Lies?

Undiplomatic German

I'm not saying he's right but Marc Pitzke  makes an interesting case in one of Germany's leading magazines:

Africa is a country. In Libya, the Taliban reigns. Muslims are terrorists; most immigrants are criminal; all Occupy protesters are dirty. And women who feel sexually harassed -- well, they shouldn't make such a big deal about it
.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the US Republicans. Or rather, to the twisted world of what they call their presidential campaigns. For months now, they've been traipsing around the country with their traveling circus, from one debate to the next, one scandal to another, putting themselves forward for what's still the most powerful job in the world.


As it turns out, there are no limits to how far they will stoop.

It's true that on the road to the White House all sorts of things can happen, and usually do. No campaign can avoid its share of slip-ups, blunders and embarrassments. Yet this time around, it's just not that funny anymore. In fact, it's utterly horrifying.

It's horrifying because these eight so-called, would-be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party, the party of Lincoln lore. Worse: They're ruining the reputation of the United States.

UPDATE:
If I recall correctly John Danforth had a quite a bit to do with foisting Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court. Still, this echos our friends in Berlin:

DANFORTH: What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured don’t treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that. [...]
It doesn’t have anything to do with the republican party that I was a part of. This is just totally different. And all of these people who are saying this, y’know, and claiming that, y’know, they’re for all this stuff, they also sort of ostentatiously say, “Oh, we’re very religious people. We really, we’re just very pious, Christian people.” They were for torture, and electrocution of the people on along the border and all of that. That doesn’t have anything to do with, is contrary to the Christianity that I understand.

Obama disappoints, as it were but better him then the anyone running as a Republican. And I include Jon Huntsman in that.

Closing Time

Some years ago, Aristotle argued that there is a 

reason the rich and the poor are regarded in an especial sense as parts of a state. Again, because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government- democracy and oligarchy.

It's important to note, that Aristotle insisted the the rich and their riches were beneficial only to the extent that "the wealthy . . .  minister to the state with their property." By which he means that wealth is a means to the end of creating a thriving city-state; should, he suggests, the wealthy use their wealth to further enrich themselves they are, in the Greek sense, idiots and, consequently, a destructive force. 

With the collapse, or apparent collapse, of this democracy's commitment to the poor, it would seem, in Aristotelian terms that we are entering a period of oligarchy.  I offer you, consequently, mad man Jack London's Ernest Everhard and various versions of Woody Guthrie's genius:



or



and



comedic relief



 

A Crucial Difference

Why did Obama "cave" when Clinton didn't? From an article getting quite a bit of attention, although not -- apparently -- this paragraph:

THE MOST CRUCIAL difference between Clinton’s debt limit battle and the current crisis is that, in 1996, the Republicans were bluffing. No Republican seriously considered defaulting on the debt to be a viable option. “It was essentially unthinkable,”Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton, told me. “There was nobody in the Congress who really contemplated forcing a default.” Larry Haas, communications director for the OMB from 1994 to 1997, agreed. “Everybody in the White House and on Capitol Hill knew that the conflict had to end at some point,” Hass told me. 

Then again, maybe the Tea Partiers were just bluffing.

What Trump Meant

There's a post a with a really powerful video over here concerning what Trump was really saying.

The End is Near: History Remains a Discipline

Andrew Sullivan right twice on Wisconsin and concerning Libya. To make up for that unusual occurance -- which might otherwise be the first warning of the end time's nearness -- fortunately, he misreads Darton's essay, which doesn't explore the analogy between 1789 and 2011 but rather denies its validity and, indeed, cast very cold water on the notion of comparing revolution altogether.

Relatedly, the French have decided to intervene on the side of the forces of order:

Defense Conseil International (DCI), a French state-owed training company, has three crowd-control specialists acting as advisers to the Bahrain Army, chief executive Jean-Louis Rotrubin said at the IDEX trade show.
The advisers, drawn from the French Gendarmerie Nationale and elite GIGN special forces unit, are part of a program to train Bahrain special forces in non-lethal crowd control and the avoidance of the use of deadly force, he said. The program is just beginning.
DCI also has sent French personnel to Libya to train pilots and maintenance crews, aimed at bringing the Libyan Air Force’s Mirage F.1 fighters back into active service. Up until three years ago, an embargo prevented the delivery of spare parts, which meant Libya was unable to fly the Mirage F.1, Rotrubin said.

Why it's just like when France intervened in Spain and (what would become) Italy in 1821. Except, of course for nothing like that at all.

Kerensky Screwed Up

So, it looks like Mubarak is going to step down, or that something is a brewing.  Already various voices have warned ominously of the Muslim Brotherhood's standing in the shadows waiting to radicalize the call for democracy.  Keep in mind that the radicalization of various revolutions, from the French to the Iranian, or their hijacking by forces of the old order, like some of the color revolutions in the old Soviet Union, played out the way they played out because of actual people making decision and taking concrete actions.  Take, as an example, Alexander Kerensky the liberal leader of the Provisional Government until the Bolshevik coup.  He and his fellow politicians worried excessively about Russia's commitments to the Allies while the Allies pressured the Provisional Government to greater exertions. Consequently, Kerensky and his fellows not only refused to pull Russia out of a war that was ruining its economy and was more or less universally despised, they actually authorized an attack on the Germans which destroyed the Army and led to the Provisional Government's destruction.

In other words, who gets what in the wake of Mubarak's resignation, should he resign, is an internal matter and an external matter.  If the US and others try to engineer against some group or another, they may well delegitimate the whole process leading to greater chaos leading to an aggressive minority, of what ever stripe, to seize control.

UPDATE:
Well he didn't resign nor yet even give any evidence of being interested in resigning or really understanding the nature of those opposed to his continued reign. Also, an Egyptian history where short means long.

A Path to Citizenship

The repeal of DADT is the first step toward full equality not only because military service and citizenship are tightly linked in the "western tradition" but also because of the generational split it exposes between and among Conservatives. So, I say, well done Obama well done.

The Economic Problem in a Nutshell

Fred Clark on the arithmetic of mass lay offs:

The most recent figures, if you want to be precise: 14.2 million looking for work; 3.4 million job openings. That means 10.8 million Americans right now, today, are royally, epically screwed.

That means it wouldn't matter if every unemployed American followed all the advice for what job-seekers are supposed to do. If every single one of them keeps a positive attitude while still being willing to settle for less, if each and every one of them takes classes and volunteers to keep their skills sharp, if each and every one networks furiously, gets up every morning, showers, shaves and gets dressed for the office before sending out dozens of perfect, enticingly crafted résumés all day, every day, then 10.8 million of them will still not find jobs because there are 10.8 million fewer jobs than there are job seekers.