…is a complete mystery to me: “Dow headed for best October ever.
Andrew McCarthy on the Libyan War, Obama, and Gaddafi
Here’s an excellent article by Andrew McCarthy that skewers Obama and the left (with a small dig at RINO Lindsay Graham along the way) for their hypocrisy in dealing with Libya and Gaddafi vs. Iraq and Bush. I will quote his piece at some length:
Just to review what happened here: Qaddafi…was not “brought to justice”…In “leading from behind,” our government went rogue ”” to the evident satisfaction of the formerly antiwar Left. Obama claimed to be keeping the peace and protecting civilians while waging an unauthorized offensive war against Qaddafi’s government ”” a regime with which the United States was at peace; a regime with which the United States had made a great show of arriving at friendly relations; a regime to which the United States (urged on by such official emissaries as Sen. Lindsey Graham) had provided foreign aid, including assistance to prop up Qaddafi’s military; a regime to which the Obama administration, including Secretary Clinton’s State Department, had stepped up American taxpayer subsidies ”” including aid to Qaddafi’s military and contributions to charitable enterprises managed by Qaddafi’s children.
Protecting civilians? Please. We jumped in as a partisan on the side of the Islamists, who sported violent jihadists in their ranks and among their commanders ”” including al-Qaeda operatives whose dossiers included a stint at Guantanamo Bay and the recruitment of jihadists to fight a terror war against American troops in Iraq. While NATO targeted Qaddafi, the rebels rounded up black Africans, savagely killing many…When the Islamists finally began seizing territory, which they could not have done without NATO, they raided weapons depots. In Qaddafi’s Libya, his regime controlled the materiel; once the “rebels” swept in, weapons started going out ”” to other Islamists, like al-Qaeda in Northwest Africa and Hamas in Gaza.
And now that the Islamists have won, the first order of business, naturally, was to install sharia ”” Islam’s politico-legal framework that oppresses non-Muslims, women, homosexuals, and apostates. To install sharia, by the way, is the reason jihadists engage in violence ”” it is the prerequisite for Islamizing a society…
Qaddafi had last attacked the United States almost a quarter-century ago. Before that, he’d endured punishing retaliation for his Reagan-era terror attacks. The Bush 43 administration had declared these hostilities settled. The two governments resolved outstanding claims ”” much to the chagrin of those of us outraged by the moral equivalence drawn between Qaddafi’s terrorist aggression and President Reagan’s righteous response…Qaddafi abandoned his advanced weapons programs and began providing what the Bush and Obama administrations regarded as vital intelligence ”” vital, no doubt, because Libya is rife with Islamists who despise America and the West…[A]s the State Department put it in 2008, Libya had become “an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism.”
In the last several years, the Libyan regime never even threatened, much less attacked, American interests. Qaddafi spoke glowingly of Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and of President Obama, the Bush and Obama administrations embraced him and supported his regime. There was nothing close to a casus belli for the United States to launch a war against his government. The rationalization about the regime attacking civilians is nonsense: Qaddafi never stopped repressing Libyans in the years we were allied with him, and our aid to him only increased; Libya is a brutal society in which Qaddafi’s demise will not stop the internecine savagery; and we don’t intervene when hostile governments in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere repress their citizens.
Yet, President Obama invaded without congressional authorization ”” just consultations with the Arab League and a Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians, not for war against Qaddafi or regime change. Even as Obama paid lip-service to this charade, promising Americans there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” he dispatched covert intelligence operatives to guide the Islamists…
Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized ”” not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.
It has occurred to me that, except for the fact that in Libya the US has been acting under the aegis of a US-dominated NATO rather than with a US-dominated coalition of allies as in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq was far more justified than that of Libya, for many of the reasons so ably stated by McCarthy. And yet, as we know, much (although not all) of the left defends Obama’s actions in the former while excoriating and reviling Bush’s in the latter.
Whether or not WMDs were ever found in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had done worse—to his people, his neighbors, and the UN—than Gaddafi ever did, and he did it far more recently prior to the US invasion. What’s more, Saddam had only been a supposed US “ally” briefly, back in the 80s in the war against Iran, on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but Gaddafi had (as McCarthy points out) been recently embraced by the US as a reformed sinner.
I am not saying Gaddafi shouldn’t have been deposed, although McCarthy goes so far as to say just that. I’m saying it should not have been done in this manner, and it most definitely should not be accompanied by continued criticism of Bush’s action in Iraq, which was a model of rectitude in comparison. After all, Saddam had continually and brazenly defied UN sanctions. He was not a US ally. He had committed genocide on the Kurds of his own country, and murdered countless other citizens of Iraq. Bush went to the UN for approval before the invasion, as well as to the US Congress, and got it. After the war, Saddam was tried, convicted, and executed by the Iraqis, not lynched by a mob.
And—very importantly to this neo-neocon—Bush was at least somewhat committed to the US sticking around to manage the aftermath of the invasion. That this was done poorly, especially at first, and that the task was far more difficult than the administration had naively expected it to be, does not alter the fact that there was at least a commitment to do it, and that in the end (post-surge), its efficiency and effectiveness improved dramatically.
Not so for Libya. You might say that, paradoxically, Obama is much more of a pure neocon in Libya (at least as the term is popularly although incorrectly defined) than Bush ever was in Iraq, since Obama seems to have a much lower threshold for military intervention. As for my own neocon persuasion, it comes with the following restrictions that appear to be lacking in the Obama brand: (1) support for liberal democracy that preserves human rights, not just democracy; (2) some responsibility for the aftermath of any war started in its name and in which the US participates, in order to give (1) the best chance of occurring; and (3) the need to determine what a side stands for before supporting it militarily.
[NOTE: It has long been great sport for the left to demonize neocons after setting up a strawman as to what they believe. But if you really want to know more about what neocons actually think, there’s this, this, and this.]
It occurs to me that…
…nowadays, campaign staffs are increasingly composed of moles. Each time an aide quits, doesn’t he/she seem inordinately quick on the draw with the critical interview and/or the tell-all book?
Now staffers don’t even wait for the campaign to be over to start the trash talk. Case in point: Cain’s ex-staffers give the NY Times enough ammunition to create the catchy headline, “As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos.”
Has the term “disgruntled former staffer” become a redundancy?
Anybody else…
…experiencing a lull in their interest in the 2012 election? I am.
I have little doubt it will spark up again. But the idea of comparing the latest of Perry’s gaffes to the latest of Romney’s flipflops to the lastest of Biden’s stupidities to the latest of Obama’s bamboozles fills me with ennui at the moment.
Instead, let us rejoice at “Dancing With the Stars.”
No, really. I happen to think that JR Martinez and Ricki Lake are excellent dancers, considering they’re not professionals. Yes, I know the show is a piece of trash. But that’s why I like it. We’ve all got to eat bon-bons and unwind sometimes.
Here’s Ricki and then JR, each doing the quickstep (it’s quick! And it’s got a lot of steps!):
I adore JR. What an upbeat personality, and the guy’s a natural dancer. If you’re not familiar with his amazing story—for which the word “inspirational” might have been coined—please take a look.
Mad Men
I’ve finally gotten around to watching the first few episodes of the TV series “Mad Men.” I’d heard it was set in the early 60s—an era I remember well, although from a child’s eye view—and so I was predisposed to like it.
I gave it a good try and watched about three episodes. But it seemed soulless and empty, a stylized and shiny surface with nothing underneath. The writers were focused mainly on conveying the thought, “we’re so smart and good and aware nowadays; and they were so dumb and bad, but so much fun to look at!”
I wasn’t in a Manhattan ad agency in the early to mid 1960’s, it’s true. But I remember the times in general, and people had a lot more emotion and variety than that. They were not just smooth (and often reptilian) facades, and men didn’t automatically hit on their secretaries the moment they were introduced.
In short, people were as varied and complex as now, and not the unaware and power-hungry idiots depicted in the film, although of course some were. The heart of things has been taken out. Maybe more is put back in as the series goes on, but I don’t feel like sticking around to find out. And I know it’s a show, and not meant to be reality. But for me to continue to watch it, there has to be some emotional hook other than emptiness and the opportunity to congratulate myself on my own illusory superiority.
Ah, but the clothes! Now, that’s the interesting part—and, for you guys, Christina Hendricks’s formidable ta-tas. However, her character Joan’s girdled underpinnings (necessary in order to wear those sheaths effectively) bring back very unpleasant memories for me. Even thin women word girdles back then so as not to jiggle and look trashy, and one of the rites of passage for a young girl was to wear a panty girdle to hold up her stockings and appear generally refined.
But those things hurt. They were constructed of an iron-like material that not only harnessed the gut, but effectively stopped digestion. I’ve got no nostalgia for those suckers.
Changing out of Pajamas into PJs
Pajamas Media announces a name change: it’s now PJ Media. Its new URL is, appropriately enough, pjmedia.com (although the old URL pajamasmedia.com will still get you there).
Well, most of us already called it “PJ” anyway, didn’t we? But, according to PJ Media head Roger Simon, the new name gives PJ more gravitas and signifies that “we are here to stay.”
It’s been six years since PJ was formed, with the snazzy kickoff party in Manhattan that Roger calls “in retrospect a bit too snazzy.” Well, those were heady days in the blogosphere, and it sure wasn’t too snazzy for me. I had a great time meeting and greeting so many other bloggers, and the food was good, too. But in the relative austerity of the post-2008-crash world, we can’t expect that again, although we can dream.
I’ve always been partial to the name Pajamas Media, though. I think you can call a company almost anything, so long as it performs. After all, funny names didn’t stop Google or Apple, did they?
[NOTE: Here’s a piece I wrote back in those early days of Pajamas Media’s formation.]
So, what do you think…
Obama: not a good politician?
Ramesh Ponnuru doesn’t think Obama is a very good politician:
Obama never had to fight for and win the votes of people who don’t agree with him. Both his biggest political setback and his biggest political accomplishment — his defeat by Bobby Rush in a 2000 U.S. House primary and his victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 — came during struggles within a liberal universe.
Ponnuru adds that Obama has been the beneficiary of good luck, not only during the 2008 campaign (particularly the financial crisis towards the end), but also earlier “in November 2004 because his first Republican opponent self-immolated in scandal and his second was Alan Keyes, a fringe figure who came from out of state to run.”
That’s certainly true, as far as it goes. But Ponnuru doesn’t go nearly far enough. As I’ve described here, that “self-immolation in scandal” to which Pnnuru refers (involving Obama’s 2004 Republican opponent Jack Ryan) was preceded by a similar “self-immolation in scandal” of Obama’s Democratic primary opponent in the same race (Blair Hull), and the latter’s scandalous revelations may have been helped along by forces in the Obama camp. Then, of course, there was the matter of what Obama did to Alice Palmer during the primary of his very first run for office, a story that should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand Obama the politician, but not widely-known even today.
So while it is true that Obama has rarely had a strong political opponent, and that he’s been the beneficiary of much good luck, it also appears that some events that at first glance appear to have been good luck were actually helped along by Obama and/or his forces in a series of rather nasty and strategic machinations. Therefore, we could say that some of Obama’s strongest political skills have long been in the realm of dirty tricks.
This runs so counter to the picture Obama presented the world during his 2008 campaign that it’s been almost universally ignored, despite the fact that it was a prominent and early part of his political history—perhaps because, until now, another of his strongest political skills has been to get the press to cover for him.
So, is Obama a good politician? Well, it depends what the meaning of “good” is.
Nature/nurture
Nurture it is.
[NOTE: Busy day; will post more later.]
Springtime for Islamists in Libya?
The headline reads “interim [Libyan] ruler unveils more radical than expected plans for Islamic law.”
There’s that word again: expected. But those who thought they knew what to expect in Libya were either arrogant or daft, or both. And one of the many things that was clearly possible there was the ascendance of Islamist elements.
At any rate, here’s the announcement:
Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de fact president, had already declared that Libyan laws in future would have Sharia, the Islamic code, as its “basic source”.
But that formulation can be interpreted in many ways – it was also the basis of Egypt’s largely secular constitution under President Hosni Mubarak, and remains so after his fall.
Mr Abdul-Jalil went further, specifically lifting immediately, by decree, one law from Col. Gaddafi’s era that he said was in conflict with Sharia – that banning polygamy.
In a blow to those who hoped to see Libya’s economy integrate further into the western world, he announced that in future bank regulations would ban the charging of interest, in line with Sharia. “Interest creates disease and hatred among people,” he said.
It seems somewhat minor in the scheme of things. But is it an ominous portent for the future?
David Warren contrasts the irony of the relatively orderly Bush-overseen judicial end of Saddam Hussein with Gaddafi’s extra-judicial lynching under forces promoted by Obama. He adds:
In Libya itself, we will see what we will see. The reports I read suggest we may soon be nostalgic for the days when Gadhafi was alive, to unite the various opposing factions. Different militias, that despise one another, are in possession of different parts of Tripoli; old regime loyalists are still not entirely extinguished even in that city; and the rest of the country is far from peace. Contempt is also being expressed for the transitional government, by its various fickle allies…
No one is responsible in Libya, now, and such international assistance as the transitional government may require, to create security and make life less cheap, will come after the fact of chaos.
Not unexpected at all. That’s why there is something to be said for what happened in Iraq, where—because we invaded and stuck around, despite the huge cost in blood and treasure—that country has at least a chance of coming out relatively well compared to others in the region.
Steve Jobs refused to meet his biological father…
…Syrian-born Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, because his father had bragged that he’d met Jobs in his restaurant, and that Jobs was a good tipper.
This things were apparently not untrue, mind you: the two men apparently had met briefly in the father’s restaurant, which Jobs had patronized a couple of times, and had shaken hands. And, although no information is given one way or the other about it, it’s probably also the case that Jobs was a good tipper.
When all of this happened, Jandali had no idea Jobs was his biological son. Here’s the fuller story:
When I heard the tape, I wondered from whom Jobs had heard that “little bit” that he didn’t like about Jandali. Was it from a report by the man’s ex-wife, Jobs’s biological mother? She may be a wonderful person in all other respects, but no ex-wife should be the most trusted person to report fairly on her ex-husband (and I say that as an ex-wife, and I think I’m ultra-fair). Or did Jobs learn about his biological father from Mona Simpson, Jobs’s sister, who seem to have had her own issues with a father she only knew as a very young child (after their parents had gotten married and before their divorce when she was four)?
I know nothing about what sort of a person Jandali really is; he may be every bit as abominable as Jobs seems to have thought he was, and more. But I also know that these divorces stories are not always what they seem. When a father drifts away and is heard from no more, sometimes it is indeed abandonment by that father. But sometimes the mother has kept him away by being uncooperative about his visitation right, or even by dropping out of sight herself with the child and and becoming somewhat difficult to find (especially in those pre-Google days of Jobs’s youth). IMHO, unless a biological parent is a criminal and/or psychopath, if a child decides to search it’s probably a good idea to get information from the horse’s mouth rather than secondhand.
Jandali’s crime of wanting to impress Simpson, his long-lost daughter, with the fact that he was once a big shot who knew Steve Jobs is hardly the sort of thing that one would think would be judged so very harshly. We all have our flaws, and a father or mother is often an imperfect creature, full of the minor foibles common to humanity, such as looking back on a glory time and saying “I used to be somebody!” An adoptive child in particular can face a powerful dilemma when deciding whether or not to search for, and then to talk or meet with, a biological parent who has given him or her up. The parent is usually unequal to the task of being perfect or anywhere near it. And although the child is absolutely not required to forgive, it would be nice if the child gave the parent the chance to tell his or her own story at last before making that judgment.
[NOTE: Here’s a WSJ piece about Jandali.]
Voter ID: now, here’s a profile in courage
Sort of, anyway.
In this article Artur Davis, former Democratic Congressman from the 7th District of Alabama and an African-American, recognizes that voter ID laws can be good and are not inherently racist when well-drafted.
So, better late than never, Mr. Davis! He starts his piece with an unusually forthright declaration and admission, which fits right in with the theme of this blog:
I’ve changed my mind on voter ID laws — I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one — and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office.
You can see why I’m choosing to highlight Davis’s article. He goes on to write:
When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.
Davis then goes on to explain how the Alabama law has provisions that protect potential voters (such as the elderly, who don’t drive) from being unfairly shut out of the registration process. Davis adds that he’s been disappointed to hear Bill Clinton, a president he admires (Davis is still a Democrat, after all), “compare voter ID to Jim Crow, and it is chilling to see the intimidation tactics brought to bear on African American, Democratic legislators in Rhode Island who had the nerve to support a voter ID law in that very liberal state.”
If Davis keeps paying attention, he may discover a lot more out there that’s chilling—and a large proportion of his cold shudder will be engendered by the actions of his own party.