No Three Strikes on Marriage

Matthew Yglesias asks whether it would be better to ban fourth marriages rather than gay marriage if we want to protect the sanctity of marriage.

Marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples leads naturally enough to gay divorce. Along those lines, I was thinking recently that if you really wanted to do something to shore up the sanctity of marriage then rather than ban gay marriages you ought to ban, say, fourth marriages. It's one thing to say that people who make a mistake ought to get a second chance, but serial nuptuals really do make a mockery of the institution's basic premises in a way that same-sex couples don't. Maybe some people just need to admit to themselves that they have no business making promises of life-long commitment.

But he's very mistaken here.

A lot of people who get married aren't ready for marriage. Hell, some folks who get married aren't ready for a decent hook up yet. But, they show their "commitment to marriage as an institution" by continuing to try until it works.

I have an aunt in her late 70's who was working on her fifth marriage when she was 48 and husband no. 5 had just moved out of the house in San Diego the day before I pulled for a visit. My poor aunt was just as blown away by no. 5's departure as Snow White would have been if Prince Charming left her. But, she hung in there, No. 5 eventually back and she's still married to the guy 29 years later. What would she have done if Matt's silly "three strikes" idea was in effect? More to the point, how would Matt's idea have helped her given that either she or her third husband weren't ready for marriage (at least to each other).

My aunt's story is one of the reasons why legalizing gay marriage is important. People all over the country put an incredibly high value on marriage and are willing to go through any number of traumas to make their marriages work--even their fifth.

The fact that gay people are largely banned from marriage is an extremely harmful form of discrimination that excludes gay men and women from one of the satisfying and significant dramas of human life. Marriage is something that my aunt was willing to go through five times before she got it right. It is something that everybody, straight or gay, should be allowed to experience, work through, struggle with, and succeed or fail in if they wish.

The Cause of All Mankind

In the introduction to Common Sense, written in 1776, Thomas Paine states that:

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested.

In today's Berlin speech, Barack Obama completed the circle that Paine began drawing in one of the fundamental documents in American political history.

For Obama, the cause of America is still universal, but the cause of all mankind is also America's.

Although Obama emphasizes that Americans are citizens of the United States, he also stresses that we are citizens of the world who stand equally with the global citizens of other countries.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

Obama portrayed the Berlin Airlift of 1949 as creating a bond between the United States and Germany that foreshadows the need for even wider and stronger bonds today. He believes that the problems of Afghanistan, terrorism, climate change, and genocide in Darfur call for a global cooperation that requires even stronger bonds between the United States and Germany, the United States and Europe, and the United States and the rest of the world in general.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations – and all nations – must summon that spirit anew.

The idea of a shared bond between peoples is something that escapes conservatives. The right has a difficult enough time sharing our society with liberals, urban dwellers, gay people, immigrants, and other people who aren't like them. The idea of "shared bonds" with people in other countries is almost entirely outside the range of their imaginations.

President Bush was a true conservative in viewing himself as above the rest of the world. Bush could teach, threaten, bully, and discipline other countries and he took special pleasure in holding the rest of the world "accountable." But he could never bring himself to view himself or the U. S. as "sharing" any kind of bond with anyone. That was just too much equality for President Bush's hierarchical sensibilities--trained in the privileged, pampered milieu of a rich white guy growing up in segregationist Midland, Texas--to bear.

What makes Barack Obama different from Bush is that he views American global leadership as being built on the equality of shared efforts to solve common problems. Obama's assumption is that other governments will be more willing to accept American leadership if the United States views itself as the "first among equals" rather than the dominant party in a hierarchical relationship. Obama's global popularity is a sign that that the rest of the world is eager for a new model of leadership from the United States.

But there is a question about whether America is tolerant enough of equality to lead in a way that the rest of the world finds acceptable.

And that's one of the many questions will be decided by this election.

Death of Nancy Peterson

It saddens me to report that Nancy Peterson died this morning. Nancy was a longtime friend and colleague of mine at Morehead State University. She was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer six years ago and fought it with everything she and modern medicine had. Nancy had an outsized personality and she fought her cancer in an outsized way, gathering all the information possible, getting herself into experimental treatments, and undergoing round after round of radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery. It was all emotionally exhausting to contemplate, but Nancy was never emotionally exhausted. She was very tough and determined even after she was told her time was limited.

Nancy and her husband Glen also had tremendous support from a group of very close friends who will go unnamed here but deserve an enormous amount of credit for their loyalty and steadfast love.

But, finally, her body just gave out. It's my understanding that her kidneys stopped functioning and that her liver was also having problems. After being in the hospital for most of the week, she finally slipped into a coma and passed away.

The Fly on Novak's Windshield

Right-wing journalist Bob Novak was so engrossed in NPR's "Morning Edition" this morning that he didn't notice the fly on the windshield of his Corvette convertible. But oops! That fly turned out to be a 66 year old guy who was "splayed" across Novak's window.

It turned out that Novak had turned illegally, hit a man who was crossing the street according to the light, and then drove away. Novak would have left the scene of the crime entirely except that he was chased down by a lawyer on a bicycle.

Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias refers to Novak as a "sociopath" and "criminal." But to consider conservative involvement in crime, it's necessary to think about what Novak has in common with liberals like Yglesias. In fact, I bet that most conservative media figures in New York and Washington start out their day by obsessing over NPR's "Morning Edition." They also lead largely secular lives. Ann Coulter is one of the few big-league conservatives one will ever hear talking about her own religion or speaking at churces. Media titans like Novak, Sean Hannity, and Rich Lowry of the National Review talk a lot about traditional values, non-college educated constituencies and and guys in Wheeling, West Virginia. But they have just as little in common with the guys in the Wheeling or Winchester, VA pool halls as Al Gore and should be considered just as much a part of the political elite as Al Gore or Barack Obama.

So what do conservatives mean when they pose themselves as fighting against "liberal elites." Basically, they're fighting against liberals in order to improve their own position within the elite political culture they share with liberal politicians and media figures.

This is where the question of crime comes up.

In many ways the Bush administration criminalized politics as a strategy in their competition with liberal political elites. Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their allies viewed their illegal warrantless wiretapping, torture of suspected terrorists, involvement of civil servants in Republican campaigns, perjured testimony to Congress, and politicization of the Justice Department primarily in terms of gaining and maintaining the upper hand in the competition between conservative and liberal factions of the national political elite. The idea was to openly flout the relevant statutes, brag about it, and then let Congress, the courts, and liberal media elites enforce the laws if they dared.

To date, Congress and liberal political elites largely avoided the showdowns associated with confronting the Bush administration about their behavior.

Conservative media figures like Novak, Hannity, and Ann Coulter weren't committing these kinds of crimes, but they have been implicated in the Bush administration's criminality to the extent that they are 1000 percent behind the Bush administration's criminal endeavors. Bob Novak himself gleefully participated in the "outing" of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame as a way to get revenge on her husband for criticizing the Bush administration.

What gives Bob Novak his "criminal" mindset isn't his absent-minded driving. I have lots of liberal friends who are lucky they don't run people over while they're absorbed in listening to National Public Radion. What involves Novak in the criminal world is his decision to defend Bush administration to the hilt. Not unlike a mob lawyer, Novak and other conservative media figures devote their considerable talents and energies to defending, rationalizing, obfuscating, and diverting attention from the crimes of their allies in the Bush administration. In Rush Limbaugh's words, conservative media figures like Novak are "carrying the water" for the criminal enterprise even if they aren't committing the main crimes.

As a result, they deserve just as little respect as the Bush administration.

The Depth of Republican Pessimism

One of the dimensions of the presidential campaign that doesn't receive enough comment is the depth of the pessimism among Republican elites concerning John McCain's chances. There are times when it appears that liberal bloggers are the only political commentators who think McCain has a chance to win. It seems that Republicans see Democratic advantage everywhere they look. Insider worries about the incoherence of McCain's campaign induced McCain to replace his senior leadership. When that didn't help, conservative journalists like Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru started writing articles on how McCain could "turn it around before it's too late" even though McCain's barely behind in the daily Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls. Other reasons for McCain to lose include the economic tailspin, climbing gas prices, the unpopularity of the war, the even greater unpopularity of the Bush administration, and the Democratic fund-raising advantage.

And Republicans keep seeing new clouds over the horizon.

Today, Newt Gingrich came out with a statement on McCain's VP choice in which he argued that the Obama campaign will have so much energy in the fall that McCain can't afford to nominate another "boring white guy" for vice-president.

“What I’m afraid of is that if Sen. McCain picks one more relatively boring, normal, mainstream Republican white guy … he just makes the ticket seem boring compared to the level of energy and drive and excitement that Obama has . . . And this is not a comment on any of my many friends who are competent people . . . It’s a comment on the objective reality that this fall, there is going to be a lot of energy surrounding the Obama campaign.”

Obama's "fall energy surge"--yet another reason for Republicans to be pessimistic.

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Reflecting on al-Maliki's endorsement of Obama's timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman claims the election is over:

There's nowhere left for McCain to go here. Either he endorses a timetable for withdrawal, which he has consistently said would be a disaster, and cedes his only big issue to Obama -- and more importantly, concedes that Obama's judgment is sound -- or he deliberately ignores the concerted, expressed wishes of the Iraqi government in order to prolong an unpopular war.

But the mainstream media have already formulated a new "gotcha question" for Obama. The question which Nightline asked him tonight is "If you had to do it over again, . . . would you support the surge?" It's a clever question because it focuses Obama's immediate attention on whether the Bush administration was correct in launching the surge rather than whether it's now appropriate to withdraw American troops. However, if Obama acknowledged that the surge was a good idea, he would leave open the possibility that the Bush administration might be right about not withdrawing at all.

Obama's answer was that "these kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult." That's not very good and he'll probably have to come up with a better answer the next time he's asked. Maliki's endorsement of the idea of getting American troops out of Iraq in 2010 could be a big boost for Obama. But Obama has a long way to go before he nails that big boost down.

And there will be more "gotcha questions" coming Obama's way.

Contrary to Spencer Ackerman, "it ain't over till it's over."

McCaining the Media

The massive coverage of Barack Obama's overseas trip has led the McCain campaign and various voices on the right to complain of media favoritism toward Obama.

According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Obama has been featured in 77% of the stories done between the end of the Democratic primaries and early July. There are far fewer stories on McCain.

Rush Limbaugh sees an effort to tilt the playing field toward Obama:

"My prediction is that the coverage of Obama on this trip will be oriented toward countering the notion he has no idea what he is talking about on foreign policy and defense issues and instead will prop him up as a qualified statesman . . . McCain, on the other hand, is a known quantity on these issues and his position does not excite nor fit the mainstream media's narrative on Iraq and Afghanistan, so they simply ignore it and him."

Unlike most observers on the left, I view Limbaugh as an extremely perceptive observer of the media and Democratic Party politics.

But Limbaugh's mistaken here.

Before Obama got into the air, the basic media narrative of his overseas trip was that Obama was playing defense in the face of criticism from the McCain campaign. McCain had been taking the initiative by challenging Obama to travel with him to Iraq and hold as many as ten townhall meetings. McCain was also aggressive in calling for overturning bans on offshore drilling for oil and attacking Obama's ideas on negotiating with Iran and withdrawing from Iraq as naive and ideological.

In the context of McCain's aggressive criticism, the media has been portraying Obama as "on the defensive," "dogged by criticism" and "boxed in" by McCain on Iraq and other issues. For example, the Kansas City Star framed one of their stories on Obama's patriotism by emphasizing the extent to which he was "dogged by criticism" for not wearing a flag pin in his lapel. Likewise, an ABC story by Jake Tapper was headlined "The Success of the Surge Seemingly Puts Obama on the Defensive." The same was the case with Dick Morris and Eileen McGann column for the New York Post which was headlined "The Way to Box in Barack on Iraq."

Contrary to Rush Limbaugh, the basic media narrative has been that McCain on offense/Obama on defense.

That doesn't mean that all the puff stories from the network talking heads aren't going to help Obama. But the question is not whether the current success of Obama's trip is going to confirm media bias toward Obama, but whether the trip is going to change the media narrative in Obama's favor.

The Miracle of What?

Salon has an interesting interview with James Carse, a historian of religion and the author of a new book entitled The Religious Case Against Belief. For Carse, being religious is connected with a question of existence:

Are you religious yourself? I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

For Carse, the world has a "miraculous glow" because something was created out of nothing. But that doesn't strike me as quite right. I believe it would be more accurate to say that the world has a miraculous glow because "something" is always being created that didn't exist before. The earth is a tremendously fertile place where all creatures great and small, plant and animal, are continuously and miraculously bringing new things into life. Thus, the world isn't miraculous because an original "first" thing came out an original "nothing" as Carse suggests. Instead, the world is miraculous because of the constant cascade of newness around us. It isn't the first creation that should fascinate us, it's the continuous roar of creativity within us and around us.

Carse also has a comment on the popular atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens:

To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Of course, it's as easy to misfire on atheism as it is to misfire on anything else and the new atheists strike me as being superficial. It strikes me that atheism is more a matter of separating one's most profound questions from any kind of understanding of "God" and divinity. I'm fascinated by miraculous things like the green-ness of my environment after it rains, but I fail to see how that interest of mine connects to a concept of god at all.

Where Carse sees a religion of the miraculous, I have an atheism for a miraculous world.

When Will the Maliki Bomb Go Off?

MALIKI'S TIMETABLE BOMB. On Saturday, Maliki certainly dropped a bomb when he told Der Spiegel that he agreed with Obama's plans to withdraw American troops from Iraq within 16 months. Here's the key passages from the interview

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq.

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes . . .

Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.

FALLING INTO THE CLUTTER ZONE. As I noted in an earlier post, Maliki's agreement to any kind of timetable severely undercuts John McCain's presidential candidacy. McCain has banked most of his argument for being elected on his greater foreign policy wisdom. If Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months becomes widely accepted, McCain's going to lose most of the justification for electing him president.

As a result, McCain is lucky that the Maliki's announced agreement with Obama's particular timetable did not go off with the big bang that might have been expected. The liberal blogs caught on quickly and fully recognized al-Maliki's statement as a "game-changer." But the significance of Maliki's statement ended up being lost in the mainstream media "clutter." After the McCain campaign issued a counter-statement and Bush administration leaned on the al-Maliki government to take the statement back, the mainstream media began reporting on the various sides of the "controversy" rather than focus on the significance of what al-Maliki originally said.

MSNBC's report was typical in its "he said/she said" effort to appear objective:

The Illinois senator, challenged at every turn on the Iraq issue by Republicans, including presidential rival Sen. John McCain, was expected to arrive in the country amid the controversy over comments by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that were supportive of Obama's 16-month timetable.

The Iraqi leader's aides have said his remarks, published in a German magazine, were misunderstood and that he was not taking sides in the U.S. election.

Other media sources buried al-Maliki's statement in their reporting about Obama's trip to Afghanistan. Following the conservative blogs, some media figures are warning against Obama becoming over-confident or appearing immodest. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Trudy Rubin framed her comment in terms of Obama's need to stay "humble" despite his positions in favor of negotiations with Iran, troop increases in Afghanistan, and troop withdrawals from Iraq all being validated within the last week.

Given the various forms of media clutter that have obscured the significance of al-Maliki's endorsement of Obama's position, it's possible to wonder whether al-Maliki's bombshell will eventually explode to Obama's benefit.

THE ULTIMATE ANSWER. It's likely that al-Maliki's statement is going to help Obama a great deal over the long run. There are several ways in which it will be helpful. The most immediate effect will be that day to day campaigning is going to be easier for Obama. Barack Obama and his surrogates can use the day to day jousting to remind voters that the Iraqi prime minister and Iraqi people agree with Obama's position and that McCain hasn't adjusted to the realities on the ground. Obama will also be able to quote al-Maliki to great effect during the campaign debates. Obama can also al-Maliki's statement to great effect in his campaign advertising. Although the al-Maliki bombshell on troop withdrawals isn't going to greatly help Obama on a short-term basis, it will be a gift that keeps on giving to the Obama campaign.

The Wind at Obama's Back

Barack Obama touched down in Afghanistan on Saturday after a brief visit to Kuwait. Soon it will be onto Iraq for meetings with the Iraqi leadership, Gen. Petraeus, and the U. S. senior staff.

If anybody has ever had a fair wind behind them as they traveled, it's been Barack Obama.

Courtesy of McCain's demands for Obama to travel to Iraq, Obama's trip to the Middle East is now his "much anticipated" trip. In fact, Obama's trip is so highly anticipated that all three of the major network television anchors are traveling with him. That means plenty of puff pieces about Obama that will probably improve his poll numbers. Obama is a celebrity presidential candidate and puffing celebrities is one of the major ways that Brian Williams, Charles Gibson, and Katie Courie "earn" their millions of dollars.

So puffing there will be.

And Obama will take it.

Because Obama's trip to the Middle East has been so highly anticipated, Obama also had an opportunity to give a major speech on Iraq in which he pivoted nicely on his justification for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Before the surge, Obama advocated withdrawing American troops in sixteen months because the troops weren't helping the Iraqis stabilize their country.
But last Tuesday, Obama argued that the progress brought about the surge provides even more justification for troop withdrawals. Building on Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's suggestion that a timetable for withdrawal would be appropriate, Obama argued that Iraq is stable enough that American troops can be withdrawn within 16 months and switched to Afghanistan with little danger to Iraq.

It was a sweet manuever. To top it off, Obama also looked determined and presidential while making the speech. The same can't be said for McCain and President Bush's responses. Boxed in by the fact that the Iraqis were supporting a withdrawal timetable, McCain was reduced to the carping complaint that Obama had announced policy before seeing conditions on the ground. The Bush administration didn't do any better in announcing that they had accepted the idea of "a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. That had the appearance of being a concession to the strength of the Maliki/Obama position. However, a "general time horizon" and "aspirational goals" are so vague that they appear transparently dishonest and made the Bush administration look they're lying more than anything else.

Indeed, one could argue that "ineffective dishonesty" has become one of the defining traits of the Bush administration.

Today, Obama got the best news yet. Just as news of Obama's arrival in the Middle East started filtering through the media, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq endorsed Obama's plan for withdrawing American troops by May 2010.

Malike stated that “U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” al-Maliki told Der Spiegel. He said he wants U.S. troops to leave “as soon as possible.”

Al-Maliki not only specifically supported Obama's plan and named Obama, he was also specific about undercutting John McCain's rationale that setting a timetable for withdrawal is tantamount to "surrender." Quoting al-Maliki:

"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.""

How good can it get for Obama? Obama has the Prime Minister of Iraq announcing support for his policy at precisely the very moment that the American media is most focused on Obama's trip to Iraq. Obama could not have hoped to have a better set of circumstances for making him look like an effective foreign policy leader.

It's a fair wind indeed.

Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela

Last week, I saw a notice where Karl Rove expressed amazement that the United States kept turning out people like Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who was killed in Afghanistan.

Personally, I would like to see the U. S. start turning out some people like Nelson Mandela as well. Certainly, we could use that kind of greatness of spirit and human generosity.

Mandela turns 90 today. Happy birthday!

Thinking a little bit about Mandela's remarkable efforts to reconcile white and black populations in South Africa, I won't use his birthday as an occasion to trash George Bush.

Obama and the Expectations Game

The Obama campaign was unhappy about the New York Times story on the divide between African-American and white opinion on racial issues.

But they had reason to be happy about the survey from which the story was written.

One of the most important things Obama should be happy about is that they're far ahead in the expectations game.

According to the New York Times/CBS News survey, a big majority of those polled believe that Obama is going to win in November. Overall, 54% believe Obama will win and only 30% see McCain winning. Among whites, it's Obama 50%-32% and among blacks 72%-16%. The fact that most people expect Obama to win is one of those"fundamentals" that make life tough for the McCain campaign. When people expect a candidate to win, they're more willing to raise money, volunteer for the candidate, attend events, and vote. Losing the "expectations game" doesn't kill a candidacy but it does make everything more difficult and costly.

The fact that Obama's ahead in the "expectations game" is also a big change from 2004. I can't remember any of my friends or colleagues thinking that John Kerry was going to win and I believe that ingrained pessimism was one of the reasons Kerry lost. If Obama wins, part of the reason will be that he was expected to win.

Obviously, political candidates can turn expectations around. Until the last couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses, most commentators (including this one) expected Hillary to win the Democratic nomination. But that was all changed by Obama's victory in Iowa.

Perhaps John McCain will figure out away to change expectations in his favor; perhaps Barack Obama will blow it. But right now, the expectations are breaking in Obama's favor.










much harder for John McCain to raise money, recruit volunteers, This is a real change from 2004 when none of the Democrats I knew saw John Kerry as winning the election.

And We Also Need to Pay Them . . .

Classisist Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute wants America to de-emphasize the sedentary, bureaucratic arts before the United States goes the way of other previously great nations.

American universities bragged that they were teaching the world how to design and engineer -- as our own kids gravitated to law and management schools. We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn't do rather than turn to our best and brightest private citizens to show us what we could.

Alas, no successful civilization in history -- Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on -- ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers.

Instead, Hanson wants America to re-emphasize manual labor.

A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.

It's time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit.

Except for the drilling, I'm all for that. I went the grad school/professor route myself but it's an injustice that manual labor of all kinds is so devalued in American society. It's also wrong that so many students are in college who don't want to be because of the lack of well-paid manual labor positions.

The best way to change things around is to create incentives for factory work, mining, building, farming, and other kinds of manual labor. All of these kinds of jobs would be more attractive and valued more highly if they had more job security, paid better, and had more effective health plans.

But where are the resources for increasing the welfare of manual workers going to be found?

How about creating disincentives for overpaid CEO's, Wall Street financial manipulations, high end trial lawyering, rainmaking lobbyists, and other occupations that tend to detract from the welfare of American society.

The policy prescriptions for more appropriately distributing wealth are well-known.

The United States could raise taxes on the wealthy to European levels, deny federal contracts to companies that overpay CEO's, socialize health care, and rely on government agencies rather than lawsuits to curb business abuses.

As Victor Davis Hanson would say, "the fate of Western Civilization is at stake."

Carrying Obama's Water

In a recent post on Talking Points Memo, the eminent Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol argues that progressives need to unify and get behind Obama. What especially bothers Skocpol is the feminists who are so angry over Hillary losing that they're willing to support McCain. But she's also dissatisfied with the liberal bloggers who won't let FISA go, single-issue people, "blustering egotists" like James Carville, and Jesse Jackson.


I'm with Skocpol. Progressives should be "carrying Obama's water" (to use a Limbaugh phrase) and pounding McCain morning, noon, and way into the wee hours for the pajamas media.


But it's not happening and it's especially strange that it's not happening in the major liberal blogs.


Skocpol mentions that "the supposedly progressive blogs are full . . . of diversions." Actually, the liberal blogs are so full of diversions that it's ridiculous. Obama gave a major speech on foreign policy yesterday and laid down his markers on withdrawing troops from Iraq. Nevertheless, "general news" blogs like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post didn't devote much more space to Obama's Iraq position than they did to the New Yorker cover of Barack Obama as a Muslim terrorist. In fact, Obama's speech on Iraq is now far down on TPM's front page while their report on McCain's criticism of Obama as "rigid and ideological" is fairly close to the top. In a certain way, TPM is (unknowingly) disseminating McCain's positions.


Much of the problem with Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post is that they view themselves as political news organizations. Feeling obligated to report all the news that's "fit to blog," these blogs end up peddling the diversions much more than they promote Obama or attack McCain.


Another problem with the liberal blogs is the rigidity of their approach to criticizing McCain when they do attack him. Contrary to the conservative blogs which continually experiment with new ways to attack Obama, the major liberal blogs stays consistently on two themes--that a McCain administration will be the third term for Bush and that McCain is doing an enormous amount of flip-flopping. McCain's certainly doing the flip-flopping but there are a number of other things that should disqualify him from the presidency as well.

A final point is that progressive bloggers tend to distract themselves with their criticism of how the mainstream media is covering McCain. The fact that the mainstream media is formulating a number of the campaign narratives in ways that favor McCain drives progressive bloggers to distraction and they devote a disproportionate amount of blog space to deconstructing the mainstream media. If the progressive blogs were doing a better job of creating their own narrative for electing Obama and defeating McCain, they might actually push the mainstream media to change their tune.

The only exception I see to Skocpol's argument is Daily Kos which pushes pretty hard against McCain.

Progressives really need to unite around Obama while the progressive blogs need to cut through their own clutter to promote Obama's candidacy.

No Diarrhrea on Mars

It appears from the pictures sent back by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that at least half of Mars had water more than three billion years ago.

The key is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered extensive outcroping of phyllosilicate rocks "which include clays rich in iron, magnesium or aluminum, mica and kaolinite."

These kinds of clays are formed through contact with water.

Despite the confirmation that Mars used to be a wet planet, there is still no evidence that there was life on Mars.

But if there was life, the creatures probably didn't have diarrhea. "Kaolinite" is one of the ingredients in Kaopectate.

Obama and McCain's Brass Tacks on Iraq

On July 15, Barack Obama and John McCain gave dueling speeches on Iraq that greatly clarified the issue of the war for the election.

The argument between Obama and McCain boils down to a simple choice concerning what's the most important thing to consider. For Obama, it's "what should we do in Iraq in the future;" and for McCain, "who was right about the surge."

Whoever wins the debate on "what's important" will win the debate on Iraq and more likely than not win the election.

In my opinion, Obama has a much better argument. But that doesn't mean he'll win the debate. In fact, McCain has certain advantages that will make the argument hard for Obama to win.

John McCain's view doesn't make sense at first. Why does he insist in talking about the surge rather than what he would do as president? McCain wants to frame the issue in terms of "the surge" because he was an early advocate of increasing American troops by 30,000 in Iraq and because the surge has been a relative success. In this context, McCain claims that he can be trusted to be right about everything connected with Iraq because he was right about the surge. For his part, Obama opposed the surge and predicted its failure (bias alert: I didn't think the surge would succeed either). Thus, McCain has a real advantage if he can convince voters to accept the idea that "who was right on the surge" is the most important issue.

There's also a subtext here. McCain also wants us to focus on the surge is because he's reluctant to say exactly what he wants to accomplish in Iraq. The only way to coherently think about McCain's ultimate goals for Iraq is to think of him as a neo-conservative and he certainly has agreed with the neo-conservatives about the war. What defines the neo-conservative position have been the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, establishing Iraq as a "stable democracy," and making Iraq into an ally in the war on terror. What is meant by Iraq being an ally in the war on terror is that Iraq would be a client state of the United States and that Iraq would (gladly) allow American troops to be stationed on its soil for the purpose of intimidating other Arab nations, supporting Israel, and maintaining a permanent state of confrontation with Iran.

Given the steadfast opposition of the Iraqi government and population to this kind of permanent American occupation, the whole neo-conservative idea is a pipe dream. It's difficult to tell how much McCain shares in that pipe dream, but he wants a large-scale American military presence in Iraq at a time when the Iraqi government is more stable. One can only assume that he wants the U. S. military to pursue "other American interests" as conservatives define those interests. This is what Obama thinks McCain is angling at as well when Obama rejects the idea of "permanent American bases in Iraq."

However, McCain has a good chance of selling his emphasis on the surge enough to make it an advantage for him. He has at several advantages. Most importantly, one can view "support for the surge" as the most important issue in Iraq without independently evaluating the competing claims and complexities of military and political conditions there. Thus, accepting McCain's argument makes decision-making easier and more efficient. Likewise, the whole conservative media establishment and 20-25% of the electorate was enthusiastic in their support of the surge. McCain's emphasis on the surge has the advantage of building on the enthusiasm of a passionate part of the American political scene. Finally, McCain's a relatively popular and trusted figure even among Democrats. That makes the argument easier for undecided voters to empathize with or accept, even for those who have mildly opposed the war.

Ironically, accepting Obama's argument might be a bigger leap of faith for undecided voters even though it's a simpler argument that coheres well with the facts. Obama's argument is that the relative success of the surge has made it possible for the U. S. to withdraw most of its troops within 16 months after his inauguration. It's simple, elegant, and conforms to accepted facts about the progress of the surge. However, Obama has a problem in that accepting Obama's argument about the future requires undecided voters to make their own judgements about future conditions in Iraq and thus puts more of a burden on voters.

The state of public opinion is a disadvantage for Obama in other ways. A large percentage of the moderate and independent vote is opposed to the war, but much of that opinion is fairly soft, uncertain, and uninformed. All McCain has to do is make undecided voters uncertain about their opposition to continued occupation for him to succeed. Obama has the more difficult task of convincing those same voters that withdrawing troops actually will work.

Finally, Obama is not nearly as familiar to the public as McCain and constant questioning and criticism has chipped away at Obama's veneer of charisma. As a result, Obama's not as automatically believable as McCain even when McCain is dissembling or hiding his opinions.

As a result, Obama has to be much more effective at promoting his ideas than John McCain if Obama hopes to win the debate on Iraq and probably if he hopes to win the election at all.

That's the hand Obama's been dealt. Now he has to play it.

Obama Recognizes Obvious--Needs To Sell It

It was only a matter of time before the Obama campaign saw the obvious on Iraq and Obama came out with the needed update in a New York Times op-ed just today.

There are two points that are obvious.

The first point is that the Bush surge has resulted in a solidification of the Malik government and general progress. Perhaps more surprising is the second point that the progress of the surge also makes the argument for withdrawing from Iraq stronger than ever.

The Bush administration and the pro-war faction had imagined that progress for the surge would justify a long-continued occupation of Iraq. However, it turned out that the significance of the surge was to remove the main obstacle to withdrawal. The greatest weakness of the anti-war argument had been that a U. S. withdrawal would leave Iraq in a Hobbesian nightmare of a war of all against all. The situation in Iraq was so bad at the end of 2006 that withdrawing could have been legitimately seen as abdicating our responsibility for fixing problems that we ourselves caused by our invasion.

The success of the surge solved that problem. The Maliki government has established a commanding position in relation to the Shiite militias. Sunnis have stopped revolting and al-Qaida is no longer a dynamic factor. Moreover, Iraq is awash in cash as a result of rising oil prices. Now, the United States can now withdraw its military forces without the specter of abject failure hanging over the mission. We can withdraw with no fear of Iraq falling into a Somalia-type collapse, no fear of a general genocide of the Sunni population, and no fear of an al-Qaeda take-over.

In other words, we can withdraw with some of our dignity intact. Not all of our dignity. After all more than one hundred thousand Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and two million more have been driven into exile. But the U. S. has managed to achieve some stability.

Even more to the point, the Iraqis want us out. According to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a
timetable on their withdrawal,” al-Maliki said, according to a statement released by his office. “In all cases, the basis for any agreement will be respect for the full sovereignty of Iraq.”

Last week, talks on a continued Status of Forces Agreement broke down. In a typical over-reach, the Bush administration wanted control of Iraqi air space, full control over U. S. combat missions, and immunity from prosecution for American troops AND private contractors. As a result, the Iraqi government not only rejected the U. S. proposal, they started to insist that the Bush administration accept a deadline for withdrawal and agree for Americans to leave the Green Zone compound that had come to serve as a symbol of U. S. arrogance.

"A senior Iraqi government official said this weekend the enclave should revert to Iraqi control by the end of the year. “We think that by the end of 2008 all the zones in Baghdad should be integrated into the city,” said Ali Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman."

Liberal blogs have been noticing for some time that progress for the surge strengthened the argument for withdrawal. It became obvious that Barack Obama would have to pounce when the Maliki government announced that they wanted a timeline for withdrawal as well. And Obama did pounce.

"The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States. . .

"As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

That's a plan for withdrawal that can be defended. Now Obama has McCain campaign in a box. If McCain keeps arguing for a permanent American presence in Iraq, he can be accused of trying to override the sovereignty of the Iraqi government. If McCain agrees to an expedited withdrawal, he's basically agreeing that Obama is right and has been right all along. If the Obama campaign is smart, they'll pound away at the Obama/Maliki convergence with all the energy and money they have.

It's interesting to think about the counter-arguments from the Bush administration and the right. The McCain campaign calls Obama's new arguments for withdrawal a "losing proposition" in the sense that they imply the failure of the American mission. They won't be using that theme for long because Obama is talking about getting out while we're ahead instead of while we're behind.

There's also a great deal of rage in Commentary over Obama's failure to give the Bush administration any credit. But why should Obama give Bush credit? The war was a bad idea and the Bush administration floundered around for almost five years, wasting 4,000 American lives, and let the country sink into the abyss before finally righting themselves.

I've also seen some commentary to the effect that we shouldn't take the Maliki government's call for a deadline seriously because they're just pandering to popular Iraqi hostility to the occupation. But shouldn't the Maliki government be taking popular opinion in Iraq seriously if it's a democracy.

The Obama campaign now has a workable angle on Iraq. They should push it as hard as they can.

Does Obama Have a Big Enough Ego?

One of the prerequisites for a serious run at the presidency is a huge ego. Everything about the American presidency--the White House, Oval Office, West Wing, Lincoln bedroom, and nuclear football, as well as moments like the Gettysburg Address, Kennedy Inaugural, and Roosevelt's fireside chats--as been given iconic, semi-religious status in American society. To be an American president means that someone has to rise so far above the idolizing of presidents that they can see "the Oval Office" as a place to get work done, meeting foreign dignitaries as "part of my job," and dealing with earth-shattering events like the war in Iraq or Katrina in the mundane terms of "solving problems," "seeking political advantage," or "responding to opponents." In other words, part of being president is being a man or woman apart from the cultural and political apparatus for idolizing the presidency.

All of that takes an enormous sense of self-confidence, personal mission, and a large vision of a person's place in history. In other words, it takes an extraordinary amount of ego.

That has especially been the case for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. As the first serious African-American and female contenders for the office, Obama and Clinton have had to see themselves in even more monumental terms than white male candidates. In many ways, Obama's and Clinton's candidacies have been culminations of the long histories of black struggle and the women's movement in the United States. The efforts of literally millions of men and women over the entire history of the United States went into putting Obama and Clinton into a position to run such powerful campaigns. It must have taken an extraordinary amount of self-confidence for both Obama and Clinton to carry thos legacies while also focusing on mundane things like meeting with reviewing speeches, local dignitaries, choosing New Hampshire diners for breakfast, getting hair done, and locating the right tie.

Now that Clinton has been eliminated, one question for Obama's candidacy is whether he really has a big enough ego to not only be president but to preside over a unprecedented and unavoidably monumental kind of presidency.

In this light, Jonah Goldberg's complaints about Obama's ego in the New York Post seem strangely off-key.

Goldberg writes in the New York Post:

Perhaps [Obama's] an adulation junkie . . . That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium. Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn't even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK's highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany's Brandenburg Gate . . .

To the contrary, doing things "big" like this is a strong sign that Barack Obama is someone who's up to the job. Two of the logical questions associated with managing a political convention are "how do we make my nomination special?" and "what can we do to stand out?" Obama's answer shows exactly what a high level of imagination, confidence, and guts he and his staff have. The idea of giving the acceptance speech in the football stadium stands out in a huge way, makes the speech an even bigger event than it would have been otherwise, and grabs the attention of people in the important swing state of Colorado. Even more important than that, the idea of giving the acceptance speech in the stadium speaks volumes about Obama's confidence in his own ability and the ability of his staff to make an signal success of the event. Obama is assuming that his camp can nail down the mundane details of ticketing, lighting, seating arrangements, writing the speech, and delivering the speech so well that they can produce a "happening."

The fact that Obama has this kind of matter of fact confidence is a good sign that he thinks on a grand enough scale to be a successful president.

Obama's stadium gambit is also politically astute because it puts pressure on McCain in areas where McCain is weak like staging events and writing and delivering speeches. McCain and his people aren't big on preparation and this is a chance to really show them up.

The same thing is true of holding a rally at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin where JFK and Ronald Reagan created a lot of their own legacies. In discussing the event, Obama is assuming that he can make a mark on history just as well as Kennedy or Reagan. Given that Obama is running for president, he should be taking it for granted that he will make an impact on American society and indeed the world at large that rivals or surpasses the significant presidents of the past.

Otherwise, Obama shouldn't have run at all.

The irony of Obama's trip to Germany and Iraq is that he might not have been making the overseas trip at all if John McCain hadn't challenged him to travel to Iraq. If Obama ends up speaking at Brandenburg Gate and the speech is a big success, the whole trip might be a huge plus for his campaign.

But that's a lot of being president is about--dealing with challenges in imaginative and successful ways. And it appears that Barack Obama has enough skill and confidence--and a big enough ego--to get it done.

The Tooth Hippo Comes Out of Retirement

That's right. I thought my career as the "tooth hippo" was over. Mildly bored after living for more than 40 years with the tooth fairy myth, I decided that my girls would get money from a "tooth hippo" instead. Why not? Hippos are big, fun-loving animals with prominent teeth and they're related to whales and dolphins. Why couldn't there be a tooth hippo to pay off my daughters for losing their teeth?

And so it went for about seven years of delivering $2 for each tooth. Over time, I got a little careless about it all and sometimes the tooth hippo took two nights to get the job done. But it did get done. Also, my daughters were incredibly slow about getting their adult teeth. Miss Teen RSI still has a tooth descending and she's almost 14. Anyway, I thought the tooth hippo had gone into permanent retirement, but then Miss Tween RSI found an old, unrewarded tooth and reminded me that I was the tooth hippo and that I had a job to do tonight.

Kids are so cynical.

As one can imagine, it was a fiasco. The kid didn't go to bed until after 11 and then she slept right on top of the pillow so I couldn't grab the tooth.

But I did give her the money.

Something tells me that will be the main point.

And now the tooth hippo needs some rest.

Tasing for Kicks?

One of the signal contributions of the African-American blogs has been their efforts to follow the story of taser abuse by American police.

Today, African-American Political Pundit carries a story about the death of Barron Scooter Collins in Louisiana as a result of multiple taser hits. Heading his post with "They Could Not Get The Jena 6 So They KilledThe Cousin, AAPP notes that Collins was the first cousin of Mychal Bell who was at the center of the Jena Six controversy and that his death was listed as a "homicide" on the death certification. Unsurprisingly, the police officers involved haven't been subject to any disciple or seemingly any investigation.

On Tasered While Black, there's an account of a man who died as a result of being tased for riding without proper lighting on his bike.

Tasered While Black reports that a nationwide effort to more strongly regulate the use of tasers by police. That's an effort well-worth supporting. It's also important to come to an understanding of the extent to which the availability of tasers has created more opportunities for police abuses.