A LOOK AT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF big-screen TVs.
Archive for 2006
November 12, 2006
STRATEGYPAGE: “One of the immediate things known in the wake of the American November elections is that the media strategy employed by al Qaeda has succeeded.”
UPDATE: Related item here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rajat Datta disagrees:
Regarding the stories in StrategyPage and elsewhere about how the Republican defeat shows that Al Qaeda’s media strategy succeeded: bullshit. Who crafted this meme? Karl Rove? To take attention away from the absolute execrable performance about this Republican Congress?
This Republican Congress and administration betrayed fundamental tenets of the Goldwater/Reagan (dare I say, Gingrich?) “revolution” and have become hypocrites. They lost the election because they became figures of contempt; Al Qaeda’s media strategy had nothing to do with the results of this election.
Yes, in the exit polls “corruption” was issue one. Iraq was issue three. And reader Kjell Hagen sees a bright side:
Al Qaeda has been living on the hope that the Democrats will be “surrender monkeys”, and can be scared to defeat. I think the Democrats will be more steadfast about the war in position than opposition. Sensible Democratic politicians, together with Republicans, will ensure that the fight is not hampered.
When Al Qaeda sees that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will cut and run, they will lose the illusion that all they have to do is to defeat Bush. They will see that whatever party is in power, Al Qaeda faces an unending struggle. This will turn the “media victory” into a bad psychological blow.
In a sense, showing Al Qaeda that both American political parties will fight Al Qaeda relentlessly, is the best thing to do now.
This assumes that the Democrats will not cut and run, of course…
Yes, it does.
JOSH TREVINO LOOKS AT THE APPEARANCE OF the avid losers.
Meanwhile Gateway Pundit offers some historical perspective.
UPDATE: Pelosi backs Murtha for Majority Leader.
Is this the face of the New Democratic Party?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Steny Hoyer launches an “ugly fight.”
INTERESTING: “He also makes a point I had never thought of, which is that the United States and the Coalition have an obligation under Security Council resolutions to maintain security in Iraq until Iraqi security forces can take over.”
PROVIDING SOME OVERSIGHT ON OVERSIGHT, for The New York Times.
ROGER SIMON reviews Borat.
TIGERHAWK liked our last podcast with Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan: “Make time to listen to it regardless of your politics. Bay and Dunnigan offer the most nuanced assessment of the Rumsfeld years you are likely to hear or read, with far more grey than the black or white you get from most pundits, editors and politicians.” Given that, as usual, Austin and Jim do pretty much all the talking, I don’t think it’s bragging on my part to point that out. They should have their own show! In the meantime, you can hear them here.
THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE looks at what’s going on with the Rumsfeld suit. And Michelle Malkin warns people not to get carried away.
ORIN KERR notes that in oral argument, the Supreme Court discussed possible Commerce Clause objections to a federal ban on partial birth abortions.
Marty Lederman has blogged about the issue, too. Dave Kopel and I raised a similar objection to the abortion ban in this article, but I concede that it has less force after the Supreme Court’s decision in Raich.
OKAY, ONE MORE TIME: If you haven’t made a Veterans’ Day donation to Project Valour IT, please consider doing so.
TOM ELIA SPOTS a new election myth in the making.
A WAKE-UP CALL that will probably go unheeded.
MORE BUTTER! The New Zealand vs. Irish Butter question came up last night at a family gathering at my house. So we got out the Irish butter and the New Zealand butter, put some of each on pieces of fresh bread, and did a comparison. Most people preferred the New Zealand butter slightly, though my brother — who likes his butter salty — liked the saltier Irish. (He also said it reminded him of Nigeria, as the very same brand is on sale there.)
Your results may vary. Numerous readers also sent me links to places where I could buy fresh, handmade butter that would be even better. I’m sure that’s true, and I think it’s probably a good reason for me not to buy any. Notwithstanding Nina Planck’s recommendations, I’m pretty sure that more butter isn’t what my diet needs.
That said, I’ve noticed that adding a very small amount of butter — say, a tablespoon — to a nonstick pan when cooking fish makes the fish a lot better. if that keeps you from eating something else that’s more fattening (which would be most things) it’s probably a good investment.
AIR ZIMBABWE IS DODGING THE REPO MAN:
Zimbabwe’s troubled state airline has cancelled flights to London, fearing seizure of its aircraft over unpaid debt.
Air Zimbabwe board chairman Mike Bhima said a European air safety agency won a court order empowering it to impound the airline’s aircraft over an outstanding $2.8m debt.
‘As a security measure, our lawyers have advised us to suspend flights pending discussions,’ he said.
Sadly, this is no real surprise. (Via Rantburg).
RUSS FEINGOLD WON’T RUN: I wonder if Kucinich will, though. Why not? He says he’s the new center, or something like that!
ROBERT IRWIN’S NEW BOOK, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents,
Indeed, Orientalism supported the central theoretical premise of many intellectuals at the time — that the prejudices of dead white European males had utterly distorted and warped their scholarship, art, politics and human sympathies.
Robert Irwin, himself an Oxford-trained Arabist, doesn’t buy this. He asserts in his introduction and argues in his penultimate chapter that Said’s book, thinking and evidence are shoddy, unreliable and mean-spirited. The Columbia literary critic’s attack on Orientalism, Irwin argues, maligns the lifework of admirable and deeply learned people, mocks a long, honorable tradition of scholarship, and plays fast and loose with the facts. Dangerous Knowledge is in part, then, Robert Irwin’s riposte to Edward Said. . . .
It ends, though, with Muslim critiques of Western Orientalism and a chapter about Edward Said titled “An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic.” This is an allusion to John Carter and Graham Pollard’s quietly devastating 1934 Enquiry into Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets , which exposed Thomas J. Wise, England’s foremost book collector, as a forger, cheat and liar. Irwin forthrightly maintains that “Said libelled generations of scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good faith.”
Sounds very interesting.
The Baker commission seems to be doing a lot more than just re-thinking Iraq. It appears to be copiously leaking a Vietnam-type cut-and-run plan that will leave the Gulf far more dangerous than it is now. The Vietnam model looks like a “face-saving†retreat by the United States—just like that one that left Vietnam a Stalinist prison state with tens of thousands of boat people fleeing and dying, and next door in Cambodia, two or three million dead at the hands of Pol Pot.
Baker’s press leaks seem designed to test public reaction to the cut-and-run plan.
Conservatives have lost Congress for the next two years, but acquiescing in a disastrous retreat from Iraq would be the worst of all possible worlds.
Yes, if that’s the plan, it’s the sort of thing that could make the Republicans a minority party for the next 40 years, and deservedly so.
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:
If the White House concedes to this I will be forced to grapple with the fact that John Kerry may, in fact, not have been any worse than GWB. Hell the president might as well ask Jack Murtha to be Sec. Def. Oh, okay maybe it won’t be quite that bad, but it will be damned close. And it will be a good reason never to vote for a Republican.
Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. But Bill Quick is saying “I told you so.” And my speculation that Iran has some method — nuclear or otherwise — that has deterred us from taking the kind of action that both Bill Quick and I expected in 2004 is seeming better-founded.
ANOTHER UPDATE: John Hinderaker is very unhappy with this talk. He also thinks that any expectation of a deal with the Iranians is “delusional.”
I’ll just note that the last time folks in the White House tried to cut a deal with the Iranians, Don Regan characterized it this way: “We got snookered by a bunch of rug merchants.”
MORE: Reader C.J. Milner emails:
Agreed, but the Democrats shouldn’t get a pass on this. After all, this “cut and run” idea has been their plan all along, and already today they are talking about forcing withdrawals to begin in as little as four months. If the Republicans should spend a couple of generations in the minority for going along with this, they should be joined in political purgatory by the Democrats. The great political struggles of our age will have to be fought out between the Libertarians and the Greens.
You go to war with the political class you have, alas.
MORE STILL: Michael Ledeen thinks talk of a deal with the Iranians is implausible, as the Iranians don’t want to deal.
The media beast is a creature of habit. There’s little enterprise of thought. It keeps true to narratives and story lines: Gore is a earthtone-wearing weirdo. Bush is dumb. Try arguing against either of those points and you’ll be laughed out of the talk show studio. Even worse, the host or anchor will never ask you back.
No, the big-picture problem with the media isn’t bias — although it indeed is biased in favor of liberals. It’s laziness. Balance the newsroom politics, yes. But bring in new ideas. And try not reading the New York Times for a day.
Seems like a lot of people haven’t gotten the message: “David Gregory and Maureen Dowd constitute Russert’s entire panel.”
PROPHETIC: A profile of Jeff Flake.
OVER AT TRUTH LAID BEAR, questions for GOP leadership candidates.
Plus, Hugh Hewitt comments: “I’ll be broadcasting from D.C. this coming Wednesday and Thursday. All of the candidates are welcome to come to the studio and run through the topics.”
LONGEVITY UPDATE: Will slowing aging save health care costs and produce a “longevity dividend?”
Yes, and fightaging.org has a roundup, along with the usual (and to my mind correct) reasons not to adopt an overly conservative approach. But though I agree, I think we’re still at the point where any progress is important, and likely to be transformative.
WELL, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: The gun prohibitionists at the Brady Campaign are warming up for a Democratic Congress.
The question is, will the Democrats be dumb enough to listen to them given that the last time they did it cost them control of Congress for twelve years?
The value in tossing the bums lies in reminding them that they can be tossed. If you think that the “culture of corruption” will go away if only we’d elect the Right People, then you lost the plot long ago. Until you change the underlying incentives, the story will stay the same.If the Democrats move to limit their own power and to change the underlying incentives, they’ll change the culture. If not, then they were never serious about getting rid of the corruption…they just wanted a piece of it.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Oops cut-and-paste error picked up the breakout quote and double-pasted. Fixed now.
NED LAMONT’S SUPPORTERS ARE NOT DISAPPOINTED:
“I think in any type of significant social movement . . . there are a series of triggering steps, like Rosa Parks sitting on the bus. There had already been a number of sit-ins that happened,” Swan said. “I think when people reflect on the war in Iraq and mistakes that have been made and how we dealt with them, this campaign and particularly the primary will be a very significant moment. Ned having the courage to step up and run – it’s not something that happens regularly in U.S. politics.”
It was a “moral victory,” no doubt about it.
November 11, 2006
SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE EMAILED to thank me for linking Bill Stuntz’s piece on what we should be doing in Iraq that I’m going to link it again, since it’s scrolled down a lot and could easily be missed in the post-election buzz.
I also recommend this post by Armed Liberal. (“Elections are sexy and easy. Infrastructure, institutions and laws are boring and hard.”) And read this by Westhawk, too, on the wider war-on-terror situation.
UPDATE: Greg Djerejian and Andrew Sullivan (who are sounding more alike in general these days) are both charging me with a change in positions on troop numbers. It seems to me that neither Greg nor Andrew should be casting the first stones regarding changed positions, but here’s the post that they claim shows “scorn” for the more-troops argument. Here’s what I wrote:
Greg thinks we need enough American troops to physically protect all the polling places in a country the size of California. That strikes me as a very unwise allocation of military assets. McCain and Hagel think we need a bigger army, and they may be right. But as I noted, the way you get a bigger army is to create one, and if McCain and Hagel think the need is that screaming why haven’t they introduced legislation to do that, instead of simply calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation? I don’t think that getting rid of Rumsfeld is likely to yield any additional troops.
So where are they going to come from? The “more boots on the ground” folks don’t seem to be doing much talking about that. (This post from The Belmont Club notes that it’s not as easy as it sounds.) We could enlarge the Army (probably a good idea, but it won’t produce any new combat formations for a year or more, probably more if the new formations are to be any good), or we could send troops from somewhere else. Where? Korea? Europe?
I remain unconvinced that we need more troops in Iraq. Afghanistan saw successful elections with far fewer U.S. troops. I’m not convinced that we don’t, but we’d need a million troops to blanket all the polling places,and we’re not going to have that. So what’s the mission? Just as one seldom wins a war by slapping armor on everything (and no army in history has armored all its soldiers and transport vehicles), one seldom wins a war by dispersing forces to lots of locations in a “prevent” defense. That seems to be what the “more troops” crowd has in mind, but it strikes me as a poor idea.
It’s quite hard for me to judge Rumsfeld’s performance, but it’s not so hard for me to see that a lot of the attacks on Rumsfeld seem to be opportunistic and dishonest (something that Greg freely admits). That has no doubt colored my evaluation of the case for his resignation, but I’d welcome some explanation of why, say, a Secretary McCain would do a better job. Tom Maguire sides with Greg, tentatively, but there are some interesting arguments in both posts’ comment sections.
This is “scorn?” (And see the update at the bottom!) It seems rather temperate to me, particularly compared to the kinds of things that Andrew and Greg are writing today — or, for that matter, the kinds of things they were writing in the other direction, a few years ago. I don’t really think that my link to Stuntz’s post is exactly “breathless,” either.
This pattern of misrepresenting posts is the sort of thing that I’ve come to expect from certain lefty bloggers, but it’s too bad to see it from Andrew and Greg.
MORE: Greg Djerejian emails to note that it’s Andrew Sullivan who says I was “scornful,” while it was Greg who said that I was “carrying water” for Rumsfeld.