Matt Zeitlin

So Cal put the beat down on Air Force, coming back from 21-0 to win 42-36 and put some frosting on what was otherwise an awful second half of the season.  But since this is a political blog, let’s focus on the politics.  Cal didn’t just beat our nation’s Air Force Academy, they beat them in the “Armed Forces Bowl” which featured all sorts of militaristic pomp and circumstance, including not only an fly-over, but the starting line ups being read from the jet’s pilot.  Air Force , perhaps the whitest 9-4 team in college football, was lauded by the announcers for being so “disciplined.”  Of course, Cal’s players are way better, and blacker.  And so we hear about how “athletic” and “big” they are.

The cultural undercurrents are interesting to.  The Air Force Academy is, of course, conservative in the sense that all military academies are, but it’s exceptionally so. Based in Colorado Springs, there’s been persistent complaints about evangelical influence in the Academy and of religious discrimination and evangelizing.  Cal, on the other hand, is the original radical campus and has had a testy relationship with the military (except of course when it’s designing and testing their nuclear arsenal). While the football team itself is estranged from the student body, they are still representatives of everything Cal stands for.

So one could say that Cal vs Air Force is a battle between defense spending and social spending, militarism vs humanism or a whole set of imagined academic vs military conflicts.  What the game really was was an amazingly talented yet highly inconsistent team finally getting its act together with a freshmen quarterback and delivering an offensive beating of the sort that’s been absent for the last seven games.

Go Bears.

PS – I wonder who neocon extraordinaire Max Boot was rooting for.  While a big fan of bombing stuff, he is also a Cal alumnus.

Cal just scored to make it 24-21, but I’m not totally confident about how above-ground this game is. While one could say that all college football is in some sense rigged because of the massive amount of corporate and booster money sloshing around the system, this game is exceptional. It’s against Air Force, it’s sponsored by a defense contractor, it’s in a military area and all the ads are for various military branches. I think it’s safe to say that all the forces are pulling against those America-hating hippies from Berkeley.

Go Bears!

UPDATE: Cal’s playing great. 35-27. After being down 21-0. Even though it’s the “Armed Forces Bowl,” the forces of hippiedom are really kicking some ass. After beating the US military in ‘Nam, we’re beating them in football!

Now is a good of time as any to link to Robert Farley article arguing for the abolition of the Air Force.

While I’m as befuddled and disappointed that the Times is giving Kristol the Op-Ed gig, I’m even more confused by people who are self-righteously canceling their subscriptions and then telling the world about it.  I mean, could you play more into Kristol’s hands?   Surely he’s enjoying getting paid by the newspaper whose editors he thinks should be in jail for writing about government secrets, and I’m positive he’s just thrilled by seeing Times-reading liberals totally lose their cool with the thought of him spoiling those hallowed pages.  Just as moving to Canada was a bad idea after Bush won in 2004, cancelling your subscription will only be counter productive.  First of all, you’re depriving yourself of doing something you enjoyed before.  Second, you’re just being dumb because Kristol in only going to be on there once  a week.  So keep on reading the Times, and when your eyes happen to fall over Kristol’s garbage, just blog about it.

One of the dangers of running a populist campaign whereby you criticize your opponents for being tainted by special interests and the influence of the rich and powerful is that any slip up becomes more than just taking donations, but inexcusable hypocrisy.  First it was when Edwards harshly criticized Clinton for refusing to pledge to take no lobbyist/special interest money, but then had former supporters forming a 527 to run attack ads on Obama.  He then spent two days going around Iowa desperate to talk about Pakistan and also criticizing Obama for trying to politicize the Bhutto assassination.  And now we find out that a 97 year old Mellon daughter in law — whose father in law is one of the industrialists to whose era he says we’re returning — is one of the main funders of a 527 backing Edwards.  Now, this isn’t objectionable, per se, rich people can be progressive to, but it sure looks bad for Edwards.  If it were Obama or Clinton who had a 527 supporting them that  got massive donations from some rich heiress, it would be no big deal, because they aren’t sanctimoniously talking about how their opponents are tainted by big money and special interests.

Maybe this is one of the reasons a full-on populist campaign has never captured the White House.  The very act of running for president requires that one doesn’t act in a very populist way, and when routine campaign activities turn from the necessarily sundry to the hypocritical, it’s a big problem.

Giuliani’s City Journal essay laying out his homeland security vision is notable for a bunch of reasons, including his shocking refusal to mention that he put his disaster command center in the World Trade Center so he’d have a “shag shack” in which to…do stuff…with his girlfriend, but more importantly, he has decided that his response to every policy question is to establish a “-stat” program.   For example, here’s what he wants to do on counter terrorism:

 To gather and analyze such useful information, first preventers can be assisted by the widespread implementation of a “Terrorstat” program, an idea proposed by former NYPD police commissioner William Bratton and criminologist George Kelling… By bringing all crime and arrest data together by category and by neighborhood, Compstat revolutionized policing, enabling officers to focus their efforts in problem areas, armed with up-to-the-minute, accurate intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, individual accountability, and relentless follow-up. Terrorstat would do the same for counterterrorism.

And border security:

To bring real order to the border, we should establish a “Borderstat” program, also based on Compstat principles. Borderstat would use technology to monitor illegal border crossings and compare them with captures…Even before the completion of SBI, however, we can use Borderstat to monitor incidents better along the border—shootings, petty crimes, and garbage dumping—that indicate illegal crossings and deploy border law enforcement resources to where they can have the most impact. Borderstat will apply a version of the Broken Windows policing theory to our borders.

Disaster Preparedness:

Federal officials need a new “Readystat” system to measure localities’ preparedness against risks and prioritize federal funding accordingly. Readystat would conduct annual assessments to determine the needs of each locality based on geography, population, and the unique threats that each community faces. These data would then be used as an objective guide to funding and grant decisions. Armed with the data, DHS regional directors would also work with state and local leaders to ensure preparedness. Readystat could have pointed out New Orleans’s pre-Katrina vulnerabilities and given us the chance to correct them.

What’s next?  How about “healthstat”to address people not using government programs like medicaid or S-CHIP? (oh wait, Rudy already proposed that) Abortionstat to identify women who are likely to have unwanted children?

Biden’s quip definitely needs an update.  “Noun-Verb-9/11-Stat”

So apparently when Obama went on Meet the Press today, he said that to discourage free-riding when young, healthy people don’t get health insurance until they’re sick, his plan would “charge a penalty if they try to sign up later.” While of course I’m waiting for Cohn and Klein (sounds like a good law firm…) to weigh in, preliminary reports indicate that this is something of a big deal. I mean, hell, Paul Krugman is happy about it. Now, I’m no health wonk, but if you charge a penalty to people who don’t sign up for health care until they need it, isn’t that basically using the same enforcement mechanism as a mandate…

Steiger follows up her remarks defending Clinton’s experience against the hoards of young, male, Obama supporters (me and minipundit).  She claims:

Patrick Healy‘s article [addressed] a question that’s been bubbling below the surface throughout the primary season: When you are a woman married to a politician, do you count? How much? Does it matter? I don’t expect female candidates for president to be held to “lower standards,” but rather I asked a question. What does count? The answer was overwhelmingly in favor of the existing paradigm.

The fact that my post engendered such a vehement no suggests that women face endless challenges when it comes to the merging of public and private lives. Clinton seems to serve as a cautionary tale to young women; if you decide to support your partner in his endeavor for office, you may forever forgo your own desire to do the same. Male politicians, on the other hand, rarely face challenges framed in the same way.

I really don’t see how Clinton is being treated “unfairly” – the point Minipundit and I were trying to make was that there’s no reason to think that, as a normative issue, the experience of two candidates should be evaluated differently based on gender.  And while Steiger is right that women face “endless challenges” in pursuing political offices, I think she is wrong to say that Clinton is a “cautionary tale” because she is now facing questions over her experience that are rooted in her deciding to support Bill in his political ambitions.  What made the Healy article so important was that she has made “experience” the center point  of her campaign.   When it’s exposed that her claims to be more experienced than Obama or Edwards are largely bogus, that was what mattered.

It’s true that women have to face more challenges in getting the experience to be seriously considered for public office, but it’s also true that there are plenty of female politicians who have the qualifications and experience to be president.  And while it’s true that, within a couple, it’s hard for both partners to get presidential qualifications, this is hardly unfair. Clinton, instead of being hampered by supporting her husband, has been elevated by Bill’s being president.  Compare that to most political spouses, male or female, and it’s hard to say that Clinton has suffered for having a political husband.

Apropos of the discussion Kerry Howley and I had about how nepotism is important for getting women into high office, it’s worth noting that nepotism is now hitting closer to home — namely at how it can get teenagers to be in charge of political parties.  Specifically, Benazir Bhutto’s 19 year-old son Bilawal will become the leader of the PPP.  A great sign for teenage equality?  Is Pakistan more progressive for the young than America?  The Time article discusses Bilawal’s qualification for being head of the party – not only is only 1.5 years older than me, but he also “attended the Rashid School for Boys, serving as Vice President of the school’s student council.”  Now that’s some experience.

A real maverick:

McCain was outspoken in his defense of Musharraf, who has had to contend with criticisms today from others on the campaign trail, such as Bill Richardson’s call for a curtailing of U.S. aid to Pakistan. “I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job, done a lot of the things that we wanted him to do,” McCain said, citing Musharraf’s decision to relinquish his military post, to call elections, and to end martial law. He added, “I would remind some of my fellow Americans that Benazir Bhutto and [former prime minister Nawaz] Sharif presided over failed states, there was corruption, there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf took charge…I would like to give Musharraf some credit for taking the measures that we asked him to do.”

I’m really mystified by people who are unhappy with the Bush administration’s foreign policy and still think McCain is worth supporting.  While he’s right on things like torture and Guantanamo, on the big-picture foreign policy questions, he really is just a bushier version of Bush.  When he talks about giving Musharraf “some credit for taking the measures we asked him to do” is he referring to the diversion of military aid for arming against India, declaring martial law, arresting the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, shuddering the media, allying himself with Baluchi separatists and Islamists or unseating a democratically elected government in a military coup?

Maybe McCain would like America to be a bit more like Pakistan.  Because Rudy and Mitt “Double Gitmo” Romney are running, it’s been forgotten how much of an authoritarian, or at least deeply militaristic, streak John McCain has.  Matt Welch gave us the goods in April’s Reason.

When I put out my call for “someone who knows something about IR theory,”  I was actually thinking of my east coast doppelgänger Minipundit. And responded he did.  While you can go try to find it in the comments, it was about as complete a response as one could want, so I’ll just post it right here:

I honestly and truly despise semantical debates like this. Look, classical liberals like Norman Angell made a set of arguments back in the day, those arguments inspired those of contemporary neoliberals like Robert Keohane, who wrote in response to neorealists like Kenneth Waltz, who built off of classical realists like Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr, who were responding to Angell, and so the circle continues. Now, is Waltz similar to Angell? I’d say no; Angell was almost Panglossian in his optimism about the pacifying effects of globalization, whereas Waltz doesn’t think economic affairs matter much at all. Indeed, Keohane’s critique of Waltz was built around the potential for economic relations to lead to cooperation in an anarchic international system. But regardless, this isn’t what matters. I don’t care if Waltz is a closet liberal; I care if Waltz is right. Same goes for Angell, Keohane, and all the rest of them. While it may be an interesting parlor game to go around accusing people of incorrectly labeling themselves (though the piece Carpenter quotes seems to not understand that liberalism in political theory and IR theory are two completely different things), the labels aren’t the important element here. The theories are.

Kerry Howley links to this Bhutto interview with New York in which Bhutto kinda-sorta makes the argument that I made a few months ago, namely that just because she inherited the leadership of her party and became Prime Minister in a country that has high illiteracy and poor democratic institutions, doesn’t exactly mean that Pakistan is particularly far ahead as women’s rights/representation goes:

Q: Why do you think that the U.S. seems to have a harder time with women at the highest level of power than other countries?

A: In a country like Pakistan or India, when a charismatic leader dies, people are not sure that the traditions he symbolized will continue—there’s a lot of illiteracy and there isn’t the same access to information. So they tend to transfer allegiance from a male leader to a female descendant, in the hope that his policies will be continued. But in Westernized societies, it’s a little different, because people have greater education and greater access to information—they don’t have the same need to be sure of the message of the leader.

Howley argues that “electing a woman to the most visible high status position in a patriarchal society is a kind of social progress distinct from any particular policy she might support.”  I think that Pakistan is just about perfect proof that this argument isn’t true. Pakistan is weird because there’s a large section of the population that is (relatively) progressive gender-wise and highly educated, and thus had no problem supporting Bhutto.  On the other hand, in Pakistan, women can be sentenced to gang rape by a court of law. Pakistan is the best example to show that using the presence of a woman in the highest state office as a metric for women’s equality is misguided.

I know Will Wilkinson is a “libertarian” and I’m a “liberal” and thus I’m supposed to think that he hates poor people and wants to take their malnourished bodies and convert the carbon in their bodies to diamonds to encrust his Cadillac which runs on the blood of factory workers who he ruthlessly beats while they make toys out of pure lead and so on…but I have to agree with just about everything he says in this post.  Here’s the best bit:

As I’ve argued before, I think this conception of cosmopolitan liberalism almost got lost in the Cold War, during which cosmopolitan, internationalist ideals were largely ceded to the communists while liberalism rode out the red tide by tying itself defensively to nationalist feelings in those nations with a more or less liberal identity. The Cold War has been over for almost twenty years now. It is time to get back to the project of securing world peace through extending the scope of mutual cooperation. It is time to get back to the cosmopolitan ideals of liberal humanism…

So a guest-worker program would have a real short-term benefit to the U.S. in terms of increased border security, return migration, and labor market efficiency. The medium-term benefit of a large guest worker program aimed at our neighbors to the south is this: Once the program is established and has demonstrated its efficacy, it will be possible to make a persuasive case for further North American labor-market integration, pushing toward a common North American labor market. In the long term, large regional labor markets, such as the EU and a North American market (and a South African market, an African market, an Asian market, etc.) can begin to integrate, moving us toward the ultimate liberal aim of an open world of mutual cooperation.

It’s unclear if Wilkinson and Kerry Howley are the King and Queen of the new Cosmopolitan Libertarianism, but its refreshing to see self-styled libertarians who don’t think that freedom stops at the Southern border.  It’s ironic that as much of the “mainstream” libertarian movement represented by Cato and Reason have become strong advocates for international labor mobility, the nativist/asshole/Old Right libertarians represented by Paul, Rockwell and their ilk are having their moment in the sun.

PS – While we’re bashing nationalism, let me just say that I hate the Patriots.

I’m at best a dabbler in IR theory, so anyone who knows more than I do should probably just read Charli Carpenter’s post discussing an article claiming that “neo-realism is actually most consistent with classical liberalism” and make their own conclusions.

My impression is that Daniel Deudney, in his book Bounding Power, made the argument that realism and liberalism aren’t as opposed as certain scholars make them seem.  Instead, Deudney talked about “Republican Security Theory” which is supposed to cover up the shortcomings of both realism and liberalism.  His notion, as described by the book’s website is that “The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is necessary has expanded due to technological change.”

Anyway, if you want to know more about Duedney and his work, his bloggingheads with Michael Lind is a good place to start.

PS – Ten points for the first person to explain the connection between Bounding Power and Non-Zero…

*Spoilers Abound*

One of the many reasons that I loved Juno was just how sweet-tempered it was.  The movie predominately had characters being nice to each other, and for Juno particularly, those around her were mostly understanding and kind.  The same goes for its politics.  Like Knocked Up, it has a brief run-in with the possibility of abortion, but for obvious plot reasons, she doesn’t go through with.  Juno is then a decent movie for both the pro choice and pro life causes, the former because Juno is supported by her friends in family in whatever choice she makes, and the latter because the film depicts getting an abortion to be a poor decision for the protanginist to make.

Ross Douthat, “movie obsessisive and pro life scold” makes the latter argument, mostly because Juno rejects abortion not only because she’s expressing her “personal autonomy that’s of a piece with her broader nonconformity,” but also because the fetus “already has fingernails.” While Juno clearly isn’t Ramesh Ponnuru in thinking the fetus should have the rights of a person, she is at least sympathetic to pro-life concerns.  But I feel like Ross is missing some broader points about Juno, that despite its pro-pregnancy, abortion skeptical message, it is, at its core, all about choice.

The reason Juno is able to go through with the pregnancy is the same reason she is able to openly contemplate abortion.  It’s because everyone close to her is incredibly supportive of whatever choices  she makes.  While it’s not true that all pro-lifers would want to slut-shame Juno, it’s certainly true that, on average, those in the pro-life movement would be more likely to have a reaction that included, “why is she having SEX at 16?”  Her parents, while certainly not thrilled that their 16 year old daughter is pregnant, support her in whatever decision she makes.  Their refusing to be judgmental is an attitude that is fostered by pro-choice convictions.

It’s impossible to ignore that Juno immediately plans on getting an abortion and is in the clininc before she gets cold feet.  So why does she back ou?.  While Ross is certainly right that the “fingernails” were a big part of it, when she is explaining her decision to Leah, she says that the clinic “smelled like a dentists office” and while she’s there, she is visibly turned off by the shabbiness of the place and odd, goth receptionist.  The fact that her decision is influenced by the “unremitting grossness of the abortion clinic” is another reason why Juno is a pro-choice movie.  In states/regions that are more generally pro choice, the idea is that abortion clinics won’t turn off their potential patients by being so nasty.  If the ability for a 16 year old girl to be as autonomous as possible in dealing with her pregnancy is valued, than her shying away from abortion because the clinic is off-putting isn’t really a good point for the anti-abortion cause.

While Ross is certainly right that Juno is “decidedly a brief for not getting an abortion,” I think he would be wrong to generalize out from that.  Juno is a brief for why the main character, Juno, made the best decision for herself in keeping the baby. It is a brief for tolerance, acceptance and being sympathetic to girls and women who have unplanned pregnancies.  And while there is much for both pro-lifers and pro-choicers to like, the celebration of tolerance and autonomy is also a celebration of what being “pro-choice” means, in its highest form.

It really is a sign of the times that in a list of the “Top Ten Dumbest Bush administration legal arguments of 2007″ that “the vice president’s office isn’t part of the Executive Branch” is only number eight.

Among many people who actually know something about Pakistan (like Brian Katulis or Juan Cole) , the emerging CW is that the US strategy of trying to install Bhutto as Prime Minister so as to provide Musharraf with a bigger base of support was bound to fail.  More broadly, our strategy of making Musharraf our guy in Pakistan, when much of his governance is driving the instability and turmoil we so fear, is widely agreed upon to not only be a failure, but a predictable one.  This really begs the question, in the Bush administration’s security and diplomatic apparatus, is the only way they know to relate to Muslim countries picking one or two prominent leaders and just supporting them, regardless of how many people they represent or whether people in their country really like them?

So much of the conservative commentary about Iraq or Pakistan is driven by this noxious rhetoric of supporting “our guy” in X country.  First it was Chalabi in Iraq, then Allawi, and when we realized that those who actually individuals who actually weilded influence in Iraq weren’t exactly so into being the US’s “guy” (Sadr), this type of rhetoric on Iraq petered out.

What’s really disturbing in Pakistan is how much the President has adopted Musharraf as “our guy.” Despite the fact that since he eviscerated secular leaning parties and thus had to align with Islamists and Baluchi separtists to hold on to power, despite the fact he squanders our hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, despite the fact that after crushing independent political sources of power, he went on to crush the independent judiciary and media, Bush made a total ass of himself by saying that Musharraf “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”

Like so many foreign policy clusterfucks, it turns out you can blame Dick Cheney.  Ahmed Rashid, reporting in June, explained that not only was Cheney essentially running Pakistan policy but that there were few to none Pakistan experts in the government:

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney‘s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. “They know nothing of Pakistan,” a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.

No one in Foggy Bottom seems willing to question Cheney’s decisions. Boucher, for one, has largely limited his remarks on the crisis to expressions of support for Musharraf. Current and retired U.S. diplomats tell me that throughout the previous year, Boucher refused to let the State Department even consider alternative policies if Musharraf were threatened with being ousted, even though 2007 is an election year in Pakistan.

So, we have the State Department desk on Pakistan staffed with hacks who know nothing of the region, Cheney being in charge of Pakistan policy and stubbornly sticking with Musharraf and refusing to hear any dissent.  While this is just so typical of the administration’s approach to foreign policy, it is still a bit shocking to hear it explained so vividly.

What’s even more interesting about Rashid’s article is that the agencies with actual Pakistan and South Asia expertise, the DOD and the CIA, had already started to sour on Musharraf, “With Cheney in charge and Rice in eclipse, rumblings of alarm can be heard at the Defense Department and the CIA. While neither agency is usually directly concerned with decision-making on Pakistan, both boast officers with far greater expertise than the White House and State Department crew. These officers, many of whom have served in Islamabad or Kabul, understand the double game that Musharraf has played — helping the United States go after al-Qaeda while letting his intelligence services help the Taliban claw their way back in Afghanistan. The Pentagon and the CIA have been privately expressing concern about the lack of an alternative to blind support for Musharraf.”

It’s hard to believe (well, it actuallly isn’t) that even today, this type of denigration of expertise is so widely accepted in the administration and among conservatives in general.  Like when we were told that the military and State Department were too dovish on Iraq, specifically that the State Department were just Arabists, we are now reaping the fruits of having our Pakistan policy consist of picking “our guy.”  While supporting Bhutto made it an “our girl and our guy” policy, it was still more of the same.  Katulis put it best, “US policymakers should resist the temptation to see the situation in simplistic, black-and-white, freedom-versus-terror terms. Past experience in Pakistan and elsewhere demonstrates that putting our hopes on a single leader or a single election rarely makes Americans safer or advances stability and prosperity in other countries.”

Grrr…William Kristol is going to be a NY Times columnist. While I don’t mind there being conservative columnists, William Kristol isn’t just a conservative, he’s a total GOP hack(arguably this is OK to balance out Krugman, but I digress). And Andrew Sullivan is right, if you’re going to have two conservative columnists, having a pair of former Weekly Standard colleagues who are dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives doesn’t really add much to the Op-Ed page. Couldn’t they get someone who isn’t so enthusiastic about invading Muslim countries and war-making in general?

While I know I don’t have a ton of readers, it would be cool if yall could give some suggestions in the comments.

My own are Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Since I think that Obama and Clinton’s surrogates using Bhutto’s assassination as an “in” to discuss their respective foreign policies is OK, I didn’t have the same “WHAT? politics in a political campaign?!” reaction that Dana Goldstein and Adele Stan had, they’re leaving out a huge part of the story in their celebration of Clinton “hitting the right note” and her “mature statesmanship.”

While Clinton herself didn’t “politicize” the Bhutto assassination (not that there would have been anything wrong with that), Evan Bayh said that “When there are unfortunate calamities like this, the Republicans [will say], ‘See. See what we told you? We have to have someone who’s strong to defend America at a time of concern.’ Well, Senator Clinton is strong.”  While Axelrod used the assassination to denigrate Clinton while Bayh used it to promote her, this is a distinction without a difference.  If anyone actually changes their mind about Clinton or Obama based on their surrogates using a news-peg to promote their candidate…well, I’ll just say that’s not how I evaluate candidates.

PS – Everyone should thank TAPPED for the early New Year’s gift of getting Sam Rosenfeld to blog for them again.

John Podhoretz’s post, claiming that Bhutto’s assassination is the turning point from venal campaign riff raff to serious talk about foreign policy, seems to have captured the emerging CW. While I agree that candidates using Bhutto’s assassination as a chance to talk about their foreign policy is a good thing, J-Pod is wrong in saying that up until now, the campaign has just been about silly stuff.

On the Democratic side, foreign policy has been constantly discussed. Obama’s judgment on the Iraq war is why many Democrats are supporting him. They realize how serious a foreign policy disaster Iraq was, and they want a candidate who won’t make the same mistake. When Clinton harped on Obama for promising to meet with foreign leaders or pledging not to use nukes against terrorists or saying he would bomb Pakistan, that was a serious foreign policy debate. When Obama and Edwards go after Clinton for voting yes on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, it’s because they think that giving Bush any war-making authority with Iran would be a huge error for America’s security and foreign policy.

It’s on the Republican side, however, that we’re seeing the “holiday from history.” With the exception of Paul and Huckabee, the Republican candidates are in lockstep with Bush on Iraq and on foreign policy more generally. When Mitt Romney talks about “doubling Gitmo” or when Rudy says that the problem with out foreign policy is that State Department officials don’t advocate for America enough, that’s taking a holiday from history. I could go on and on with the un-serious, inane or just batshit insane ideas Republican candidates have about foreign policy, but I think you get the point.

But we all know that when Podhoretz talks about moving “foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign” he clearly means that the campaign should become a contest to see who will invade the most Muslim countries and crack down on civil liberties the hardest. Which makes us wonder, why is he disappointed with the GOP race so far?

Vanessa at Feministing comments on New Jersey’s proposed law to make HIV testing of pregnant women and their children mandatory with an opt-out provision. She points to a horror story of someone’s baby being taken away and mentions that these opt-out provisions are rarely used, and ends the post with a pertinent question, “It’s a complex issue and obviously prevention should be the priority, but do women’s private medical decisions need to be sacrificed in the process?”

While I’m generally sensitive to this class of concerns, the issue of there being a child involved complicates matters. What distinguishes HIV is that A. there is a high risk of mother-to-child transmission if the mother is HIV+ and B. there are perinatal treatments that significantly reduce the risk of transmission. For example, there can be a c-section delivery, or while in labor, the mother can be treated with nevirapine. In the early 1990s, AZT treatment for the mother was recommended, and since then there has been a 2/3s decrease in mother-to-infant treatment in the US. The CDC estimates that with treatment, the risk of transmission drops from 25% to 2%.

Since there is no one to speak for the baby in the case of mother-to-infant transmission, it seems reasonable to enact policy that will increase testing for HIV and thus increase treatment for infants. While there is a good case to be made that women shouldn’t be compelled to get HIV tests (even though I’m of the opinion that there should be opt-out mandatory testing for a wide range of infectious diseases), the case of pregnancy changes things. It would be almost negligent for someone who had a high risk of being HIV+ to not get tested, and while one hopes that mothers would get tested in the best interest of themselves and their children, that can’t be guaranteed.

One final note — there are very few cases of mother-to-infant transmission in New Jersey, or even the United States for that matter.  UCSF Center for Aids Prevention Studies estimates that there are 300-400 cases of MICT in the United States, while New Jersey state health officials reported seven infants born with HIV in 2005.

Crossposted on campusprogress.org/blog