Matt Yglesias

We’re Number Three

Yet another al-Qaeda number three man killed. I’m too tired to make a joke

Hayes’ Case for Obama

Take a look at Chris Hayes’ case for Barack Obama in The Nation. I find it pretty convincing but, of course, I was already convinced so what does that prove?

Official Super Bowl Prediction

It was clear to me that the Giants weren’t going to beat the Green Bay Packers. But then again, it was also clear to me that the Giants weren’t going to win their other two playoff games either. Thus, the mere fact that the preponderance of the available evidence strongly points in the direction of a Patriots win doesn’t really prove anything. Thus, I predict that New England will wind up getting the loss they so richly deserve.

Fallows’ Annotated State of the Union

A now annual tradition at The Atlantic presented for your reading pleasure.

John McCain, Grand Strategist

I’ve written a bit about John McCain apparent ignorance of economic policy, but it’s also worth noting the vacuity of his thoughts on national security. Check out this farce flagged by Kevin Drum and Steve Benen:

John McCain says in almost every stump speech that he knows how to capture Osama bin Laden and that he’d follow the al Qaeda leader to the “Gates of Hell.”

So Washington Wire was wondering, what does McCain know that President Bush and the Pentagon don’t about how to sweep up America’s most elusive enemy.

“One thing I will not do is telegraph my punches. Osama bin Laden will be the last to know,” he said today while riding on the back of his bus between Florida events. In other words: he’s not telling. Why not share his strategy with the current occupant of the White House? “Because I have my own ideas and it would require implementation of certain policies and procedures that only as the president of the United States can be taken.”

On the small issue of fighting al-Qaeda, in short, he has no ideas whatsoever. Instead, he has a silly slogan about the gates of hell. Macho posturing? Check. Ideas about keeping the country safer? Not so much. But he’s virtuous so who cares, right? Plus, though McCain may not know much about fighting al-Qaeda he really loves war which passes for statesmanship these days, I suppose.

Revisiting False Populism

I’d like to revisit the false populism issue from Bush’s State of the Union address the other night. Obviously, the Colombia Free Trade pact is hardly the most important thing in the world (Colombia’s just too small for this to make a big impact on the US economy one way or the other), but the claim that “If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere” is an excellent example of the complete lack of strategic thought that characterizes this administration. James Poulos, like me, didn’t understand how Hugo Chavez would be emboldened by our failure to ratify the agreement. Daniel Larison explains:

It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild. That’s clear, isn’t it?

That’s really it, though. In Bush world, first you set out to do something. Then if that thing seems to not be working out or causing problems, what you need to do is do it again harder. Anything else, after all, would only embolden the bad guys. It’s that simple and it’s that dumb.

Fare Thee Well, Hegemony

Now that I read it, I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments made by Parag Khanna in his “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” article in The New York Times Magazine. However, in the interests of sobriety it’s worth flagging two important caveats. One is that one shouldn’t understate the extent to which the US/EU/China “big three” is still an unequal triad. The United States is a lot richer than China. We have a much larger and more competent military establishment. And while China is beginning to play a global role, we have much more deeply entrenched relationships with countries in every region of the world — including places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in China’s back yard.

Meanwhile the EU, were it a cohesive nation-state, would be an extremely mighty power. But it isn’t one. When Europe acts with common purpose, it’s a very influential player, and it’s every bit America’s equal in certain commerce-related aspects of international relations where this happens, but Europe simply has much less institutional capacity to act in this way than does the United States.

On top of that, the big thing to keep in mind when considering any particular “declinist” thesis about American hegemony is that we’ve actually been on the decline for a good long while. In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled and Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony, a study of America’s efforts to forge a diplomatic system to continue to get bye in this new world actually came out decades ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a kind of illusion of a return to hegemony since international politics had been organized as “USA or USSR” for so long, but all along throughout the postwar period other countries have been gaining in importance.

What happens, I think, is that whenever the United States makes policy blunders such as Vietnam or Iraq, the fact that hegemony has been slowly slipping through our fingertips for decades suddenly becomes apparent. But we’re still the most important country out there, our economy’s still growing in absolute terms, and when our country implements sound policies the whole issue fades into the background.

That said Khanna is fundamentally correct that the United States is not the be-all and end-all of world affairs and that it’s increasingly possible to imagine important diplomatic and commercial endeavors being undertaken that we’re not involved with. As Kevin Drum remarked “it’s a useful article if only because it’s so rare to see foreign policy pieces in the mainstream media that aren’t almost completely America-centric” and it’s fascinating and refreshing to see a take on world affairs that’s not dominated by a “pro-American reformer versus anti-American despot — go!” narrative.

All The Pretty Communists

One genre of journalism I’m always very suspicious of starts with the observation that there appears to be a trend toward such and such, tosses off maybe an anecdote or two, then leaps to a broad sociological explanation of the trend’s existence. Missing is any effort to quantify the extent or reality of the trend itself. Case in point, Anne Applebaum’s article about how capitalism causes hot Russian women. She starts by saying that in the 1990s, one started to see a lot of hot Russian women around whereas “Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude.” I looked it up and someone who has “pulchritude” is, roughly speaking, an attractive person. Thus the time has come to answer a question posed by a male friend of Applebaum’s “where were they all before?” Her answer:

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren’t any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren’t any ratings. There weren’t many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn’t get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I’m thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin’s favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people’s republics.

This seems really, really dubious to me. Among other things, the contention that “there weren’t many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them” seems oddly gullible about Soviet claims to have created an egalitarian paradise. Surely there were high-ranking powerful party officials to seek out beautiful women and marry them. The idea that the Soviet entertainment industry was entirely insensitive to the basic principles of attracting an audience seems, likewise, bizarre. Zhanna Prokhorenko playing the love interest in Ballad of a Soldier certainly seems like an attractive woman to me. Here’s a review essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film:

Besides rejecting political rhetoric and monumental, classical cinematography, the films of the thaw also rejected the sexless, puritanical Soviet representation of love on the screen, reclaiming the body and a youthful, healthy sexuality––rather modest by today’s standards, but liberating for the times. After changing his mind on using the professional actors he had cast, Chukhrai picked two very young, unknown acting students, matching a prototypical, blond, open-faced, and handsome Russian everyman with a (Ukrainian-named) Slavic beauty; her luminous eyes, pouty lips, full figure and long glorious hair are often filmed with a halo effect. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Alyosha’s and Shura’s faces and her billowing hair are superimposed over the pure Russian birch forest the train is passing as they are finally able to exchange their unspoken expressions of love.

Most likely, the change Applebaum is trying to explain is just something that hasn’t actually changed. Instead, part of the Cold War dynamic was that most of the Russians a Westerner might see or interact with were government officials, who tended to be middle aged men rather than attractive young women. The idea that the Communist Party somehow managed to create a society in which “there was no market for female beauty” is pretty fantastical — about on a par with the notion that the Party was going to create a New Soviet Man.

Post as Pravda

Dean Baker makes the analogy. As far as it pertains to the editorial page, I think it holds up pretty well.

The Price of Google

Adam Thierer’s making some other point in this post but his chart comparing the market capitalization of new to old media firms is fascinating. Did you know, for example, that at $214 billion the market capitalization of Google is about seven times that of the entire American newspaper sector ($31 billion)? Now admittedly, in part that just shows that the newspaper sector is small.

But it also certainly reminds me of the circumstances that prevailed before the AOL-Time Warner merger (speaking of which, Time Warner’s market cap is a bit below $60 billion). Maybe Google’s just hugely overvalued. Or maybe not. Maybe this points the way to the future of news operations. Maybe after another decades of attrition pure aggregation functions like Google News won’t work so well since there’s so little actual news being written. Maybe the continued decline of newspapers will start to be a drag on the blogosphere. Maybe a newspaper chain gets picked up for a song as a kind of loss-leader for Google News, Google Reader, and Blogger. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about — why, after all, would you take business advice from me?

Bowden on Interrogations

Spencer Ackerman’s trying an interesting experiment called “sources holler back” where he says that “from time to time I’ll share with you the responses I get to my work from my sources, pending their approval, in the interest of providing a more in-depth airing of the issues I’m reporting on.” Thus I note that in response to his piece on CIA interrogation policy, John Sullivan, longtime CIA polygrapher, complains:

In your article, you made no mention of Michael Koubi, the legendary Israeli interrogator. May I refer you to Mark Bowden’s interview, “The Truth About Torture,” that appeared in the September 11, 2003 Atlantic Monthly and his related article, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 2003. If I wanted to learn something about interrogating Arabs, Israel is the first place I would go.

Thanks to our newly-free archives, you can read “The Truth About Torture” and “The Dark Art of Interrogation” along with Bowden’s more recent, torture-free interrogation piece “The Ploy”.

You Might Call It “The Audacity of Hope”

Jon Chait and Harold Meyerson both nail down what, to me, is the fundamental political case for Obama — that to pick Hillary Clinton would be to reconcile ourselves to playing between the 49 yard lines at a time when it looks feasible to open the game up and throw downfield. Harold even comes up with an appropriately nice to the Clintons analogy:

I’ve turned to a book Michael wrote 23 years ago — “Exodus and Revolution,” and its discussion of why the Jews had to spend 40 years in the desert before they could reach the promised land.

As Walzer noted, both Maimonides and Marx, in very different ways, argued that the Jews who had lived in bondage had to die out, and a new generation that hadn’t known the habits of slavery take their place, before the people could cross over into Canaan and freedom.

It’s hard to imagine more thankless tasks than organizing for George McGovern in Texas or bearing the torch of progressive politics in late-1970s and early-1980s Arkansas. And of course Bill Clinton really did take the lessons learned from winning in that inhospitable territory and put the Democratic Party back in the White House. From that vantage point, he governed well and proved to a country that had come to doubt it that Democrats could be trusted to run the federal government. But is 2008 the hour of Mark Penn? I don’t see it.

Pundit on Pundit Action

The oft-mocked David Broder does us all an enormous services and writes the name of another Washington Post columnist:

Unelected conservative ideologues — such as Rush Limbaugh and George F. Will– can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: “If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president — and president-in-waiting.”

The unwritten first rule of the op-ed page — you do not talk about other writers on the op-ed page — has long struck me as in need of revision. If Broder can use his “dean” status to knock this wall down, good for him.

On The Road

I’m traveling today to a Liberty Fund conference. Bloggy goodness should continue throughout the day, but I may wind up a bit off the news if something important happens. Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports that security is re-deteriorating in Iraq according to “Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent.”

The Politics of Personality

Ed Kilgore, reflecting on the lessons of John Edwards’ campaign, makes an interesting observation:

While no one will ever know how Edwards would have fared had he won Iowa, his campaign ultimately appealed to the same kind of voters he won in 2004 with a very different message: moderate-to-conservative white men. His exceptional weakness among African-Americans, in 2008 as in 2004, provides a cautionary tale about the breadth of appeal of “populism.”

But doesn’t this seem like an unduly narrow reading of the point? Edwards adopted a very different political and policy approach in 2008 from what he did in 2004, but the results were very similar. The interesting fact here is that neither policy shifts nor messaging shifts trump the basic fact that the core constituency for a southern white dude is moderate-to-conservative white men. This is one of these things that everyone kinda sorta knows, but that often seems to drop out of the picture when it’s being discussed.

Wingnut Versus Wingnut

Infighting sure is fun! John McCain hates capitalism, and Mark Steyn’s inspired to almost touch an anti-militarist note:

Well, Kathryn, since most of the gang seems to have turned in early (too demoralized to opine?), I might as well chip in. I’m getting a bit tired of Senator McCain’s anti-business shtick. The line about serving “for patriotism, not for profit” is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from?

To me what’s galling here is that it’s not as if McCain took some kind of vow of poverty. When he divorces his first wife he “gave her a generous settlement, including houses in Virginia and Florida and financial support for her ongoing medical treatments” before marrying a wealthy heiress. Nobody’s running around disparaging McCain’s military service; there doesn’t seem to me a need for him to disparage the life choice of people who got their money by earning it.

The Need for Disclosure

I wrote back in October about the lack of transparency surrounding donations from corporate titans and foreign princes to Bill Clinton’s foundation. My view was that it made sense for liberals to push for this disclosure sooner rather than later so that we could see if there are any stinkbombs in those records before Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. According to The New York Times there’s at least one, where in exchange for a $31 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton helped a guy named Frank Giustra win some lucrative mining contracts from Kazakhstan’s despotic government.

The only Hillary connection that the Times could uncover really highlights the lack of a Hillary connection here “Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.” Still, this obviously reflects quite poorly on Bill. And more to the point, it highlights the need for rigorous disclosure of this stuff. The Clintons are by no means unique in this regard — the fundraising for the George W. Bush presidential library is super-shady. Normally, the relevant shadiness goes down during a president’s lame duck phase so nobody really notices, but it’s been a huge looming problem for years.

Straight Talk

One interesting thing about politics is that you might think that when a politician develops a reputation for honesty, the way Saint John of Arizona has, that from that day forward he needs to be super-scrupulous about telling the truth. Otherwise, voters who might dismiss a small fib from a “regular” politician will suddenly be outraged. In truth, the reverse is the case. Thus, Mac was not only Back last night, but appears to have made his patently false accusation that Mitt Romney favored a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of his argument at last night’s debate. Shocking stuff. McCain’s made this claim before, everyone who’s looked at it concluded that it wasn’t true, and so McCain . . . just did it again in a higher-profile forum.

Naturally, Jonathan Martin’s Politico article on the subject was given the headline “Romney falls into McCain trap on Iraq” rather than, say, “McCain Lies His Ass Off.”

No Laws for You

You’ve got to be impressed by the audacity of George W. Bush’s claims of executive power. In the latest adventure in signing statements, the congress appropriated some money for defense with the proviso that none of the money be used to finance the construction of permanent military bases in Iraq. Bush signed the appropriation into law but with the proviso that he won’t abide by the restrictions. After all obeying the law he just signed “could inhibit the president’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

And, of course, it’s true. If we live in the sort of utterly lawless society that Bush appears to be envisioning, it’s very easy to take care that the nonexistent laws be faithfully executed. In a country with the rule of law, by contrast, the president has a lot of hard work that might distract from having people tortured.

GOP Debate

I went to see my friend’s band The City Veins play a show and missed the debate. What happened? I understand sparks flew.