NY Times: Bush middle east policy vindicated

Ok, they didn't put it that way. But I will.

What the Times said was Libyan Arms Pact Reduces Qaddafi’s Power

In late 2009, the Obama administration was leaning on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his son Seif to allow the removal from Libya of the remnants of the country’s nuclear weapons program: casks of highly enriched uranium.

Meeting with the American ambassador, Gene A. Cretz, the younger Qaddafi complained that the United States had retained “an embargo on the purchase of lethal equipment” even though Libya had turned over more than $100 million in bomb-making technology in 2003. Libya was “fed up,” he told Mr. Cretz, at Washington’s slowness in doling out rewards for Libya’s cooperation, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important.

And why was that effort successful? Does anyone else remember this?

It received little notice at the time, but in an interview with the British Spectator in September, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (search) said Qaddafi had told him in a phone conversation that "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

I do. Libya is one of the collateral benefits of Iraq, and it's been obvious for a very long time. Back in 2005, when Chuck Hagel decided to hop on the "rush-to-defeat" bandwagon, I made this comment about what had happened in Iraq:

2 1/2 years ago, Saddam Hussein was in power in Baghdad. He was paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He was providing a haven for some Al-quaeda members. He was shooting at US and British planes that were enforcing the UN no-fly zones. He had the largest army in the middle-east. He was taking UN Oil-for-Food money and preventing aid in the form of food and medicine from reaching his oppressed citizens. Now he's gone, his armies are gone, his sons are gone and the Iraqi people have elected a representative government that's making progress towards a democratic constitution. The influence of the actions in Iraq has caused changes in behavior - positive changes of behavior - in Syria and Lebanon and Libya.

So, yeah, I'm going to say "Bush policy vindicated."

"Commies? Good people, nothing wrong with them" - NY Times

Thought experiment: Read the following and answer this question - would the New York Times, or any other serious newspaper, run a story that began and ended this way?

Where Nazis Pontificate, and Play

IF National Socialists have a reputation for anything, it is seriousness. (And if you have seen old photos of Adolf Hitler, you know that he did not smile much.) But at the Reifenstahl Forum, a community center on West Street where revolutionaries and radicals gather daily to ponder and to pontificate, they also play. (Smiles abound.)

Amid the honeycomb of offices and hidden rooms on the ground floor of a shabby brick building facing the Hudson River, activists and agitators unite for classes like “Ernst Haeckel: Revolutionary Strategy and the Historic Bloc” and talks like “Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Future.” Networks of pipes snaking along the ceiling and glimpses of exposed brick give the space a slightly industrial feel, which seems fitting for discussions on labor theory and worker exploitation.

But there is also the monthly Game Night, when regulars put down their copies of “Mein Kampf” and immerse themselves in table tennis, foosball and a complicated Nazi version of Monopoly called, appropriately, Race Struggle.

In a city known for cynicism, the Reifenstahl, which survives on donations, is a surprisingly open and idealistic place.

...

While Mr. Balagun waved me out the front door, I imagined Hitler’s ghost floating in the hazy light of the evening, watching over the poker players. Beneath his famous mustache, I could almost see a grin.

Do you want a little more time to make your decision?

Of course not. They'd never run anything like that. Everyone recognizes the abomination which was the Nazi regime, and everything related to it is tainted.


So why is the Times running this?

Where Marxists Pontificate, and Play

IF communists have a reputation for anything, it is seriousness. (And if you have seen old photos of Karl Marx, you know that he did not smile much.) But at the Brecht Forum, a community center on West Street where revolutionaries and radicals gather daily to ponder and to pontificate, they also play. (Smiles abound.)

Amid the honeycomb of offices and hidden rooms on the ground floor of a shabby brick building facing the Hudson River, activists and agitators unite for classes like “Antonio Gramsci: Revolutionary Strategy and the Historic Bloc” and talks like “Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Future.” Networks of pipes snaking along the ceiling and glimpses of exposed brick give the space a slightly industrial feel, which seems fitting for discussions on labor theory and worker exploitation.

But there is also the monthly Game Night, when regulars put down their copies of “Das Kapital” and immerse themselves in table tennis, foosball and a complicated Marxist version of Monopoly called, appropriately, Class Struggle.

In a city known for cynicism, the Brecht, which survives on donations, is a surprisingly open and idealistic place.

...

While Mr. Balagun waved me out the front door, I imagined Marx’s ghost floating in the hazy light of the evening, watching over the poker players. Behind his famous thicket of a beard, I could almost see a grin.

Ho, ho, ho. That's so amusing. Those serious communists have a playful side!

Let's consider, for a moment, a little bit of historical perspective.

Death tolls:

• Nazis - 10-25 million
• Communists
  
  • Russia - 20-25 million
  • China - 50-65 million
  • Cambodia - ~2 million
  • North Korea - ~2 million
  • and more...
  Total - ~94 million

Someone tell me why the second excerpt, the one that actually ran in the New York Times, isn't more offensive than the first, which no one would ever run.

The answer, of course, is that, for the American left (of which the New York Times is both opinion leader and member), it was the anti-Communists who were wrong. It was Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon that defined the domestic political opponent, in their eyes, and so whatever they opposed was to be supported. Hitler was a monster, of course, but was he more of one than Stalin? Was he more of one than Mao? Not by body count, he wasn't. Yet affection for those tyrannical monsters is an amusing or serious or admirable trait in the eyes of the Times...

Making Ignorance Chic

So sometimes, someone links a Maureen Dowd column and I read it. Someone did that today on facebook, referring to this in glowing terms. So I clicked. And it demands a response. Which I generally refrain from doing on facebook, but did today anyway. Please, do NOT try this at home. Reading a Dowd column almost inevitably kills brain cells, and frankly, it hurts, so don't do it. I did it so that you don't have to.

Making Ignorance Chic

...unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema [Marilyn Monroe] had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and be friends with intellectuals, even going so far as to marry one. But now another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable.

What a load of hogwash. Take a whole lot of individual people with whom you disagree, find one misspoken phrase from a couple, misrepresent things that a couple of others have said or done (does Marueen even understand that the phrase "separation of church and state" is not in the first amendment? Christine O'Donnell does.), take a sardonic spoonerism that you've just missed, and accuse them of making ignorance chic.

What if someone had said that he'd campaigned 57 states and only had one more to go? Said "How's it going, Sunshine?" while campaigning in Sunrise, FL? Said that he sees many of America's "fallen heroes" in the audience? Claimed that 12 dead were 10,000? Is that person making ignorance chic? No, you ignore it, because Barack Obama's a Democrat.

You may not agree with Sarah Palin, but that doesn't make her ignorant, and it doesn't make those who agree with her ignorant. It is one of the least attractive memes of those on the left that those on the right are stupid. It's not true, it's unpleasant and it's unattractive. (Like pretty much everything Maureen Dowd writes.) It goes a long way to provoking the kind of bitter partisanship that you claim to dislike, because it creates an attitude and expectation that you never have to listen to anything that anyone on the right has to say. You just brush it off, because they're lesser beings, stupid, racist, homophobic, "bitter, cling(y), scared" and so you don't have to deal with anything they say. (Yes, I've noted this before.) You can ignore their arguments, because what could they be worth, anyway? You don't need to debate or discuss - you can just belittle. (Like pretty much everything Maureen Dowd writes.)

It's just like all of the leftists and Democrats and "journalists" (I know, that's redundant) laughing at Sarah Palin on Tuesday for her comment at a Tea Party rally on Monday that it was too early to "party like it's 1773." "She's so smart" said one. "Ummm..." said another. "WTF happened in 1773?" asked a third?

Umm...The Boston Tea Party.


(Skip the first link - it goes to the Dowd column at the Times and, as I said, it's not worth the time. The other two links are fine, and you should click them...)

The quality of the "filter"

Worth keeping in mind when reading NYT analyses of Climategate.

In 1920, Robert Goddard was conducting experiments with rockets. In an editorial, The New York Times sneered at Goddard’s work and particularly at the idea that a rocket could function in a vacuum:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969…the year of the Apollo moon mission…the NYT finally got around to issuing a correction for their 1920 mistake.

What is noteworthy about the original editorial is not just the ignorance, but the arrogance and the outright nastiness...It appears that some of the attributes of the NYT which make it so untrustworthy and unlovable today are actually cultural characteristics of long standing.

How many journalists are qualified scientists? How many have good experience and expertise, even from an academic perspective, in any of the hard sciences, higher level math or statistics? Are not they drawn almost exclusively not just from the ranks of Liberal Arts majors, but from the ranks of Liberal Arts majors who want "to make the world a better place?" And that's the filter through which we've gotten our news on everything. Al Gore, for example, depends on it.

Thankfully, there's a lot of information getting past the filters now...

Captive "conservative" on the liberal plantation speaks...

David Brooks, who now writes an opinion column for the New York Times, is one of the nominally Rebuplican, allegedly conservative writers who supported Obama last fall, largely on classist lines. He has been, ever since the election, trying to justify that support. In doing so, he continues to perpetuate the myth, which was obviously a myth to those not as well-tied in to the east coast liberal media elite as David Brooks, that Obama was a centrist, running on centrist principles, with a centrist temperament.

His column from yesterday, in which he attempts to explain Obama's plummeting approval ratings, has attracted a fair bit of attention. Primarily because of comments like this:

Obama’s challenge was to push his agenda through a Democratic-controlled government while retaining the affection of the 39 percent of Americans in the middle. The administration hasn’t been able to pull it off. From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress. The White House has failed to veto measures, like the pork-laden omnibus spending bill, that would have demonstrated independence and fiscal restraint. By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington.

The New York Times, no matter how much of a joke some of us think it is, maintains it reputation as the place to go for what's going on in the world. There still may not be a more prestigious bit of newspaper "real estate" than the Times' op/ed page. And when you turn to it, this is the kind of nonsense that you get.

Why is it nonsense? Let us count the ways...

1. "Obama’s challenge was to push his agenda through a Democratic-controlled government..." Well, Obama's a Democrat. He wants the same sorts of things that the rest of the Democrats want. He's a newly elected President, with both houses of Congress controlled by his party, with large margins on the strength of his coattails. The idea that it's a "challenge" to "push his agenda through" is uncommonly silly.



2. "...push his agenda through ... while retaining the affection of the 39 percent of Americans in the middle..." His agenda is a far left agenda. It was obvious (though not, apparently, to David Brooks) before the election that it would be. It's one thing to run as a centrist and garner the affection of the "middle;" it's something else entirely to attempt to implement a liberal agenda and maintain that affection. In other words, what Brooks is saying he hasn't done is something that was un-doable. It would be like Sherman attempting to "push his agenda" through a Union-controlled army while "retaining the affection" of middle class Georgians. The two goals are mutually exclusive. Of course he "hasn’t been able to pull it off." It was un-pull-off-able.



3. "From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress." Brooks is within shouting distance of a legitimate point here. Some (a really tiny, small) fraction of his problems stem from his letting the Congressional Democrats do the heavy lifting. He has allowed the far less appealing faces of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer become the faces of his initiatives. That said, the initiatives aren't failing because Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chuch Schumer are the faces of "change," they're failing because the Democrats, including Barack Obama, want to restructure the relationship between the government and the people in a way that the people don't want. And he isn't "joined ... at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress" because he has failed tactically, or because he's been "rolled" by the House - he's joined at the hip because he is a liberal who wants the same things, and believes in the same policies, as the liberals in Congress.



4. "The White House has failed to veto measures, like the pork-laden omnibus spending bill, that would have demonstrated independence and fiscal restraint." Yes, David. That's very true. Why do you suppose it failed to veto the porkulus bill? Because this President and this White House wanted that omnibus spending bill. Guess what - he won't veto a health care bill, either, no matter how much the citizens of the country don't want it. Not because it will be something foisted upon him by the Congress, but because he wants it.



5. "By force of circumstances..." I love this one. It's like the Clinton-era formulation, "mistakes were made." Not "I made mistakes," not ever, but "mistakes were made." Poor Barack is just the victim of life's circumstances. "He's depraved on account'a he's deprived."



6. "the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington..." He sure has. I'd bet money, if I had any left, that this trend will continue into the future. Here's a clue, David - it's not a bug. It's a feature...

Now THAT'S an op-ed column

I'm not a big fan of Stephen Colbert, but I sure enjoyed this...

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.