan guarantee program created 3,500 jobs in two years, the Washington Post reported today. In other words, the White House is just 61,500 jobs short of reaching its promised goal:
A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.
09.15.2011 - 11:30 AM
The government of Azerbaijan is determined to resist radicalization. That’s no easy feat: Shi’ite Muslim Azerbaijan shares a 400-mile border with the Islamic Republic of Iran which has consistently sought to undermine the Azerbaijani state and which offers lucrative scholarships and subsidies to Azerbaijani imams in order to get them to accept Iran’s revolutionary interpretation of Shi’ite Islam.
Enter the State Department: While the Azeri Education Ministry prepares to crack down on those who violate its ban on hijab in schools, the State Department has criticized the secular republic for violating religious freedom. Meanwhile, Azeri girls are caught in the middle. Al-Arabiya quoted an Education Ministry spokeswoman as saying, “We are getting calls from girls who inform us anonymously that they do want to go to school but their parents don’t let them do so, saying that they must wear the hijab.” The Al-Arabiya story continued, “The State Department also criticized the Azerbaijani government for the continued closure of several mosques and for increasing fines for violating laws regulating religious activities.”
09.15.2011 - 11:10 AM
These are themes better dealt with in extended articles than short blog posts — and the issues inevitably get lost in the tempo of election seasons, which are seemingly always now — but cultural decency matters, and moral fortitude matters, and social cohesion matters. And Britain is thoroughly hosed:
Three-quarters had a previous caution or conviction, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show, and those with a criminal record averaged 15 offenses. This showed “existing criminals were on the rampage,” said Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke. The justice system needed changes “to ensure both effective punishment and reform to tackle reoffending,” he said. “I am dismayed to see a hardcore of repeat offenders back in the system.”
09.15.2011 - 10:50 AM
The answer to that question is certainly no. While I may disagree with Powell’s foreign policy recommendations while he was Secretary of State and subsequently, he has served the United States honorably in a variety of capacities. The State Department should tread carefully, however, as its allies in Europe and the organizations it funds in the United Nations embrace the trope that disproportionate force is somehow wrong. The Turkish government, for example, has dismissed the legitimacy of the Palmer Commission but seized upon its findings that Israeli forces used disproportionate force. It has also embraced similar testimony by self-described human rights experts and UN bureaucrats to the UN Human Rights Council to complain about disproportionate violence.
Now let’s consider the Powell Doctrine through the same lens. Part of the Powell Doctrine declares, “When a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing U.S. casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.”
09.15.2011 - 10:30 AM
Most would agree that reducing our dependence on Middle East oil is an economic and national security imperative. But with the recent collapse of Solyndra – and warning signs that other government-supported alternative energy companies may follow suit –there are clearly financial risks that come with the federal government subsidizing the clean energy industry.
At the Washington Examiner, Reps. Mike Pompeo and Jeff Flake make the case that these subsidies actually keep the U.S. reliant on foreign oil because they distort the alternative energy market:
09.15.2011 - 10:10 AM
According to a Turkish news agency, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised religious freedom in Turkey, saying, “Turkey also now allows women to wear headscarves at universities, which means female students no longer have to choose between their religion and their education.”
If this statement is accurate, Clinton accepts the Islamist argument hook, line, and sinker. Let’s put aside the idea that head scarves or full veiling, as is increasingly common in some segments of Turkish society, is ‘”religion.” The Quran talks about the importance of modesty, but Muslims communities are not homogenous and not every Muslim accepts Saudi interpretations of Islamic law.
09.15.2011 - 9:52 AM
I certainly agree with Jonathan that it’s amusing to see Democratic pundits up in arms over a “nefarious” attempt by the Republicans to glom onto some of next year’s electoral votes in Pennsylvania. But I’m always amazed at how many people who write about politics have memories whose span can apparently be measured in nanoseconds. In 2004, Pennsylvania Democrats were touting an initiative to have the state’s electoral votes allocated according to the popular vote. Kerry ended up carrying the state narrowly, so they were lucky their bright idea went nowhere, and he ended up with all the votes.
And, of course, after the Electoral College gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 although Al Gore won a very narrow plurality of the popular vote, Democrats were loudly demanding the abolition of the Electoral College altogether.
09.15.2011 - 9:33 AM
Last weekend, when the Israeli embassy was being ransacked by an Egyptian mob, Prime Minister Netanyahu called the White House to ask for American assistance. To his credit, President Obama took the call and promised to help. The head of Egypt’s military government, who couldn’t be found when the Israelis had tried to reach him, turned up to respond to the American request, and the desperate situation was back under control. The six Israelis who were trapped in the embassy got out alive. For this, President Obama deserves Israel’s thanks.
But for defenders of the administration, this was more than a praiseworthy episode. For liberal groups like the Israel Policy Forum and liberal newspapers like the Forward, the Obama phone call was a vindication of the administration’s entire record on the Middle East and Israel. According to the latter, this one incident discredited all complaints against Obama for his behavior toward the Jewish state during his time in office. While Obama is entitled to take credit for doing the right thing here, the notion this means he ought to get a pass on everything else that he’s done isn’t merely absurd. It is, in fact, a good example of what Obama’s defenders have accused the right of doing: exploiting Israel for partisan political purposes.
09.15.2011 - 9:00 AM
The Obama administration failed to heed numerous warnings from government experts that a long-term care insurance program included in the health care reform act was unsustainable, and continued to promote the initiative to the public, according to emails released by a Republican congressional working group today (read the full working group report here).
Republicans have questioned the solvency of the CLASS Act, a long-term insurance entitlement pushed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, since its inception. But the subpoenaed emails show the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Health and Human Services department staffers were also raising alarms about the program, only to be ignored by other administration officials and congressional Democrats.
