Lawyers, Guns and Money, we learn that Cap’n (”shortbus”) Ed wonders:
Wow.
Our informant at Captain’s Quarters has provided us with a list of the Cap’n’s next few posts:
Is Generalissimo Francisco Franco Finally Dead?
Will Adolf Hitler ever be stopped?
Can the United States reach the moon before Russia?
and:
What can I do with the waxy substance between my ears, other than make candles?
Michael Kinsley hits the mark in today’s LA Times, at least with respect to the GOP’s love-fest with a :
Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have turned into a Ronald Reagan adoration contest.
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Mitt Romney, meanwhile, kept repeating, inanely, “We’re in the house that Reagan built.” Reagan “would say lower taxes”; “Reagan would say lower spending”; Reagan “would say no way” to amnesty for illegal immigrants; Reagan would never “walk out of Iraq.” And, by the way, McCain’s accusation that Romney harbors a secret timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.”
A problem: Reagan actually signed the law that authorized the last amnesty, back in 1986. Romney deals with this small difficulty by declaring: “Reagan saw it. It didn’t work.” He offers no evidence that Reagan had a change of heart about amnesty, and learning from experience was not something Reagan was known for. The proper cliche is McCain’s: “Ronald Reagan came with an unshakable set of principles.” And — pointedly — “he would not approve of someone who changes their positions depending on what the year is.”
All of this is what Democrats these days would refer to as a fairy tale. There is no evidence that Reagan was bothered by the rough and tumble of political campaigns. Mischaracterization of an opponent didn’t even qualify as a “dirty trick” to Reagan, because of his fantastic ability to believe anything helpful.
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Would Reagan “walk out of” Iraq? Far from clear. He scurried out of Lebanon in 1984 after things got hot there. During the Reagan years, the United States was pro-Iraq in its war against Iran, although we also sold weapons to Iran to raise money for a terrorist war we were secretly financing in Nicaragua, while denouncing terrorism. It’s hard to find any “unshakable set of principles” in this mess.
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But the biggest fairy tale about Reagan is the most central one: about taxes and spending. It is one thing to sit in a North Vietnamese prison in the early 1970s, dreaming of a California governor who one day will balance the federal budget. It is another to imagine that it actually happened.
When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $74 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $141 billion. As a share of the economy, Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6% to 18.4%, and he cut spending from 22.2% to 21.2%, increasing the deficit from 2.6% to 2.8%. The deficit went as high as an incredible 5% of GDP during his term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two-thirds. You can fiddle with these numbers — assuming it takes a year or two for a president’s policies to take effect, or taking defense costs out — and the basic result is the same or worse. Whatever, these numbers hardly constitute a “revolution.”
This is a point I made several months ago, about Republicans fetishizing a mythical version of Reagan, one who possessed Solon-like judgment instead of incipient Alzheimer’s, and who practiced Periclean statesmanship instead of crude cowboy interventionism:
Reagan?s foreign policy with respect to the Middle East was extremely confused and ineffective. He led an ineffective intervention in Lebanon which ended in disaster and withdrawal. His administration brokered illegal arms deals with Iran, though the extent to which Reagan was even compus mentos is brought into doubt by Reagan?s later testimony during which it appeared he was unaware of much that was transpiring due to the early onset of dementia and Alzheimer?s. The Reagan administration also gave money and arms to radical Islamists in Afghanistan, much of it to groups which later formed al Qaeda. His administration fostered cozier ties to Saddam?s Iraqi regime as well.
Reagan was popular, and his presidency was regarded as a successful one in large measure, certainly in comparison to the debacle of George W. Bush’s, but it also had marked scandals, its own misadventures, and serious moral failures. Moreover, as Kinsey again points out, it never embodied the specific virtues attributed to it by the clot of dim, fetishistic current GOP presidential hopefuls.
Two examples of Bill Kristol’s unbounded ability to be wrong about everything.
First, there’s this splendid example of fertile imbecility from 5 years ago:
?There?s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ? that the Shia can?t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There?s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq?s always been very secular.?
Of course, subsequent events proved Kristol to be a blathering ignoramus, as years of sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia have taken tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, at its peak as many as 2,000 to 3,000 dying per month as ethnic cleansing of mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods was prosecuted without pity.
And from this week’s Kristol-spoor in the Weakly Standard, Can he close strong in 2008? :
Crittenden’s response was the right one: to mock the effort [to point out Bush’s failures and inadequacies], and to adduce the easily adduce-able evidence that Bush has been a pretty decent president.
Perhaps someone should point out to Mr. Kristol that “evidence” does not mean “whatever half-baked opinion a neocon fucktwit warmonger pulls out of his ass.”
Further proof that publishing a crappy book .
Just 10 short days after being endorsed by the preferred periodical of the batshit-crazy, Fred Thompson :
Fred Thompson, the expected Republican front-runner who spent most of his campaign loping in the middle of the pack, dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday.
He finished third in the Republican primary in South Carolina, behind Senator John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Mr. Thompson had proclaimed South Carolina was his firewall, a state that he hoped would rescue his flagging candidacy. After his defeat, he stopped campaigning, deciding not to follow most of the Republican field to Florida, which holds its primary next Tuesday.
?Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States,? Mr. Thompson said in a statement. ?I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.?
We’re beginning to suspect that the apparently fatal endorsement from Human Events was just another cunning strike at conservatism by that well known pinko, David Horowitz.
According to Doughy Pantload logic, that is.
Roy actually read Liberal Fascism and :
We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. “Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other,” he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini’s (”the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism”) — even while calling Il Duce “The Father of Fascism” — prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini’s youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing — that is, liberalism.
As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that “as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient” — yet he doesn’t seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn’t he have been conning them when he embraced it?
Catch that? According to Pantload, since Mussolini was a socialist when in his youth, he was also a socialist when he came to power as a fascist and renounced everything socialist.
Ultra-conservative was a notoriously a member of the , so it’s clear that he, like Mussolini, remains a committed communist rather than the batshit-crazy paranoid conservative he manifests so obviously, or rather that Horowitz’s Conservative group and the Young Spartacists are the same thing.
In the way that socialists and liberals are also fascists.
The Independent reports that in parts of Iraq:
The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.
Afghan with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad.
At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, according to a local source.
The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium was first revealed by The Independent last May and is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq. The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala, which is one of the places in Iraq where al-Qa’ida is still resisting US and Iraqi government forces. It is also deeply divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and the extreme violence means that local security men have little time to deal with the drugs trade. The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa’adiya, Dain’ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa’ida is strong.
The agency cites a local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi as saying that local farmers got no support from the government and could not compete with cheap imports of fruit and vegetables. The price of fertiliser and fuel has also risen sharply. Mr Azawi says: “The cultivation of opium is the likely solution [to these problems].”
It looks like all the Neocon think tank hacks who endeavored so hard to make Iraq a model of free market economics succeeded, at least in Diyala and other parts of Iraq.
A free market modeled on Afghanistan, however.
But it’s close enough.
The Batshit-Crazy Wingnuts at (where Ann Coulter is listed as an editor) endorse politically moribund, low-wattage, way-behind-in-the-polls actor/politician Fred Thompson for President.
Because, after all, he’s Rush Limbaugh’s guy, and Rush is a “depth guy.” I think he meant to say “fat, drug-addled” instead of “depth,” but that’s another story.
Senatorial War Pimps John McCain and Joe Lieberman in today’s WSJ - Opinion:
It was exactly one year ago tonight, in a televised address to the nation, that President George W. Bush announced his fateful decision to change course in Iraq, and to send five additional U.S. combat brigades there as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy and under the command of a new general, David Petraeus.
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After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already “lost,” and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.
In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.
Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge. Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001. Thanks to the surge, the Sunni Arabs who once constituted the insurgency’s core of support in Iraq have been empowered to rise up against the suicide bombers and fanatics in their midst — prompting Osama bin Laden to call them “traitors.”
McCain and Lieberman are using a sub-floor yardstick for measuring the “success” of the surge — the erosion of al Qaeda’s role and power in Iraq. It ascribes Sunnis turning on Iraq as a success of the surge, when that outcome was inevitable given how widely despised al Qaeda was among all segments of Iraqi society, long before the surge.
A — a year before the surge was even a gleam in eyes of two senators desperate for vindication — showed widespread rejection of al Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin:
Growing approval for attacks on US-led forces has not been accompanied by any significant support for al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are rejected by overwhelming majorities of Shias and Kurds and large majorities of Sunnis.
Overall 94 percent have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views.
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Views of Osama bin Laden are only slightly less negative. Overall 93 percent have an unfavorable view, with 77 percent very unfavorable. Very unfavorable views are expressed by 87 percent of Kurds and 94 percent of Shias. Here again, the Sunnis are negative, but less unequivocally?71 percent have an unfavorable view (23% very), and 29 percent a favorable view (3% very).
McCain and Lieberman are crooning about success in Iraq measured by the fact al Qaeda — the most unpopular organization in the entire country — has been battered and the people who have long despised al Qaeda predictably turned against it. The success in Anbar occurred largely in the absence of any troop surge, but rather was accompanied by the brokering of regional alliances with tribal groups — an agreement to “” without US or Iraqi National forces — over the objections of the Shiite national government. The surge is successful, says Sens. McCain and Lieberman, because the most widely despised organization in the country head by the most loathed man in the country — failed to take over.
In short, we’ve prevented something which could never have occurred anyway.
Obviously, the reduction in murders and bombings is a positive result of the surge, but violence remains at appalling levels, only measured in the hundreds instead of the tens of hundreds. And, more importantly, the reduction of civil violence of the last few months has in resolving the long term political, social and sectarian rifts undermining stability and fueling the violence.
In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop “surge” and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.
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In many cases — particularly on the political front — Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis,” he pledged. “Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year . . . the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.”
In short, if we’re achieving our goals in Iraq, it is largely because we have abandoned most of the goals set at the onset of the surge.
What remains to be seen is what happens when the “surge” brigades leave the country (and the 130,000 American troops who remain in country) and whether the contradictions inherent in the patchwork of local solutions can resolve itself without another spike in violence.
Even the Doughy Pantload hits the mark, once in a while. From today’s Freudian projection column in the Los Angeles Times:
What Americans really want when they look into a politician’s eyes is to see their own images reflected back, like in Narcissus’ pool. The presidency in particular has become the highest ground in the culture war. Americans want a candidate who validates them personally. “I’m voting for him because he’s a hunter like me.” “I’m backing voting for her because she’s a woman too.” “I’m for that guy because he’s angry like me.”
If you think about this, it makes sense — at least with respect to the Pantload himself. When Jonah voted for George Bush, he no doubt said, “I’m for the incompetent, intellectually moribund son of a privileged family, who was handed every job he ever had (and for which he was wholly unfit) through a lethal combination of nepotism, family name, and his parents’ connections — because he’s just like me!”
Jonah Goldberg, narcissist.