Quote of the day

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." —Ann Coulter, 13 September 2001

"Under the Rightwing Rock"

Every time I think about maybe possibly voting Republican in the future, some bozo neocon opens his mouth and reminds me of the kind of people I'd be putting in government....here's Andrew:

If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:

A terrible event - but I don’t want anyone to call it an “act of violence” or “a terrible tragedy”. It was an attack - one or more men decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right down to the bottom of this - and, liberals, if the stories of accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).

This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-watered slide to throwing out the entire American system of government.

The purged moderate speaks

The Daily Beast interviews Scozzafava:

How do you characterize yourself? We live in such a label-induced society – oh that person’s a liberal and this is a conservative. If I was to say to Dede Scozzafava, so what are you? What applies, if anything?

I’m a Republican.

Defined as what?

When I look at the Republican Party of Lincoln and I look back at eight principles of being a Republican, I think I pretty much identify with each one of those principles. Whether it’s less government dependency, promoting self-sufficiency, believing in lower taxes, believing in fewer government regulations, believing in less government spending, or believing in individual liberty, individual freedom, and less government interference in the lives of people. Those are all positions that I’ve always held to, I’ve always articulated on behalf of, and those are the things I stand for. And I think those are Republican principles.

I went through an editorial board during this most recent race. And at the end, the gentleman, the lead editor just looked across the table at me and he said, “A moderate Republican? You’re a conservative Republican.” The social issues sometimes people might not agree with, but I really think I govern according to the Constitution and I live my personal life according to my faith, and I try very hard not to mix up the two.

My kind of Republican!

Is it your intention to stay in the Republican Party?

I have every intention of staying in the Republican Party. This is my party too. There are a lot of moderate people—Republicans, like me--and I’m hearing from an awful lot from them. And I think the Republican Party needs to know if they don’t have room for us and they don’t want us working with them, we’re going to find a way to work against them. I’d much prefer for us to be a bigger party and us all to work on the things that are most important, the fiscal issues, foreign policy. If you listen to my foreign-policy positions, you know I’m a Republican.

Give me an example.

Israel. I’m pro-Israel. I’m pro-defense spending. I think diplomacy is good, but diplomacy only works if it’s backed up by a strong defense. And making sure you have a strong defense budget. When I see what’s going on with Iran it’s very, very scary. I don’t think that you can–it’s hard to put a peace branch out when you’re dealing with a regime like that. I think you have to be very, very firm with a lot of these countries. So if people took the time to know who I really was, I think they would have a Republican member in Congress today.

Er, so she's somewhat to my left on economics and clearly too much of a neocon on foreign policy.

But I'd definitely choose her over the Beck-Palin axis.

Military force: Is there anything neocons think it can't do?

Max Boot:

what seems to be conspicuously absent from the conversation in the United States is the realization that Afghanistan’s corruption problem, like its security problem, can be best addressed by additional troops.

Yglesias snarks: At long last the case for military occupation of Louisiana and Illinois that we've been waiting for.

Neocon humor

Quoth Michael Goldfarb:

In the course of Donald Morrison's review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald's is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine.

I once ate at the McDonald's right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

(ht Will)

Wow

A Dish reader submits some amazingly cynical neoconservatism:

I had a conversation at lunch yesterday with a friend, a neocon Jewish American, that fascinated me. We were getting ready to get up from the table when he said, "Hey, wait a minute, do you want to talk politics for a minute?" We proceeded to discuss the events in Iran and at one point I brought up my amazement at the protesters' embrace of non-violence and their courage in the face of aggression. I said, "I wonder if this will be a lesson to the Palestinians. That perhaps if they renounce violence and embrace peaceful resistance they too could garner more international support for their cause, a la Gandhi." His reaction fascinated me. He got this very serious, dour look on his face and replied, "That's what worries me. The biggest existential threat to Israel is that the Palestinians will realize the potential for non-violence and embrace it.

I finally understood why some of the more cynical neocons cannot stand the Green Revolution. Without a conflict, without a bogey man to demonize, they are scared to death. In their minds their legitimacy comes from the fact that they are better than the bogey man, that they are necessary to keep the bogey man at bay. I don't think that the nation of Israel is so fragile that it could not come to terms with a peaceful movement for Palestinian statehood.

The importance of local legitimacy

Hilzoy on neoconservatism:

My biggest difference with neoconservatives concerns attempts to create democracies by military force. I do not believe that it is impossible to do this: we did it in Germany and Japan after World War II. But in that case, we had a really good reason both to occupy Germany and Japan: namely, the fact that they had attacked us, and they had lost. Similarly, we had a decent reason for trying to recast their political institutions: those institutions were partially responsible for the fact that they had just started a world war.

Creating a democracy requires the active participation of a lot of people in the country in which you are trying to create it, and you are unlikely to get this participation if those people regard your presence not just as undesirable, but as illegitimate. People tend not to regard our occupation of a country as illegitimate when they attack us, and they lose. But they do tend to regard it as illegitimate when we invade simply because we think they should have a different form of government, even if they themselves do not much like the government they have. For this reason, I think that even if we had the right to invade a country for the express purpose of creating a democracy, that invasion would be virtually certain to fail.

She goes on to discuss Iran and Iraq as poignant examples.

Lesson in democracy for neocons

Via Andrew, AL points to the fact that the nuclear program has an 84 percent approval rating within Iran:

Bombing that country would, in addition to generating many casualties, significantly strengthen the hand of the hardliners. It would poison public opinion against the West and stifle reform efforts. And on the flipside, if the reformers succeed and the result is a more democratic Iran, there's little reason to think Iran's elected leaders would abandon the country's nuclear program. In functioning democracies, elected leaders tend not to kill programs that are massively popular. To truly embrace democracy in the world, you have to understand that people in other countries will often see things differently than you see them.

One for the (neoconish) rightists

Why shouldn't we waterboard Scott Roeder?

Non-intervention

Matt Steinglass asks:

Isn’t the Prime Directive’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of (particularly underdeveloped) alien civilizations a classically paleo-con non-interventionist position?

Larison's answer:

Indeed it is, which is why most Star Trek plotlines are so annoying. If the most important principle is non-interference, why is the moral of almost every Star Trek story that this or that Federation captain is right to violate the Prime Directive in order to “do something” whenever there is a crisis? Surely the stories should drive home why non-interference is the better, wiser course, but instead they routinely show the Prime Directive to be the invention of moral and political idiots. It is hard to think of another fictional world in which its heroes so regularly disrespect the core values that they are supposed to espouse. Anyone who watched very many of the original episodes with Kirk would come away with the impression that the Prime Directive was a rule mostly observed in the breach, and most TNG episodes and movies would tell you that non-interference is either misguided or actually morally corrupt. The entire ninth movie was one big celebration of so-called humanitarian intervention. The advocates of non-intervention–the people invoking the Prime Directive most often–were portrayed in that feature as corrupt collaborators with the worst of the worst.

A commenter retorts:

You’d have to be an extraordinarily doctrinaire non-interventionist to advocate anything like a Prime Directive approach to US foreign policy. Non-interference in other state’s domestic affairs is one thing. A policy of deeming other states too primitive to even be graced with the knowledge that the United States exists is a bit more extreme. Similarly, you can respect a state’s desire to protect its most important industries without going further and arguing that any economic or cultural exchange at all is too dangerous to the less-powerful culture. According to the Prime Directive it makes sense for an entire civilization, including all its people, to perish in a natural disaster, since saving anybody would halt that civilization’s natural progression towards extinction. I know paleo-conservatives aren’t known for their sentimentality, but I don’t think they’re quite that, uh, mean.

The Prime Directive is routinely disregarded on Star Trek because it’s so hard for a rational or moral person to take it seriously. A more flexible approach (like the way the crew on TNG actually makes decisions when the Prime Directive clashes violently with common sense, morality, ethics, etc.) seems more reasonable.

I'm decidedly against intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries (e.g. toppling Saddam Hussein) but I think the commenter is right about the Prime Directive becoming morally absurd when it means not being able help a civilization avoid extinction when it's of little cost to us.

There are multiple areas of intervention:  military (force), trade, and migration.

Larison, being a paleocon, is opposed to them all—which is why he likes the Prime Directive.  Some paleocons aren't quite so obtuse on trade. But they definitely oppose migration, because they despise multiculturalism.

Once, the American right agreed with Larison on avoiding military intervention, and it was the bleeding heart Left that would propose boneheaded freedom-spreading, nation-building exercises.  Times change, huh?  And it's all the neocons' fault.

Now the Left is better on military non-intervention, better on migration, and tolerable* on trade.  Which is why they have a superior foreign policy now.

*The talk last year of renegotiating NAFTA was fodder for stupid Democratic primary voters. The leadership is, thankfully, not so dumb as to follow through on that. All they'll do is stand in the way of new trade deals with e.g. Columbia. So basically we're just treading water on trade for the foreseeable future.

Torture intelligence in action

From a declassified Senate report, more nauseating news:

The Bush administration’s motives for employing the harsh techniques are also called into question by the report. The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence.

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Apparently, one of the individuals applying pressure for results was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major advocate of the Iraq invasion. Wolfowitz called the man in charge of Guantánamo at the time, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey.

Wolfowitz called “to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production” at Guantánamo, the report says. Wolfowitz suggested the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques. The report cites the Guantánamo interrogation chief at that time, David Becker, as the source of this information about Wolfowitz. Dunlavey, however, told the Senate investigators he could not recall the Wolfowitz call.

Radley concludes the obvious:

So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.

And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.

Obama's deficits in perspective

Via Mankiw, Stanford economist Michael Boskin:

The CBO baseline cumulative deficit for the Obama 2010-2019 budget is $9.3 trillion. How much additional deficit and debt does Mr. Obama add relative to a do-nothing budget with none of his programs? Mr. Obama's "debt difference" is $4.829 trillion -- i.e., his tax and spending proposals add $4.829 trillion to the CBO do-nothing baseline deficit. The Obama budget also adds $177 billion to the fiscal year 2009 budget. To this must be added the $195 billion of 2009 legislated add-ons (e.g., the stimulus bill) since Mr. Obama's election that were already incorporated in the CBO baseline and the corresponding $1.267 trillion in add-ons for 2010-2019. This brings Mr. Obama's total additional debt to $6.5 trillion, not his claimed $2 trillion reduction. That was mostly a phantom cut from an imagined 10-year continuation of peak Iraq war spending.

The claim to reduce the deficit by half compares this year's immense (mostly inherited) deficit to the projected fiscal year 2013 deficit, the last of his current term. While it is technically correct that the deficit would be less than half this year's engorged level, a do-nothing budget would reduce it by 84%. Compared to do-nothing, Mr. Obama's deficit is more than two and a half times larger in fiscal year 2013. Just his addition to the budget deficit, $459 billion, is bigger than any deficit in the nation's history. And the 2013 deficit is supposed to be after several years of economic recovery, funds are being returned from the financial bailouts, and we are out of Iraq.

Obama's post-recession budgeting is not about stimulating recovery, people, and his administration trying to sell it that way is Rove-style disingenuous.

Nay, as I've pointed out before Obama's is the most progressive budget since LBJ's Great Society, which in my estimation did not work out nearly as well as, say, Reaganomics and Clintonomics.

A little history lesson for some of you: The failures of LBJ's welfare and entitlement programs are what lead many liberals to defect into neoconservatism (note the etymology, "new-conservatives"). The neoconservative movement actually began in the social science halls of academia, from empirical evaluation of the failures of progressive government. This movement culminated with the very successful welfare reform in the 90's.

There was, however, a very unfortunate side effect. Many liberal hawks joined the neoconservative bandwagon, and the Republican Party morphed into the people who brought us an unnecessary and disastrous war and subsequent nation building in Iraq. When dominated by paleocons and libertarians, conservatives used to be against nation building. (Heck George Bush said as much when running, for old time's sake)

Today everyone associates the word "neoconservative" with Bush's disastrous foreign policy, but that is not how it began.  And twisted though it may seem, the historical causality is clear:

Failure of progressive programs -> Need for reform -> Liberals hawks join defection bandwagon -> A tragic war.

There is no reason to think this particular chain of events will repeat itself, but there is plenty of reason to be wary that Obama's progressive budget will be just as counterproductive as it was during the LBJ era as well as in Europe today.

That concerns me quite a bit, but I think we need to keep it in perspective. The only alternative was McCain-Palin and doubling down on the sad failure and corruption of Republican governance during the past 8 years, particularly in foreign policy. I can accept a measure of long-term government inefficiencies, increased debt, nanny statism, and slightly reduced GDP as a price for throwing those bums out.

Neocons gone wild

Shadow Government:

Those who have read the recent posts from George Packer, Steve Walt, and Matt Duss on the latest doings of the "neo-con cabal" -- ahem, the Foreign Policy Initiative -- must be eagerly awaiting a report of what happened at today's conference on Afghanistan. Well, I won't leave you hanging.

All that you suspect is true. Bill Kristol, wearing a Viking helmet and a bone through his nose, exhorted the participants to invade Chad, just because. He may have listed other countries, but he was speaking in tongues and war whoops half the time, and my Neo-con-to-English translation kept dropping out. Bob Kagan followed, bare-chested (as usual), in full war paint, banging the Mayflower china with a combat boot, shouting that America needed to put 10 million men under arms to extend its hegemony (benevolent, of course) into the Arctic, shouting something about the road to Moscow leading through the North Pole.

I saw this with my own eyes, people.

Haha, so funny.

[...]  It's easy for critics of the neo-cons to cast them as marginal thinkers with out-sized influence, along with all the dark conspiracies that implies. Harder, though more honest, is to recognize that the neo-cons are really championing tendencies in U.S. foreign policy that run much deeper in American life than the pockets of their advocacy shops. Yes, the regular cast of characters signed those PNAC letters that get quoted all the time, but at one point or another, so did folks like Jim Webb, Bob Zoellick, Ivo Daalder, John Bolton, Jim Steinberg, Rich Armitage, Dennis Ross, Michael O'Hanlon, Philip Gordon, Richard Holbrooke, and many others who would sooner take your scalp than be called a neo-con.

In other words neocons champion the worst tendencies of American foreign policy, which many non-neocons only partly share. Is that supposed to make anyone feel better?

Nothing makes me more nervous about Obama's Afghanistan plans than the endorsement of so many from this latest incarnation of PNAC.

Set phasers to "OohRah!"

Photo: Northrop Grumman

Ok they're not really phasers, but still:

(WIRED) Military Laser Hits Battlefield Strength

Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time -- paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.

In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser -- past the "100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for 'weapons grade' power levels for high-energy lasers,"

TMV thinks it through:

So is this really “great news” for us? Opponents of military force may not think so, but lasers should have some distinct advantages in combat. Even for pacifists, one of the chief complaints regarding combat operations is the potential for collateral damage. (Read as: blowing up civilians) The general goal has been for “laser accuracy” with smart munitions. Well, here you have it. There’s nothing more laser accurate than an actual laser. Burning a hole in a target should generally produce less unintended consequences than blowing something up.

As a bonus, I reckon neocon hawks and their ilk will need to find something other than bombs to satisfy their testosterone urges.

Perhaps we could build them a holodeck with virtual bat'leths ?

Dealing with the neocon mess

Via Yglesias:



An example of neocon foreign policy insight:

"What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle. Who is responsible for it? The New York Times gives the major credit to ``the Afghan people'' with their ``courage and commitment.'' Courage and commitment there was, but that courage and commitment was curiously imperceptible until this administration conceived a radical war plan, executed it brilliantly, liberated the country and created from scratch the structures of democracy ... Against all expectations, Afghanistan is the first graduate of the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in rather hostile places. We should take a moment to celebrate a remarkable success that had long seemed so improbable," —Charles Krauthammer, December 10, 2004.

Aha, so for five years Afghanistan has been busy celebrating the "miracle" of our "remarkable success."

I'd hate to see what an unmiraculous and unremarkable failure looks like.

Sunlight on torture

We may soon get the memos. It's little wonder Cheney and other neocons are squirming.

Realism in the world of "you are anti-semitic or anti-Israel" epithets

Dish reader:

Of course you are not anti-semitic. Your increasingly harsh criticism of Israel is of a piece with your general shift toward moral equivocation between the friends and enemies of enlightenment civilization. You have become virtually unable to make distinctions between initiation of force and retaliation, and thus you must see "cycles of violence" in all conflicts. Keep it up. It is a useful model for descent into nihilism.

Andrew's response:

I am grateful for this upbraiding in a way. The truth is: it is extremely hard in a conflict like ours to maintain the proper balance between defending civilization with all necessary will and force - and undermining one's own civilization in a Manichean mindset that sees the enemy as all wrong and us as all right. I don't believe civilization is advanced, for example, if we advance and legitimize torture. I don't believe Israel will be secure if it continues to treat many Palestinian lives as less worthy than Israeli ones. I don't believe human liberation is advanced by creeping colonialism. I do not believe an idea can be defeated by military force alone.

These things we have learned. Adjusting to these lessons, becoming more attuned to the worldview of those to whom the Jihadists appeal, finding ways to neutralize that appeal even as we use legitimate military force against them: these are not easy things.

I do not believe, for example, that Petraeus' outreach to former Sunni insurgents who had murdered Americans and allied with al Qaeda was a descent into relativism and nihilism. I think it was a pragmatic adjustment to advance the core interests of civilization. Similarly, I would like to explore pragmatic ways to ensure that ordinary Persians are not forced into the arms of the worst mullahs. I'd like to see whether we can reach a grand bargain in the Middle East that could deleverage some of the polarization that has taken place. I'm aware, after these last seven years, that the righteous and justified abhorrence of Islamism can sometimes unwittingly empower Islamism.

My own loathing of theocracy - because of my respect for both politics and religion - is unabated. I am fully aware of the distinction between Israel's civil society and Hamas'. But simply reiterating these differences and holding that mere expression of them in military terms will be enough to win this war seems foolish to me. That much I have learned. You could, I suppose, call this a descent into relativism and nihilism, and I certainly see the reason to be vigilant against that. But I would prefer to think of my adjustment as maturity, as long as it too never becomes complacent or impervious to new facts.

That's solid.  But here's my more flipant take: better a nihilist than an absolutist.... especially when that absolutism is non-empirical and impervious to reality, as the bulk of George W. Bush's tenure was.

Thankfully Bush actually managed to learn from his mistakes in his later years in office, best exemplified by the replacement of Rumsfeld with Gates. What we've seen with the Obama administration is in part an extension of Bush's turn to realism when it became clear that the neoconservatism of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol et. al. was a disastrous failure.

IOW let's give credit where credit is due: Bush's last two years in office get a BC from me. The years prior, an F.

In Alberta, on his plans for a memoir:

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened,"

You do that, buster.

Explaining foreign policy realism

I'm a realist, albeit quite an amateur and not particularly well-read one.  So I'll hand the Freeman controversy over to Cato:

Jon Chait makes a common mistake in an op-ed for Saturday’s Washington Post.* Joining various neoconservatives to attack Charles Freeman, just-appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chait writes that Freeman is a realist and therefore doesn’t care about morality in U.S. foreign policy. I don’t know enough about Freeman to know if the article is fair to his views (he seems like a great pick), but it shows a misunderstanding of realism.

Modifying a noun with “moral” does not make it so. Realists argue that idealism – ignoring realities that encourage tradeoffs among competing goods –  is foolish, and there is nothing moral about doing foolish things in the name of morality. Realists believe that our foreign policy should be governed by an ethic of responsibility, where you do things that actually lead to good consequences, starting at home. They see the promiscuous use of power as destructive of it and therefore of all the goods it serves, including the ideological sort.

Those with even passing familiarity with leading realists like E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr know that their goal was to create a moral foreign policy in an anarchic world. They saw idealists who thought they could escape realist concepts like the balance of power as a source of catastrophic wars. Given the nature of international relations, they saw idealism — seen in undo faith in international institutions and later military adventurism in service of ideological ends — as wasteful, dangerous, and therefore immoral.

Realists are partially to blame for this misconception. They have been too reluctant in recent decades to state their moral case. They too often allow people to get the impression that phony beltway realists like Henry Kissinger are the real deal – as if thrashing around Southeast Asia and South America in service of confused ideas about the balance of power was consistent with realist thought.

A realist U.S. defense policy would be moral for at least three reasons. It would stop squandering wealth on futile missions and allow it be used for worthier ends. It would not offend our values by embracing militarism and empire (in fact if not in intent) and restore the United States to its position as a model of liberalism, not its vindicator. It would keep us out of unnecessary wars, which are bad for liberty at home and only rarely conducive to moral ends abroad.

*It is typical of the Post to publish a column like this. Their op-ed page is home to about 10 advocates of militarized liberalism in foreign policy. The distinction between the neoconservatives and the liberal internationalists is largely academic.

Noted realist Stephen Walt, author of The Israel Lobby, also speaks up for Freeman.

Like Larison I'm mildly encouraged by his seeming to have all the right enemies.

Meet the new boss, different but cagy like the old boss

I declared The Who's 1971 hit to be a theme song for the Obama era. It was an obvious call, but the lyrics are becoming even more apropos...

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
No, no!

...

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Obama may be the Un-Rove, as Andrew says.

Yet Obama is cagy, just in a different way:

Look at how he's framed the debate since the election. Every single symbolic act has been inclusive and sober. From that speech in Grant Park to the eschewal of euphoria on Inauguration Day; from the George Will dinner invite to the Rick Warren invocation; from meeting the House Republicans on the Hill to convening a fiscal responsibility summit; from telegraphing to all of us Obamacons that he wasn't a fiscal lunatic to ... unveiling the most expansive, liberal, big government reversal of Reagan any traditional Democrat would die for.

Smart, isn't he? He won the stimulus debate long before the Republicans realized it (they were busy doing tap-dances of victory on talk radio, while he was building a new coalition without them). And now, after presenting such a centrist, bi-partisan, moderate and personally trustworthy front, he gets to unveil a radical long-term agenda that really will soak the very rich and invest in the poor. Given the crisis, he has seized this moment for more radicalism than might have seemed possible only a couple of months ago.

He ran on a rediscovery of Clintonomics and said in his speech to Congress on Tuesday night: "As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day… Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am."

Yet two days later he puts forward the most progressive populist long-term budget in more than 40 years.

That's not channeling Clinton-era policies.. It's a new amalgam of FDR and LBJ, updated for our times.

We knew some of this stuff was coming. And many decided to vote for him anyway because of the worse-er failures of Bush Republicanism. But we didn't know it would be quite this audacious. Can he pull this long-term growth of government off competently? Quite possibly. But will it be sustainable without The Empiricist at the helm? Because we'll be doomed if in 2016 or beyond we elect another incompetent bumbler like George W. Bush or an incurious demagogue like Sarah Palin to manage a bulked-up federal government. Can you imagine the disaster?

Andrew continues:

The risk is, at least, a transparent risk. If none of this works, he will have taken a massive gamble and failed. The country will be bankrupt and he will have one term. His gamble with the economy may come to seem like Bush's gamble in Iraq. But if any of it works, if the economy recovers, and if the GOP continues to be utterly deaf and blind to the new landscape we live in, then we're talking less Reagan than FDR in long-term impact.

It's going to be a riveting first year, isn't it?

Just the first one?

Wake up America, you're getting a bit more change than you bargained for. It's nice that we're getting the country back on track, but let's try to avoid another derailment shall we?

Just how we'll manage to do so with a hapless, bigoted, morally bankrupt Republican opposition that has literally gone crazy remains to be seen.

Another neocon's genocidal diatribe

Robert Stacy McCain:

Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be “forward march” and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order “about face” would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast.

E.D. Kain puts it as "an inherent lack of understanding regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, and an unhealthy degree of bloody, American-made machismo."