31 May 2008

Petty weekend pet peeve

Local sportscasters* who introduce a highlight of a bunt play by telling us we are about to witness some "fundamental baseball." For that matter, add them to the broader population of nostalgia-peddling drones who somehow accept the bunt is a fundamental baseball play at all.

Fundamental skills, as far as I understand them, are skills required for basic levels of success. Making a clean fielding play on a ball hit directly to you is fundamental, as is not swinging at pitches three feet high. Failure at these tasks usually means you'll have trouble cracking the lineup of a beer league outfit, let alone more competitive levels.

Bunting, however, is a specialized skill. There are only three conditions where it would be useful for player to learn to bunt effectively ahead of learning other skills. 1) The player is fast enough to use the bunt as a way to reach base, 2) The player is a far weaker hitter than his teammates, allowing him to use the sacrifice as a modest contribution (i.e. National League pitchers) 3) The league is an extremely adverse run-scoring environment (i.e., the dead-ball era).

The last point is where your average tradition cultist most often goes wrong. A basic tenet of sabermetric theory holds that outs become more valuable as it becomes easier to score runs. Therefore, a sacrifice bunt is a much bigger waste in a 12-11 game than a 2-1 contest. The Oakland A's were widely ridiculed for shelving the sacrifice bunt during the peak years of the "Moneyball" phase, but, given the well-known offensive increase across baseball and the team's own collection of disciplined sluggers, it was a decision that made sense. Now that the A's have less pure offensive punch, they're more likely to bunt. That's how a team adapts to its changing situation instead of doing whatever purists feel is somehow requisite to the game of baseball.

Amateur baseball, thanks to the aluminum bat and other factors, often has an even more favorable offensive output, making the bunt even less of a tactical necessity. Nothing, however, gets a cranky old traditionalist more worked up over the moral decadence of youth today than some kid fouling off a bunt. I remember going to an IU game several years ago where one of the hitters toward the middle of the Indiana order offered a bunt on the first pitch and shanked it foul, which set off a couple of old bird-watchers sitting a few feet away from me. The kid didn't attempt another bunt in that at-bat, presumably because he was much better at performing the fundamental batting skill of getting on base. Oh, the teams combined for roughly 20 runs in that game.

Now, there's another possible reason for a misunderstanding here, and that is because your average dumb sportscaster thinks "fundamentals" means "easy shit my grandmother could do." I suppose that last part may be true, which is why they teach bunting to NL pitchers, but that doesn't make it an important or even necessary skill to spend limited practice time teaching most players.

*I could have ended it here, really.

29 May 2008

It's like I read their mind

Crooked Timber and LGM both have threads discussing this essay by Edward Lengel in the Washington Post about the American memory of World War I. Quiggin writes:
In any case, in the long run, the absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.
Commenters at both sites have mentioned the persistence of Southern militarism as a counterexample to the notion that having a massively destructive war on your home soil is a tonic against thirst for more war. Of course, the South needed the myths of the Lost Cause and Yankee aggression to prop up the apartheid state for the next century. Certainly interwar Germany didn't have any trepidation in the immediate aftermath of the war thanks to the prototype dolchstosslegende.

Anyway, I think the key difference is that the causal relationship between the wars is what has been lost in the United States. One commenter points out that the period between 1914-1945 should be referred to as a second 30-Years War. The war party--and its enablers in popular history--want to excise any contextual factors that helped spawn extremist ideologies in interwar Europe so they can imagine wannabe Hitlers and Mussolinis popping up out of the blue all over the world. It's the same motivation that keeps any causal analysis deeper than "hating us for our freedoms" shunned from any discussion of 9/11.

28 May 2008

Clintondämmerung

Wow, she really is going down in flames; comparing the supposed black-coat conspiracy against her to fraudulent elections in Zimbabwe, and citing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as an example of a primary election that wasn't over by June.

The latter remark has been widely dissected, but what makes it offensive isn't so much that she invoked the murder of a politician whose ability to galvanize the youth vote against the party establishment reminds people of Obama but rather that it's completely counter-intuitive to the point she is vainly trying to make. If you want to find an example of a long, bitter primary fight that still had no adverse effect on the party's chances in the general election, 1968 must be the worst possible one you could imagine. Unless riots at the convention and the eventual election of Richard Nixon are your ideas of a great outcome.

At this point, I really haven't got any guess on what Clinton is up to anymore. I think I can say with some certainty that she is not going to be the next president of the United States, since using some backdoor machination to swindle the nomination would disenfranchise too many voters, particularly young people and African-Americans, in Obama's core of support. Is she hoping to torpedo Obama's run so she can return again in 2012? This is a strong accusation even for people as duplicitous as the Clintons, and it's not likely to work anyway. Clinton has already moved much of the Democratic base from being tepidly ambivalent toward her to active dislike. If Obama loses, she'll be widely blamed for the outcome by party activists, and the Clintons' status will fall even further. If they want to keep much influence within the party, they'd better hope Obama wins.

Of course, if Clinton does want to sink Obama's chances in November, she still holds a potent weapon. In a speech excerpted by last week's Washington Week on PBS, she invokes the suffragist movement, saying there were women in the audience who were born before universal suffrage was added to the Constitution. It's a subtle reminder that she is The Woman Candidate, and nicely dovetails with the rallying cry of many Clinton boosters on the internet claiming she is only losing because of sexism from the media and from Obama's campaign. Clinton may be trying to dog-whistle women voters both as a way to last-minute support and encourage them to stick it to the mean boys in the fall who stopped her from winning because they hate women. (See Brilliant at Breakfast and The Mahablog here and here.)

26 May 2008

In Munich

Fred Clark has a couple of great posts concerning the persistent invocation of Munich by hawks trying to convince you of the total Hitleriness of the latest little Hitler who's annoying them.

No one who invokes Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Analogy is arguing in good faith. That goes for your crazy uncle, your co-worker, President Bush and John McCain. Just look at their shoes. Are the laces tied? No one smart enough to be capable of tying their own shoelaces is stupid enough to really believe what they're saying when they invoke this analogy.

The one-size-fits-all Munich template requires that we pretend that all diplomacy is capitulation. It requires that we pretend that containment, deterrence, isolation, sanctions, international pressure, inspections, soft power, summit meetings, aid, withholding aid, trade and every other form of possible influence whether political, economical or cultural are all just cowardly euphemisms for surrender.

To really believe that, one would have to be sublimely ignorant of history, geography, politics and the basic vocabulary of the English language. That level of perfect ignorance takes too much effort to achieve and sustain for anyone to master it accidentally.

It is simply not possible that these people are sincere. They do not -- they cannot -- believe what they are saying.

Unfortunately, enough of the American public is "sublimely ignorant of history," which allows the willfully stupid and insincere hacks to spin the Munich argument effectively. Here in the United States of Amnesia--to channel Gore Vidal--the rendering of history by the popular media, which is subsequently employed by politicians and opinion-framers, begins around 1939. World War II was the salvific virgin birth of the American Nation as we know it, when we brought forth the saving grace of Freedom and cleansed the world of evil. And boy, have we not let anyone live it down since then.

History before Munich only exists in dry, dusty textbooks, as a kind of remedial recitation of a ossified, irrelevant antiquity. It's conveniently never germane as a historical analogy to any present circumstance. Alas, however, most subsequent attempts at re-creating the glory of WWII have been lacking the same buoyancy, as all such efforts of recapturing the euphoric experience of initial salvation inevitably do, so we're left with bearing the cross of Munich forever.

I often think the difference between the way Europeans and Americans understand the world wars is that is that, while Europeans remember both wars and the causal relationship between them, Americans only remember the second and believe it to be a divine, epiphanic spark on the pages of history when the United States passed away and America was born. Curiously, despite the reverence we must pay to that war we also, like devout Catholics seeing the Virgin Mother in a Cheez-it cracker, believe it re-appears at any moment when we need to control some other country's resources.

Of course, just because the hawks shout "Munich!" at every turn doesn't mean they have any understanding of all the forces at play there. (A lot of history buffs love to play with counterfactuals about the outcomes of Munich, which is interesting but I won't get into it now.) For example, many people have seen this video of Chris Matthews running up a poor right-wing talker to see if he's capable of doing anything besides yell "appeaser!" The answer, apparently, is no.

23 May 2008

Yelling "Hitler!" in a crowded planet

Both Robert Farley and Eric Martin have been useful dismissing the silliness of this article which, while more on the hysterical side, nonetheless seems to be echoing the broader consensus of the bomb-bomb-Iran chorus line. It's apparently settled truth among the hawks that, as soon as Iran rolls a nuke off the assembly line, it's going to be lobbed at Israel. Even the threat of mutually assured destruction won't stop them, because they're Kah-razy Suicidal Mussel-men!

But even if Iran does pose a serious threat of this variety--and Farley and Martin give good reasons to believe that a "suicidal Arab state" is ahistorical, and Iran has shown no inclination to be the first--why, exactly, should we believe the hawks the benefit this time when they've already botched the "pending nuclear annihilation!" excuse with Iran's next-door neighbor? If I were I hawk, I'd want to carefully ration the nuke fearmongering and, furthermore, actually hit the target when I do. Otherwise, people might start to suspect that I'm just looking for an excuse to bomb Muslims into oblivion.

I am aware of the reports claiming the administration plans to strike Iran in the coming months, and I'm sure such contingency plans exist, but I suppose I'm one of the few who doesn't believe it's going to happen. Oh, I wouldn't doubt that they would like to, but they lack the political capital provided by the groundswell of jingoism that paved the way for the misadventure in Iraq, which also, of course, provides a handy counter-argument for much of the public whose amnesia about the selling of that war hasn't yet set in. You shouldn't necessarily listen to my hunches, though. I was one of those people who couldn't understand how Saddam Hussein could have weapons of mass destruction after his military capacity had been nearly erased by 12 years of war, inspection, and sanctions. Nukes aren't exactly something to cook up in a damp basement after all. And look how that turned out.

22 May 2008

News, News, News

You may have seen the photos of Obama's rally in Portland, Oregon last week that drew an estimated 75,000 people. Apparently there are skeptical righties, unconvinced of Obama's drawing power, claiming a great portion of the crowd was only there to hear his opening act; wildly popular rock superstars--and Portland natives--The Decemberists.

(By the way, is there a decent person anywhere named Bob Knight? What about that name makes you an autocratic jackass? Phone in if you know someone to reverse this trend.)

.....

I polished off Chris Bachelder's satirical novel U.S.! in just a couple of days. It's a quick read, and often entertaining though much of the humor relies on in-jokes, a common problem with the McSweeney's set. The jokes I got, however, were very funny, such as a letter written to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue in 1998, part of the scrapbook of collected ephemera that comprises the first half of the book, that is absolutely uproarious.

U.S.! imagines a world where socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair, after his death in 1968, is resurrected by idealistic lefties, only to be assassinated again shortly thereafter. Thus begins a perpetual cycle of death and reanimation, with both sides unrelenting in their determination even as the feud becomes less and less relevant to the wider world.

Besides having fun with Sinclair's many tics and oddities, Bachelder resurrects the old lefty primarily to wrestle with the value of didacticism in art, almost as extinct as the American left itself. Sinclair's countless novels are famously terrible, with boilerplate shallow characters and earnest commitment to furthering the socialist cause. Notably, this style is alive and well in the evangelical Christian world, with similar results.

The films of Ken Loach are an example of how didactic works can still be worthwhile and survive on its own merits. (I need to set up a Loach marathon soon, as I've still only seen two films.) Loach's secret, I think, is keeping his antagonist off-screen, and weighing how it effects his characters, allowing him to make his points without creating grossly unrealistic situations. And, of course, there is P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, based loosely on Sinclair's Oil! Maybe we'll disinter the old man's spirit yet.

...

From the Wapo, U.S. immigration officials drugging people on deportation flights. A few days old, but still ought to be seen.

....

21 May 2008

2008 Indy 500 preview

With the last two winners of the '500' off chasing glamor and glory in Taxicab Land, the 92nd running of the race is wide open for a first-time winner, likely from the two drivers who have been the dominant forces in the sport for the past five years but are still looking for their first win in the biggest event of the season. Taciturn Kiwi Scott Dixon lost the 2007 championship by running out of fuel in the final turn of the season but has come out firing in '08 with one win in the first four races and two others that could easily have come but for bad luck with pit sequences. He's also on the pole raceday. His chief rival left in the series is maddeningly consistent Tony Kanaan, who has led in each of his six prior starts but has yet to win, though he may have deserved it last year only to be shuffled back in the weather-induced chaos of the final segment.

The past three seasons have been dominated thoroughly by the "Big Three" teams in the sport, Team Penske, Andretti Green, and Chip Ganassi Racing, and they remain head and shoulders above the rest of the field. However, even among that troika, Ganassi has pulled out a clear edge in the early season schedule as Dixon and teammate Dan Wheldon, the '05 winner, have won twice, scored three poles, and has swept the first two starting positions for the last two races. Most of the damage has been done by Dixon, though Wheldon has had the much better career of the two at Indianapolis. Team consistency may be playing a role in the team's success; while Ganassi enters his third season with the same driver lineup its main rivals have been forced to replace past champions with question marks.

Roger Penske, chasing his 15th '500' title, has tabbed quick but erratic Australian Ryan Briscoe to step in for the departed Sam Hornish, Jr., gone to Penske's stock car operation. Briscoe pairs with two-time winner Helio Castroneves, who achieved minor celebrity in the off-season by winning ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" reality show. Castroneves is in his ninth season with Penske still seeking his first series championship, and, after a great start to his career at Indianapolis, has been uninspiring in recent years. Briscoe and Castroneves will trail the Ganassi cars off the grid, starting third and fourth respectively.

Defending champion Dario Franchitti is spending his retirement tooling around the back of the NASCAR grid, leaving Kanaan the undisputed standard-bearer for Andretti Green's four-car armada. The team's other three drivers have only two career wins between them. Marco Andretti is the heir to that family's racing legacy, but is coming off an abysmal sophomore season in 2007, and still seems prone to rookie errors. Japanese rookie Hideki Mutoh replaced Franchitti and is smooth but conservative. If Danica Patrick gets her second career win in the 92nd '500', the world may not survive to see Monday.

The teams with the best shot of cracking the superteam monopoly are two single-car efforts qualified in the top 11. Brazilian veteran Vitor Meira starts Panther Racing's only entry in eighth. The affable Meira and the plucky, independent team are fan favorites, and Meira getting his first career win--he has eight runner-up finishes--would be one of the most popular outcomes for the diehard observers. Roger Penske's son Jay is building an impressive operation with technology executive Steve Luczo, and they have brought fearless South African Tomas Scheckter on board for the team's second '500'. Scheckter starts 11th, and is guaranteed to be a factor at some point in the race, for good or ill.

Of the teams brought over by the dissolution of the Champ Car World Series, the most prominent is the longstanding powerhouse operation of Newman/Haas/Laniagan, another team replacing a key member with four-time CCWS champ Sebastian Bourdais moving to the Toro Rosso F1 team. While 19-year old Graham Rahal, son of the former champion Bobby, gets all the press clippings, its Bourdais' replacement, lanky career overachiever Justin Wilson, who gives them the best shot at a high finish. KV Racing Technology also has a capable tandem in Oriol Servia and Will Power, who should both improve on lackluster qualifying efforts. Conquest Racing and Dale Coyne's operation are low-budget survivors, though former Indy pole-winner Bruno Junquiera found good speed in qualifying to start one of the Coyne cars 15th. HVM Racing brings rookie E.J. Viso to the track for its debut outing. Viso, a cocky, aggressive outsider with sponsorship from the Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA, no less, is like a perfect storm of hate for the oldtimers.

Elsewhere, the Dreyer and Reinbold duo of Townsend Bell--fastest second-day qualifier--and 2004 winner Buddy Rice could challenge for top-10 finishes. Tony George's friends-and-family-only Vision Racing team has made great strides in the past two seasons, and has the boss's son Ed Carpenter starting 1oth, as well as ex-driver turned radio analyst-turned driver again Davey Hamilton. Future superstar Alex Lloyd makes his first career Indycar start on loan from Ganassi to Bobby Rahal's team. Lloyd starts on the seventh row with his teammate, able Californian Ryan Hunter-Reay. Journeyman Darren Manning gave the legendary A.J. Foyt's team a boost with a 14th place qualifying run, but the team lacks the race management ability to sustain it.

If you've bothered to read this far, I assume you're crazy enough to be interested in my picks. While one would be foolish to pick against Dixon, I have a superstition that the driver who claims most of the headlines during the month often gets overshadowed on race day by someone who has been lying in the weeds. Plus, although he is often dominant everywhere else on the circuit, Dixon has never shown much natural affinity for Indianapolis. I'm going to go a little against the current and pick Briscoe. While it may be crazy to think he can keep it off the barriers for 500 miles, if he does he's much too fast to not be in the mix. And, admittedly, it's a bit of a rooting interest; I've always felt Briscoe has been hard done by the fan community (very few non-American drivers can avoid this, however) never more then now replacing All-American Hero Sam Hornish. I'd be delighted if he could serve up a crow sandwich to all the right people.

19 May 2008

My patriotism can beat up your patriotism

Far be it from me to defend sadsack decent liberal Todd Gitlin, but I'll link to this post by Sam Boyd at TAPPED, because David Frum's reaction to Gitlin is very instructive--perhaps unintentionally so--on how diehard jingoes rationalize their patriotism.

Frum writes:
Gitlin tries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy
.To which Boyd says:
This then, is Frum's real problem. For Frum, it doesn't mater what America has actually done -- acknowledging America's faults makes you unpatriotic by definition. Unless you have a Panglossian view of America -- that it's the best possible country imaginable -- then you're not a patriot.
This is correct. The jingoist view of America is basically Calvinist; America creates goodness simply by acting in the world, and the proof of America's greatness is simply the actuality of past events. America willed them into being, and her will is, by definition, omnibenevolent.

Frum does, unwittingly, stumble onto a nut in Gitlin's hapless I TOO CAN HAZ UR PATRIOTISM? performance.
If we were wrong, he wants to say, we were wrong for good cause, wrong for admirable motives, wrong because we were in some deeper sense right. In his telling, anti-Americanism may be a fault, yes, but only the sort of fault to which over-eager applicants confess in job interviews. "My faults? I just care too darn much!"
This is why, as I wrote in an earlier post, the liberal flavor of patriotic posturing is often more insidious than the vanilla proto-fascism of the likes of Frum. What Gitlin and others who like this path are effectively saying is, to put a twist on a popular evangelical bumper sticker, "America isn't perfect, just forgiven." Insofar as America fails the rest of the planet, it's only because we aren't living up to the higher standard of righteousness God (or whomever) has set for us. They won't hear any talk from troublesome hippies about the corrosive effects of global hegemony, in spite of all the evidence they still hold fast naively to the promise of an imperial gentle giant.*

I'm already beginning to see the "liberals are the real patriots" meme sprout up this election season over Barack and Michelle Obama's supposed deficiency. For once, I'd like to see someone respond to allegations of insufficient loyalty by declaring superstitious belief on the superiority of the arbitrary nation-state where you were born is irrelevant. But I'm not holding my breath on that front.

*I immediately thought of the Alliance in Joss Whedon's Serenity when I wrote this sentence as an example of an essentially well-meaning juggernaut whose quest to control the known universe frequently sparks resentment and conflict.

17 May 2008

Prose of the day

James Wolcott, in his blog at Vanity Fair.

The word "surreal" is so oft over- and misused these days (Teresa Rebeck has fun with a blonde party girl's oh-wow usage of "surreal" in her play The Scene), but this sight qualified: Kissinger, slumped into himself, as if burdened and buried under his own ponderous self-importance, his head--as craggy and ancient-eternal as a Koren drawing of a Galapagos lizard--protruding from a shiny, ripply black Yankees jacket that looked fresh off the souvenir rack. It seemed wrong that Kissinger should enjoy a cushy spot to watch the Yankees lose, that he should still be here after Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut have gone. Perhaps he's hanging on long enough for the United States to embark on another foul, misguided war so that he can squeeze out one or two more appearances on Charlie Rose and grace us with his "unique perspective" in a guttural voice thick with stones and ash.
Damn, I'd give at least a half-dozen appendages to do that. (A person can type with his tongue, right?)

15 May 2008

Why won't they talk about it?

With the two Democratic primary contenders being effectively identical on matters of concrete policy, much of the chatter in the big and small media has been devoted to breakdowns of demographic support. We all know the drill by know. Obama wins African-Americans and educated whites, Clinton gets white women, Latinos, and, as she infamously says, "hard-working white people." There's another demographic that's been breaking sharply for Obama, however, that's passively acknowledged but seldom analyzed in any detail: Young voters.

Exit poll data shows that Obama does consistently better among the youth vote regardless of race, class, or gender. In Indiana, which Clinton won by a scant two points, Obama won among voters aged 17-29 by a 22-point margin. Clinton won among white voters as a whole by 18 points, but lost under-30 white voters 54-46. The MSNBC poll does not break down age by gender, and there are frequently not enough black and Latino voters to register representative samples. In Texas, Obama nearly broke even with Latino voters under-30 while losing the overall Latino vote handily, though in California his results were similar through all age brackets.

Likewise, Clinton has been sweeping up the over-65 vote by large margins in virtually every state. In Indiana, she won this group by 40 points, and it rarely breaks less. In North Carolina, she lost the overall vote by 15, but still carried the loyal elderly 57-41.

So, I'm sure you're saying that this is all mighty academic, and nothing we don't already know. Well, yes, we know it, but, unlike with the rest of this identity-obsessed race, no pundit seems inclined to wager on what it means. Perhaps the ages-old conflict between children and their parents (though in this case, it's more like their grandparents) doesn't have the contemporary pomp and circumstance to keep them interested. But with Obama set to face John McCain in the general election, the generation gap will only get more pronounced as the divide between young and old reaches almost-comical levels.

At least the mainstream pundits will have to muddle through for the first time a presidential election which doesn't involve re-fighting the same cultural battles of the 1960s. As John Rogers put it so succinctly, the media drumbeat during the 2004 election seemed to be, "Fuck the current war, we've got some Vietnam shit to settle!" They've been trying, of course, such as pleading with us to believe Obama might have had some dealings with Weathermen agitator Bill Ayers as a uniquely precocious eight-year old. Tim Russert's head may balloon to an even-more-ungodly size going through withdrawal symptoms, but I think he and his colleagues will survive the ordeal.

It's likely they'll survive it by ignoring it, though, and that would be a shame, because the generation gap isn't going to go away. Whether or not one sees Obama as an agent of genuine change, he is nonetheless an avatar for the battle between aging Boomers clinging to one more banzai run at saving their legacy and post Gen-Xers staking their own claims to a vision of which direction the country should go.

14 May 2008

Suck. On. This.

Glenn Greenwald disembowels the abominable Tom Friedman.

In a related story, remnants of the Fried-stache were collected near Battery Park and Shea Stadium.

12 May 2008

The empire you have

The Donkeyman points out this article in Time floating the possibility of invading Burma to force needed relief supplies to victims of the recent cyclone there. Erik Loomis of Alterndestiny has posted a few important caveats to such an idea, and more thoroughly than I could, but this thought piqued my interest because it's related to the broader impulse of liberal humanitarian intervention as expressed well by this paragraph from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

And yet, despite all this, I am not a pacifist. I respect and admire the qualities of professional soldiers. Without the determination and leadership of soldiers like General Wesley K. Clark, we might never have intervened in Kosovo or Bosnia. It was, in the end, a general Ulysses S. Grant who saved the Union. Even as I detest the pestilence that is war and fear it's deadly addiction, even as I see it lead states and groups toward self-immolation, even as I concede that it is war that has left millions dead and maimed across the planet, I, like most reporters in Sarajevo and Kosovo, desperately hoped for armed intervention. The poison that is war does not free us from the ethic of responsibility. There are times when we must take the poison--just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy in order to live. We cannot succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.
This seems like a very natural and laudatory goal, and makes you wonder why cold-hearted lefties are so unflinchingly opposed to such obviously well-intentioned interventions. I think the answer is a curiously realist one. Bleeding-heart liberal internationalism could only work in a world where such a faction which is actually committed to its goals existed. But there is no omni-benevolent Captain Planet in our world sweeping to the bloodless rescue of the oppressed and persecuted. There are industrial empires who keep an army designed to project their national interest around the world, and the global hot spots where they wield this power are often a labyrinthine landscape of ethnic and political tensions they seldom understand and frequently exacerbate.

To paraphrase a certain ex-defense secretary, you carry out your liberal humanitarianism with the empire you have, not the comic-book army you wish you had. Any decisions on armed interventions must be made with this reality in mind.

11 May 2008

The weekender

Sensible Liberal Moment of the Day.

That’s an interesting argument because virtually every liberal blogger I read was extremely critical of Wright’s recent narcissistic rant. For that matter, I didn't see anyone endorsing his earlier statements either (some made the analytically distinct point that it was a silly controversy). For that reason, I anxiously awaited his evidence of the “left’s” “newfound love.” He gave three — all people I’d never heard of: (1) John Nichols of The Nation, (2) Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, and (3) former Tribune public editor Don Wycliff. Quite an impressive list. Maybe these are all liberal luminaries who I've missed over the past four years of blogging, but it seems like he should have added more beef to make such a sweeping, nasty point about so many people.
Here we have a well-executed Sensible Double-Axle. Step One: Read an unhinged righty diatribe about supposedly unforgivable liberal misdeeds. Step Two: Reassure your friend that no one save Dirty Frakkin' Hippies would defend those sorts of things anyway, and he certainly won't see anything but deference and capitulation out of you. Stick the landing!

Speaking of which, the Real News goes where Real Liberals fear to tread; inside Trinity Church of Christ for a five-part feature with Paul Jay and Prof. Dwight Hopkins.

Mother Jones and Brave New Films have teamed up for this video featuring one of John McCain's emissaries in the world of faith.

Provided the McCain-Parsley link were ever explored in depth--and fat chance of that--it would produce some very thorny election geography problems for Sen. St. BBQ. Parsley is a high roller in Ohio, and if McCain wants to command the same kind of fervor from the faithful flock that carried Bush in 2004, he needs to have someone of Parsley's statue delivering the mail for him. Especially since McCain, unlike Bush, lacks fluency in evangelicalism and is already distrusted. If he has to publicly repudiate Parsley's endorsement, he risks disillusioning thousands of right-wing Christian voters in a swing state.


Rep. Keith Ellison (D - MN) in Counterpunch? My mind is blown. More Dems like that one, please.

The always-funny Lewis Black tells us how he's spending his $600 tax rebate



Finally, I get to decide how to spend my tax dollars. I wonder what countries I could invade for $600?

Also, don't miss Monday's Daily Show with guest Bill Moyers, who's out stumping for his new book.

08 May 2008

At long last, just go away

It appears any hope that Hillary Clinton would depart the race peaceably was a pipe dream.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
Remember, kids, Jeremiah Wright is the crazy one.

07 May 2008

Feast your eyes on this

*drool*




Ken Silverstein explains how America rules.
[Y]ou probably haven’t heard much about the weekend voting in Equatorial Guinea, the pro-American, oil-rich nation led for the past 29 years by Brigadier General Teodoro Obiang Nguema. “The West African state voted Sunday in parliamentary and local elections whose outcome was a foregone conclusion for observers, amid opposition charges of voting irregularities and harassment,” reports AFP. “According to first partial official results, the president’s [party] won 100 percent of the vote in some constituencies in the election to parliament.”
I've never understood why you'd rig an election to give yourself 100 percent of the vote. Are these guys really so vain that they'd sacrifice any hint of credibility for the self-assurance that no-one opposes them?

Silverstein links to this piece giving more detail on this lovable fellow who somehow hasn't caught on as a cause celebre among Hollywood liberals.

Here is the Donkeyman's new favorite blog. ;-)

And here is a new entrant into the All-Name Hall of Fame for whom someone has already got the induction plaque ready.


Yeah, you'll just have to deal with the motorsport posts for a few weeks.

I've finished "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (yeah, I'm still slow) and can recommend it, though Hedges relies too much on Shakespeare for me. Nonetheless, I'm encouraged to see him keep digging an even deeper hole with the Serious Liberals.


06 May 2008

Over = Very Yes

Rest easy, Obama fans, my dire prediction isn't going to come to pass. It turns out Indiana may have played a decisive role in this year's elections after all. Clinton is going to get a very slim win in the Hoosier state but that margin, combined with a decisive defeat in North Carolina, will be awfully hard to spin in the expectations game. And indeed, it's being reported that Clinton has canceled her media appearances for Wednesday morning.

Perhaps Clinton is going to concede after all, as surely she must now. Her last hope that she has been flogging since before PA--claiming Obama is unelectable and divisive--is now toast as Obama re-establishes his pre-Wright, pre-Ayers constituency. On the other hand, Clinton is bound to put up big numbers in KY and WV, and may wait to see if there's another last-ditch sales pitch to twist enough arms in her favor.

If we're lucky, we won't have to wait for her to make the call. Many believe that enough superdelegates have been laying in wait for the right media cover to come flooding in behind Obama. Now that he has regained momentum in the national narrative, Obama could get enough of them to put him over the top and effectively declare a TKO.

05 May 2008

Primary eve

Most of the TV ads we've been getting here are playing the standard game of who loves 'Murica the most and fighting over the gas tax holiday. This is Indiana, after all, and it's an open primary, so now's the time for both candidates to put on their best Republican outfit.

There has been one ad here that's really making me furious, though. It's being run for Obama by an SEIU PAC, I believe, (I can't seem to find it online) and it features in big, fat letters across the screen "XX schools built...XX hospitals built...XX roads and bridges improved...IN IRAQ!" Yes, because what's really wrong with the war isn't that we're killing people, it's that we're building stuff for them. Sweet Jesus, we hate foreigners.

Of course, the other topic frequently invoked is the old "shipping jobs overseas" canard, which has been a hot topic in our sphere lately. I don't really have any major disagreements here with my E. asinus colleague on this one, though I'm sure he could run rings around me on the particulars. The American worker does need to get past his sense of entitlement (and a broader destruction of the exceptionalist religion helps), but nobody's going to take kindly to a severe reduction in their prosperity, and we have to find a way to deal with that.

Oh, how could I forget "our dependence on foreign oil." Why does the Cosmos hate America?


I haven't got any good news to cheer you up. The only semi-reliable polls have been showing Clinton pulling out a solid lead in the past week (Zogby is now polling Girl Scouts only), and closing the gap inside double-digits in North Carolina. If that happens, the media narrative of Obama hemorrhaging votes will shift into overdrive, and denying it will become very difficult.

Here's what I can see happening; you can throw this scenario up against a wall to see if there's anything to it. I believe in Obama enough to think he sincerely doesn't want a bloodbath. At least, he's got much less taste for it than Clinton, who'll go down to the last inch to get power regardless of what gets blown up in the process. He'll get a nice, lucrative offer to be Clinton's veep and the newest toy mouthpiece for the neoliberals--politically, he's virtually there already--as well as the anointed Heir Apparent. Obama brings his supporters into the fold--they'll follow him anywhere--and we're all one big happy sellout family again.

04 May 2008

The weekender

Yes yes yes. This bugged me for a while last year, then I got over it largely because I don't hang out on social networking sites much. I'm sure your carefully-culled lists of highbrow pursuits says something about you, just not as much as you think it does.

I think this shows meeting people blindly through their internet profiles is almost as futile as any real-world forerunner. Many people use taste as a firewall, but it's a very rudimentary one. For example, even if I were marginally literate, I'd still be a douchebag, and no amount of Proust is likely to change that.

Remember when I said this?
...it may be a blessing in disguise for the Reds to fall out of contention early...
Well, that plan is working out brilliantly.

Paul Jay talks with Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a member of Trinity United Church of Christ about Wright and Obama.

Hopkins answers a couple of questions I had been curious about and changes my view here slightly. Particularly, he says no young black politician looking to break through into the Chicago scene would choose to attend Trinity if he or she were simply looking to put a church photo up on the desk. So that absolves Obama of the charge of opportunism, but it doesn't make his sudden "I know thee not!" posture any clearer. Obama must have been aware of Trinity's reputation for radicalism which means--juggle your prayer beads, kids--it wasn't Wright's opinions that suddenly changed when he was faced with the national spotlight.

While you're enjoying the fruits of New Labour in the recent British local elections, let me drop a recommendation for This is England, a grimy, tough and sweet picture about a young misfit boy caught up in a world of English nationalism and skinhead culture in the early 1980s. Top-tier work.

02 May 2008

Heretic pride

Chris Floyd has already done a great job righteously slamming Obama's craven denunciation of his former pastor. I don't have a lot to add.

What Obama looks like now is another oily politician who uses church membership to burnish his resume. The great majority of what Wright said over the weekend was a restatement of standard liberation theology, yet Obama attended his church for 20 years and claims he has just now discovered what his preacher was about? He needed Wright and his church to give him some legitimacy in the community; apparently he slept through all the sermons. If Wright's charm offensive was the result of having his ego shattered by Obama not fully standing behind him in March, as the popular liberal psychoanalysis goes, it's awfully hard now to fault him.

Yes, if I were moving Wright's lips I probably wouldn't have said everything he did over the weekend, especially since he should know more than anyone how the press would leap at the more fantastic moments of bombast and ignore the meat of his message. He might not have expected Obama to swing right off the tee the press had laid out for him. The uproar over Farrakhan is especially absurd. I never heard Wright defend Farrakhan (and Floyd catches Obama misquoting the Reverend); what I heard was him refusing to bash Farrakhan for the delight of the assembled vultures of the press. Would that Obama had similar decorum.

Instead, the beatified savior of American politics went back into the old playbook to do what the shallow, shit-eating pigeons of the political establishment wanted him to do. Issue a broad, unspecific denunciation reassuring everyone that American exceptionalism will rule the day. Our government would never lie to you, we can solve racism by ignoring past injustice, and our military only bombs civilians with flowers and candy. Go on about your business.

I think Obama has deserved credit at points during the campaign for his willingness to fit simple narratives with nuance. His steadfast refusal to cave on the flag-pin nonsense has been especially admirable. But since he's gone into full-on prevent defense mode in the past two months, he's looking a lot more predictable and unappealing.

SEE ALSO: Pastor Dan here and here, and Sara Robinson.

01 May 2008

Happy May Day, everyone




To celebrate, the U.S. Socialist Worker is debuting their new website. Go throw a few coins their way if you can spare it.

UPDATE: Today is also apparently the National Day of Prayer, cause we're not frakkin' pagan Commies here, son. I heartily encourage those so inclined to combine the two and really blow some heads...