Palestine’s UN gambit

The New Neo Posted on by

Abbas’s announcement that he will seek UN approval for a Palestinian state and a seat at that august institution is hardly surprising. Israel’s position during the Obama years has been understood by the world to have been significantly weakened, because so many of Obama’s actions (insulting Netanyahu, for example) have telegraphed that his commitment to Israel is exceedingly squishy compared to that of his predecessors. In addition, so much of his Middle East policy has transmitted a sense of a drifting and powerless administration that no one respects or fears, no matter what its intentions—which are nearly impossible to divine.

And without the US as stalwart friend, Israel is more isolated than ever. The Palestinian PR campaign has been remarkably effective. Support for its agenda has only increased in the nearly forty years since the Munich massacre of 1972 gained Yasser Arafat the prestige and privilege of addressing the UN a scant two years later, empty gun holster and all:

Apart from Pope Paul VI, Arafat is the only person who does not represent a government ever to address the plenary Assembly. The Pontiff had a claim to legitimacy as head of a state; he is ruler of Vatican City. Arafat heads a heterogeneous organization whose popular strength is untested, but the Arab nations nonetheless greeted him as a conquering hero.

Except for a brief moment at the beginning of Israel’s existence, when the UN voted to partition the former British colony into two states, one Palestinian and one Israeli (a partition the Israelis accepted and the Palestinians rejected, leading to war), the UN has been the stalwart champion of the Palestinians. This latest move is only the most recent in a long long line of actions in which the UN is nearly obsessed with condemning Israel; you’d almost think it was the UN’s main function.

Abbas seems a bit surprised that the Obama administration appears determined to hold to America’s usual support for Israel through a Security Council veto. But such a move is hardly surprising; even Obama is not prepared to abandon Israel so publicly and break precedent so openly.

Equally unsurprising are the responses of pundits such as Friedman of the Times to the Abbas move and the US reaction. It’s the Israel lobby holding the US hostage, yada yada yada. If you read the comments section after Friedman’s piece, you’ll see that’s the acceptable party line now, not a fringe opinion (as Glenn Greenwald approvingly points out here).

Nothing much may come of the UN gambit except more PR. The US will veto the action in the Security Council. If Abbas chooses to go to the General Assembly, he will win the vote, but the win doesn’t seem particularly meaningful in practical terms. It will probably only serve to further convince Israel of how alone it is, as though it needed any convincing at this point.

[NOTE: See also this and this.

Oh, and a prediction: just watch the trolls come. They nearly always do when Israel is the topic.]

Looking back at George W. Bush

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people have recommended this article by Walt Harrington about George W. Bush, whom the journalist first met back in the 80s and became friendly with. Those people are correct; it’s a fascinating read.

Their friendship endured throughout Bush’s presidency. Despite the fact that Harrington seems to be a Democrat, he clearly likes Bush and has long been outraged by the hatred directed against him.

Harrington describes watching the advent of BDS (he doesn’t call it that, though) from his perch as journalism professor at the University of Illinois during the early years of the Bush presidency. He was shocked and mystified, knowing Bush as he does and knowing the man that he is. He sees some graffitti reading “Kill Bush” scrawled on a wall at the university and wonders “Is this America?”

Although Harrington did not vote for Bush, he did write a column during his presidency attacking the attackers and saying, “[Bush is] smart, thoughtful in a brawny kind of way and, most of all, a good and decent man…It baffles me that grown people must convince themselves that those with whom they disagree are stupid or malevolent.”

Those who feel that Bush is actually stupid and malevolent (and their numbers are legion) probably either are not reading Harrington’s piece, or are discounting it if they happen to read it. They know what they know, and one thing they know for sure is that Bush never reads and that even if he did he wouldn’t understand what he read, although Harrington describes a Bush whose love of reading (especially history) goes back at least to their meeting in the 80s, when Bush was still called “Junior” and his father was still president.

Harrington quotes Bush as once having told me that “reading books means you’re not lonely.” But one thing the Harrington article makes clear is that loneliness has not ordinarily been a big problem for Bush; he’s always been good at making friends and keeping them. This ability was probably Bush’s most salient characteristic, going back at least as far as his school days at Andover (see this about Bush’s prep school career, which describes a well-liked, friendly, and humorous guy whose people skills were already highly developed; also see this profile in Time that appeared before BDS had taken such a firm hold of the press).

Harrington writes about how disturbed Bush II was during the Bush I presidency at the bad press his father was getting, and when I read that I wondered how the son had subsequently managed to handle his own far more vicious press so well. He had learned something in the interim:

“When I got elected governor and president, history gave me a chance to study the decisions of my predecessors,” Bush says. As governor, he read The Raven, by Marquis James, a biography of Sam Houston, the father of Texas statehood. “I was fascinated by the story of Houston voting against secession, and reading a description of him basically being driven out of town by angry citizens. ”¦ My only point is that one lesson I learned, if they’re throwing garbage on Houston, arguably Texas’s most famous politician””Sam Houston Elementary School, where I went to school in Midland, was named for him!””if they’re throwing garbage on him, they can throw garbage on me.”…

When Bush read, in Presidential Courage, by Michael Beschloss, that historians were still debating whether George Washington had been a good president, he told Laura that if they were still debating Washington’s presidency more than 200 years later, he would not worry what public opinion was saying about him now. “And the other thing for me was that I saw a great man be criticized, as you might recall,” he says, referring again to the vitriol aimed at GHWB during the losing reelection campaign of 1992. “On the harshness meter, it seemed unusually harsh to me, as the son. So, therefore, when I became president, the criticism to me was nothing compared to the criticism to him. And so I was able to keep life in perspective two ways: one, through reading of history and how other leaders were treated, but also having witnessed history with my dad.”

Also there’s this (and as I read it, I can’t help but wonder if Obama, who seems to revere Lincoln as well, has read 14 biographies of him, as Bush has. Certainly if he has, he’s not learned the lesson about signaling weakness, or passing the responsibility buck):

Bush believes that one of the most important stage requirements of the presidency is indeed never to signal weakness or self-doubt or confusion: “One of the things you learn about great leaders is that they never project the burdens of responsibility on others.” He remembers Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (one of 14 Lincoln biographies Bush read while he was president), which recounts the 16th president’s perseverance through not only military defeat after defeat, stupefying troop casualties, and public ridicule, but also the death of his son Willie and the debilitating emotional turmoil of his wife.

“You’re not the only person that’s ever gone through hard things,” Bush says of the lessons he has learned from history. “In other words, can you imagine the signal I would have sent had I said, ”˜Ah, why me? Why am I thrust in the middle of all this stuff?’ And they had kids on the front line of combat who were actually having to do all the work.”

But perhaps the most interesting part of the article is when Harrington visits his old friend GW at the White House in 2003, and asks him what it’s like to be president. Bush answers only after ascertaining that his response will be off the record:

And he began to talk””and talk and talk for what must have been nearly three hours. I’ve never told anyone the specifics of what he said that night, not even my wife or closest friends. I did not make notes later and have only my memory. In the journalism world, off the record is off the record. But I have repeatedly described the hours as “amazing,” “remarkable,” “stunning.”…

As he talked, I even thought about an old Saturday Night Live skit in which an amiable, bumbling President Ronald Reagan, played by Phil Hartman, goes behind closed doors to suddenly become a masterful operator in total charge at the White House. The transformation in Bush was that stunning to me.

Here’s Bush in a later post-presidency interview with Harrington, on how history will judge him:

“Some people walk up and say, ”˜Oh, man, history is going to judge you well.’ And my quip is, ”˜I’m not going to be around to see it.’ And to me, that’s one of the most important lessons you learn through history””you’re just not gonna be around to see it. ”¦ I’m confident of this: that those conclusions will be more objective with time than they could conceivably be now.”

I wonder whether those judgments are already starting to change.

Feeling your pain

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is out that a way to objectively document a patient’s pain is being developed:

A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.

“The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes,” Dr. Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.

The method is in the earliest stages. But it may someday make it possible to tell whether an infant, a coma patient, or a person who’s elderly and demented is in pain.

I can also think of some potentially troublesome uses for it: to deny pain medication to patients whose brains don’t test out as undergoing enough pain to justify the treatment, despite the fact that a machine like this could never be flawless.

A personal note: back when I was in fairly severe chronic pain for a number of years (I’ve written about that experience here), I fantasized the invention of a pain replicator, to show doctors exactly what the experience felt like, if only for a moment. I imagined the sort of machine you see in 50s science-fiction movies, a metal contraption that a patient could step into and have his or her pain recorded in detail. Then the doctor would enter it, and for a minute or so would undergo exactly the same pain as the patient. This would not only help with diagnosis, it would bring on a bit more empathy from the medical profession.

I realized, of course, that even my imaginary machine couldn’t tell them about the suffering chronic pain patients feel at the seemingly intractable quality of their pain: the perception that it may never end, that there is no relief to be had. I had read the work of Dr. Eric Cassell, who had observed in his book The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine (excerpt here) that pain and suffering are not always the same.

There are three other times when suffering in close relation to pain is commonly reported…First, when the pain is so severe that it is virtually overwhelming. The second is when the patient does not believe that the pain can be controlled. The suffering of patients with terminal cancer can often be relieved when it is demonstrated that their pain truly can be controlled. They will then often tolerate the same pain without any medication, preferring the pain to the side effects of their analgesics. Another type of pain that can be a source of suffering is pain that is not overwhelming but continues for a very long time so that it seems the pain is endless. Physicians commonly tell patients that they will “get used to the pain” but that rarely happens.

It is difficult to describe the effect this book had on me at the time I read it, which was in the early 90s, when the treatment of chronic pain was still in its relative infancy. It sounds depressing, but to me it wasn’t. It held out a ray of hope: if this doctor understood, then chronic pain patients weren’t so alone.

For most chronic pain patients, the pain is not imaginary or “all in their head.” For example, my pain had very clear antecedents, and the neural path of my pain was consistent with my injuries, so fortunately I was not usually tormented by physicians accusing me of malingering or being a whackjob. Nevertheless, I knew that pain does have a psychological component and a psychological effect, and Cassell understood both without needing a pain-replicating machine to show him.

Hollywood may no longer love Obama…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it hates Perry and Bachmann worse.

In Hollywood, the disaffection seems to come down to “Obama wasn’t the miracle worker I thought he’d be.” It should come as no surprise that Hollywood’s belief in magical thinking extends to politics.

But nothing energizes the Hollywood crowd like the thought of crazy stupidheads Perry and Bachmann:

But even the most disenchanted of the Hollywood Democrats could be pushed into Obama’s fund-raising effort by the Republican nominee. “The more we see the Michele Bachmanns and the Rick Perrys, the more frightened we are,” Bragman says.

When asked why he hasn’t deserted Obama altogether, Lear says: “The Republicans running for president are a bunch of clowns. We may be disappointed in a lot of things that are going on in the Obama administration, but whatever we say about him, he’s not a clown.”

As the disenchanted executive who’s sitting things out so far puts it, if Obama “is suddenly in a competitive race with Bachmann or Perry, I’ll max out so fast it will make your head spin.”

Attacks on the Republican front-runners, including lies and distortions of their positions by the MSM, serve many purposes. One is to discredit the Republicans in the eyes of those who might be on the fence. But the other is to rally the potentially-reluctant moneygivers and spur them on. If they won’t donate out of love, they’ll donate out of fear.

I don’t know Jack

The New Neo Posted on by

It may come as no surprise to you that I’m not a fast-food fan. For me it’s not the principle of the thing: I just don’t like the taste, for the most part. And if a lot of calories are going to be involved in a food item, it had better be extra-yummy.

I used to take my son to McDonald’s when he was little, as a very special treat for him (the playground! the Happy Meal!). But I usually didn’t have much to eat there myself, except perhaps some fries. Same for Burger King and the rest.

But recently I was with some friends on a trip out west and one of them waxed eloquent about the culinary charms of Jack in the Box. I had heard of the chain, of course; how could a person travel around the US and not notice them? But I couldn’t remember ever having stepped foot in one.

Why would I? After all, they combined two of my most hated items: fast food and jacks in the box (jack in the boxes?). I’d owned one of the latter as a child, and although I wasn’t especially scared of it, I found its suddenly appearing and disappearing clown head creepy, and its feeble mechanism readily and frustratingly breakable.

But my friend kept talking about how good the food at Jack’s was, especially the egg rolls and the sirloin burger and the…well, suffice to say this didn’t sound like a McDonald’s menu. So we stopped at one.

I have to say I was favorably impressed, although I’m not talking gourmet dining here. But this was clearly the most yuppie-ish fast-food haven around. Jack tries harder, and succeeds in getting out a product that is at least somewhat tasty and somewhat varied in scope. As the Jack Wiki entry says:

Jack in the Box also offers an American version of ethnic cuisine…Jack in the Box also carries seasonal items such as pumpkin pie shakes, Oreo mint shakes, and eggnog shakes during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. In some locations, local delicacies are a regular part of the menu. Locations in Hawaii, for example, include the Paniolo Breakfast (Portuguese sausage, eggs, and rice platter)…In the Southern United States, the company offers biscuits and sweet tea. In Imperial County, California, some locations sell date shakes, reflecting the crop’s ubiquity in the region’s farms. In the spring of 2007 Jack in the Box also introduced its sirloin burger and followed this up with recently the sirloin steak melt.

Now of course you may know all this—especially if you live in the west or the southwest. I learned from going to Jack’s website that the company does not have any franchises in the northeast or northern midwest, and not many in the southest, either, although my friend had distinctly remembered a presence in the northeast. The puzzle was solved when I learned that Jack had at one point expanded into the northeast and then pulled back and regrouped when things didn’t go well.

Jack is good on regrouping, as its ad campaign (which, if you don’t live in the northeast, you may also be familiar with; I had never seen them before) has emphasized. The “Jack” character in the ads still has that creepy-clown quality, although he’s got a quasi-hipster style now. But the ads themselves are clever and not always PC.

Here’s a fairly typical one:

I happen to like this one a lot:

Jack in the Box posts the calorie content of its meals right up there on the menu for you to contemplate when you’re ordering, and the information is mighty sobering indeed. So I’m not going to mourn the northeast’s lack of Jack too much. Each item has about half my recommended caloric intake for a day, and some contain my entire caloric intake for a day.

Carville to Obama: time to panic!

The New Neo Posted on by

James Carville has never been one for understatement. And although as a good Democrat he has supported Obama, there must have always been a disconnect between Obama’s cool, laid-back style and Carville’s natural tendency towards heat.

Now that things are going especially badly for Obama, Carville tries to light a fire under the president and tells him to fire people, indict people, and “make a case like a Democrat.”

I’m not quite sure what that latter means. But the whole thing is a cri de coeur, a scream of frustration and pain from a guy who cannot stand seeing all the hard-won Democratic gains squandered. One can hardly blame him.

Have you noticed how many Democrats have been carping at Obama during the last two years, telling him what they think he should be doing? I’ve never before seen a president given so much advice from the sidelines. But perhaps that’s because never before have there been such high expectations of a president with so little experience.

Joe McGinniss finally…

The New Neo Posted on by

…comes out with his book-length gossip sheet on temporary next-door-neighbor Sarah Palin, and even the NY Times can’t stomach it: McGinniss is “too busy being nasty to be lucid.”

Ouch—although, of course, the two are hardly mutually exclusive.

McGinniss is also too late, poor dear. As the Times points out, pretty much everything in the book has already been thoroughly aired online (except for a few new but unusually poorly-sourced allegations), although the review manages to coyly avoid mentioning one of the most prolific practitioners of the “nasty rather than lucid in service of smearing Plain” art, Andrew Sullivan.

Will books such as McGinniss’s matter? It’s hard to believe that anyone other than the most rabidly entrenched Palin-haters, who believe her fully capable of every stupidity and/or evil already, would care much about what McGinniss is saying. Even Palin-hating gets old after a while.

Fashion tails

The New Neo Posted on by

Fashion tales of fashion tails—this can’t be a trend, can it? It just can’t.

First, there’s fore:

And then there’s aft:

The wearers are Emma Roberts and Olivia Palermo, in that order. I have no idea who they are and I’m not about to look them up and link to them. If you care, that’s your task.

[Hat tip: Go Fug Yourself.]

Obama’s depression?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been asked to comment on Obama’s depression—no, not the economic kind; the psychological kind. Speculation is that the NY Times is about to do a story on the president’s growing gloom and listlessness.

So here it is: I haven’t a clue whether Obama is depressed. No one except his close associates has a clue. However, depression would be a pretty normal response to what’s going on in Obama’s life right now. Of course, there’s depression of the mild and non-incapacitating sort, and depression of the severe and disabling sort. My guess is that the allegations—if they do come out—will be that Obama is suffering from the former rather than the latter.

Presidents have been depressed before. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was famous for suffering from the malady, and he seemed to do okay at his job. In those days there were no anti-depressants, and Lincoln showed great strength in battling with what was then known as melancholy throughout his life:

With Lincoln we have a man whose depression spurred him, painfully, to examine the core of his soul; whose hard work to stay alive helped him develop crucial skills and capacities, even as his depression lingered hauntingly; and whose inimitable character took great strength from the piercing insights of depression, the creative responses to it, and a spirit of humble determination forged over decades of deep suffering and earnest longing.

Obama is not Lincoln, however much he might quote him. But Lincoln is not the only president who’s been depressed. LBJ is reported to have become depressed about the Vietnam impasse:

Moyers described Johnson to me [author Robert Dallek] as “paranoid” and “depressed,” and never more so than in 1965. Moyers attributes this dark passage to “the realization about which he was clearer than anyone — that [Vietnam] was a road from which there was no turning back.” Johnson saw the decision to send troops as potentially marking the end of his presidency. “It was a pronounced, prolonged depression,” Moyers adds. “He would just go within himself, just disappear — morose, self-pitying, angry…. He was a tormented man,” who described himself to Moyers as being in a Louisiana swamp that was “pulling me down.” “When he said it,” Moyers remembers, “he was lying in bed with the covers almost above his head.”

I asked Moyers if others in the White House were as troubled by Johnson’s behavior as he and Goodwin. Yes, Moyers replied, and “when they were deeply concerned about his behavior, they would call me — Cabinet officers and others. Rusk would call me and tell me about some exchange he just had with the President that was very disturbing, and he would say that he seemed to be very depressed.

We all know how that ended: with Johnson’s withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, leaving Nixon and VP Humphrey to duke it out. And we all know how that ended, as well.

Although in some ways it hasn’t ended yet.

NOTE: And then there’s always this:

The Jews of NY District 9

The New Neo Posted on by

The day after the special election to replace Rep. Weiner was won by the Republican Turner over the Democrat Weprin, a few things are clear:

(1) A district that is ordinarily 3-1 Democrat went strongly for a Republican candidate, giving him an 8% margin of victory.

(2) A district that went for Obama by 11% in 2008 went strongly for a Republican candidate.

(3) A district that gave Weiner a 20% margin of victory in 2010 (a year that was mostly a Republican tsunami nationwide) went strongly for a Republican candidate.

(4) The district has a very unusual composition ethnically and religiously: 1/3 of voters are Jews, and 1/3 of those are Orthodox. However, the losing Democrat was an Orthodox Jew and the winning Republican a Catholic.

It’s difficult to know exactly what this all might mean in the long run—except that I think it’s safe to say that, although it may be “good for the Jews”, it’s not good for Obama. Was the main issue here the president’s lack of support for Israel, or generalized discontent with the economy, or other factors such as Democrat Weprin’s vote for same-sex marriage (which is against Orthodox Jewish law), or some combination of them all? Only the voters know for sure, and I haven’t seen any exit polls to indicate which of these was most important.

Turner’s victory cannot be explained by saying that in general, Orthodox Jews tend to be more Republican. Although they indeed do, the voting results in this district for 2008 and 2010 make it clear that many there who voted Democratic just a short while ago had to have changed their vote to Republican now. And when Jews start to desert the Democratic Party, the Democrats have got to feel the ground shaking beneath them.

This Jerusalem Post article explains a bit more about why:

Ari Fleischer, former spokesman to president George W. Bush, said at a panel discussion at the AIPAC conference in May that if Obama wins over the Jews 4:1, as he did last time, he wins the next election; but that if he only takes the Jews 3:1, he’s in trouble. A shift of a few percentage votes among Jews in 2012 in key battleground states with large Jewish populations such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania could have a huge impact in a close presidential race.

Though some will say that the Jews who live in the Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods that make up the 9th district that was up for grabs Tuesday – the district that once belonged to disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner – are not reflective of American Jewish demographics: that the Jews there are more religious and Russian than the national average, which makes them more conservative. However, the Jewish demographics in southern Florida, where presidential elections have been won and lost before, does reflect to some degree the demographics in Queens and Brooklyn, as many of the Jews in south Florida hail from areas represented in the contested congressional district: Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, Sheepshead Bay.

Jews are a very small group, representing only 1.7% of the population of the US. However, as Fleischer points out, a change in the Jewish vote can affect totals in large states that will be exceedingly important in 2012. Weprin seems to be less an anomaly and more the canary in Obama’s mine.