Jeremiah Wright=Falstaff?
Eve Fairbanks and I diavlogged yesterday on, among other things, the critical issue of whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush more resembles Prince Hal of Henry IV parts 1 and 2:
Tag: "bloggingheads"
Arrrrrr!!!!!!!
Matt Duss and I diavlog away, touching upon such subjects as piracy, the Clash of Civilizations, turkey, the Sound of Music, and Matt’s prospects for replacing Alan Colmes:
Alterman vs. Hitch
Christopher Hitchens has returned from an alternate dimension, bringing a tale of terror and woe. Actually, that would explain a lot…
If someone hacked Hitch’s gmail account and activated Mail Goggles, how long would it take the rest of the world to notice his absence?
Ackerman from Afghanistan
Last week, Spencer Ackerman and I diavlogged about Afghanistan. Spencer was in Kabul at the time; I was merely in Cincinnati…
Also check out Spencer’s Afghanistan coverage at the Washington Independent.
NATO and Moral Hazard
This diavlog is tagged “Liberal vs. Libertarian Foreign Policy”; I guess I’m not convinced that there’s such a thing as a libertarian foreign policy (seems all warmed over realism to me), but then again I tend to be suspicious of claims that the word policy can be accurately used to characterize the anything that libertarians come up with. In any case, Preble does seem to get the moral hazard aspects of letting Georgia into NATO correct. But then Hurlburt correctly points out that not every alliance results in reckless behavior; Preble doesn’t have much of a response to that.
More Blather About Georgia
For alcoholics, angry loners, and the unemployable who happen to have 50 minutes to kill…. Heilbrunn is a little bit more Realist than myself, but I think that we have pretty similar instincts regarding the crisis. On the other hand, we disagreed about the appropriateness of the John Edwards coverage; that comes in about the last five minutes or so.
In other news, the Georgians appear to be displeased at the lack of a more forceful American response. This, as much as anything, gives an indication as to what Georgia thought it was buying with its Iraq deployment:
As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”
Great Power Confrontation for its Own Sake
I know that most people don’t have time, but this diavlog between Francis Fukuyama and Bob Kagan is really worth watching in its entirety. I think Fukuyama goes a bit easy on Kagan, but then many of Kagan’s arguments are self-refuting; in particular, his claim that if China were actually a status quo power, then it would maintain a much smaller military than its economic and geographic positions indicate is laughable both from a realist theoretical point of view and in the context of the massive military buildup that the US has pursued over the last eight years.
Hurlburt-Farley Death Match
Heather Hurlburt and I have an entirely-too-cordial discussion at Bloggingheads…
Yglesias vs. Kirchick
The main point here seems to be that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says many things about Israel, and that the sum total of these things is incoherent contradiction. As such, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to credit what he says to one audience (the Iranian people) more than what he says to another (the international community), given that he may have incentive to deceive both. Of course, Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel certainly call for some scrutiny, but I doubt that Kirchick credits the Iranian president’s statements about the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, the “You’ve criticized Dick Cheney 103 times, but haven’t mentioned Attila the Hun even once; is Cheney really worse than the Scourge of God?” construction is just about the most useless talking point that Kirchick could have invoked.
The other point seems to be that Yglesias needs to regrow the beard.
