Mark Liberman has a post over at Language Log on the general subject of Obama’s reference to Washington in his inaugural address. It’s a little too long to quote in full, so follow the link and read it for yourself.
Tories then and now
But it’s worth remembering that the Washington of 1776 was the general of a revolutionary army, and the words that he ordered to be read to his men were written by Tom Paine, a radical agitator.
This Daily Show item pointing out a few lines from the Inaugural that seem similar to Bush’s rhetoric is making the rounds (via John Schwenkler). In fact, there aren’t that many similar phrases in this particular speech, and those that Stewart was able to identify seem like so much standard boilerplate. However, the statements seem to be nothing more than this, because they reflect the bipartisan ideological and policy consensus. Obviously, I think there are much better examples that show clear affinities between the ambitious hegemonist views of the two, but the examples taken from the Inaugural are useful to illustrate a more important point. That point is not merely that “Obama is more like Bush than you want to believe,” or that his election represents no fundamental change in the way the government will make policy. While true, these are no longer in any way remarkable, and they have all been covered many times before. If the transition didn’t made these things clear already, I’m not sure what will.
What is interesting is what these statements show about the minimal differences between the parties and the political class’ embrace of shared assumptions about U.S. power and their acceptance of myths relating to American history. When Obama says that “we” will not apologize for our way of life and Bush said that “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” they are expressing in a simple form the key convictions of what Prof. Bacevich has identified as the ideology of national security. Let’s review those convictions. …
Some Jewish leaders say the very qualities that may appeal to the Obama administration — Mitchell’s reputation as an honest broker — could spark unhappiness, if not outright opposition, from some pro-Israel groups.
Abe Foxman
“Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn’t been ‘even handed’ — it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support.
“So I’m concerned,” Foxman continued. “I’m not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East.”
Unstated here is that Mitchell is half Lebanese Christian by ancestry. And I think there’s little way that isn’t playing into this in the background. Roger Cohen had a good column a couple weeks ago in which he began …
The Obama team is tight with information, but I’ve got the scoop on the senior advisers he’s gathered to push a new Middle East policy as the Gaza war rages: Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby.
Needless to say this is not Obama’s Middle East team. And as Cohen went on to note, Obama’s team is made up of five Jewish men. Now, I’m Jewish. Got no beef with Jews. And I’m sure this post will generate a bunch of nonsensical emails claiming I’m saying that Jews can’t be trusted to deal with Middle East policy, which is too nonsensical even to discuss. But if there’s reflexive opposition to a distinguished former senator who happens to be half Arab by lineage because of the stated reason that he may be too even-handed, that’s really a problem.
John V. Whitbeck, “an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel”. today in the San Francisco Chronicle.
President-elect Barack Obama has a problem. Particularly in the wake of Israel’s holiday-season attack on Gaza, he is under heavy pressure to focus immediately on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to “do something.” However, if he were simply to announce an intention to work harder to achieve an impossible goal by means that have repeatedly failed – a decent two-state solution through bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – such a commitment to further years of time-wasting would kill hope rather than inspire it.
Furthermore, he has let it be known that he would like to make a major speech in a Muslim country early in his presidency. A welcome gesture, to be sure, but what would he say? If he were simply to promise more of the same, as he did during his campaign, his frustrated audience might be tempted to throw shoes. What could he say that would truly represent change in American policy and would inspire genuine and justified hope that Middle East peace really is possible?
Whitbeck is talking, of course, about a “one-state solution“, an idea that’s been kicking around since the 1920s. Its low level of support among Israeli Jews (18% in one survey) understates the virulence of Jewish opposition to “a thinly veiled strategy for destroying the State of Israel“. Whitbeck points to the example of South Africa, though the political dynamics don’t strike me as all that similar.
On the same page of the Chronicle, Michael Lerner (Tikkun) advocates an Imposed two-state solution.
The only viable alternative is for Obama to call for an international conference of the European Unon, Israel and the Arab States, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and, yes, Iran and India as well, and allow that international conference to impose a solution that provides security and justice to both sides. Only an imposed settlement has the slightest chance of being just to Palestinians – the precondition for a lasting peace, and a secure Israel.
Hard as it might be to push the Obama administration in this direction, it will be less difficult than getting Secretary of State Clinton to use American power to directly force Israel to be responsive to the minimum needs for peace and justice for the Palestinian people.
Imposed how, exactly, Rabbi Lerner saith not.
And yet…the possibility of a negotiated two-state solution steadily declines. Three impossibilities—one state, two states, and the status quo—, except that the status quo is, sadly, not impossible at all.
… By all rights, America’s dilapidated rail lines ought to be a prime candidate for some of that spending. All over the country there are opportunities like the I-81/Crescent Corridor deal, in which relatively modest amounts of capital could unclog massive traffic bottlenecks, revving up the economy while saving energy and lives. Many of these projects have already begun, like Virginia’s, or are sitting on planners’ shelves and could be up and running quickly. And if we’re willing to think bigger and more long term—and we should be—the potential of a twenty-first-century rail system is truly astonishing. In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 85 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emission by 38 percent and oil consumption by 22 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 13 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.
Yet despite this astounding potential, virtually no one in Washington is talking about investing any of that $1 trillion in freight rail capacity. Instead, almost all the talk out of the Obama camp and Congress has been about spending for roads and highway bridges, projects made necessary in large measure by America’s overreliance on pavement-smashing, traffic-snarling, fossil-fuel-guzzling trucks for the bulk of its domestic freight transport. This could be an epic mistake. Just as the Interstate Highway System changed, for better and for worse, the economy and the landscape of America, so too will the investment decisions Washington is about to make. The choice of infrastructure projects is de facto industrial policy; it’s also de facto energy, land use, housing, and environmental policy, with implications for nearly every aspect of American life going far into the future. On the doorstep of an era of infrastructure spending unparalleled in the past half century, we need to conceive of a transportation future in which each mode of transport is put to its most sensible use, deployed collaboratively instead of competitively. To see what that future could look like, however, we need to look first at the past. …
For too much of the world at large the names of the dead and wounded in Gaza might as well be John Doe too. They are the casualties and victims of Israel’s decision to silence the rockets from Hamas terrorists by waging war on an entire population. Yes, every nation has the right to defend its people. Israel is no exception, all the more so because Hamas would like to see every Jew in Israel dead.
But brute force can turn self-defense into state terrorism. It’s what the U.S. did in Vietnam, with B-52s and napalm, and again in Iraq, with shock and awe. By killing indiscriminately — the elderly, kids, entire families by destroying schools and hospitals — Israel did exactly what terrorists do and exactly what Hamas wanted. It spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution.
Hardly had Israeli tank fire killed and injured scores at a UN school in Gaza than a senior Hamas leader went on television to announce, “The Zionists have legitimized the killing of their children by killing our children.” Already attacks on Jews in Europe are escalating — a burning car crashes into a synagogue in Southern France, a fiery object is hurled through a window in Sweden, venomous anti-Semitic graffiti appears across the continent, and arsonists strike in London.
What we are seeing in Gaza is the latest battle in the oldest family quarrel on record. Open your Bible: the sons of the patriarch Abraham become Arab and Jew. Go to the Book of Deuteronomy. When the ancient Israelites entered Canaan their leaders urged violence against its inhabitants. The very Moses who had brought down the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” now proclaimed, “You must destroy completely all the places where the nations have served their gods. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe out their name from that place.”
So God-soaked violence became genetically coded. A radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. Israel misses no opportunity to humiliate the Palestinians with checkpoints, concrete walls, routine insults, and the onslaught in Gaza. As if boasting of their might, Israel defense forces even put up video of the explosions on YouTube for all the world to see. A Norwegian doctor there tells CBS, “It’s like Dante’s Inferno. They are bombing one and a half million people in a cage.”
America has officially chosen sides. We supply Israel with money, F-16s, winks and tacit signals. Our Christian right links arms with the religious extremists there who claim divine sanctions for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Our political elites show neither independence nor courage by challenging the consensus that Israel can do no wrong. Although one recent poll found Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive by a 24-point margin, Democratic Party leaders in Congress nonetheless march in lockstep to the hardliners in Israel and the White House. Rarely does our mainstream media depart from the monotonous monologue of the party line. Many American Jews know, as Aaron David Miller writes in the current “Newsweek”, that the destruction in Gaza won’t do much to address Israel’s longer-term needs.
But those who raise questions are accused by a prominent reform rabbi of being “morally deficient.” One Jewish American activist told me this week that never in 30 years has he seen such blind and binding conformity in his community. “You’d never know,” he said, “that it is the Gazans who are doing most of the suffering.”
We are in a terrible bind — Israel, the Palestinians, the United States. Each greases the cycle of violence, as one man’s terrorism becomes another’s resistance to oppression. Is it possible to turn this mindless tragedy toward peace? For starters, read Aaron David Miller’s article in the current “Newsweek”. Get his book, “The Much Too Promised Land”. And pay no attention to those Washington pundits cheering the fighting in Gaza as they did the bloodletting in Iraq. Killing is cheap and war is a sport in a city where life and death become abstractions of policy. Here are the people who pay the price.
That’s it for the Journal. I’m Bill Moyers. We’ll be back next week.
Henry Paulson may be the most powerful manager of money in the world and he still couldn’t do for taxpayers with the $700 billion bailout of American banks what Warren Buffett did for his shareholders in investing in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The Treasury secretary has made 174 purchases of banks’ preferred shares that include certificates to buy stock at a later date. He invested $10 billion in Goldman Sachs in October, twice as much as Buffett did the month before, yet gained warrants worth one-fourth as much as the billionaire, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Goldman Sachs terms were repeated in most of the other bank bailouts.
Paulson’s warrant deals may give U.S. taxpayers, who are funding the bailouts, less profit from any recovery in financial stocks than shareholders such as Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owner of 4 percent of Citigroup Inc., said Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.
The transactions are “just egregious,” said Johnson, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “You want to do it the way Warren does it.”
Paulson’s decisions mark the first time in the nation’s 236- year history that the U.S. government has had to prop up the financial system by purchasing shares in institutions from Goldman Sachs, the most profitable Wall Street firm last year, to Saigon National Bank, a Westminster, California, lender with a market value of $3.8 million.
Matthew Yglesias wants to lower the threshold (that is, make it available to more families) for the Child Tax Credit, and adduces this evidence in support of the need to do so.
There was a fine interview with Amos Oz on NPR this morning. Give it a listen.
The many Israelis who have been watching the conflict in Gaza include Amos Oz. The Israeli novelist is known as a dove. He co-founded a group called “Peace Now” in 1978. Yet, he tells Steve Inskeep that he initially supported Israel’s air strikes on Gaza.
Mr. OZ: In the long term, the only thing that will work for Israel and for the Palestinians is the unavoidable one and only political solution, which is a two-state solution. The Palestinians are in Palestine for the same reason for which the Norwegians are in Norway. It is their homeland, and they are not going away. The Israelis are in Israel for exactly the same reason, and they’re not going anywhere either. They cannot become one happy family, because they are not one, and because they are not happy, and because they are not even a family. They are two unhappy families. Now the good news — and there are some good news from the Middle East, although you people only get the bad news all the time. The good news is that the majority of the Israeli Jews and the majority of the Palestinian Arabs know now in their heart of hearts that in the end of the day there will be a partition and a two state solution.
… We know the way out. We don’t like this way out. It’s like a patient who has to undergo a painful surgery, an amputation. And dividing the country into two nation states is going to be like an amputation, both for the Israelis and for the Palestinians. But it has to be done, and it’s time for bold leadership on both sides to carry out this solution and to do what people know has to be done.
While you’re at it, this piece is worthwhile as well.
The fighting in Gaza has killed more than 600 Palestinians — many of them civilians. Col. Jim Hellis is chairman of the U.S. Army War College’s department of national security and strategy. He talks with Ari Shapiro about how the U.S. military factors in civilian casualties when assessing war strategy. Hellis says it’s a balance among legal, ethical and political concerns.
Andrew Brown describes research into conflicts over “sacred values”, published last year in the Proceedings of the NAS.
Our experiments tested the general hypothesis that, when reasoning about sacred values, people would not apply instrumental (cost–benefit) calculations but would instead apply deontological (moral) rules or intuitions.
… In these experiments, nearly half the settlers considered land on the Occupied Territories a sacred value, while a little more than half the Palestinians considered sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light. More than four-fifths of them thought the right of return was a sacred value, too, which makes any rationalist observer despair.
The first interesting result was that offering money or material goods in exchange for sacred ones did not make the sacred goods less valuable but more. Expressions of anger and disgust and of the willingness to use violence actually rose among moral absolutists when a deal involving giving up some sacred value was sweetened with material incitements, such as suggesting to Israeli settlers that they give up the West Bank to a Palestinian in return for an American subsidy to Israel of $1bn a year for 100 years.
So far so hideously depressing. But the second, more optimistic, result was that the absolutists who rejected with contumely the offer of profane money (or peace) for sacred land would accept deals that involved their enemies giving up things that they considered sacred. The paper cites both Israeli and Hamas leaders saying that they could make peace if only the other side would apologise for 1948, or recognise formally Israel’s right to exist. Demanding this kind of wholly intangible mutual surrender of pride makes no sense on a utilitarian calculus, and yet it may be the only thing to unlock the situation. …
The framers of the Constitution designed the treaty process with a bias against “entangling alliances,” as Thomas Jefferson described them in his first inaugural address. They designated the Senate as the body responsible to protect the interests of the states from being bargained away by the president in deals with foreign nations. The framers required a supermajority to ensure that treaties would reflect a broad consensus and careful, mature decision-making.
One should be clear that this sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn’t representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza. It’s unfair to use the Goldfarb/Peretz pathology to impugn all supporters of the Israeli attack. It’s certainly possible to support the Israeli offensive despite the deaths of these civilians, to truly lament the suffering of innocent Palestinians but still find the war, on balance, to be justifiable.
It appears that Blagojevich has decide to appoint one Roland Burris, 71, former Illinois AG, to Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Burris might even be a good guy, but the Senate Democrats are saying they’re having no part of it.
Here’s a suggestion, via Josh Marshall, that the Senate may have no say in the matter. Interesting.
I said below that the Senate had full power to seat or not to seat any Blago appointee. And the senate does have extensive power to judge elections and qualifications. But Jeff Greenfield points out that the senate may not actually have that power with regards to an appointment…
Hey, Josh—re the Senate’s power.
I think you’re wrong about saying the Senate has full power not to seat the Gov’s pick. In Powell vs McCormick, a 1969 case involving Adam Clayton Powell, the Supreme Court said, 7–2, that a house of Congress does NOT have such power-they can judge “qualifications” in the Constitutional sense (age, citizenship, etc). And they can judge elections, but say nothing about appointments. (Nate Silver did a great piece on this awhile back).
They can probably EXPEL a member as they see fit—though the Court’s decision does not make that clear—but on what grounds? Just because they don’t like the guy who picked him?
PS—just know these are tentative notions…I’m sure all sorts of folks are trying to tease out this one…(don’t know if every Senate official and/or academic is on vacation this week).
… But Mr. Baydan insists he recognizes his shoes. Given their light weight, just under 11 ounces each, and clunky design, he said he was amazed by their aerodynamics. Both shoes rocketed squarely at Mr. Bush’s head and missed only because of deft ducks by the president.
… Noting the spike in sales, Serkan Turk, Baydan’s general manager, said, “Mr. Bush served some good purpose to the economy before he left.”
I’d like to think that most Americans are just too insular to realize that our child poverty rate is absolutely off the charts in international terms, even when compared to other high-immigration Anglophone countries, to say nothing of the Nordics:
The alternative to people just not knowing is the idea that people just don’t care which, frankly, is an upsetting possibility I’d prefer not to believe in. …
Add this graph of tax progressivity (or lack thereof) from the NY Times (2005).
CHART OF THE DAY….Via The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life, here’s the makeup of the 111th Congress. Note that the number of Americans who lack affiliation with any church is about 48 million or so. The number of members of Congress who are willing to admit lack of same is: zero one*. Apparently Rick Warren speaks for great big chunks of America when he says, “I could not vote for an atheist.”
*Apparently Pete Stark came out of the closet earlier this year.
Of course, “willing to admit non-affiliation” and “non-affiliation” aren’t quite the same thing…
Just in time for the feast of Sol Invictus, American sun god Barack Obama has declared that megapriest Rick Warren will deliver the hocus-pocus at his coronation. I doubt we’ll have to look very hard for the hilariously predictable outrage. It occurs to La Digs, again, that to the Democratic party, Progressives are a reliable voting bloc whose pet concerns can be winked at and discarded. Forever. Remember: Progressives are the audience for Whatsammatta wit Kanzis. Oh, do they ever wonder how the poor hicks of the heartland can forever give their affirmation to a political party that doesn’t actually give one shit about them! How mysterious is the human heart! How unusual the mind!
Of course, Barack Obama knows, and Joe Biden knows, and Nancy P. and Harry R. know, that if Barry O. dons the scarlet robes of an emperor and has himself crowned Grand Moff of the Universe by the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Progressives will still come out for the party, before returning to their blurgs to murmur darkly about the traitorous thanksralphery of “purists,” whose uncompromising un-commitment to lesser-evilism makes them an eternal target of proggie ire. “The perfect,” they cry, “is the enemy of the good.” True. But so is the bad. The problem with the Democratic Party is not forgivable imperfection. The problem is that the Democratic Party is evil, vicious, and wrong. Is Rick Warren a vacuous moral apologist for American exceptionalism? Yes! The word for his selection is: appropriate.
Hitting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq. It means that the target is even lower than the shoe, which is always on the ground and dirty.
— The Times, Dec. 15
…
For scholars of insults, what comes to mind almost immediately after a high-profile insulting incident is the central African nation of Chad, where hitting someone with a pair of pants is the highest form of insult. It means that the target is lower than pants, the hem of which, while not on the ground, is often near the ground and, again, unclean. The only problem with this form of insult is that the thrower then has to retrieve the pants, as he or she had been wearing them.
For many years people threw shorts, but almost no one was offended, as the hem of shorts is a great distance from the ground. “We’re working on new forms of insult, as well as changing our country’s name, which, strangely, is a common first name in California,” said a Chadian cultural attaché. “We need to be taken more seriously.”
…
Haha. Famous blackface comedian Juan Williams says the Iraqis are ingrates for not loving our boot stomping on a human face . . . forever! I agree! Juan Williams also wrote a very interesting book about something called “Civil Rights” in which he exhorts the Negro to be grateful to the White Man because he “brought you all the way over here for free, and gave you jobs when you arrived.”
Tories then and now
Henry Paulson may be the most powerful manager of money in the world and he still couldn’t do for taxpayers with the $700 billion bailout of American banks what Warren Buffett did for his shareholders in investing in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
