Matt Zeitlin

Michael Crowley provides some steamin’ heap of it

Today’s NYT on Chelsea Clinton’s career path:

Friends say financial independence is important to Ms. Clinton.

Okay, but why? Her parents are multimillionaires and she is more or less American royalty. Chelsea has all the freedom in the world to follow her heart and so she chooses… a hedge fund?

First off, the idea that anyone is discussing Chelsea Clinton’s career choices strikes me as sorta bizarre, but we deal with the media we have, not the media we wished we have.  So on to the substance of the snark – it makes perfect sense of Chelsea Clinton to work at a hedge fund.  Not only is it fairly common for management consultants (she worked at McKinsey for three years after getting a masters from Oxford) to move on to hedge funds, it seems like for someone who’s made a point of staying out of the spotlight and maintaining a fairly “regular” profile, working at a hedge fund seems to be exactly what a “regular” person in her situation would do.

Instead of snarking at her career choice, I think Chelsea should be commended for being determined to make her own way in the world (as much as she can) and have a substantial independent source of income.  She could easily be wasting away becoming a lame socialite, content to be name checked on Gawker every other week, but no, she’s actually doing difficult, intense, real work.  I feel this also reflects well on the Clintons as parents.  And while we’re talking about presidential daughters, at least she didn’t participate in maybe the most embarrassing convention speech in living memory.

So I’m going about my business, doing my standard morning internet browsing, and I see this horrorshow of a message:

Facebook is temporarily unavailable.

What the hell is wrong with you people, you can’t be the social networking site of a generation and then do this bush league crap. Shameful. How the hell am I supposed to waste time now?

UPDATE: The universe appears to have realigned, all is well now.

Read his most recent column, it’s a comparison between the Obama and Edwards anti-poverty platforms.  And it’s totally free of standard right wing tripe – complaints about “big government”, implicit victim blaming, the word “responsibility” doesn’t even show up in the piece.  The opening of the article is even “Suppose you were going to decide your vote for president entirely on the issue of who could best reduce poverty. Who would you vote for?”  Are there any other conservative pundits who even begin to think this way?  Marvin Olasky, maybe, but even that’s a stretch.

So this brings up the question – why isn’t David Brooks a Democrat? We have a big tent, us Democrats, and Brooks is pro-choice, pro gay marriage and not particularly doctrinaire or ideological in any of his “conservatism.”  As far as Iraq, if Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon are Democrats, Brooks can be as well.  He isn’t farther to the right economically than most DLC types and most of sociological columns are basically non-partisan anyway.

Surely, he wants to be a republican or a conservative, but why?  It seems like an accounting of his beliefs could place him within the Democratic fold, so his conservatism seems more like a framing device rather than a coherent description of his beliefs or attitudes.  He could write columns with the same substance as he does now, but if he self identified as a Democrat or a liberal they would only be slightly different.  He’d probably attack Republicans a bit more, and not frame so many columns in right leaning ways, when the data or issue he’s discussing could easily be framed in a neutral manner. Hell, if he self identified as a Democrat or a liberal he could probably write the same columns without too much cognitive dissonance.   Sure, the netroots and left wing of the party would complain, but he could easily just be another Washington media centrist and no one would find his writings too out of the ordinary.

Of course, it’s out of the question to see him actually announce a conversion, he was at the Weekly Standard at its conception and clearly has a lot built up in his conservatism, but he didn’t have to.  He was a liberal until the early 80s, when he, like many liberal intellectuals and policy types, became vastly dissatisfied with the cultural effects of the welfare state.  Some, like Mickey Kaus, basically stayed in the fold, while Brooks just got up and left. After making such a definite break with your ideological and partisan roots you can’t really go back.  But he was never all that far from many late 70s, early 80s neoliberals who never made the partisan switch.

A man who said this: “In my darker moments I sometimes think he (Bush) is a ‘Manchurian candidate’ put into office to discredit everything I believe in.” can surely become a Democrat.

Most underrated song of the 90s – Coffee and TV.  Great video as well.  Enjoy.

Bill Walsh, the legendary 49ers coach from 1978-1989, died today of leukemia. Here’s the LA Times obit that covers all the basics. For a sports fan or any remotely sports conscious person who lived in the Bay Area between 1984 to around 1995, it’s hard to overstate how revered Bill Walsh is. He was a Bay Area figure to the core – starting his coaching career at Fremont Union High before he went on to Cal and Stanford. He then bounced around Cincinatti and LA before landing in San Francisco in 1979 – in which the 49ers would go 2-14. But, he drafted Joe Montana and the best 15 years in Bay Area football history began.

Bill Walsh really was the perfect coach for the 49ers then, not only did he invent a whole new offense and have the best quarterback-wide receiver combo ever (Jerry Rice and Montana) but he also was a bit different from other coaches. He struck everyone as being more refined, not the blustery type that is associated with “great” coaches from the midwest.

The Bay Area has always been a bit insecure about the authenticity of our football – with the Raiders shuttling in and out of LA and in frequent conflict with the city of Oakland – and the 49ers having a reputation for being the “wine and cheese” team. Not to mention that the great NFL cities are supposed to be from the industrial heartland and have hearty, midwestern fans that brave the snow and “frozen tundra” from Green Bay to Pittsburgh and Chicago. There’s never been snow at a 49ers game, and never will be. The 49ers style of play under Walsh was more refined – the West Coast Offense depends on very precise route running and timing between receiver and quarterback. This was a departure from the major offense approach in the NFL – run behind a big, sturdy offensive line and use that run to set up passes on third down.

The 49ers switched that up by using short, quick slants that had the receivers catching the ball only 5 or 7 yards from the line of scrimmage, but catching the ball in stride so they could turn upfield for big gains. Additionally, tight ends and running backs, who were traditionally blocking on pass plays, had to be able to catch the ball. Walsh played thinking-man’s football, with a temperament to match his city and fans.

Though I never actually watched a football game coached by Bill Walsh, I was aware of how the 94 49ers team, coached by former assistant George Seifert with Steve Young as quarterback, was perhaps the most talented football team in history. They ran Bill Walsh’s offense, and to great success, destroying the Chargers in the Super Bowl. Moreover, in my family and among sports fans who did see the 49ers during their amazing 15 year, 5 championship run, Bill Walsh is spoken off in reverential terms.

The 49ers have been in a post Rice and Young doldrum for a while now, just recovering from the NFLs sanctions for their exorbitant free agent spending in the mid to late 90s.  With a surprisingly competitive season last year and an energetic  young coach in Mike Nolan, memories of Walsh’s tenure are floating back to the Bay.

I would say that this entire “progressive v liberal” debate had gotten silly when Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin brought up the best historical smear against progressivism -  its support for massive, state mandated and supported eugenics.  Any student of American History knows that progressive movement, about 100 years ago, was caught up in all sorts of perverse, psuedo Darwinian, historical claptrap.

And while Ross is right that conservative intellectuals like Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama have been sounding the alarm on the whole range of biotechnology advances and that sex selective abortion, testing for Down Syndrome, PGD and a whole host of “eugenic” technologies are available and use is becoming more and more widespread – its not because of “progressives” being at the forefront advocating for their use.  It’s simply that technological advance, parent’s desires and the respect for parental and reproductive privacy have converged upon the use of these neo-eugenic technologies.  Most on the left simply don’t care as much about biotechnology as those on the right do (there are, of course, exceptions). So while I am fairly interested in these issues, and even a supporter of “liberal eugenics“(despite the fact that we totally need a better phrase), most on the left are simply indifferent.

The political group that is forthrightly advocating for greater use of “eugenic” technology and enhancement are the bio-utopian-futurists, who are oftentimes libertarians or just too out there for every day politics.   These are the “progressives” that Levin and Douthat should be worried about, not the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So, if you want to connect people on the political left calling themselves progressives with your best historical examples of their perfidy, the liberal eugenics revolution isn’t the intellectually honest place to start.

speaks the truth.   Some days I dream about a Democratic president giving a fiery speech about how bad the Hyde amendment is – something that will never happen if the entire abortion issue is “de-politicized” It should be noted that “de-politicization” is basically a strategy that protects abortion rights for those who need them least – wealthy, older women – while leaving younger, poor women out to dry.

Among the Washington Press corps, people are bemused by Bush’s seeming boundless optimism. One would think with 2/3 of the country not supporting your war that was based on falsehoods, which was then executed awfully and now stuck in an unsolvable political morass that has totally engrossed your presidency, one would be a bit less chipper. But I’ve finally figured it out, clearly Bush knows…The Secret. For those of you who don’t live with or associate with total morons, The Secret is a movie/book produced by Australian Rhoda Byrne.

The basic premise of The Secret is that people can take advantage of and use “The Law of Attraction.” This “law” states that someone’s thoughts actually put in motion events in the outside world in accordance with those thoughts and feelings, they “attract” the positive events to the positive thoughts. Essentially, your positive thoughts can change the material nature of the universe.

The implications for our current situation in Iraq are enormous. Clearly Bush has learned The Secret. If he is optimistic enough about the outcomes in Iraq…things will just get better. So why everyone else is figuring out the least disastrous way to extricate us from that shit-vortex conflict, Bush has taken things into his own mind, and is thus actively changing the situation on the ground using the The Law of Attraction. Pretty neat trick that.

UPDATE: In the course of further research on the Secret, I have learned that Maureen Dowd essentially wrote this post – as a column – 5 months ago.  Of course, I wasn’t blogging then – and was only a wee lad of 16 (the column was published a week before my birthday) so I’m keeping the post up.  I always knew that ceasing to read Maureen Dowd would turn out badly in the end…

While we’re talking about taxation of the compensation of private equity, hedge funds and venture capital firms, it should be noted that Chuck Schumer is against taxing the 20 percent of money earned (the “carry) as income.

Mr. Schumer has been busy with hedge fund and private equity managers, an important part of his constituency in New York. He has been reassuring them that he will resist an effort led by members of his own party to single out the industry with a plan that would more than double the taxes on the enormous profits reaped by its executives.

It’s just so frustrating how parochial politics can be.  First we have the ethanol scam because of the stupid Iowa caucuses, and now this.  I think Schumer will be able to raise money from hedge fund and private equity employees if their taxes go up.  It’s not like they’re giving money to the Democrats because they think the Dems will be better in protecting their interests – they’re giving money to the Democrats because they think we’re going to win, and that perception isn’t going to change if their “carry” starts getting taxed as normal income and not as capital gains.

I think there’s a way for both sides to back down and not lose face.  Schumer should recognize that some sort of tax increase on his buddies in private equity and hedge funds is inevitable.  But he doesn’t want to alienate one of his major hometown constituencies and bases of support.  So instead of introducing this poison bill legislation that would similarly increase taxes on energy and real estate partnerships, he should simply vote no on Baucus-Grassley, but let it pass.  This way, he can go home to New York and say he did his part and we get our tax adjustment.  Everyone’s happy, right?

The 25 people whose incomes equal that of the CEOs of the S&P 500 have the lion share of their compensation taxed at 15%.  I’m of course referring to the recent hoopla over managers of hedge funds, private equity and venture capital having the 20 percent of the gains off their investors money that they take home as income taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of 15 percent.  Everyone to the left of WSJ editorial page, including anti-populists like the Economist and Robert Rubin, think that these managers ought to pay the top income bracket.  That this uproar is concurrent with fears (and hopes) of economic populism among Democrats is hardly surprising.

The tax adjustment for hedge fund managers may be the perfect, popular low hanging fruit for this populist moment, it might also take away its energy.  Economic populism, especially today’s vintage, is more of a feeling than a coherent set of policies or an economic perspective.  It’s a feeling that there’s too much inequality and that the pie isn’t getting bigger for everyone(which could very well be true).  A whole host of bogeymen are blamed for this phenomenon – globalization, tax cuts for the rich, outsourcing etc – and thus the feeling is to strike out against these phenomena in some sort of manner.

The problem is that this striking out can have little to do with reducing inequality or improving the prospects of those in the working classes.  I feel that if the tax adjustment is passed for these investment managers, it could be quite the populist firestrom.  David Sirota can jump up and down in glee as the kings of the new economy are brought down (a little bit) off their gold encrusted thrones.  Moreover, the hedge fund is the perfect populist punching bag.  They apparently manipulate money and make a bunch of small trades that have no obvious, immediate connection to increased wealth for anyone except the mangers and investors.  Private equity firms can be an even better scapegoat – the narrative can easily be firms buying up companies, moving all their work to Singapore and then taking them public at a sweet profit.  German politicians already call them “locusts.”

Put this feeling of populism and hostility towards inequality can easily be let off.  If we get the equivalent of a 2 minute hate against Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman and raise his taxes with the support of all but the most extreme neoliberal and conservative press and economic thinkers, then the energy could easily be drained out of this emergent populism.  The economist and Robert Rubin can all say that they care about the working classes because they supported raising the taxes on fund managers as they bear down for the battle against restrictive trade legislation.  And I think this could be a very good development – I want Schwarzman’s taxes to go up and not have bogus anti-dumping trade restrictions or other misguided policies of that ilk – and hopefully doing one will help out the other.

Rush Limbaugh on Abu Ghraib:

Limbaugh said that England and the other accused soldiers were engaging in acts that were “sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank. Sort of like that kind of fun.”

Matthew Yglesias on the acts described by “Scott Thomas” Beauchamp

Obviously, it may turn out to be the case that some details of Scott Beauchamp’s story don’t check out, and equally obviously no political issue of consequence turns on whether or not his tale of fraternity-style pranks [mz - emphasis added] is 100 percent accurate.

I’m not saying that Abu Ghraib and the “Shock Troops” stuff have anything in common.  Ghraib was the government directed torture of detainees, Beauchamp’s stories, while somewhat repulsive, seem to be standard fare for wartime.  And I agree with Matt’s overall point that the conservative blogs are being slanderous and stupid in this entire affair.  But dude , do you really have echo the man with talent on loan from God?

Moreover, I’m nearly 100% sure that where Yglesias went to school there are no residential fraternities, and so I find it unlikely that he himself ever participated in fraternity pranks that involved say, running over dogs in military vehicles.

This story has been bouncing around the blogosphere, but it seems that birth control prices on college campuses, due to some obscure adjustment in how medicare gives money to the states, are set to double and triple.  Here’s the WSJ story.

For years, drug companies sold birth-control pills and other contraceptives to university health services at a big discount. This has served as an entree to young consumers for the drug companies, and a profit center for the schools, which sell them to students at a moderate markup. Students pay perhaps $15 a month for contraceptives that otherwise can retail for $50 or more.  But colleges and universities say the drug companies have stopped offering the discounts, and are now charging the schools much more. The change has an unlikely origin: the Deficit Reduction Act signed by President Bush last year. The legislation aimed to pare $39 billion in spending on federal programs, from subsidized student loans to Medicaid. And among the changes was one that, through an arcane set of circumstances, created a disincentive for drug makers to offer school discounts.

 If there ever was a case for the government stepping in to drive down the price of some product, it’s birth control for college students.  Keeping college students non-pregnant seems to be a preeminently sensible public policy goal.  These are people that will otherwise be hitting their most productive year soon after they leave school, and anything that increases the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies will certainly mess with that.  And it seems unlikely that the president will sign anything that will make it easier for women to have pre-marital sex.

While I certainly agree with the sentiment that stories about Condoleeza Rice’s dominatrix boots, Dick Cheney’s parka and Hillary Clinton’s cleavage are frivolous and stupid – I don’t feel quite right condemning the Post for running them. Publius seems to think that the story’s popularity and the more general popularity of such stories aren’t reasons to run it. But Robin Givhan is a popular writer, hell, she won a Pulitzer for writing this tripe, so it seems that, perversely, the Post would be doing it’s readers a disservice by not running the cleavage story. Of course, this implies that the newspaper/media consuming public are a bunch of trivial minded morons when it comes to presidential candidates. This is an implication I’m rather comfortable with.

Of course, the media shouldn’t be feeding into these moronic realms of public opinion and is probably encouraging such trivial evaluations of presidential candidates. But if people are so into this, then it seems nigh inevitable that some media outlet will devote considerable resources to such coverage. So maybe it’s better if Robin Ghivan is given her own corner to be trivial and petty, while the rest of the Post can hypothetically do some real reporting.

I’m hardly the first one to say that Hillary is not the most progressive candidate out there. I also think that the more bad press she gets from progressives, the more likely she is to win both the primary and general elections. The logic is simple, her base of support now isn’t going to leave her. And assuming the rest of the vote is split between Edwards and Obama, one could win Iowa and the other is going to probable be second in a bunch of states, both will stay in long enough for it to be too late for a progressive, anti Hillary to emerge and successfully challenge her. And when the left wing of the party challenges her, I think it makes her look more electable, and more palatable to those who otherwise wouldn’t vote for her. I mean, she has already won over Krauthammer, how hard can the rest of the country be? Moreover, a site (via Yglesias) sponsored by her campaign is linking to this article – clearly she wants to be seen, and is, to the right of Edwards and Obama on foreign policy.

But let’s get back to the point. If Charles Krauthammer writes a column praising your foreign policy, you’re not a progressive. Sure, some Hillary partisans are trying to minimize the past week’s Clinton-Obama flap, and while on the actual substance – should we talk to leaders of bad countries or not – both Clinton and Obama seemed to be functionally much closer to each other than is now being spun out, the perception matters. Either Clinton is feigning right for the primary, or she actually believes that talking to bad foreign leaders within the first year of being in office in naive. And maybe it is, but she wouldn’t be making such a big deal about this minor issue if she didn’t think it was important. One could say she’s pursuing this attack on Obama to highlight his inexperience, but when most Democrats were happy with his response, she could only be pursuing this to highlight and emphasize her hawkishness.

Moreover, Krauthammer’s column highlights another distinction which he thinks make Obama look inexperienced and naive, and Hillary “serious” (remember, that same epithet was used for those who opposed the Iraq war from the start, they weren’t “serious”) – the matter of what to do immediately following a hypothetical terrorist attack on two American cities.

Obama’s answer: “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response — something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.”

…

When the same question came to Clinton, she again pounced: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.” Retaliatory attack did not come up in Obama’s 200-word meander into multilateralism and intelligence gathering.

So immediately following a terrorist attack Hillary just wants to retaliate. Now I imagine that in an Obama administration, some relation would be in order. But why does such retaliation have to be so fast? Even the Bush administration waited nearly a month to strike Afghanistan. Also, in their minds, the war in Iraq was retaliatory.

The point is, reflexive hawkishness is the natural bias leaders have in crisis situations. It’s a bias that must be checked against for prudent policy to be made. And Obama’s emphasis on multilateral intelligence gathering to ascertain who actually would have committed the attack and the focus on emergency relief is exactly the type of mental and positional check against reflexive hawkishness that a post-Bush presidency means. Hillary, on the other hand, has it mentally blocked out that retaliation is immediately necessary and the first thing to think about in a post attack environment. This makes the subsequent retaliation less likely to be accurate and more likely to be a continuation of the last 6 years of “retaliation.” Is “Bush-Cheney Lite” all that inappropriate to describe her foreign policy outlook?

I guess my question is, in light of her wanting to be seen as a hawk, hiring hawkish advisers and doggedly defending the president’s prerogative to “pursue vital security interests” without congressional approval, how can Dana Goldstein argue that she’s progressive and Garance Franke-Ruta say that she’ll be transformational?

This is an issue I’ve had, uhh, very little interaction with – 20 something women getting tubal ligations (ie – getting their tubes tied). Not to surprisingly, many doctors refuse to perform the surgery on women who are under 30. Not too surprisingly, Ann at feministing takes offense:

Is it a medical professional’s job to “protect” women from their own decisions? Is it a pharmacist’s right to make medical and ethical judgments like whether to dispense contraception? If you’re a doctor who’s happy to provide tubal ligations to older women, it seems totally out of sync to deny them to younger women who are equally certain they’ll never want to reproduce.

I am very sympathetic to women’s medical and reproductive autonomy being highly valued, but I’m torn on this issue. Surely Ann would admit that there’s a difference between the type of medicinal paternalism being practiced in the case of Laura Green, the 25 year old graduate student who has been uniformly turned down for tubal ligation, and in the case of procuring an abortion or getting the morning after pill. For starters, getting morning after or an abortion are both time sensitive in a way tubal ligation isn’t. Moreover, tubal ligation also has permanence that abortions and birth control do not.

For feminist activists, it makes sense to immediately blanch at any question of a woman’s reproductive autonomy or her standing to receive certain medical treatment – especially on the Justice Kennedy esque grounds of “we must protect women from their future selves.” There is however a stark difference between abortions and tubal ligation – while the only likely future negative consequence of abortion is some sort of emotional pain (the risks of such are serially overstated by anti-choice groups), tubal ligation makes it impossible for a woman to have her own children if she changes her mind. And yes, while birth control can be inconvenient, it seems prudent for doctors to at least make sure women don’t rush into such a decision. Additionally, there are the standard risks with come any surgery.

And yes, that justification seems awfully paternalistic, but I’d argue that everyone under 30 could use some soft paternalism, and permanent decisions of this nature ought to be extensively thought through, and then thought through some more. Doctors also have extensive personal and collective wisdom on this issue, so when there’s a near unanimous position- even among those doctors who work at organizations that provide abortions – against doing this surgery for women under 30, I feel that there should be stronger arguments against it than claims of agency, especially considering tubal ligation’s elective nature.

I feel it’s well within a doctor’s purview to counsel against elective, dramatically life changing surgery at such a young age. Does this conclusion seemingly rely on common stereotypes of young women being “fickle” and emotionally and intellectually immature? Maybe it does, but just saying that doctors are acting in a possibly stereotypical manner is not a reason to say that the decision of thousands of OB/GYNs is prima facie wrong, just a reason to question it.

Some people wanted photographic evidence of my thinking that JK Rowlings’ depiction of goblins draws upon (almost certainly unconsciously) on some common stereotypes of Jews. Well, via a message board post that linked to me, I’ve tracked down these pictures. Once again, I’m not calling JK Rowling an anti semite, or anything of that nature. Just thought it was interesting how greedy, miserly, cheap, hooked nose, treacherous, studiously neutral, short and banker all got thrown into the mix of a single magical race. All the stereotyped fun is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

For everyone who was looking forward to the once-imminent Zeitlin-Hirshman throwdown on virtue ethics, Rawls and the best philosophical groundings for the American left, it appears that someone who actually has some qualifications has thoroughly rebutted - err “substantively answered” her thesis. Now, Hirshman could still respond to my objections, but I think it’s much more likely she’ll respond to her fellow Open Uer Jacob T. Levy. And you all should Levy’s post as well – it’s not like I made many similar points or anything. But bitterness is one of the least becoming traits, isn’t it?

Perhaps being an “unrepentant blog whore” didn’t turn out so well after all.

Linda Hirshman, whose piece on Rawls and his influence on American liberalism was widely panned by bloggers named Matt, has taken to TNR’s Open University to defend herself against charges that she’s “obviously insane.” She doesn’t actually address the substance of Yglesias’ critique, that her establishing a causal relationship between Rawls’ writing Theory of Justice in 1971 and Democratic presidential defeats in 1980, 84 and 92 is highly dubious. But that’s not very important, anyone can understand how questioning your interlocutor’s mental health can poison the well for reasoned debate. But is it true that:

When Matthew Yglesias–or any of the people who cite to Matt–comes up with a substantive argument against my thesis, I will be available to answer it.

Well Ms. Hirshman, it turns out that your specific thesis isn’t exactly falsifiable – how exactly does one prove that ToJ didn’t cause the Democratic presidential defeats? But aside from that, I have taken up your argument on whether Aristotelian virtue ethics, or virtue ethics in general, are the best philosophical orientation for American liberals. In fact, I have two extensive posts taking issue with your argument. I feel these ought to constitute a “substantive answer” to your thesis. Additionally, I have cited Matthew Yglesias numerous times, and I did once in one of my posts responding to your latest piece, so I guess we should be ready to roll with this debate.

So, Ms. Hirshman, I have attempted to come up with a substantive answer to your thesis, am clearly willing to engage you on the broader issues at hand and I have cited Matthew Yglesias, and thus have met all your criteria to actually engage in some sort of debate. I feel that since I’ve already responded to your two articles advocating your approach to the appropriate philosophical grounding for liberals, you should respond to the points raised in my two posts.

I know this looks like impudent gauntlet throwing, but I think that you have overlooked (for good reason, not very many people read the blog anyway) someone who has disputed your thesis in a thorough and reasonably wide-reaching manner and thus you should be willing, by the standards you’ve laid out, to debate them. Clearly the philosophical groundings of American liberalism are an important issue for intellectuals (and aspiring intellectuals) to debate, and I feel that your support and advocacy for virtue ethics as our groundings are misguided. Everyone’s perspective will be illuminated if you engage those who have responded to your thesis and broader ideas. But that can’t happen until you actually take up your own challenge.

If Marty or Frank are reading this (a highly unlikely occurrence, I know), we could take this (proposed) debate to the hallowed webpages of TNR.com. Professor Hirshman, I’m totally willing to debate our disagreements, are you?

For those of you who don’t know, Orthodox Jew Joseph Lieberman and many other prominent Jews and Israelis have allied themselves with people who’s support for Israel is due to their desire to see all Jews killed, converted or “left behind” in the End Times. Max Blumenthal, the liberal Sascha Baron Cohen himself, has a sweet video of the recent “Christians United for Israel” conference, run by by pastor John Hagee, whose recommendations for a prudent Israeli foreign policy are…how do you say this…batshit crazy:

In Hagee’s telling, Israel has no choice but to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, with or without America’s help. The strike will provoke Russia — which wants Persian Gulf oil — to lead an army of Arab nations against Israel. Then God will wipe out all but one-sixth of the Russian-led army, as the world watches “with shock and awe,” he says, lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God’s wrath.

…

To fill the power vacuum left by God’s decimation of the Russian army, the Antichrist — identified by Hagee as the head of the European Union — will rule “a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion” for three and a half years. (He adds that “one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality.”) The “demonic world leader” will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains — and presumably any nonbelievers — into a “lake of fire burning with brimstone,” thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign.

For Likudnik hawks like Lieberman and the AIPAC gang, there’s a perfectly cynical reason for cavorting with people who just 50 years ago were harsh anti-semites, and have managed to contort their eschatological Jew hate into “support for Israel” – AIPAC and Lieberman know that the end times won’t come, but they do know that those who think the rapture is around the corner are plenty willing to write checks and provide fervent political support for their foreign policy agenda. Moreover, if there appears to be backlash from this hawkishness or even short term negative results, their entire worldview inoculates them from even paying attention to that policy’s shortfalls or failings.

And at a certain level, this practice isn’t morally objectionable, part of politics is making unlikely alliances around certain issues of common interest. What makes this objectionable is that when your strongest political support base has moved from broadly liberal, anti Iraq War American Jews to people who think that God is literally pre-ordaining an aggressive foreign policy, it gives hawkish Israelis free rein to do pursue their unwise earthly polices.

So sure, we should point out that accepting this type of support is awfully ugly and that Jews should be more honorable than to shill for the likes of Hagee, but politics isn’t about honor. What we should do is try to win the argument that the policies that evangelical support for Israel promotes are harmful to both Israel’s and America’s self interest and security. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who supports shitty policies, but that those polices are shitty.

Michael Crowley’s TNR article about the duplicitous and unseemly nature of many ex-congressman lobbying for the US not to recognize the Armenian genocide raises all sorts of rankle about how god damned dishonorable the whole affair is.  There are clearly lots of symbolic politics involved.  The Armenians have historically been pushed aside in the 20th century “Olympics of sufferings” and have finally accumulated enough clout in America to make recognition a serious prospect.

Turkey, on the other hand, is irrationally obsessed with those who “insult Turkishness” or whatever, even leading them to them to pass a law, commonly called Article 301 – “A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.”  They then charged the most famous and respected Turk in the intellectual community, Orhan Pamuk with violating this law.  So clearly, the Turks are sensitive to this entire genocide issue.

The question I’ve never heard satisfactorily answered is this:  What happens after the US government recognizes the genocide?  Besides pissing off the Turks, that is.  Will all the genocide deniers, like Bernard Lewis, immediately come to realize the folly in their ways?  I know the genocide happened, the consensus in non-Turk academic circles is that it happened.  Besides diaspora Armenians and Turks, who cares?  If Turkey is serious about withdrawing all sorts of military support and shutting down the Incirlik base, then perhaps it just isn’t worth it to “recognize” the genocide.

If I were Armenian, I would hold a totally different view, and think that what I wrote above was callous and despicable.  But the brute matter of the fact is that this recognition is purely symbolic for the Armenians, and deadly serious for the Turks.  Surely, we should do our best to get Turkey out of their absurd policy of genocide denial and suppression of those who dare speak about it, but aggravating them in a way they have indicated they will find incredibly offensive probably isn’t the best way.