"What number is this one again?"
Three looks at war from the Gray Lady...
The New York TImes editorial board thinks we have strange bedfellows.
The Obama administration needs to bring together a reliable international coalition as the backbone of its campaign to defeat the Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group that controls large parts of Iraq and Syria. So far, more than 40 countries have offered to help, and none are more important than the Sunni Muslim countries that are needed to give legitimacy to the American-led effort.
But even if every would-be ally agreed to play a productive role, political grievances, sectarian tensions and mistrust make organizing the coalition a lot like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Many countries in the region are skeptical about President Obama’s open-ended plan to carry the fight against the Islamic State, known as ISIS, to its strongholds in Syria and fear that it would strengthen President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war.
The NYT goes on to look at the different, often conflicting, roles that coalition partners have played in the region. It's a picture of real disagreements and long time enemies shoved onto the same team. It's also exactly the sort of arrangement one would expect given any 40 nations trying to work together on
any activity in the Middle East. In short: if we're going to demand the fig leaf of a "coalition," that fig leaf is going to cover a mass of conflicting goals.
Ross Douthat delivers the best analysis of our unfolding Tragedy in Iraq 2 (now with more Syria).
Across years of war and at an extraordinary cost, the United States built an army that was supposed to prevent jihadists from gaining a sanctuary in the heart of the Middle East. It had American-trained leaders, American-made weaponry and 250,000 men under arms — far more troops and firepower than any insurgent force that might emerge to challenge it.
That army was the Iraqi Army, and we know what happened next...
There is still time for the president to reconsider, to fall back on the containment-and-attrition strategy in Iraq and avoid a major commitment inside Syria. That strategy does not promise the satisfaction of the Islamic State’s immediate elimination. But neither does it require magically summoning up a reliable ally amid Syrian civil strife, making a deal with the region’s bloodiest dictator, or returning once again to ground warfare and nation-building in a region where our efforts have so often been in vain.
Read Douthat's piece. I don't care how many times I've poked fun at the man. He may—no, probably will—go back to arguing that liberalism causes scabies and poor spelling next week. But he's not wrong this week, and the more people willing to call out the emperor's startling nudity, the better.
Robert Stavins looks at a sadly ignored conflict.
On Tuesday, world leaders will converge at United Nations headquarters in New York for a summit meeting on the climate that will set the stage for global negotiations next year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the threat of global climate change. The summit is titled “Catalyzing Action,” a decidedly hopeful characterization.
I wish I were so hopeful.
It is true that, in theory, we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change with an intensive global effort over the next several decades. But given real-world economic and, in particular, political realities, that seems unlikely.
There are emerging hints of a positive path ahead, but first let’s look at the sobering reality.
The world is now on track to more than double current greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere by the end of the century. This would push up average global temperatures by three to eight degrees Celsius and could mean the disappearance of glaciers, droughts in the mid-to-low latitudes, decreased crop productivity, increased sea levels and flooding, vanishing islands and coastal wetlands, greater storm frequency and intensity, the risk of species extinction and a significant spread of infectious disease.
And this threat, this very
real threat, not only to our national security, but also to our economy, environment and health, is not just simply ignored. It's actively dismissed, even encouraged, often by the same people driving us to a repeat of the actions in the Middle East which have proven over, and over, and over to generate not peace and stability, but their polar opposites.
So... yeah. Might as well come on in and see what else is up.
Frank Bruni believes the modern breed of politician is the result of a Darwinian process, a strong selectional bias toward the hyper-ego.
In case you missed it, our nation’s officeholders, current and former, have been working overtime to make us proud.
Ted Cruz threw a histrionic hissy fit in front of Arab Christians. Sarah Palin went to a birthday party where her family reportedly got into a brawl. Mark Sanford emitted a self-pitying aria of romantic angst. Debbie Wasserman Schultz compared some Republicans to wife beaters....
Then I burrowed into Matt Bai’s new book ... about Gary Hart. Remember him: the presidential contender who rode a boat named Monkey Business into a media whirlpool? You should, as the book, which is excerpted in The Times Magazine this weekend, makes clear.
And the reason isn’t so much the scandal that swallowed him or his particular exit from the political arena. It’s the warning that his story sounded — about a new brutality on the campaign trail, about uncharted frontiers of media invasiveness and about the way both would wind up culling the herd, not in favor of the strongest candidates but in favor of those so driven or vacuous that the caress of the spotlight redeems the indignities of the process.
A lot of Bruni's despair boils down to the song we've all heard before—oh, those blogs and tweets, always ready to blow someone up for a slip of the tongue. Which misses the point entirely. What's astounding about today's politics is that Ted Cruz
isn't destroyed by his many,
many nonsensical diatribes. It's that Palin
ever was talked about as a serious candidate and that she still carries some aura of influence. Bruni has it absolutely backwards. It's not that today's politics washes out everyone at the first sign of fault, it's that so many are willing to absolve politicians of any idiocy whatsoever, so long as that idiocy enforces their own beliefs.
Ruth Marcus has some proposals to bust gridlock.
Is the country condemned to another two years, at least, of gridlock?
The world-weary take on the midterm elections is an indifferent shrug. Whether Democrats control the Senate or Republicans, nothing will be accomplished anyway, this apathetic argument goes. ...
There is a credible case that a Republican-controlled Senate could prove more productive. The new, tenuous majority, with an eye on 2016, would want to prove itself and would have more leverage over recalcitrant House Republicans. Meanwhile, if there is an urge for a deal — say, on corporate tax reform — Republicans might as well pursue it with this president, who won’t use the achievement as reelection fodder.
And damn. Just trust me that this piece does not get better. Marcus devolves into a convoluted analysis, based on recommendations by the ever pointless
Third Way and complete misreads of old Mitt Romney proposals to determine that losing could be good Democrats and Republicans might discover... discover... Whatever. It's nonsense. Next week: how cutting off your nose could really help your face.
Dana Milbank on campaign visuals.
There may be easier ways to improve Washington’s dysfunction than to force Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to swim in shark-infested waters, eat nothing but coconut water and hunks of raw clam for a week, and fight off the world’s largest crabs — although that would make for excellent TV. ...
The problem in Washington is less about ideology than the fact that lawmakers “don’t trust each other enough to work together,” reasoned Heinrich, who, like Flake, is a former House member in his first Senate term. “A lot of our predecessors were from very different ideological places, but they had a personal trust so that they could negotiate in good faith.” The absence of such ties “is really caustic to the functionality of this place.”
Milbank seems to be having fun with this piece, but he's missed the obvious. In fact, he's contributing to what in my mind is the biggest failing of the media since their promotion of the 2003 Iraq invasion—the utter ignoring of the fact that gridlock is not a bi-product of personal animus or even ideological extremity. It is a
strategy, deliberately and openly engaged in by one party on the theory that the media would respond exactly as it has, by wringing its hands over our poor, poor democracy while allowing the culprits to go on laughing all the way to the bank.
Heather Cox Richardson wonders if it is possible for the GOP to recover it's lost empathy.
In 1862 , in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Justin Smith Morrill stood in Congress to defend his party’s invention: an income tax . The government had the right to demand 99 percent of a man’s property, the Vermont representative thundered. If the nation needs it, “the property of the people . . . belongs to the government .” The Republican Congress passed the income tax — as well as a spate of other taxes — and went on to create a strong national government. By the time the war ended, the GOP had invented national banking , currency and taxation ; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s 4 million slaves.
A half-century later, when corporations dominated the economy and their owners threw their weight into political contests, Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” ... the Republican president called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes.
In the mid-20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower recoiled from using American resources to build weapons alone, warning, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He called for government funding for schools, power plants, roads and hospitals.
It's not just a legacy that the Republicans no longer claim, it's one they wish would stay in the closet. They want to claim these men for their skill in fighting wars. Otherwise, the Republican Party didn't exist before 1980. So say they all.
Leonard Pitts doesn't believe a switch is always abuse.
My mother was a child abuser. I was, too. In fact, growing up, pretty much every parent I knew abused their kids.
Or so many of Adrian Peterson’s critics would have you believe. Peterson, a star of the Minnesota Vikings, was arrested recently for child abuse after hitting his 4-year-old son with a switch. A “switch,” for those who don’t know, is a long twig. I should know, having been on the receiving end of quite a few. When no switch was available, mom was also known to employ a section of the orange plastic track from my Hot Wheels.
...
“Spanking isn’t parenting; it’s child abuse,” goes a headline on CNN’s website.
“Violence is violence,” argues a piece on Bleacher Report..
Sorry, but that’s going to be a hard sell for me — and for the three other people my mom raised successfully, and essentially alone, in the gang- and poverty-ridden slums of Los Angeles. But then, the idealized model of modern mothering now resembles less her example than it does that of a woman I once saw pleading with a child to behave. The child in question, a boy of about 4, was frolicking barefoot through the ice cream cooler in the supermarket.
As a product of the "go cut your own switch, and if breaks we'll need another" era... I honestly do believe that most parents who operated under those thoughts at the time believed they were doing what was best for their children. I have a much harder time thinking that anyone believes that today.
Lawrence Steinberg argues that the longer time before adults become independent, is not a bad thing.
One of the most notable demographic trends of the last two decades has been the delayed entry of young people into adulthood. According to a large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s, it has taken longer for each successive generation to finish school, establish financial independence, marry and have children. Today’s 25-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be students, only half as likely to be married and 50 percent more likely to be receiving financial assistance from their parents.
People tend to react to this trend in one of two ways, either castigating today’s young people for their idleness or acknowledging delayed adulthood as a rational, if regrettable, response to a variety of social changes, like poor job prospects. Either way, postponing the settled, responsible patterns of adulthood is seen as a bad thing.
This is too pessimistic. Prolonged adolescence, in the right circumstances, is actually a good thing, for it fosters novelty-seeking and the acquisition of new skills.