By his own admission, President “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars” made the same mistake in Libya that President “Mission Accomplished” made in Iraq. It’s almost as if that Best and the Brightest thing doesn’t always work out.
Obama’s admission that his failure to plan for a post-reconstruction Libya was his greatest mistake—and his concomitant refusal to say that the intervention was a mistake—makes me wonder how many times a government gets to make the same “mistake” before we get to say that the mistake is no mistake but how the policy works.
I mean when you have a former University of Chicago Law School professor/former Harvard Law Review editor doing the exact same thing that his alleged ignoramus of a predecessor did in Iraq, when you see that the failure to plan for a post-intervention reconstruction is not a contingency but a bipartisan practice, don’t you start wondering about the ideology of intervention itself?
Category Archives: Politics
Note to Paul Krugman
Note to Paul Krugman, “We’re comin’ fer ya, motherfucker! [maniacal laughter]”
From The Atlantic:
Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton had 46 percent—a narrow gap that fell within the poll’s 2.5 percent margin of error. The national survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders erasing Clinton’s edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had a 20-point lead.
Musical accompaniment for Krugman’s column:
Thought for the Day: April 2, 2016
Some people think that the money Clinton accepted from Goldman in speaking fees doesn’t mean that she’s in the tank for Goldman or the financial industry in general. That’s nothing, I can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
Obama by the numbers
Commenter Paul from Long Island in response to a Krugman column:
Obama by the numbers;
1. Jobs created: 9 million
2. Unemployment rate: 5 percent down from a high of 10 percent in first year
3. Increase in national debt due to his policies: $983 billion
4. Decrease in deficit: $492 billion from $1.4 trillion
5. Corporate profits: up 166 percent
6. U.S. Iraq military deaths: 128 down from 3401
7. U.S. Afghanistan military deaths: over 1000 up from 575
8. Number of bankers jailed: 0
9. Number of torturers jailed: 0
10. Number of whistle blowers jailed: 2 (Manning, Kiriakou)
11. Climate accord: 1 (Paris)
12. Nuclear non-proliferation: 1 (Iran)
13. Uninsured rate in health care: 9.2 percent down from15.7 percent
14. Trade: 2 (Trans-Pacific partnership, Cuba)
Additions to the list?
Who Should I Vote For?
Thought for the Day – March 28, 2016
All businesses should be employee-owned.
Thought for the 2016 Presidential Election and American Politics in General
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force. Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others…
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others…
But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something…and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
And so it begins
[Merrick] Garland is, by any objective measure, a nominee of Supreme Court caliber who could make a historically influential justice…. [He] is perhaps the least political nomination Barack Obama could have made. In a sane world, that would make Garland’s confirmation more likely. In the world we live in, it probably makes it less likely.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The way you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things. We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.
UPDATE 5/23/2016: And, sure enough, the fleshy dominoes start to fall.
You are what you eat.
The coming presidential election… will consist of ordering one of three things for dinner: pizza, Indian food, or anthrax. For me Sanders is pretty good Indian food, while HRC on her worst days is Pizza Hut pizza, but the choice between Pizza Hut and anthrax is not a choice in any conceivable sense of the word…
I’d say that HRC on her best days is Pizza Hut pizza but, that quibble aside, overall a pretty good analogy. In a similar vein, Andrew O’Hehir on having to choose between HRC and the Republican nominee come the general:
The 2016 choice is more like last week’s Nestea from the back of the fridge versus a foul-smelling mystery beverage that might be diesel fuel or lawn chemicals or sorority-house vomit, but that someone in a Halloween mask has promised will get you really wasted.
I would have gone with “slightly sour milk” rather than “last week’s Nestea” but again that’s a quibble with what’s overall a pretty good analogy.