The Viability of Obama (It’s the Sanity, Stupid)

After their experience with Bush, Americans are looking for a candidate who exudes sanity. (Is “it’s the sanity, stupid” a possible slogan?). It’s not a high standard: please, just don’t be crazy. Obama possesses this un-crazy quality in much greater quantity than any other candidate in the Democratic or Republican field. It’s part of his sincere, calm, and charismatic demeanor. That he is an African American with these qualities makes him a more, not less, formidable candidate.

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Brooks: Is it Safe? (“Security Leads to Freedom”)

Speaking of “psychological” principles, the psychological version of authoritarianism afflicts people who are cruel and controlling towards themselves and others. Many great, poems, plays, and novels have been written about the disastrous effects of this principle, political and psychological. Many chapters in history support the observations contained in these works. Brooks should go read some of these. They hardly support the notion that authoritarianism leads to freedom, unless you are reading authoritarian propaganda, in which a kind of perverse pleasure is taken in trumpeting and forcing others to acquiesce to patent contradictions of fact — e.g., the description of a law that allow for more pollution as the “Clean Air Act.”

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Skepticism, Conservatism, and War

The “Iraq experiment” of which Sullivan’s reader speaks is a phrase of ignorant, Mengelian callousness: did we ask Iraqis if they thought liberation and “democracy” weres worth dying in large numbers? Did we hold a democratic referendum? And do we really think that war can be an act of grace? Did we think to evaluate or own cultural maladies, including the murderous recent history of the United States, against those of the Muslims above whom we assumed we were so culturally elevated that we thought we could help them cure their “extremism” and “social development” and “political attitudes” — with bombs? This is like Ghenghis Khan describing his rampages as a kind of finishing school for those who could benefit from his brand of refinement.

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Exactly What Christopher Hitchens Means to Say

…. let Hitchens tell Iraqis that the destruction of theirs was “worth it” because of our abstract sense of safety and their abstract sense of liberation from a bad, bad man. What are the deaths of a few hundred thousand when you’re spreading freedom? Let him tell them how, consequences be damned, he was right, because by his math a world minus a bad man is a better world, notwithstanding the insertion of a few hundred thousand missiles, soldiers, and machine guns — and the chaos they have wrought — to replace him. Let him tell them that this is exactly what he means, as if one writer sticking to his virtual guns were itself such an act of fortitude that it redeems any amount of actual destruction.

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This is a Wahr! (A Tale, Told by an Idiot, Full of Shock and Awe ….)

Another Washington Journal moment: “This is a Wahr,” the old woman reminded us. “This” — not two wars, the war on terror and the war in Iraq, the first a made-up fantasy and the second elective folly. The first not really a “this”, but rather an unending excuse for abuses of executive power and the [...]

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You’re a Democrat and it Shows

At is as if the show is the political version of a nursing home: “this is the logical consequence of the partisan mind,” it seems to say, “we’ll take care of you while your spleen deteriorates”.

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Dick Cheney’s Assasination – Sick, but I Understand

Yes, we are so pleased that the attempt on Cheney failed. Each day I light a candle before my picture of Cheney, and each day that his heart faithfully and gently beats him to sleep like a Guantanamo detainee, I tenderly hush the candle, thanking God, not just for Cheney but for the many blessings he has brought to America and Iraq, hoping that we prevail — meaning, prevail in furthering our good work of establishing security and preserving the lives of the Iraqis who aren’t dead or forcefully emigrated, and the good work Padilla, and all those good works, Amen.

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Pan’s Labyrinth on the Art of Torture

In Bomber Harris’ description of the effect of aerial power on Kurds, and Barry Lando’s comparison to Guernica, I am reminded of the recent film by Guillermo Del Toro which has its setting in Franco’s Spain.
Pan’s Labyrinth is about torture, broadly conceived: there is the literal torture of a rebel by a sadistic Captain in [...]

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Air Power and “Them”

To revisit Bomber Harris’ description of use of airpower to supress rebellion: it describes an approach to war that might be called cowardly. Most surprising is his glee over
four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors
Of course war has long been about more than defeating the [...]

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Design by Force: The New Intelligence

And so Bush appoints a be-medaled, NSA domestic spy program-defending, active-duty officer to head the CIA. Appointing an officer is not unprecedented, but this one is not free of that banana republic feeling. An emblazoned, heavy yes-man.
In government, uniforms are a sign of weakness. Sadam Hussein decked out and firing a gun, or Mayday parades with [...]

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