Publius and JMM draw one of the obvious implications from Verizon’s bizarre decision to refuse to carry pro-choice text messages because of their “unsavory” nature. This does make me think that it’s time to switch to digital phone service…
Presidential sock analyst Ann Althouse complains about Jeffrey Toobin’s new book…for being too concerned with gossip and trivia and reading too much into anecdotal evidence, rather than more rigorous, serious thinking like seeing vaginas in non-labia shaped fast-food items denied a man who recently had a quadruple bypass. I swear.
Any of Marc’s “political prognosticators and Iowa Democrats” who’d like to do some gambling on the democratic primary should contact me immediately. Name your own odds!
Apparently Biden thinks that his “sophisticated message about the Iraq war” is one his major assets here. If he thinks the electorate in Iowa and elsewhere really wants to hear about the Iraq war is more “sophistication” he’s living in a different country than I am. The last line of Marc’s piece rings sadly true:
“A figure of some celebrity, he will rely on his public image to keep him on television until then.”
It’s amazing to think that just one month ago the Mets seemed to have one of the best bullpens in the league…
Ben Nelson (DINO-Nebraska) signals that he will, of course, defect to Republican position, allowing Hans von Spakovsky to get to the full Senate. Of course, maybe the full Senate will vote agai…no, really, I can’t even type something so implausible.
I think that Dan Drezner’s effort at refuting Rick Perlstein’s Khruschev-Ahmadinejad comparison is quite weak. Dan is correct to point out the dangers of historical analogy, but I find the one Perlstein makes pretty solid. Dan’s points:
1) The USSR was an acknowledged superpower; Iran is not. And yes, these things should matter in how foreign potentates are treated. And last I checked, neither Hu Jintao nor Vladimir Putin has complained about their treatment in visits to the United States during the Bush years. In fact, as Matt Zeitlin observes, Hu got the 21-gun salute and exchange of toasts the last time he was in the USA.
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t exactly argue in favor of the hysterical response to Ahmadinejad. Since the point of the wingnutty is that Ahmadinejad is EVIL DANGER EVIL DANGER EVIL DANGER EVIL and must be silenced at all costs, the comparison seems quite apt. Nikita Khruschev had in his hands the power to destroy the United States, or at least a very large part of it. He was also a direct lieutenant of Joseph Stalin, and guilty of untold crimes against humanity. Ahmadinejad has very limited power in a country that has no nuclear weapons and is trivially weak compared to the United States. Why the latter merits a more hysterical response is utterly unclear to me.
2) Khrushchev had no problem wearing a tuxedo and delighting in the petty charms of the bourgeoisie as it were. If we even offered a white tie dinner to Ahmadinejad, does anyone think he’d actually accept? And what would he wear? This sounds like a small difference, but it’s symbolic of the larger cultural gap that exists between Iran and the U.S. than existed between the superpowers during the Cold War.
True enough, but it’s unclear to me why this matters. Ahmadinejad doesn’t wear neckties and Khruschev did; is Dan suggesting that this somehow justifies the difference in reception? I don’t even think it explains, much less justifies… certainly the United States has entertained other world leaders despite significant cultural differences.
3) In 1959, the Soviets weren’t viewed as defecting from the tacit rules regarding nuclear weapons. Once they were suspected of violating those rules, I’m astonished to report that Cold War liberals started acting in a different manner.
Take a look, for example, at this video of Adlai Stevenson’s famous 1962 UN speech in which he confronted Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba — glamorized in Thirteen Days.
Click on over and check out the speech for yourself. We get nuggets like these:
Mr. Zorin and gentlemen, I want to say to you, Mr. Zorin, that I don’t have your talent for obfuscation, for distortion, for confusing language, and for doubletalk. And I must confess to you that I’m glad I don’t.
Wow, that Stevenson was a pants-piddler, wasn’t he?
I’m utterly befuddled by the point that Dan is trying to make here; obviously, the United States and the Soviet Union had important policy differences, engaged in competitive behavior, and often used sharp rhetoric against one another. I don’t at all understand how this relates to the Ahmadinejad situation; if anything, liberals have been quite positive regarding the use of sharp rhetoric against Iran, preferring it to, say, bombs. Indeed, I suspect that if Iran tried to deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba, American liberals would be rather put out. That’s kind of the point; when we’re deciding which things we should be afraid of, we ought to choose the scary things.
If I may, I believe the point that Perlstein was trying to make was that the United States had good reason to fear Khruschev’s tanks, planes, and nuclear weapons, but none at all to fear his rhetoric. Ahmadinejad doesn’t even have the tanks, so it’s unclear why right blogistan, “Hacksaw” Jim Bunning, and the great hosts of the wingnutty have been having a freak out orgy for the last two weeks.
MoDo demonstrates that using fake Reagan nostalgia to critique George W. Bush is just as absurd as using fake Truman nostalgia to scold the Democrats. Here she is, in medias gibberish:
The Soviet Union’s stated policy for 70 years was the total eradication of American capitalism and democracy — backed up during the cold war with actual nuclear weapons. But while challenging the policies and ideology of the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan understood he had to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, not ignore or insult him. . . .Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?
For starters, I can’t imagine what rhetorical advantage Dowd believes she’ll gain by equating the Soviet Union (ca. 1987) with Iran (ca. 2007). Even if you oppose Bush’s policies toward Iran, this is a bovine comparison that unnecessarily accepts the framework being provided by the bombs-over-Tehran lobby. It’s perfectly possible, as Matt Duss reminds us, to castigate the Bush administration for missed opportunities in its relationship with Iran. This can be done, however, without resorting to more Reagan mythology that defines Reagan’s foreign policy by forgetting all but the last two years of his administration.
Rob has already said much of what needs to be said about the “status quo” nature of the Soviet state from — I’d argue — the late 1960s onward. When a nation with more arable land than any other country on earth is forced (as the Soviets were after 1971) to import grain from the nation whose “total eradication” it supposedly seeks, one would be wise — especially in retrospect — not to overstate that nation’s inherent might. Even Reagan’s speechwriters and advisers understood this, which is part of the reason that his administration could opt for a more aggressive policy of “rollback” in the so-called Third World, where the Soviets were alleged to be “on the march.” Rollback, not dialogue, was thus the Reagan administration’s weapon of choice against the Soviet “threat,” and it either created or prolonged bloody disasters in Nicaragua, El Salvador Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia and — cough cough — Iraq and Iran.
Dowd probably knows this, though I’m open to alternative explanations. Then again, since the range of acceptable statements about the Reagan Cold War has been permanently narrowed for the pundit class, I can’t say I’d be surprised either way.
. . . Obviously, I wasn’t clear enough here for at least one reader.
My argument is pretty simple: if Dowd wants to scold Bush for not being diplomatic enough with Iran, she’d do well to leave the Reagan mythology out of it. When someone urges a more “Reaganesque” line, they’re doing more, I think, than just emphasizing “one aspect” of Reagan’s legacy — they’re buying into the notion that at the end of the day, Reagan’s foreign policy was really quite sensible. Perhaps by comparison to Bush’s policy, that’s so — but compared to Bush’s policy, nearly anything would.
Moreover, when Dowd urges a more “Reaganesque” stance toward Iran, she’s obscuring the fact that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviets was conditioned by their strengths (e.g., they could in theory have killed us all) as well as their weaknesses (e.g., their sickened economy and lopsided state). Reagan’s actions in the Third World — including Iran — were shaped solely by their weaknesses (or his administration’s sense of those weaknesses.) Bush’s policy toward Iran is a fucking catastrophe in the making, but the making of that catastrophe has roots that stretch back to the Reagan years. If Dowd wants to compare and contrast Bush’s policies with Reagan’s, she should actually compare them in a way that makes sense.
The great Dahlia Lithwick explains why Democrats should not vote for Hans von Spakovsky, just as he would prefer that they not vote for anything else:
Von Spakovsky currently sits on the FEC as a result of a recess appointment made by President Bush in January of 2006. Before that he served as counsel to the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Von Spakovsky’s Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section from its “historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.” The authors named him as the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”
“If von Spakovsky is confirmed,” Lithwick notes, “it will be yet more evidence that Democrats have no more regard for the rule of law, or the integrity of the Justice Department, than Karl Rove does.” Indeed.
I should also say, since some commenters in various discussions seem to miss this distinction, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring Voter ID to vote. If IDs were provided by the state, made easy to obtain, and part of a general policy was to maximize voter turnout, an ID requirement would be fine. But many actual Voter ID laws — which are advanced by people who don’t favor measures to increase voting, are supported by people who have no problem with much more susceptible to fraud but GOP-skewing absentee voting, and are not supported by any actual evidence that people voting under other names is a remotely significant problem — are simply a pretext for suppressing Democratic turnout and should be rejected.
…Christy has a good roundup here.
Matt and Ezra cite this wonderful Rick Perlstein post, with Ezra adding the following:
Remember here that the Soviet Union wasn’t just a mean country. It was the epicenter of an expansionistic ideology that believed its historical triumph to be pre-assured. It was as religious as any religion. And it actually had a basis for this belief, as communism was a superficially attractive ideology that was attracting adherents in major countries — the US included. And yet we not only dealt with the Soviets, but spoke to their leaders and welcomed them on our soil. Because we were the superpower, and we believed in our country.
Elements of that are debatable; I for one think that, ideology aside, the Soviet Union was pretty much a status quo state during the bulk of the Cold War. What’s interesting, though, is that while the common conservative rejoinder to the Iran-USSR comparison is now “Yeah, but those Iranians are crazy!”, back in the Cold War, the Founding Fathers of neoconservatism went out of their way to argue that the Soviet Union couldn’t be deterred, either. The motivating logic of Team B was not, officially, to wildly overstate Soviet military power (although it succeeded in doing that), but rather to argue that the Soviet Union was developing an offensive nuclear doctrine and capability and would make deterrence irrelevant.
In other words, it’s the same argument, over and over again. The difference is that today, the nutjobs have been allowed to take over the asylum. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan were smart enough to understand the distinction between rhetoric and action, and how to prevent the former from overtaking the latter. That doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case with the current crop…
I’ve been remiss in not writing about the Jena 6. There are excuses but I am not offering them. Just going to jump right in.
Reed Walters, the District Attorney who has led the prosecution against the Jena 6 (more here and here), defends himself in a column in today’s NY Times. His defense: there was no crime with which to charge the white kids who hung up the nooses, and the Jena 6 deserved the charges they got. Oh, and PS, my black friend couldn’t figure out what to charge the white kids with either.
My problems with this are manifold, but in sum:
(1) While a hate crime charge might not be possible (or advisable) against the kids responsible for the nooses because there is no predicate offense on which to hang that aggravating charge, what about harassment? I’m not sure how it’s worded in the Louisiana code, admittedly, but the resort to “my black friend says so too” immediately makes me suspicious.
(2) Why not then at least verbally condemn what the kids did in putting up those nooses (which he finally does in the column) by calling for harsher punishment at school?
(3) The reasoning behind the decision to charge Mychal Ball as an adult is flimsy at best. His attack was by surprise (so the DA says)? Still not enough to try to throw a high school kid in jail for double-digit years. Besides, witnesses say that it wasn’t he who threw that first punch.
(4) Oh, and if you leave out the information about the allegedly provocative statements made by the “victim” of the attack, he sounds more sympathetic (oh, and PS, all the white supremacist and other racist websites are holding him up as a hero).
(5) Walters conveniently leaves out all of the other icky racist details: the all-white jury, the fact that all 10 students who testified against Bell were white, the fact that there was a “white tree” to begin with.
I’m sure Pam Spaulding and others will have their two cents later. But my first reactions ranged from “oh please” to “I think I am going to be sick.”
Mr Shandy asks an important question: now that The Left is no longer blogging, can its presence in the blogospehere ever be regained? Alas, until Ward Churchill starts blogging, I’m not sure that there can be a true representative…
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
