“Sleeping Under A Rock”: Foreign Policy And The Definition Of ‘Manhood’
On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sounded a deeply pessimistic note about Russian incursions into Ukraine. “I think we’re going to lose eastern Ukraine if we continue as we are, and I think it’s going to be a geopolitical disaster if that occurs,” Corker told David Gregory.
Naturally, the Republican senator blamed the Obama administration, complaining that U.S. foreign policy “is always a day late and a dollar short,” adding that Russia’s actions are emblematic of the “era of permissiveness the U.S. has created around the world.”
It was the New York Times’ David Brooks, however, that took this same line of criticism to its “crude” limit.
“Basically since Yalta we’ve had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off.
“And let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a – I’ll say it crudely – but a manhood problem in the Middle East. Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.”
As Ben Armbruster noted, Chuck Todd echoed the sentiment, adding, “By the way, internally, they fear this. You know, it’s not just Bob Corker saying it, okay, questioning whether the president is being alpha male. That’s essentially what he’s saying: He’s not alpha dog enough. His rhetoric isn’t tough enough.”
It’s tough to know what to make of this, but it’s clearly important so let’s unpack it a bit.
Right off the bat, let’s note that it’s arguably well past time for the political world to stop equating “manhood” with “cruise missiles.” Being an “alpha male” or an “alpha dog” may somehow seem impressive, in a junior-high-school-yard sort of way, but when analyzing geopolitical crises, we need a different kind of framework.
There’s apparently a knee-jerk assumption among too many that “real men” use bombs, not diplomacy. If memory serves, President Obama’s predecessor, whom no one accused of having a perceived “manhood problem,” often thought the same way. The foreign policy consequences, however, were nevertheless disastrous.
What’s more, I’m struck by Brooks’ assumption that the White House isn’t “tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad.” Indeed, that already happened last year, when Obama threatened military force and Assad agreed to give up his chemical-weapons stockpiles.
Indeed, perhaps the strangest thing about asserting as fact that “there is an assumption” that Obama is “not tough enough” is all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – even if we define “tough” in a way Brooks and others find satisfactory. It was this president who escalated the use of force against al Qaeda; it was this president that launched the mission that killed bin Laden; it was this president who increased the use of predator drones to strike at terrorist suspects (including killing Americans affiliated with al Qaeda living abroad); it was this president who helped assemble an international coalition to strike at the Gadhafi regime in Libya; and on and on.
If you knew literally nothing about the last five years, you might hear this chatter about “manhood” and “alpha males” and assume that President Obama was a pacifist, reluctant to use military force under any circumstances. But given what we know about what actually happened over the last five years, the scuttlebutt is just bizarre.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 21, 2014
“Protecting The Profits Of Big Carbon Barons”: Why Conservatives Are Trying To Strangle Solar Energy
As my colleague John Aziz wrote a few days ago, an alliance of right-wing operatives and Big Carbon barons are mounting a huge effort to try and throttle the solar industry in the crib. As the Los Angeles Times explains:
The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina, and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states. [Los Angeles Times]
The Kochs and their allies argue that they’re just trying to get rid of unfair subsidies, but this is nonsense. Almost universally, utilities aren’t anywhere close to a free market. The most common model is the investor-owned regulated monopoly, where a particular firm is guaranteed a captive electricity market, and in return has to justify their prices to a government board so (in theory at least) they don’t gouge the public. (If you want all the details, David Roberts wrote a highly useful series of posts about utilities last year.)
According to American free-market dogma, such a frankly socialist production scheme should immediately collapse. But despite our generally low quality of governance, this set-up has actually worked (relatively) well for decades. The reason is that when we set these utility systems up, electricity was a picture-perfect example of a natural monopoly. Steam turbines exhibit large efficiencies of scale, so it makes sense to highly concentrate generation capacity, and alternating current allows electricity to be transmitted vast distances.
Solar throws a wrench into this long-standing model because it’s well-suited to individual generation. It would be very expensive and inefficient to build a coal-fired steam turbine in your backyard, but that works just fine for a solar panel. Therefore, something like 40 states have a policy called “net metering,” under which if you have a solar installation, any electricity you generate is canceled from your electric bill, and any excess you generate is sold back to the utility at retail rates. The problem with that, from a utility provider’s perspective, is that those retail rates don’t just cover the cost of generation — they also cover the construction and maintenance of the grid: power lines, transformers, and so forth. (As well as the investors’ profits.)
In essence, we’re trying to incorporate artisanal, small-batch electricity into a massive socialist production scheme based around colossal mega-generators. Unsurprisingly, it’s straining the system.
So enter the Brothers Koch (on Team Mega-Socialism, remember). And to be fair, they really do have a point: The grid is important to maintain, and it’s not exactly equitable for a quickly shrinking group of electricity customers without solar to bear most of the costs of maintaining it. (Though it’s important to also note that utilities tend to exaggerate the case. After all, any electricity generated at the point of use, for example, diminishes the load on the grid, thereby reducing costs.)
The problem, of course, is that the Kochs are not disinterested observers looking out for the little electricity consumer. They’re obscenely wealthy businessmen with enormous income streams at stake. Solar is a direct threat to their business model of selling climate-wrecking carbon to utilities, and as such, they’re obviously trying to use the political system to crush potential competition and protect their monopoly profits. That’s why this has become a heated fight only recently, as the overall price of solar electricity has fallen to be competitive with carbon sources in many places. Solar was a punch line until it was an economically viable alternative. And then it became a threat that must be destroyed.
So I don’t think Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum are quite right to say that conservatives’ fight against solar is simply an issue of tribalism. Clearly, this is also about the profits of very rich people.
In any case, what ought to be done? If solar were just one more generation model among many, we might say it’s not worth the effort. But with the catastrophic threat of climate change, it’s critically important to decarbonize electricity generation as quickly as possible, and solar must be part of that effort. We’ve got to find some way of maintaining the fixed infrastructure of electricity distribution without impeding solar’s deployment.
It’s a tricky problem. But the outlines of a solution ought to be fairly obvious: We should take a hard look at just how much centralized generation capacity is needed, and retire the carbon-intensive stuff as quickly as possible. (A carbon tax would help enormously here.) This means overhauling the regulated monopoly utility model, and will possibly require a new pot of money to maintain the grid until solar’s costs, which continue to plummet, can bear a few more extra fees.
But the details of implementation aren’t as important as the political and business implications. The Kochs, and all the other Big Carbon barons like them, would eventually be driven out of business by solar. In today’s GOP, billionaires who make a lot of money (even from socialist monopolies) are Galtian heroes. That’s why so many big money conservatives hate solar.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 22, 2014
“It’s Not About Content Of Character”: Hey, Fox Pundits! How Blatant Must The Anti-Obama Racism Be?
I have a question for George Will.
If he can’t answer it, maybe Brit Hume can. Both men were recently part of a panel on Fox News Sunday to which moderator Chris Wallace posed this question: Has race played a role in the often-harsh treatment of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder? Wallace was reacting to a clip of Holder strongly hinting that a testy encounter with House Republicans was part of a pattern of race-based abuse of himself and the president.
Some of the panelists framed their answers in political dimensions, i.e., what does this mean for the midterms? But Hume and Will responded directly.
Has race played a part? Heck no.
Said Hume: “This strikes me as kind of crybaby stuff from Holder. My sense about this is that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama have benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American and the first to hold the jobs that they hold.”
“Look,” added Will, “liberalism has a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome these days. It’s just constantly saying the word ‘racism’ and ‘racist.’ It’s an old saying in the law: If you have the law on your side, argue the law, if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have neither, pound the table. This is pounding the table.”
And here, let us remove Holder from the equation because, frankly, the question I’m here to ask is more pertinent to his boss than him. I just wish Messrs. Will and Hume would explain one thing:
You say race has played no role in the treatment of President Obama? Fine. What would it look like if it did?
I mean, we’re talking about a president who was called “uppity” by one GOP lawmaker, “boy” by another and “subhuman” by a GOP activist; who was depicted as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor by opponents of his health care reform bill; as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop by an aide to a GOP lawmaker, and as an ape by various opponents; who has been dogged by a “Tea Party” movement whose earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included the Council of Conservative Citizens, infamous for declaring the children of interracial unions “a slimy brown glop”; who was called a liar by an obscure GOP lawmaker during a speech before a joint session of Congress; who has had to contend with a years-long campaign of people pretending there is some mystery about where he was born.
There’s much more, but you get the drift. So I wish those men would explain how, exactly, the treatment of the president would differ if race were indeed part of the mix. What misbehavior would make them say: “OK, this is definitely about color of skin, not content of character”? Because from where I sit, much of the behavior toward Obama would need white hoods to be more blatantly racial than it already is.
Hume, by the way, says some critics have called his comments themselves “racist.” They’ve also scored the fact that this discussion was undertaken by an all-white panel. While the optics were odd, there was nothing in what he or Will said that would seem to merit that label. Those who slap him with it are likely motivated by the same knee-jerk reflex by which my critics — depend on it — will claim that I consider any disagreement with the president to be — sigh — “racist.”
That’s silly. But then, discussion of this seminal American fault line often reveals in some of us an unfortunate fondness for clownish superficiality. And yet that silliness does not detract from the criticality of the fault line itself. Nor can I share Will’s conviction that manly taciturnity is the best way to seal that fissure.
So what I ask is not rhetorical, not abstract, not a joke. It is a serious question.
And I’d appreciate the same sort of answer.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 21, 2014
“Making The GOP Pay For Medicaid Obstruction”: National Democrats, Especially, Need To Stop Equivocating About The Benefits Of The Law
Jonathan Martin wrote a primer this weekend on why many nervous Democrats won’t take President Obama’s advice – or mine — and run on the Affordable Care Act in the 2014 midterms. To me, it seems like a chicken and egg problem: Vulnerable Democrats won’t run on the ACA because key groups of voters don’t like it. But why should voters like it if even Democrats won’t defend it?
But there is one ACA issue where Republicans seem to be on the defensive, and that’s on the question of Medicaid expansion. Even Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn and gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter, who have been wishy-washy on the law, support Medicaid expansion – and that’s partly because polls show 59 percent of Georgians support it too. Gov. Nathan Deal has tried to pass the decision off to the state Legislature, which is widely seen as an effort to pass the buck. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback just managed to do the same thing, on Friday signing a bill that gave the Republican-dominated Legislature the power to decide on Medicaid expansion – but they won’t meet again until 2015.
In Florida, newly minted Democrat Charlie Crist is hitting Gov. Rick Scott hard for his refusal to accept Medicaid funding. Much like in Georgia, 58 percent of Florida voters want to see their state take the federal funds. Crist leads Scott in the latest polling.
And Republican Senate candidates Scott Brown of New Hampshire (it seems wrong not to write Massachusetts, Scott), Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Terri Lynn Land of Michigan have all refused to take a stand on Medicaid expansion, which might make them the biggest cowards of all.
In Louisiana, Democrats are trying to bypass Gov. Bobby Jindal and let state voters decide whether to accept $16 billion in expanded federal Medicaid funding, to cover 242,000 newly eligible Louisianans. The federal funding would create 15,600 new healthcare jobs, according to Families USA. Vulnerable Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu has been hitting Jindal hard on the issue, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune just called on the state Legislature to back the referendum notion, blaming Jindal’s presidential ambitions for his decision to turn down the funds. Even conservatives, the paper suggested (perhaps with a little sarcasm), ought to back an effort to give voters a say on the matter. What are they afraid of? Well, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, for one thing, which has promised to campaign against Republicans who support Medicaid expansion.
“Remedial Education On Birth Control”: It Never Fails, Arrogance And Ignorance Often Go Together
You’d really think that an institution with as rich an intellectual history and educational capacity as the Roman Catholic Church could find ways to keep its national spokespeople from saying things as dumb as this:
Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available — my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them — is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?
That would be Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, on Face the Nation yesterday. It was Dolan who, as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2010 until 2013, guided the bishops into a firm alliance with conservative evangelicals (and implicitly, with the Republican Party) in a crusade for “religious liberty” defined as the right of employers to refuse their employees insurance coverage for contraceptives–typically those they regard, in defiance of standard medical profession and scientific definitions, as “abortifacients.”
Dolan’s dismissive comments about contraceptives and 7-11’s are reminiscent of those of conservative Catholic layperson Justice Antonin Scalia, who said this during oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case:
You’re talking about, what, three or four birth controls, not all of them, just those that are abortifacient. That’s not terribly expensive stuff, is it?
Well, yes, IUDs, the real crux of the “abortifacient” argument being made by Hobby Lobby’s lawyers, are quite expensive, and you cannot simply acquire them by strolling into a convenience store.
Arrogance and ignorance often go together, but you’d figure men as accomplished as Dolan and Scalia would have the wherewithal to avoid sounding like yahoos. Men–especially celibate men like Dolan–should go to the trouble of becoming at least marginally expert on reproductive science and economics before devoting so much of their time and attention to denying women reproductive rights.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 21, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 