Showing posts from October, 2012
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Blackout

In Union Square the chess players sit alone under the statue of George Washington waiting for a game. A Latino family, father, mother and son, sit on the sidewalk holding cardboard signs and singing. “I’ll be your friend, when you’re not strong.”  The big chain stores are closed but the bodegas are open and Muslim and Chinese storekeepers charge up to ten dollars for a gallon of water. New York City in blackout, in short, is much like New York City as usual. The electronics stores are closed and the wine stores are open. A chalk sign outside one darkened store reads, “Screw electricity.”  NYU students crowd the bus stops and French tourists elbow their way through the crowd on the way to a cheaply expensive hotel. A massive ancient tree lies torn out of the earth in the old 16 th Street park and residents crowd around sticking their iPhones through the 19 th Century ironwork of the shuttered park to get a photo. A photo of devastation. Recording disaster has become instinct
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Benghazi's Tough Questions

The story of how the Obama Administration failed to secure a US consulate and then failed to send in support while it was under attack may turn out to be the biggest scandal of this administration. But that will only happen if Benghazigate is the subject of a thorough and rigorous investigation. And that means basing stories on facts or on reliable reports, rather than on speculation and internet rumors that no one would take seriously in any other context. I have received dozens of emails in the last few days claiming that General Ham was fired for trying to go ahead with a rescue operation. The story appeared in the Washington Times . The source for the Times' story was an anonymous comment on Tiger Droppings, a forum for LSU football fans, from someone in Louisiana working in "Self Employed/Restaurants/Catering" who claimed that the story came "from someone inside the military". Now for all I know this story is true, but an anonymous comment on a foot
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The Liberal Man's Burden

One-hundred and thirteen years ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about the American enterprise in the Philippines. The title of that poem has since become a byword for racist colonialism and yet its text is a sardonic recitation of the dim virtues of the "Savage wars of peace". "Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need;" Kipling wrote. "To seek another's profit, And work another's gain. Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease." This moral imperialism has never gone away, though it is no longer thought of in racial terms. For over a hundred years, the United States has gone on trying to feed and cure the world, sacrificing for others and seeing nothing in return. The burden has been internalized, its concept not racial, but moral. The lack of empire has not lessened it. That absence of a physical empire, of conquered provinces and colonies administered with the whip has only strengthened the might of the
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The Innocence of Obama

Ten years ago most left-thinking liberals were constantly worried about the erosion of civil liberties under the War on Terror though they could rarely name an instance where an American citizen had actually experienced such an erosion. This was after all before the days when naked scanners and drone strikes had entered the vocabulary and the best they could do was to haul out Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, ACLU's choirboy of the month, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who was being held in jail for no reason at all except aiding terrorists and plotting to build a dirty bomb. Ten years later the lefty civil liberties types were proven right. The War on Terror did erode our civil liberties and America's first political prisoner in generations has spent a month in jail for making an inconvenient movie at an inconvenient time. When Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy SEALS who died fighting in Benghazi, met with Hillary Clinton, the Secretar
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Friday Afternoon Roundup - Bumps in the Road

BUMPS IN THE ROAD Charles Woods, the father of murdered SEAL Tyrone Woods, has given several interviews and described meeting Obama and Hillary Clinton. [Obama] when he came over to our little area, I could tell, he kind of just mumbled.  You know, “I’m sorry.” His face was looking at me, but his eyes were looking over my shoulder like he could not look me in the eye.  And it was not a sincere, “I’m really sorry” you know “that your son died.” It was a totally insincere, more of a whining type, “I’m sorry.” And it was like shaking hands with a dead fish.  It just didn’t feel right.  And Hillary had something even better to offer him. "She did not appear to be one bit sincere at all.  She mentioned that thing about, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video." This acknowledges that the prosecution of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, aka Mark Basseley Youssef has nothing to do with parole violations. It's a political prosecution with t
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The Jewish and Post-Jewish Vote

Last Shabbat I sat at a table in my local synagogue while a group of men argued over the election. They weren't arguing over who they should vote for, they were arguing over just how bad Obama was, their voices rising and falling as they named one detail after another. They weren't necessarily Republicans, but they were politically conservative, as my community and as almost all of the traditional Jewish communities in America are. This is how I grew up, and while for many, the Liberal Jew is the norm, for me he remains a strange creature, a shipwrecked sailor marooned on a liberal desert island for a century who no longer knows who he is anymore. There is a great deal of talk about the Jewish vote in this and every election. Probably more talk than it merits. But let us clarify what we are talking about when we talk about the Jewish vote. As with the Catholic vote and the vote of every religious group, there are the votes of those who believe in the religion and the vote
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A Star Falls Over Chicago

The Obama Campaign, that strange 4 year marriage of Generation X hipsters, inner city bosses, suburban college educated boomers longing for racial healing, Big Green businessmen and shady Saudis, appears to be finally sinking beneath the waves. It isn't going out in a blaze of glory, but with mumbles of trending topics. Obama was always a petty man and his campaign has descended into pointless pettiness, into Team Big Bird, binders full of women and bayonets and horses. Like so much hipster culture, it exists so that the participants can entertain each other with something that no one else thinks is funny or clever. And that elitism is precisely the point. It's the last resort of losers who hide from their lack of taste behind walls of exclusivity. Abandoning mass appeal, Obama is getting back to his roots of entertaining upper middle class college kids with his 'hipness'; both actual  college kids and the overgrown middle aged variety that make up the profess
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Obama's Greatest Foreign Policy Error

Obama's greatest Foreign Policy error was the same one that had been made by Bush and by numerous past administrations. The error was that the problem was not Islam, but Islamic violence. It was Obama however who took that error to its logical conclusion by pursuing a foreign policy meant to part Islamists from their violent tendencies by allowing them to win without the need for terrorism. Violence, the thinking in diplomatic circles went, was inherently alarming and destabilizing. When Islamists don't take over, they move to the West, preach radical theology, gather up followers and begin blowing things up. But let them take over their own home countries and they'll no longer have any reason to draw up maps of London and New York, not when they're beheading adulterers and burning churches back home. The Arab Spring was to the Middle East what the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis and the betrayal of the rest of Eastern Europe to the Communists was to 20th
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