I loathe HRC, but someone on Yglesias's thread claimed that Obama's plan allows for the same US behavior. I think voters will have to make judgments about expected behavior in office independent of any broad policy announcement.
Sure -- anyone who gets elected is going to do whatever seems like a good idea at the time they make the decision based on the information they have then. But if she's confident now that leaving troops in Iraq long-term is going to be a good idea, I don't want her running things.
I'm agnostic about your conclusion, but I find the argument unconvincing. Taking each disjunct in turn:
But if we stop fighting and leave troops there, there's either going to be an ongoing civil war, at which point stationing our troops in the middle of it seems like an equally bad idea
"Civil war" covers a variety of scenarios, and even a paradigm case of civil war doesn't have fighting distributed equally over the whole geographic area. It isn't clear that all scenarios that count as civil war are incompatible with the tasks HRC lays out.
or a stable government with control over Iraq is going to emerge. At which point, oh, I don't know, doesn't the Iraqi government get a say as to whether we've got troops there?
Again, these are artificially clear lines. First, the emergence of such a government takes time; second, it's not obvious that the Iraqi government that does emerge would be opposed to US presence. Presumably HRC is committing to providing the right incentives, or something like this, to avoid being a presence hostile to the legitimate government. (This seems more likely given the probability that an emerging government would be less than ideally stable, and thus would be more in need of various sorts of assistance.)
You're right that the argument is unconvincing -- it's more referred to than made. But my problem with her position is that it appears to be a committment to keeping troops in Iraq, as if she's certain it's going to be a good idea. I can conceive of circumstances under which it might be, but I can't see planning on them from where we stand now.
I don't really think that this has a lot to do with any actual choice in Iraq. She's just stating her intention of being the hawkiest Democrat in the primary, and not being outhawked by the Republicans in the general.
"You can't be a dove" is the most absolute DLC principle. It's usually expressed "The American people will not vote for a dove", but I think that it's more than that. One popular theory of government holds that the electorate should have no input on foreign policy at all, and it's not just Republicans who think that.
It's unfortunate that the sensible thing to say ("damned if I know; depends on what the situation in Jan 09 is like") is not something one could say in a campaign.
Ditto. Her comment with regards to General Pace was also lame. HRC could have pointed out, for instance, that military personnel are constrained in their expression of personal and political opinion. That General Pace, for instance, broke protocol by reserving for himself the right to express an opinion whereas lower ranking officers and enlistees would be censured and reprimanded for similar conduct. Furthermore, HRC could have said something like: "Yes, there are gays in the military. They suffer casualties like all other soldiers and are deserving of nothing less than highest honors for their service and sacrifice." That is what she could have said, but didn't. Instead, we are getting cellophane wrapping without content.
Her comment with regards to General Pace was also lame.
Right. What would have been so hard about saying that while General Pace can, in his private capacity, think whatever he likes about the morality of homosexuality, it's not his job as a general to opine on it, and that for her own part, she thinks there's nothing immoral about it?
I suspect most elite foreign-policy types, regardless of party affiliation, don't ever want to get US troops out of Iraq altogether. Permanent bases in the heart of the Middle East are just too tempting to pass up.
9: And they're going to be a necessity until we don't need the oil. That doesn't mean US troops have to be in the middle, they can be on the edges.
Look, two of my Gurus are Stirling Newberry and Ian Welsh. "Oldman" used to be before his tragic death. They all opposed the Iraq War, and all loathe HRC. Newberry pretty much despises the Democratic Party entire, and blames most of modern problems on elites protecting their privilege, from IP to globalization to War.
However, without speaking for them, my impression is that they think withdrawal from Iraq will be followed by depression or other econo-political cataclysm, and they believe the major effort should be directed toward preventing the full turn toward fascism that would follow. It may not be possible to prevent. If it is possible,only counter-revolution,of a nature you will not enjoy, will prevent it.
HRC and the Establishment is simply stalling and delaying, largely to their own benefit, like Kerensky was stalling and delaying, because Kerensky thought his interests coincided with Russia's just a little bit. That is the way to look at HRC, as Kerensky, who also continued the war.
Y'all are wildly underestimating how fucked we are.
Of course, if I'd been a middle-class Petrograder in the summer of '17 I'd have secretly rooted for Kerensky to hold out longer. Especially 'cause what followed was bound to really suck.
In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence -- even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.
Isn't this actually the worst bit? What's the point of keeping troops there if they're going to twiddle their thumbs?
11 - I read BOP News for a while on your advice, and I never got what you saw in it. They have interesting ideas, but I was never tempted to actually believe any of them.
I didn't understand your Kerensky example. If disaster will follow withdrawal, then that's an argument that our modern-day Kernesky is right.
The Kerensky comparison is pretty apt, actually.
3: In talking about proposals re: Iraq, it's strange how many people seem to forget that American troops have spent the least few years killing, beating, "detaining" (and worse), robbing, invading the homes of and otherwise antagonizing the populace of Iraq as part of a vain attempt to engage a largely invisible enemy. That's a fundamental part of considering the "tasks" HRC lays out. It's why the idea of American troops staying to "deter Iranian aggression" or "fight al-Qaeda" is so absurd (never mind "protect the Kurds" -- hello, wider war over Kurdistan). American troops basically have a choice at this point between being in the open and drawing fire or sheltering in expensively fortified Green Zones. Either HRC knows this and is not being straight about it, or she doesn't know it and is useless. I think LB's position is the correct one.
She's just stating her intention of being the hawkiest Democrat in the primary
Yep, which she has stated time and again. Ergo, not in a million years would I vote for her in a primary.
On a somewhat lighter note, a little man-in-the-street perspective on the war from Canada, overheard on yesterday's commute:
MULLET GUY #1: ...no, man, seriously. These boots are ventilated. Military issue.
MULLET GUY#2: Serious? Canadian military?
MULLET GUY #1: American.
MULLET GUY #2: (long thoughtful pause) Jesus Christ, no wonder they're losing, eh?
Couldn't see whether the boots in question really were American army boots or not.
Abandoning America ...Thomas Palley is a Washington economist. He has numbers and jargon, but I would call what he is discussing "capital flight" As in Halliburton moving to Dubai.
Let's see, starting with Reagan, the rich rip-off the workers with FICA meaningless pieces of paper and then thru globalization move their wealth overseas. I bet they have passports.
The Kerensky example is apt, but I don't see what that has to do with the inevitable doom that follows from us pulling out of Iraq.
as opposed to the inevitable doom from staying in Iraq?
Ann Wright, a former state department official who resigned in protest over the Iraq war, gave a talk at my university last week, and was surprisingly optimistic about the possibility of the Iraqi factions forming a peace among themselves if the US would only get out of the way. She pointed to a peace deal written up by Iraqi parliamentarians that was shot down by the US because it included amnesty for insurgents.
I think that a partition could work except that there'd be a tremendous number of refugees, and we'd have to meiate between the Kurds and the Turks, and we'd have to try to get between the Shias and the Iranians. Seems like the best case.
If our goal was just to eliminate Iraq as a player, partition would be success.
8 - and this doesn't apply to Obama, who also refused to give the right answer? I think Clinton is considered the most gay-friendly of the candidates.
Also, an issue to consider here is whether we want our president to comment on religious matters. Clinton made her policy view clear: she's proud of the service of gays in the military.
I think Clinton is considered the most gay-friendly of the candidates.
By whom? My own suspicion is that she is, by a marginal amount, the least likely to behave gay-friendly in office. Given trends, I don't think that's an enormous deal, even if one's focus is solely on gay issues.
23: Also true. What's wrong with the lot of them? Did anyone get that one right?
There are some enormous issues on the table, and I really don't think that gay-friendliness should even be a factor in the choice, unless a Democrat makes an egregious Republican-like statement (As Garrison Keillor just did, BTW). Any Democrat will be more gay-friendly than almost any Republican.
Link to Keillor's statement? This is the first I've heard of it.
The Keillor thing was weird. I didn't really follow it--I skimmed excerpts elsewhere--but the bits excerpted did seem pretty awful. OTOH, it angered Dan Savage, which is a plus.
Dan is so cute when he's angry. Here's his reply to Keillor
Edwards did. Ten points for him.
http://www.thestranger.com/blog/2007/03/fuck_garrison_keillor
I've stuck up for GK but this is really bad. Damn! I hate to agree with B.
As sad as it is, I will take "not actively using me as a scapegoat to rile up the freaky wing of the Christian church" as being good enough.
Savage is blocked for me. You can see why if you mouse over the link
Edwards was ok when asked.
These updates are better from Clinton and Obama. I'd prefer a clip of the candidates saying "homosexuality isn't immoral" tout court but that would be fodder for the right-wing nuts, plus I'd rather here about laws/ethics than morality.
24 - by the gay (activist) community. This based on reading DK and on Clinton's relationship with HRC. And assuming Clark won't run, because I think he'd be best.
26 - in a primary this matters to me. In the general it's not like I'm going to vote for any Republican however good.
Man, that is unpleasant. He probably didn't mean any harm by it, but he's going to need power tools to get his foot back out of his mouth.
LB, can you email me the Savage pasted in, if that's where you're getting it and what you're reacting to?
I'm voting 100% on foreign and military policy. I don't trust any of them, though Edwards and Obama look more OK than not.
Beyond dealing with Iraq, I'd hope to have someone redefine our international role entirely, but the International Relations elite doesn't ahve much real diversity of opinion. Even a lot of the ones who didn't originally support the war were willing to give Bush a chance, and if he'd been successful, or even if he had failed in a less fucked up way, they would be kissing his ass right now.
I'm more in the Fuck Dan Savage club, fuck him all the way to hell. I'll be damned if I'll grant standing for moral instruction to some rollover motherfucker who supported the war in Iraq and GWOT in the most odious ways. Insofar as the gay community needs to take the lead on this, there are less douchebaggy people who can make the case.
33: Jesus, your workplace blocks links with "offensive" words in the URL? I'm sorry.
(Thank god for SSH, shell accounts, and text-mode browsing.)
http://www.thestranger.com/blog/2007/03/fuck_garrison_keillor
Also An earlier incident found while I was looking for the current one.)
Where's my denim jacket? I feel a trip to the opera coming on.
Huh. So Garrison Keillor's homey old-fashioned values shtick includes homophobia. Shocker.
Also, Dan was wrong about the war, but he's had the balls to admit it since. And for god's sake, the man's primary claim to fame is as a sex columnist. There are things I don't like about him either, but by and large he's good at his job and fairly sensible.
Garrison Keillor's homey old-fashioned values shtick presumably does not include the shocker.
Like I said, I really hate to agree with B.
God permits her to be right once in a while, to keep us on our toes.
SB, besides denim, could you wear sneakers to the opera? For me and for B?
44: You'd be surprised about the kinds of maneuvers that fit with a homey old-fashioned values schtick.
A friend of ours who reviewed GK's novel, Radio Days, I think it was, for a big paper was musing to us at the time about what it, which she found to be vile and had said so, would do to his HO-FVS. I'm pleased to remember that my Keilorhate led me to intuit the most dispiriting imaginable answer, which turned out to be correct: nothing. Ketchup, anyone?
Garrison Keilor always seemed like a watered down version of Stewart McClean to me, anyway.
I seem to remember some earlier anti-gay thing Keillor said, but I can't be bothered to track it down.
Some day you'll all realize that I'm right about everything.
"Keillorhate" in 49 suggests a good shorthand for bullshit HO-FVS-related rhetoric: Keillorplate.
I generally like Keillor and find his down-home routine or whatever to be entertaining but that was just stupid of him.
HO FVS doesn't Google except in Vietnamese?
Some people on Savage's site are sticking up for Keillor. His mix of irony, whimsy, shaggy dog stories, and nostalgia doesn't always work.
My disagreement with B's previous attacks on GK are as follows:
1. People around here really are about like he says they are, with a few amendments.
2. He isn't exactly ridiculing them, but B seems convinced that he is because they seem ridiculous to you. This comes up in "Fargo" criticism too. It's not really tremendously ironic that boring, corny Marge Gunderson wins in the end, but it seems so to people who watch cop movies all the time.
3. He isn't really idealizing them either, though B seems to think that he's doing that too.
4. This place really exists, even though it's not typical of the US as a whole. It's been fun seeing it described for the greater world.
Those are fair defenses of Keillor, except I'm not so sure about the "idealizing" thing.
Also, Dan was wrong about the war, but he's had the balls to admit it since.
Not to my knowledge, he hasn't. He wrote a column saying we should pull out of Iraq because Bush fucked it up. He didn't say the war was a bad idea or that he was wrong for supporting it; he took the classic incompetence dodger's stance that George Bush somehow fucked up an otherwise splendid idea.
by the gay (activist) community
What gay activist groups other than HRC are behind Clinton? All of the actual gay activists I personally know can't stand her.
I seem to remember some earlier anti-gay thing Keillor said, but I can't be bothered to track it down.
You can't be bothered to track it down? I linked to it in 42.
I agree that puts it well. I've been personally sick of it for a long time though.
54.1: To an extent. But most people are more interesting than cartoon characters.
54.2-3: Marge is great. The Coen brothers have a bit of an edge to them, but ultimately it's a tolerant edge; Keillor's edge is the smug edge of the self-satisfied midwesterner who's convinced that he and his kind really *are* better than everyone else.
54.4: I happen to like Minneapolis, though admittedly I don't know shit about the rest of the state. Nonetheless, it certainly isn't typical America, and the insularity and heartlandiness of PHC's popularity is revolting.
Plus it's not funny.
57: Oh, thanks. No, I don't click on all the links.
Or read the text next to them.
True dat. Especially when I'm too busy eating Girl Scout cookies and drinking coffee.
Well, the Coen brothers, God bless their hearts, have a black-humor edge that makes everyone whatsoever look weird. I think that Fargo was a parody of a cop show or a hip crime show like "Pulp Fiction", and making a very corny person be the heroine was a joke on the audience (not on Marge).
Exactly.
Plus, they're actually funny.
You can't fairly call someone a bad person because you don't think they're funny, can you?
I would also be utterly unsurprised to discover that Keillor didn't mean one word of that column to be taken literally. Given his incredibly dry sense of humor (at least as a performer) and the fact that sometimes it can take an X-ray machine to find the sarcasm in a line he delivers in a completely serious tone, I'd be willing to believe he wrote it thinking everyone who reads his column would already know all about his own wild marital history and be in on the joke, the joke being that people who moan about the erosion of tradition as a code for hating on someone generally are doing a very poor job of said tradition in their own life.
There's no real way that the Coen brothers are tolerant. making everyone look ridiculous ins't exactly tolerant.
Ha ha, LB. I can do whatever I want to do. Because I am thin and beautiful.
I make one defense of GK as a performer. I've listened to maybe a half dozen episodes of PHC, so take this for what it's worth.
I believe that the most difficult aspect of doing monologues (in which category PHC falls) is doing good transitions. It's a lot easier to change moods and subjects if it's possible to change the focus to another performer (at least for a while), and GK's transitions were really impressive. In one episode in partcular I was floored by his ability to move from comedy to seriousness, to nostalgia, to gentle mockery without any of the transitions feeling forced.
It is for this reason that I always want to defend Keilor. I admire his skill. This is a bad reason to defend him, but I think it's worth noting.
I'm with Emerson in 38: "I'm voting 100% on foreign and military policy." The most important job of the next president will be to clean up the foreign policy mess that the current one has made. And it's going to be a very difficult job.
Unfortunately, I don't know which if any of the current crop of Democratic candidates are up to the task.
On the other topics of this thread:
Garrison Keillor: Not funny.
Coen brothers: Very funny, but I think Fargo is one of their weaker films.
Dan Savage: Very funny, but trying to spread influenza among the Gary Bauer campaign was loathsome.
67: I've confessed my own dislike, but I wondered about that too. He's too competent a writer not to be aware of these effects, so that I think this is a plausible reading. And this reading allows me to square my dislike of Keillor with my sense that Savage was being humorless and missing the point.
No, trying to spread flu among the Gary Bauer people was fucking brilliant, and I wish I'd thought of it myself.
74: IDP, you're being way too midwestern fair-minded here. Just take a deep breath and admit that GK appears to be a bad person.
75: I don't know whether to take you seriously, but assuming you're serious:
Influenza is a deadly disease. It's not deadly to healthy adults, but it kills thousands of Americans every year, mostly the elderly. Consider this transmission route:
Dan Savage -> Some Bauer staff member -> Staff member's kid -> Grandma.
Savage's influenza stunt was the work of a seriously sick fuck. If I were making the laws, he'd be doing time for it.
He didn't really lick the doorknobs at the Bauer office, did he? He just wrote about it as a joke.
You know who else is really, really good at monologues? Rush Limbaugh. His transitions might be pretty clunky, though.
You know who else is really, really good at monologues? Rush Limbaugh.
Try reading a transcript of one of his shows some time. He's barely coherent.
79: I don't know. I've never read anything by him saying that he just made it up. If it was just a joke, that would make me very happy. I could go back to enjoying Savage's column without that twinge of guilt.
The monologues are (at least, were) well executed. I don't think a transcript is a good way to judge extemporized speech.
78: Yeah, and Bauer and his ilk have done all in their power to roll back Roe v. Wade, which is going to lead to dead women. It's even-steven.
84: I had no idea you were such an eye-for-an-eye kind of woman, B. Especially with collateral damage to grandmothers.
Come on, even if it wasn't a joke, how different, in terms of health risk, is what he did from going grocery shopping when sick (cough in your hand, grab the cart handle)? If it's not immorally reckless to run errands when contagious (and really, it would be unconventional to regard it as such) what Savage did is more funny than genuinely shocking.
86: Probable right-wing religious nutzo grandmothers, whatever.
Indeed, if you're going to spread anything through the Bauer campaign, it ought to be syphillis, not influenza.
89: But that would require you to sleep with them. Ick.
89: I think that the idea was to introduce something new, no?
Not me, dude. I don't have syphillis.
But that would require you to sleep with them.
Or to make them fuck the same doorknobs.
13: Hear, hear. I can imagine few things worse than having U.S. troops in Iraq sit idly by in the midst of ethnic cleansing.
87: I consider it morally reckless to knowingly go grocery shopping with influenza. Unlike the common cold, it really is a deadly disease.
But what Savage claimed to have done was not reckless, it was deliberate.
Also, you should cough and sneeze into your elbow, not your hand, to avoid spreading disease.
Syphillis is actually a quite mild malady from which most people recover after at most a few days. It's syphilis out for which you've got to watch.
Can the crap about innocent grandmothers. At least half of them are just plain guilty!
I'd love to see a rhetorician analyze talk radio and talk TV as oral tradition. What Rush says is often senseless and faactually wrong, but he sounds so damn good and seems like such a nice, fun guy. Not to us, but to his audience. It's like he's wiped out 5000 years of literate tradition and returned us to the primal campfire where the elders are reciting our epic.
I consider it morally evil to work for the Bauer campaign.
. I could go back to enjoying Savage's column without that twinge of guilt.
No, you should still feel a twinge of guilt while reading that rollover motherfucker. Happy was he to tacitly endorse racial profiling for Muslims. It wasn't more than twenty years ago that people made related arguments about the gay community and AIDS. Fuck him.
98: And I agree. See 85. And Rob's 86.
101!!!
Hey didn't anybody notice The Editors' fine, fine take on this:
Sometimes, when a person wants to get into another person's pants, that person can act, well, weird. Not like themselves, sorta. Sometimes they can be flat-out dishonest, talking about all kinds of cars they don't own and jobs they don't have and romantic plans for the future they have no intention of following through on...
...Making comforting noises to AIPAC may be a poor strategy for getting into Max Sawicky's pants (I've had no success with it), but it may work differently on other pants, and that may be of more actual importance, in the long run, than the implications some may draw from the words.
...Hillary and Barack (and, yes, stout John Edwards, too!) care desperately about getting at the wrinkled privates of addled, licorice-smelling old ladies in Florida who go to church twelve times a day - they're absolutely gagging for it, those horndogs! - and are probably willing to give less than the maximally correct answer to wedge issue questions if they think it will move the zipper in those powder blue rayon slacks down by even a fraction of a tooth. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
101, 102: The Poor Man is taking the "they don't really mean it, it's all for the campaign, they'll turn into nice decent lefties once they win the White House" line. But this line is remarkably unconvincing given everything else we know about these people (in particular, Clinton). As Matt Yglesias has pointed out repeatedly, it's not just that Clinton seems to believe hawkishness is a political necessity for winning elections, it's that she's genuinely hawkish and acts accordingly. Her actions as a senator have often been informed by her experience within the White House - and in particular, a White House whose goals were fiercely opposed by Congress - and in addition to taking a rather militant stance on the role of the United States abroad, she tends to take a very broad view of executive power. It's more likely than not that her grotesque foreign policy positions are as sincere as they are convenient.
With regards to the specific content of the Poor Man's post: it's utterly asinine to complain about liberals complaining about Democratic candidates, as the Poor Man does here. The whole point of having an activist, left-leaning base that supports gay rights, withdrawal from Iraq and diplomatic engagement with Iran is to put pressure on Democratic politicians to support these issues. Yes, there are a host of factors, from AIPAC to cultural conservatives to god knows what else, that will influence the candidates to move in a more conservative, malign direction. But this is precisely why liberals have to criticize these candidates when they do. This isn't "the new Naderism"; it's the bare minimum required of a functional democratic process. The alternative is numbly clapping for whatever tool has the money to buy the nomination, regardless of their actual beliefs.
Sure -- I was more taken with the form than with the content of the Poor Man's post.
You voted for Nader, didn't you, stras?
105: Ugh, no. Nader is a reactionary prig. And the point of "Naderism" was to fuck over the Democratic Party by throwing the presidency to the GOP; the point of chastising Dem candidates now - and the point the Poor Man doesn't seem to get - is to improve the Democratic Party by acting as a counterweight to the uglier influences within it (AIPAC, the DLC, etc.). Especially at this stage, when the nominee has yet to be coronated, we need to do our best to shoot down bad candidates and bolster good ones. This is not the same as making the Naderite claim that Clinton/Obama/whoever is Just The Same As Bush; it's just recognizing that some choices aren't acceptable as the Democratic nominee, and we really have to do whatever the fuck we can to stop them.
As much as I hate the expression, the first Dem candidate to deliver a Sister Souljah moment to AIPAC will win my undying support.
Anyway, I think Tony Karon got this exactly right.
And nobody will think any less of you, Barack, if you choose to speak the truth, and what you know to be the truth, rather than half-heartedly embrace falsehoods that aren't doing anybody any good. The right-wing Zionists aren't going to support you no matter how hard you pander, and the liberal mainstream will respect honesty and consistency. Israel needs American leaders that can march it back from its own self-destructive impulses, rather than cheerleaders of its march of folly.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm wasting my breath...
That part about how they're never going to support him anyway is exactly right. Maybe he's trying to position himself so that they don't actively target him, but I'm not sure moves that subtle are possible in this game.
108: You can't go after AIPAC like that. You can Sistah Souljah black people because they've got nowhere else to go; the sames not true of Jewish Americans. And, even if they were in rough agreement with you, you might spook some such people because of the sheer strangeness of going after AIPAC, especially at a time when Israelis feel vulnerable.
Which is to say that Karon is fantastic, and has one of the best blogs around, but I disagree with him.
But they're not going to go to Obama anyway. And there's other money out there. I really don't understand AIPAC's (apparent) influence.
Pretty much every single Jewish person I know thinks AIPAC is a bunch of fucking lunatics.
What do your women friends think of feminism, Apo?
It's not just AIPAC--it's Jewish Americans. Even if they don't agree with AIPAC, a lot of Jewish Americans are going to be made nervous by an attack (even an oblique one) on AIPAC. There just isn't another group out there with the cultural weight that can be used to distinguish AIPAC from the vast majority of Jewish Americans--nothing those Jewish Americans can point to and say, "Not to worry, I'm with that very distinct group over there, so he's not talking about me."
Hm. Denouncing "The Israel Lobby" would be very foolish for Obama. But you could really piss the crap out of AIPAC while saying things that most Jewish Americans agree with--you might actually endear yourself to them, even.
They all consider themselves feminists, B.
I don't think anyone said he should denounce "the Israel Lobby," but and obviously his camp has come the same conclusion as SCMT, but I think there's room to ally oneself with Rabin['s memory] and stake out some independent ground.
The key difference being that AIPAC *actually is a bunch of fucking lunatics*. Look, I know I won't get my moment; I'm just expressing my desire.
118: Well, at least we know he has smart staff.
right, I know; I was just saying you could Sister Souljah AIPAC if you were smart about it. There's some risk, but I think it'd probably be a net benefit if done right...
I kind of still wish Feingold was running.