Tag: the atlantic

Sorry State of The Atlantic

Don’t know how I missed Glenn Greenwald’s take on Jeffrey Goldberg’s idiotic spew in The Atlantic (Now! More neoconservative than ever paired with incisive stories about the End of Manliness!).

Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting – forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Good news! Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

So good. Read the whole thing.

Sorry State of The Atlantic

A Steele Lockbox

Marc Ambinder, among many others, seems to be looking at the whole “secret debt at RNC” story as a sign of big trouble for the GOP going into the 2010 midterms; he goes so far as to characterize it as a threat to their whole fall product line:

During midterm elections, the national committee plays two essential roles. First, it serves as a bank account that can be drawn upon to shore up House races or put others into play. Second, it coordinates the party’s field operations and funds joint “Victory” committees with state parties. The RNC, at the moment, is barely fulfilling the second function and has less than $10 million on hand, so it cannot help much with House races.

Are our memories really this short and so utterly faulty? This whole “secret debt” thing is entirely, entirely an insidery play against Steele, who seems to be on the way out post-midterms if the inner circle has anything to say about it. Why do I say this? Well, because the GOP has awe-inspiring amounts of money available to it:

a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.

The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending – roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.

Indeed, what a scene of chaos. How will the GOP ever get by? They’ll run through that quarter-billion dollars in no time at all. Then what?!? Oh, right, more money will roll in.

And yes, for once, this news is genuinely bad for The Democrat. Page Juan Williams.

Ratfucking 2010 style

Dave Weigel lays it out:

One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But [Fox’s Megyn] Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder’s DOJ. That “Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers” video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.

“I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent.”

The crowd rises up. “Yes you do!” shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn’t know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They’ve been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.

The facts do not matter. This is precisely why people like Mr. Frazee are critically under-informed; it’s not so much that they don’t pay attention, it’s that if they are paying attention, it’s most likely they are watching FOXnews. Furthermore, anyone that grew up in the age of Cronkite has an implicit trust of television news: they simply must be making at least some effort to give us factual information…sure, it’s hyped here and there, but it must be all basically true. That’s just how it works.

And, in classic Dunning-Kruger fashion, they have no way of testing that hypothesis, are assured of their facts, and contrary, accurate information will only cause them dismay and harden their attachment to the preexisting falsity.

Now it can be told. The story about [McChrystal] voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really.

Marc Ambinder. What?
Wait, WHAT?

These people are thoroughgoing frauds – a bunch of right-wing victim-mongers whining about something they have no actual ideas about confronting. They are not something new. They are the decaying stench of the Republican corpse. If they get into power somehow, it will be Weekend At Bernie’s for conservatism.

Andrew Sullivan on the Tea Party. Whole thing well worth your short read. Breathtaking stuff. (via spiegelman)

Hopey Changey

James Fallows positively nails it:

the significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage. Period.

-and-

this [set of reforms and all the attendant process arguments] will not seem anywhere near as poisonous seven months from now as it does today. Jobs jobs jobs is what will matter most then.

So very true. If unemployment is at or near 10% in 2012, Obama will not be reelected. Period. If the economy continues to pick up this year, Democratic losses come November will be not-so-bad…not that they’ll be presented that way, of course. Anything short of a 100 Democrat Senate will be treated as an Historic Upset of the “normal order,” which, of course, currently has many Democrats representing historically red districts. But, back to Fallows:

There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these.

Nancy Pelosi touched on this point last night in her floor speech: that losing the fear of living insurance-free will let a thousand startups bloom. Folks locked into their current jobs simply to maintain a safety net for their kids can now think solely on the basis of how good they think their idea is. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. This is where the much longed-after “new economy” will ultimately come from.

…if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle.

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

Andrew Sullivan, seemingly channeling my underlying thoughts re: last post.

Cheap Premise

The Atlantic and author Christopher Hitchens, trying to declare Western Civilization dead because Jon Stewart pokes fun at our political discourse (and out-polls his Serious Journalism counterparts in the “most trusted” category while doing it), goes completely off the deep end intellectually just two paragraphs in:

And if any one thing undid Governor Palin as a person who could even be considered for the vice presidency, it was the merciless guying of her manner and personality by Tina Fey.

Uh, no. If any one thing undid Governor Palin, it was her brazenly obvious lack of qualifications for that job coupled with an obvious absence of the sort of desire or drive needed to get her ready in the several months available prior to the general election (or, for that matter, her debate with Biden). Her unceasing reliance on “You Betcha!” and other equally trenchant bits of commentary in the face of any and all questions is what created, powered, and was ultimately the thing that resonated in the Tina Fey bit. Fey was simply the person most visibly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. The imitation was so effective that viewers couldn’t help but realize that there was nothing else in there but the scare quotes, nonsensical rambles, and the closing catch-phrases. Had Palin been an unquestionably qualified (but green) candidate with a similarly idiosynchratic library of quips and old-fashioned truisms, she still would have been mocked, just as any national political figure’s most obvious tics are mocked, but simultaneously would have been accepted as an otherwise serious player on the national scene, admittedly one with a folksy shtick. Big deal. Suggesting otherwise is the real infantilization of the American discourse. And Jon Stewart and his ilk aren’t the ones responsible for any of that. Makes you wonder why his “Trust” numbers are so high.