09.20.2011 - 5:35 PM
To lose generally sympathetic pundits in the aftermath of a speech isn’t the end of the world. But it can tell you something.
Two moderate-to-conservative columnists, Ross Douthat and David Brooks, have been as favorable to President Obama as one could reasonably hope, given their political philosophies. That’s particularly true of David. So it’s worth noting that yesterday’s jobs-and-budget speech by Obama lost both men.
09.20.2011 - 5:15 PM
Rick Santorum’s inability to break out of the second tier of Republican presidential candidates despite some spirited performances in recent debates must be galling for the former senator from Pennsylvania. But though his frustration is understandable, some of his attacks on frontrunner Rick Perry are not. Santorum has lashed out at Perry at every opportunity lately, but his assault on the Texas governor for having the chutzpah to agree with him on the Middle East verges on satire.
According to Politico, Santorum was angry Perry gave a speech in New York this morning denouncing the Palestinians’ attempt to get the United Nations to recognize their independence without first making peace with Israel. Perry also rightly denounced the fecklessness of the Obama administration that had made this diplomatic debacle for U.S. foreign policy possible. But Santorum was having none of it, even though he agreed with more or less every word Perry said. “I’ve forgotten more about Israel than Rick Perry knows about Israel. There he is, reading a speech, that I’m sure he didn’t write, and has never taken a position on any of this stuff before, and [the media is] taking this guy seriously.”
09.20.2011 - 4:55 PM
An article published yesterday in Foreign Affairs by the Palestinian-American anti-Israel writer Ali Abunimah is one more particularly telling road mark of the march of the idea that a Jewish state is morally illegitimate.
Ostensibly, Abuminah’s article is about grass roots Palestinian opposition to Mahmoud Abbas’ plan to seek statehood recognition at the UN this week. It should be noted that is most likely the reason why the editors at Foreign Affairs chose to run the thing: a contrarian point of view from a robustly credentialed Palestinian source. Abuminah, after all, is both a New York Times published “journalist” and the unapologetically anti-Israel founder of the blog Electronic Intifada.
It is hard to find an act more symbolic than the slaying of a man whose job it was to make peace. So it was with the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan, a former leader of both the anti-Soviet mujahideen and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, a leader of the Tajiks, and lately head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. Apparently, Rabbani received a Taliban envoy or a former Taliban member in his home, and as a sign of trust, his bodyguards did not search the man, who then proceeded to repay Rabbani’s hospitality by blowing up his turban and killing himself and his host.
For those who may have had high and exaggerated expectations for talks with the Taliban, this is an unfortunate reminder that the “peace process” in Afghanistan is about as promising as the one in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. At least for the time being. The difference is that in Afghanistan, unlike in Israel and the Palestinian territories, it is possible to imagine conditions that could lead to fruitful negotiations before long. That would be the imminent defeat of the Taliban—something that is within the power of international forces and their Afghan allies to bring about. Israel could also defeat Fatah, Hamas, etc., but refuses to do so because it doesn’t want to re-occupy Palestinian territory—not an issue in Afghanistan where it’s simply a matter of extending the authority of the lawfully constituted Afghan government.
09.20.2011 - 3:25 PM
The Associated Press and the Washington Post have begun fact-checking President Obama’s speech yesterday. They essentially demolish the claims of the president.
According to the AP, for example:
09.20.2011 - 3:02 PM
As expected, it looks like Rep. Darrell Issa will launch an investigation into whether the Obama administration gave any improper political assistance to broadband company LightSquared, The Hill reports:
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that his committee plans to investigate government loan programs to private corporations in light of allegations of improper dealings between the White House and failed energy company Solyndra and wireless start-up LightSquared.
09.20.2011 - 2:14 PM
Obama’s budget plan calls for $13 in tax hikes $11 in tax hikes for every dollar in spending cuts when you account for all the budgetary gimmicks the White House included.
And as the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee found, Obama’s plan is stuffed to the breaking point with budget tricks. If you thought some of the Democratic deficit plans during the debt ceiling debate were deceptive, you haven’t seen anything yet:
09.20.2011 - 1:30 PM
The two leading Republican presidential contenders weighed in today on the Palestinian initiative at the United Nations. Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney urged the administration to threaten to cut off the flow of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority to persuade them to back off on their attempt to evade peace talks by trying to get the UN to unilaterally grant them statehood. In addition, both believe the United States must also re-evaluate funding of any U.N. agency or organization that recognizes Palestinian independence under these circumstances.
The administration seems to have no interest in such a tactic, and it is likely the statements of both Perry and Romney will be dismissed by the media as mere politicking that displays little insight about the intricacies of international diplomacy. But both the administration and the media will be wrong about that. After months of futile attempts at appeasing the Palestinians in order to get them to abandon their UN gambit, it is high time the United States exercises its not inconsiderable leverage over both the PA and the UN.
09.20.2011 - 12:45 PM
Michael Gerson writes today he is confident GOP primary voters will nominate Mitt Romney over Rick Perry because Romney seems to be the “safe” candidate at a turbulent hour in American economic history. Gerson writes that Republicans prefer to elect known quantities and are wary of nationally-untested firebrands.
“None of these historical precedents make Romney a shoo-in,” Gerson writes. “But they indicate his prospects are better than his current polling.” That’s probably true, and some polls–especially state polls–indicate Romney is still in the game. But Romney’s “safety” isn’t the advantage Gerson thinks it is, and more importantly, many writers and pundits are probably underestimating the appeal of Perry’s unapologetic conservatism to general election voters as well as Republican primary voters.
09.20.2011 - 12:20 PM
CNN is reporting that despite the failure of American and European efforts to persuade the Palestinian Authority to back off on their plan to demand statehood from the United Nations, they have now fallen back to a last-ditch attempt to stall them. This would involve PA head Mahmoud Abbas delivering a letter to the UN Security Council while not seeking to force an immediate vote.
This would at least put off the moment when the United States is forced to veto the measure and allow more time for pressure to resume peace negotiations. One U.S. diplomat, speaking anonymously, told CNN: “It actually is a good idea because it is like a Damocles hanging over our heads. It creates an urgency to start negotiations.” But this just shows how badly the administration has misread the situation. Far from acting to jump-start the peace process, the delay will merely serve to further isolate Israel and the United States while allowing the Palestinians to preen on the international stage without conceding anything.
So far, revolutionary Libya appears to be doing fairly well. It has not seen a breakdown of law and order as occurred in post-Baathist Iraq. So it would appear the concerns of those of us who called for the dispatch of an international peacekeeping force were exaggerated. Or were they? It’s too soon to say, but reading articles like this one in the Washington Post certainly raises one’s level of concern:
Less than a month after rebels captured Tripoli and forced longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi to flee, revolutionary militia groups are sweeping up any weapons they can find, often from huge unguarded weapons dumps left behind by Qaddafi’s forces.
09.20.2011 - 11:09 AM
In re-reading yesterday’s speech by President Obama, several things stand out.
The first is its crass distortions. In his remarks in the Rose Garden, the president said, “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit … then the logic, the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more: We’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.” As others have pointed out, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes and the richest one percent pay more than 30 percent of their income to the federal government, while the average worker pays less than 14 percent. In addition, almost half of the public do not pay any income taxes at all. This is known as a progressive tax system. Now, one may argue the wealthy should pay even more than they do in taxes – but to pretend not embracing Obama’s plan would place the “entire” burden on the middle class and the poor isn’t “math”; it’s a massive distortion.
09.20.2011 - 10:10 AM
Not if American novelists hope to regain a prominent place in the culture, concludes Dwight Garner in the magazine section of Sunday’s New York Times. He singles out Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen for special reproof. Eugenides’s last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, was published nine years ago. (The Marriage Plot, his third novel in 18 years, will be released in three weeks.) Franzen has been equally deliberate, taking nine years to finish this third novel and then another nine to finish last year’s Freedom.
Garner is convinced that something “meaningful” is going on here, even if his prose style is not up to the task of saying what the thing might be:
[T]hese long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.
This much is sure: Garner would be well-advised not to write a novel of his own. From what I can make out between the strained grunts of pseudo-profundity, novelists need to publish more often to keep their names before the public. What they lack is market presence. A whole generation of writers, Garner moans, is relatively absent from the culture. Maybe they should hire Sidney Falco.
Garner has muddled together two separate observations. On the one hand, some novelists are slower and less prolific than others. Yet their rate of production has little or nothing to do with their “place in the culture” (whatever that means exactly). W. Somerset Maugham (b. 1874) and E. M. Forster (b. 1876) were contemporaries. Maugham published 20 novels at the rate of a new one every two-and-a-half years. Forster started quickly, publishing four novels in five years. But he took a decade to write his masterpiece — A Passage to India — and then did not publish another novel in his lifetime (he died in 1970). Even Maugham, though, worked for seven years on his best book (Of Human Bondage). In the long view of literary history, Forster is easily the more important, the more “meaningful,” English novelist. And not even Maugham’s most dedicated readers have longed for more books like The Bishop’s Apron or The Hour before Dawn. Good books, not more books — that’s the message of literary history.
On the other hand, the novel has obviously declined in cultural significance. No one would deny that. The empty-headed distinction between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” which continues to be thrown around as if it referred to anything more than an inability to read intelligently, is testament to the novel’s decline. As much as I disliked Freedom, Franzen’s ambition to write a “big social novel,” to undertake the “job of social instruction,” is admirable. Novelists may not be “color commentators” (my God, what stupid language!), but they are part of the American discussion, the constant back-and-forth over American ideals and values, and they should write as if they are.
If what Garner calls their “lagging output” is not the reason for their cultural decline, then, what is? The answer is not so difficult. “Our important writers” — the writers who are known as “literary,” the writers who are “serious” about literature — belong to a coherent and homogeneous social class. They receive a common education in English departments and writers’ workshops, where they inherit a common set of assumptions and principles. They are employed in a common profession, which nurtures a common lifestyle. Their entire approach to human experience is literary (this is the sense in which they deserve to be known as “literary writers”), because they know little else than literature. Their politics are shallow and predictable, because their political views are public displays of self-identification with their class. They have not the first idea what non-writers and non-academics do with themselves all day. The only conceivable human problems are the problems of literary intellectuals.
There are exceptions. Earlier this year Roland Merullo’s Talk-Funny Girl and Lee Martin’s Break the Skin plunged into the lives of people far removed from literary society, whose problems are matters of life and death. Neither book, however, received much attention. No surprise, really. Readers have come to expect a certain uniformity of tastes and social habits, a certain language of class fellowship and commonality, from fiction that is known as “literary.” And even good books by good writers suffer by association.
09.20.2011 - 9:52 AM
Yesterday, I asked why Israel should keep signing agreements with the Palestinians if the world won’t enforce previous ones? This question has an important corollary: Why should Israel keep making concessions if it gets no credit for previous ones?
A recent New York Times editorial demonstrates the problem in microcosm. While various parties share blame for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, it opined, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has been the most intractable, building settlements and blaming his inability to be more forthcoming on his conservative coalition.”
