Author: geoff

Sullivan on Maher

I just watched the season finale of Bill Maher‘s Real Time on HBO. Normally I forget to watch it, and have to catch up via video-on-demand, but since Andrew Sullivan had blogged that he was flying out to take part I wanted to see if he’d say the same stuff on TV that he’s been blogging.
It was a weird show in some respects – Bill Maher was obviously still pretty angry underneath his bravado – but I was particularly struck by three things that Andrew Sullivan said.
(1) He attacked Bill Maher for losing the election for the Democrats by making jokes about people of religious faith that demeaned them. “If you demean them, how do you expect them to vote for you?” Say what? Look, I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are religious folk in the red states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by what they see as ungodly attitudes and actions from people in the blue states. But it’s been that way for years, just as there are secular people in the blue states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by Bible-based thinking and homophobia. For some people on both sides, these attitudes are deeply ingrained, and cleaning up Bill Maher’s jokes or Pat Robertson’s sermons isn’t going to have any effect. Each group offends the other simply by existing, by being themselves, and to argue that they should change seems to contradict Sullivan’s pleas for a return to tolerance through federalism.
(2) Why does Sullivan (and many others) froth at the mouth when anyone mentions “America” and “war crimes” in the same sentence? And why do they always argue how much better America’s actions are than those of Saddam? Is that the standard by which America should judge itself? From someone like Sullivan who argued so eloquently just a few days ago about the collective amnesia concerning Abu Ghraib, such jingoism seems inapposite.
(3) It is possible that Sullivan’s excitability was occasioned by the appearance on the program of Noam Chomsky, whom Sullivan accused of “making millions running around the world denigrating the United States”. (I may have got the exact words wrong: he certainly said “millions”, which caused a few eyebrows to be raised.) But why the outrage? Numerous legal bodies, including the International Commission of Jurists, have declared that the invasion of Iraq and many of the consequent actions of the USA and its allies violate international law. Logically Sullivan would seem to have only three options: refute the charges, accept them and agree that the USA should take responsibility for its actions, or declare that the USA is somehow above the law. Lashing out at an academic for exercising his freedom of speech, and saying that his views don’t deserve to be heard, does Sullivan no credit. (Whatever happened to Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s immortal dictum “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?)
Of the other speakers on the show, ex-Senator Alan Simpson seemed determined to take offence, especially at the antics of Maher’s unruly audience. (They should fix that – it’s actually an embarrassment.) Susan Sarandon was frustrated and exhausted after all her campaigning in Ohio and Pennysylvania, and was a bit too paranoid about voter fraud (though I can sympathize with her). Comedian D. L. Hughley was OK but forgettable, and Pat Schroeder was as forthright as ever.
Despite Sullivan’s plaintive “God help me” about tonight’s show, he appeared to enjoy himself. His reactions to Bill Maher’s New Rules segment seemed to attract the camera like a magnet. I wonder how he’ll blog about his perspective?

Follow the bouncing ball

dollar.jpgDollar at record low against euro: “It seems now that the longer-term investors like pension funds and perhaps monetary authorities are either hedging their dollar risk or moving assets out of the United States. It looks like the dollar has further to fall…”

You can check out the historical data using Oanda’s FXGraph applet: choose “from USD“, “to EUR“, “since 6 Nov 1996“. Note the trend over the last four years, and extrapolate….

What will this mean for the US economy? Unless the budget and current account deficits are slashed, the probable consequences are rising interest rates, rising inflation, a depressed housing market, and recession. We’ve seen this before: it’s called stagflation. Welcome to the 1970s. Even the oil prices look familiar….

(Via the BBC.)

"Talk more, shoot less"? What a quaint idea….

Iraqis Say U.S. Should Talk More, Shoot Less: Iraq’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid al-Bayati said the insurgency was partly due to mistakes Bush made earlier. “Using force that kills civilians on a large scale is a mistake. The logic of occupation must end. Bush’s main mistake was not to let an Iraqi provisional government take power after Saddam was toppled,” he said. “The resistance operations were seen coming as soon as the United States kept acting as an occupier.”

(Via Yahoo!.)

Culture war?

From Andrew Sullivan: “A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That’s Bill Bennett’s conclusion. He won’t be the only one. What we’re seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. […] But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options.”

UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has a different take on this: “the “huge fundamentalist Christian revival” took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political”. Worth reading, but flawed. Yes, the revival took place years ago, and Reagan and Bush Snr. courted the religious right and then ignored them. Dubya did pretty much the same in 2000. This is the first time that religious wedge issues have been so nakedly and cynically exploited as part of a GOTV effort, and it coincides with (1) the election of a new crop of Republican congressmen who are as rabid as Newt’s crowd were but are explicitly religious in their allegiance, and (2) the likely opening of 2-4 Supreme slots. I think that it is going to be different this time.

Monday morning quarterbacking

Masood has been pointing people at an interesting piece in Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, criticizing Kerry’s campaign strategy and tactics for the loss. While the brute facts of the argument are incontrovertible – the role of religion and homosexuality, and Kerry’s difficulty in establishing a clear distinction between him and Bush on Iraq, outsourcing, and so forth – I’m not sure that those factors were decisive. Look at it another way: in spite of all of those handicaps, Kerry came extremely close to unseating an incumbent president who should have been a shoo-in. What could he have done differently? (No, he couldn’t have tacked left.)
As Cockburn and St.Clair point out, the choice of VP was probably decisive:
Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle held Indiana back in 1988 and 2002. No one state in the south went into Kerry’s column. Gore did better in Florida and West Virginia. Dick Gephardt would certainly have brought the Democratic ticket Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the White House.
Gephardt could have worked, but he has a lot of baggage. I actually think that the best choice might have been Wes Clark, in order to hammer Bush on the issue of military incompetence. Unlike Kerry or Edwards, Clark could have invoked Abu Ghraib as a moral catastrophe for which heads ought to roll, and done so without being accused of betraying the troops.

Convenient fictions

Baghdad Burning: “Everyone here knows Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi isn’t in Falloojeh. He isn’t anywhere, as far as anyone can tell. He’s like the WMD: surrender your weapons or else we’ll attack. Now that the damage is done, it is discovered that there were no weapons. It will be the same with Zarqawi. We laugh here when we hear one of our new politicians discuss him. He’s even better than the WMD- he has legs. As soon as the debacle in Falloojeh is over, Zarqawi will just move conveniently to Iran, Syria or even North Korea.”

At this point, I don’t know if Allawi is using Bush or if Bush is using Allawi. And the truly depressing thing is that I don’t think it matters. The dead, the maimed, and the orphans won’t discriminate. Meanwhile, please read River’s blog and spare a thought for the people of Falloojeh.

Lessons from November 2

Independent of the actual result, one clear message to the rest of the world is that the US is simply incompetent at running elections. After 2000 one might have expected some improvement, but no: if anything it’s worse. A crazy patchwork of laws (whatever happened to “Equal protection”?) selectively applied; untested and unreliable machines; incompetent poll workers; running out of ballots; insufficient polling places. See this IHT report on overseas’ observers for one example, or the E-Voting Experts blog for more. And don’t tell me that it only affects a few voters, or that it’s an inevitable side-effect of the size of the country. Japan, UK, Germany, France… all make this stuff work at comparable scale with virtually none of these problems. When a city provides two voting machines for 1100 registered voters (Columbus), or halves the number of polling places in the face of significantly increased registration, that isn’t a “scaling problem”: it’s either incompetence or (worse) a triumph of partisanship over democratic principles. The ends don’t justify the means.
Listen guys, it may have been cute to spend a couple of hundred years pretending that you were just a bunch of agrarian sovereign mini-states, like Swiss cantons, but it’s time to grow up. Uniform laws. Uniform standards. Voting systems that work. Guaranteed provision of enough ballots, machines, and polling places for ALL, not just the people you expect/want to turn up. Absentee ballots sent out on time, not three days before the election. And voting spread over Saturday and Sunday – what’s the rush? (Although mandating an 11 day waiting period for counting provisional ballots is also ridiculous.) Try taking a few lessons from Venezuela, for instance. Or Serbia.
America may be the world’s second largest democracy, but don’t hold yourselves up as a role model.