Argent
Politics. Morality. Ambition. Marriage. Legality. Power. Responsibility. Hypocrisy. Religion.
The one thing our pundits lack the language to speak of is the one thing that would have mattered, in this story, to human beings from Sophocles to Stendhal: Passionate Erotic Love.
Jonathan Chait: Obama is Not Naïve.
I think this is quite a good analysis of what Obama is up to:
The thing that people haven’t figured out about President Obama’s conduct of foreign policy is that it’s the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries–Republicans at home, Islamists abroad–and strengthen his own position. […]
Obama’s method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation. […]
Naturally, Obama’s pacific expressions tend to alarm the more hawkish elements of his own camp, who interpret his idealistic rhetoric as naivete or weakness. […]
Obama’s method entails small acts of intellectual dishonesty in the pursuit of common ground. […]
Critics […] are correct that surrendering intellectual ground comes at a cost. Our most successful presidents articulate clear, forceful public rationales for their beliefs […]
It is a mistake, however, to view Obama’s strategy as an act of submission.
Consider how Obama explained his approach toward Iran during a recent interview with Newsweek:
Now, will it work? We don’t know. And I assure you, I’m not naive about the difficulties of a process like this. If it doesn’t work, the fact that we have tried will strengthen our position in mobilizing the international community, and Iran will have isolated itself, as opposed to a perception that it seeks to advance that somehow it’s being victimized by a U.S. government that doesn’t respect Iran’s sovereignty.
This is a perfect summation of Obama’s strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries’ constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.
The results remain to be seen. But it eerily resembles the way Obama has already isolated the GOP leadership. …
Read the whole thing. The only problem is, it’s already out of date. Because it isn’t coming across the way he wanted it to.
Tweeting Obama
In reverse (chronological), unTwitterish order:
amba12“he most definitely means he won’t be doing a damned thing for them.” Would be better if he said he would, but didn’t mean it? Like Kurds?
amba12That’s from @julescrittenden http://tr.im/pvoW But here’s the thing: Reaffirming American values is the part of Prez. job he’s not doing.
amba12It feels weird to have an oratorical Prez who’s so NOT doing that oratorical, rousing, reassuring part of the job, even if it’s hoke.
amba12Now you can say we have to grow up and get over our craving for hoke; or you cn say hoke is part of what binds ppl together, keeps ’em going
amba12Obama is what the French would call a “Fonctionnaire.” There’s this whole civil ministering role he’s deliberately refusing to fill. Weird!
amba12It makes the country feel headless–or heartless–in a most peculiar way. Obama didn’t have a father and is refusing to BE a father–to us.
amba12Also, you can sense his (quite natural) insecurity, his stumbling hesitancy in a role he was really unready to take on. HE WASN’T READY!
amba12Wonder whether, and how fast, he can find his footing and grow into this job? He’s still clinging to his original abstract ideas about it.
amba12Real events are demanding that he let go of those abstractions and start swimming strongly in the strong currents. & he’s too inexperienced.
amba12So he’s running on bravado: He’s entitled to the job ’cause he won it. I think it’s startin to sink in: it wasn’t the ultimate prize he won.
amba12I think he’s in over his head and scared shitless. (For the record, I thought Bush was too, but he was front man for a bunch of heavies.)
So Lucky . . .
. . . still to have my Dad . . .
. . . and his first love, my mom . . .
. . . at 91, 85, and 63!!
And with me, they were just getting started! Don’t get me started!
“Replacing Self-Ownership with Self-Stewardship”
On his new blog, Strike the Root, Funky Dung is doing some really original thinking at the intersection of Catholicism and Libertarianism. He doesn’t ever let himself stop and rest at a comfortable and convenient point; just when you think he’s come to a really pleasing synthesis, he challenges himself to move on. (When I got to the sentence that is the title of this post, my heart started beating faster.) He seems to be trying to figure out if a sort of “I-Thou libertarianism” is conceivable, one that goes far beyond utilitarian considerations and natural selfishness. If there’s a problem with it, it’s the problem of idealism, of basing a political vision on humans at their best, which may be ennobling as an expectation but unwarranted as an assumption. Very much worth reading, and responding to Funky’s invitation to contribute to an idea under construction.
Sotomayor Update: Starr, Catholics & Groves
The Washington Post reports that Kenneth Starr supports the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. In another section, The Post has a short Q & A with Barbara Perry about the history of Roman Catholics serving on the court. (Of the 110 who have served, only 11 have been Catholics and 5 of them are currently serving as justices.) By the way, according to Politico, Sotomayor has now resigned from the Belizean Grove, a group whose membership is apparently open to women only.
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.
Ambiance 