On Iran, Reagan’s Speechwriter Supports Obama.
Peggy Noonan still has all the eloquence she put into Ronald Reagan’s mouth, but she has come to be despised by movement conservatives for being an élite Washington insider, and reasonable. I find her persuasive on the subject of the Prez’s disappointing oratorical restraint in the cause of the Iranian protesters:
To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous. The ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week. John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn’t know whose side America is on. “In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral,” said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it’s neutral?
This was Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else’s delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.
Naturally, this leads the president’s full-bore despisers to characterize Noonan in ugly ways. Although, as a lover of words, I have to say “Obasmic” is a good one.
As Pat Buchanan said frankly on MSNBC today, the stirring, freedom-loving rhetoric coming from the right, which we would have thrilled to hear from the Leader of the Free World even if it was impolitic, is politics; it’s not pure emotion (I don’t think politicians have that), but a calculated play on the pure, or at least naïve, emotion of us the public. It’s the Republicans looking for any crack in Obama’s bulletproof aura to insert a crowbar into.
Unfortunately for him, I think he may have handed them a supersize crowbar by firing Inspector General Walpin. Also, as the economy continues to stagger, and the stimulus stimulateth not, his aura’s getting tattered; like any president past his honeymoon in rough times, he’s becoming mortal and vulnerable, if not yet a universal target of blame. Unfortunately too, the Republicans are far more focused on bringing him down than on working out something coherent to replace him with. They almost risk becoming the Palestinians of American politics, living in refugee camps in the political wilderness while dedicated solely to the destruction of their hated and envied enemy. Perhaps the party’s boldest prominent thinker, Newt, is despised personally, and its most popular candidate, Sarah Palin, is light in the thinking department. Mike Huckabee has a brain and a wit, and a loyal constituency, but he’s another big-government compassionate conservative, like Bush.
So volatile, so unpredictable is our world just now that we are, almost unavoidably, the blind leading the blind.
Noonan goes on to say (in a peculiarly contorted paragraph where her eloquence fails her):
If the American president, for reasons of prudence, does not make a public statement of the government’s stand, he could certainly refer, as if it is an obvious fact because it is an obvious fact, to whom the American people are for. And that is the protesters on the street. If he were particularly striking in his comments about how Americans cannot help but love their brothers and sisters who stand for greater freedom and democracy in the world, all the better. The American people, after all, are not their government. Our sentiments are not controlled by the government, and this may be a timely moment to point that out, and remind the young of Iran, who are the future of Iran, that Americans are a future-siding people.
I’m glad that today both the House and the Senate, acting as our elected representatives, made that declaration for us. The House approved the resolution 405-1, even though it “was initiated by Republicans as a veiled criticism of Obama.” The dissenter was Ron Paul, who said he didn’t think such pronouncements on the actions of foreign governments were in Congress’s constitutional job description. I wonder: it’s certainly served the purpose of expressing the sentiment of the people. While Congress’s main job is lawmaking, perhaps it’s also the right branch of government to do our venting and cheering for us, in resolutions that serve a real emotional need but carry no more than moral force.
Meanwhile, it’s a stomach-turning feeling to be sitting here safe and comfortable on the eve (the morning, really) of what may well be a massacre, unable to do anything to stop it.
“One size fits all doesn’t apply to adoption, any more than it does to abortion.”
My purpose was simple: I want everyone to know that giving up a child can hurt (and hurts me) like nothing else.
(Anger alert.)
Found through the related, intense discussion here.
Mullah-ing It Over [UPDATED]
Based on last night’s conversation on Twitter, Ed Morrissey is naïve to suggest that our president’s saying something in their support would help Iranian protesters topple the mullahs.
We’ve written repeatedly that Mirhossein Mousavi is no real reformer; he’s the mullah-approved version of a reformer, and a Mousavi “administration” would not differ much from Ahmadinejad’s, except in tone. Getting excited over a Mousavi win would be akin to cheering on Kim Jong-Il’s son to take over for Dear Leader sooner rather than later.
However, and this is the point that Obama and others miss, the Iranian protests have the potential to go beyond Mousavi — which is why the mullahs want to suppress them. The Iranian people have begun to awaken to the fact that they can be more powerful than the mullahcracy that has oppressed them for 30 years. If the protests continue to grow in number, Mousavi will eventually become a footnote as Iran frees itself from tyranny and grasps self-determination.
No one is cheering on Mousavi — we’re cheering the Iranian people. And we’re frankly puzzled why the leader of the free world has yet to do so.
Sheesh! Before that comes anywhere near happening, there will be a bloody Tiananmen for sure! The protesters’ only hope is a split among the mullahs themselves.
So watch Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri (“reformist cleric in Qom, and once the designated successor to Khomeini”). His statement yesterday was nothing short of astonishing. It suggests that there is dissent and dissatisfaction within the inner sanctum of Iran’s ruling clerics. But I don’t have time to go read and find out how influential, or not, he is, or what allies he may have or be gaining. If you do, please pitch in.
Here’s the New York Times archive on him. Right away you’ll see that he’s 87 years old and was placed under house arrest for five years starting in 1997, for opposing Khamenei. (It’s pretty funny, hearing people on Twitter say Newt is “too old” to run for president. This guy is pushing 90 and still a playa.)
UPDATED: I should have added, however, that the protesters potentially give a dissenting mullah a power base; and in that sense, the brave people in the streets are a real contributing factor to some kind of eventual regime change in Iran. It’s an alliance, in which neither the people nor a mullah could act alone.
Big
Thinking about the last post and the comments unfolding there, it strikes me that now that we count ourselves in the hundreds of millions or billions and manage life on a mass scale, the most important thing any two entities can have in common is bigness. Bigness reconciles a multitude of differences. Thus, for example, a Wall Street-K Street alliance is natural, because big entities understand each other, and are motivated to get together to become even bigger. Rick Warren (big) could be invited to speak at the inauguration of Obama (big). You can think of dozens of other examples. The big marry each other and do mergers. Ideology is much less influential than size.
I hear the title “Big” (the Tom Hanks movie) in counterpoint with another: “An Army of Davids” (the Instapundit book). That’s a happy notion, but the fact is that today, to be small is to be helpless, nonexistent. Even David needs a Goliath in his corner, and most Davids dream of incredible-hulking into Goliath-Godzillas who will finally loom above the mass and be seen. Goliaths make more Goliaths, like chess masters queening pawns or Olympians immortalizing their favorite boy- and girl toys: Oprah elevates James Frey, McCain uplifts Joe the Plumber, Instapundit queens Althouse. Yes, in the blogosphere Insty is Goliath himself.
In a democracy, in a marketplace, little guys have only one form of bigness: their numbers. And so they are courted and manipulated instead of brutalized. It’s the very best a little guy can hope for.
ABC’s Obamacare “Infomercial”
I’m an independent, not a conservative. I’ve been scoffing at the hysterical hyperbole of those on the right who throw around the word “tyrant” (wannabe) in regard to President Obama. This, however, really scares me.
I know. It’s Drudge. Find me a source that disputes the essential facts of the matter, or that presents a plausible argument in favor of a major broadcast network setting up in the White House, giving the administration lavish air time to pitch a legislative initiative that will profoundly affect all Americans, without opposition voices other than those preselected by the network. In consultation with the administration? That would be an assumption, but a fair one.
It’s as if the major media are voluntarily nationalizing themselves. It makes me feel disoriented. Someone will say “Just go watch Fox News!” Well, I suppose I could, and then try to split the difference. The point is, everyone has an agenda. No one can be trusted to tell it like it is. Or: how you tell it is how it is. (This reminds me of an article I linked a couple of years ago on AmbivaBlog about how the right, too, now acts on the principle that there’s no “reality” outside of how you spin it. And here it is! Biased, so read it with irony.) Has it always been that way? Is it just some sort of geezer nostalgia to think that a David Brinkley stood loftily above the fray? [added] And far worse than just having left media and right media (which is bad enough), a supposedly independent arm of the press is now coupling itself to the power of the state.
Let’s say you fully support President Obama’s vision of health care reform. You’d even be glad if it was speeding us along the path to a single-payer system. You believe health care is a basic human right that should be made available to all, not a commercial good to be traded for profit. You are convinced that a public option is at least a step in the right direction.
Does that justify ramming it down the throats of your countrymen without a full public debate?
Do you like seeing the media divided into the propaganda arm of the party in power and the propaganda arm of the opposition? Should I be grateful that at least there are still two voices?
Twitters from Brueghel
The landscape on Twitter today, with Iran’s opposition going down in flames while many of us watched ball games and ate and laughed, was this picture and the two poems written about it.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Musée Des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Cooperative Option
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota may just have headed off a looming congressional health-care stalemate by proposing a “third way” solution — private cooperatives. Ezra Klein lets Sen. Conrad speak for himself:
The G-11 group, which is the members of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, chairmen and ranking members of the key committees, who’ve been given the overall responsibility to coordinate health care reform in the Senate, asked me 10 days ago to come up with something to bridge the divide […]
The co-op structure came to mind because it seems to fulfill at least some of the desires of both sides. In terms of those who want a public option because they hope to have a competitive delivery model able to take on the private insurance companies, a co-op model has attraction.
And for those against a public option because they fear government control, the co-op structure has some appeal because its not government control. It’s membership control, and membership ownership.
Also the co-op model has proven very effective across many different models. Ocean Spray in the cranberry business, and Land of Lakes in the dairy business, and Puget Sound in the health care business.
Read the whole thing for a lucid brief explanation of how health coops would work and the various options for organizing them so that their pools would be big enough to be viable and competitive.
Where did this idea come from? I’ve done a fair amount of health care reporting, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
I guess it came out of conversations in my office after we were asked to see if we couldn’t come up with some way of bridging this chasm. Part of it is that we’re so used to cooperative structures in my state. They were begun by progressives, they came out of the progressive era. And they’re so successful in our state. So I can’t really say we came up with some brand new idea. We just thought about our own experience.
I hope Maxwell, who ran a cooperative for years, will come in on this post and take it from here.
“There’s An Awful Picture of You Guys . . .”
“. . . on my website,” was what I heard Nathan say. But no: he’d said “awesome.”
Awful or awesome? A little of both, no? I look like I’m about to pop Toto into my basket. J looks great, though, as always.
Ligo Dojo is growing. It is a nonprofit that serves at-risk kids from the Durham juvenile justice system, seamlessly mixed in with a diverse batch of regular students.
To look at these two, you’d almost think they had a life!
Ambiance 