Jesus H. Beck
56 minutes ago
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Victor Hugo and some cotton buds
Kate Muir of The Times (h/t: normblog) writes about the Chavez book programme, whereby Chavistas are distributing literature to encourage broader reading among the masses of Venezuelans who, until recently, were functionally illiterate. Influenced by El Presidente's own shelves, Victor Hugo, Eduardo Galeano and Simon Bolivar are, unsurprisingly, pretty high up on the list, along with a pile of anticapitalist stuff ranging from intriguing to turgid to soul-sapping. Friedman and Hayek, surprisingly enough, don't get a mention!
An interesting reporter might have read some of the books on the list, examined how different they were, and perhaps discussed how the ideas within them might influence the way Venezuelans interpret the world. But this is a puff piece so I probably shouldn't expect too much. What we want is the solid, simple image and then a few coffee and croissant jokes at the end for a nice, self-satisfied morning read. Muir tries to make the book programme sound like a darkly menacing project of mass indoctrination, but I don't think even she can bring herself fully to believe it. The best she can do is note that groups are assigned "a group leader who structures discussions and at first encourages people to read aloud." A description that fits rather accurately my experience of primary school.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
What is Obama's direction in foreign policy?
Perhaps it's unfair to say so, but Obama has to date come across as sharing some of his liberal predecessors’ problems when it comes to foreign policy, much of it relating to that old “vision thing”. The simple fact is that a blinkered, ideological and stupid foreign policy is easy to sell to the public, whereas complexity is, well, complex. Few people had much doubt about what the Bush administration wanted to do after 9/11, even if they hated it. By contrast, Obama is trying to juggle a number of balls at the same time: to undercut America’s imperialistic image in the rest of the world; strengthen ties with the great powers of the twenty first century, Russia, China and India; deliver demonstrable progress in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda and, secondarily, the Taliban; yet not get bogged down in another Vietnam in the process. Necessarily, all these juggling balls whirling around makes the strategy less clear in the selling.
But there is also some evidence to suggest that the strategy is simply less clear per se, that the administration is still trying to figure out exactly what it wants to do with many of these issues well into its first year in power, and which of the many foreign policy issues facing him are the priorities. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Clinton administration, which also focused primarily on domestic matters upon taking office, and took too long to figure out what it was actually trying to achieve in its relations with the rest of the world. And it’s not exactly reassuring.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Racism and logic
Ok, a quickie here as I had my racism argument quotient filled up with Henry Louis Gates earlier in the year. For the record, my view is that Republicans are perfectly able to get angry about Obama without it always being about race. Sometimes and for some people I imagine it is, sometimes it isn't. Life is complicated. The stuff about Obama's religion and birthplace seemed to offer fairly badly sublimated racial undertones. But we should remember that Republicans in the 1930s were quite happy to throw about accusations that President Roosevelt was a communist and a socialist and a dictator even though he was a patrician WASP. The state of South Carolina is a matter I'm not getting into here. But I found the confidence with which some people asserted that Joe Wilson's heckling was about race to be unsettling. I certainly can't believe Wilson would have been any more polite if a President Hillary Clinton had made the same speech. Presumably then it would have been sexism?
All that said, I've just seen a piece by Bruce Bartlett in the WSJ which frankly goes beyond my limited abilities to get to grips with. Bartlett criticizes Paul Krugman for arguing that "the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s." (Bartlett's paraphrase, but I've certainly seen Krugman, like many others, say such a thing.)
Friday, September 18, 2009
Old right and new right
I've just read NYRB editor Sam Tanenhaus' new book, The Death of Conservatism. In many ways it's not very good; it's one of those tiny little overpriced hardbacks that (I assume) are fantastic moneyspinners for the author and publisher on a price to word ratio, written by individuals already able to trade on their name and reputation, but generally rushed together. The argument at times feels a little skewiffy, and the individual chapters still seem like the separate articles they were cobbled together from rather than parts of a whole.
But the essential point Tanenhaus is making is an important one: that even while it pays empty homage to the title, the brand of right wing politics governing the Republican party today has little to do with traditional conservatism. Tanenhaus provides a number of quotations that remind us just how far today's politicians and pundits have moved from their roots in the conservative resurgence in post-war America, and how far today's Republican values differ from those of their forefathers.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Fussin' and fightin'. If the press has its way, that is...
The press loves nothing as much as a fight. And they care nothing about the consequences. Which has made me a little bit annoyed this morning.
Exhibit One, from the right. Alex Massie of The Telegraph, writing in The Daily Beast, calls Americans a bunch of wimps for reacting against Joe Wilson. The US needs to take a leaf out of the British book and start heckling each other, he argues. Except, of course, that it is expressly forbidden in the UK to accuse someone of being a liar in Parliament, so there's not actually any difference. Not to mention the fact that the spirit in the House of Commons is ugly and pointless, and a lot of Brits like me wish that they behaved less like children and focused on running the country. And, thirdly, do we really think that American politics needs more combativeness and less respect? Has Mr. Massie spent even a minute examining recent political events in the States? If politicians in America got any more adversarial we'd have had an assassination by now.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Playing around with the budget
Amid all the jeremiads about death panels, funding for abortion, and health care for illegal immigrants, there is in my view one criticism of the Obama health insurance reform program coming from the right that is really worth listening to, and that is the question of financial impact. Even if you accept that the mess the United States is in is due primarily to the astonishing financial irresponsibility of Obama’s predecessor, this does not necessarily invalidate the issue.
Nevertheless, while the cost of health care coverage is inherently difficult to control, the fact remains that the president has (i) designed this bill from the outset to be a cost control as well as coverage measure; (ii) gone to great effort to provide ways of ensuring that these costs will be monitored and addressed if they continue to rise; and (iii) responded positively to suggestions from Blue Dogs and the two or three constructive Republicans in the debate that provide innovative ways of bringing down costs. To accuse the president of failing on this count smacks somewhat of partisanship, then.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Partisan bipartisanship
I haven’t had a chance to read the press yet, they’re typically wrong about these things anyway, and it’ll be a while before we’re able to see with any clarity whether it has any meaningful impact on the course of the debate over health care. Things were never as off-kilter as the media presented them during the past month; the bubble of boredom misshaped a lot of the debate and made Obama’s position on the capitol seem more dangerous than it was. And nor was it accurate to say, as the media had also been claiming in the build up to the speech, that the president needed firmly to limit the content of the final bill and thus force lawmakers into a particular framework. Negotiations are still going on behind the scenes, and it would have been crazy to prejudice them with too explicit statements before an audience of millions.
Given all this, I’m going out on a limb. But I’m tempted to say that Barack Obama’s speech to congress yesterday night was one of his best. In terms of emotional range and sophistication of argument, I honestly can’t remember a speech like it.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Barack Obama wants to eat your children
How many letters in the surname of the student Obama selected to introduce him, Tim Spicer? Six. How many words in the name of the place he was talking from, "Wakefield High School In Arlington Virginia." Six. How many letters in the word "school"? SIX!!
That’s right, I’m here to announce I’ve uncovered the secret message hidden within Barack Obama’s speech to school children yesterday. Underlying all the apparently smooth sounding words about personal responsibility and your duty to your country was lurking a subtext that, mark my words, will within a few years have produced a Sovietized army of Obama troops addicted to fluoridated water and ready to establish a dictatorial state in what will become known as the United States of Obama.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Banking is too important to be left to bankers alone
I was travelling on the Docklands Light Railway last night. For those unfamiliar with the city, this passes through Canary Wharf, London’s central business district.
I picked up a free paper lying on one of the seats, which turned out to be not the tabloid celebrity rags that normally pass for free papers (though don’t get me started on the havoc these wretched things cause, not to mention the distributors who cause pedestrian jams blocking the streets until you take one off their hands). It was a copy of a city-only paper, CITY a.m., which – not spending much time in such places – I hadn't had the pleasure of reading before.
The experience of flicking through it was enlightening once again as to how far my daily experience differs from those operating in our financial sector.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Silly season over?
Al Franken - that's right, author of a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and, according to his pals at Fox a radical left wing firebrand - shows how to have a reasoned debate on health care reform (h/t Oliver Willis):
Isn't it nice when people aren't shouting at each other all the time?
