I thought the O'Hanlon/Kagan op-ed was best understood as a sex act between liberal and conservative warmongers.

Posted at November 23, 2007 1:53 PM in response to Military Intervention in Pakistan?

Gitlin's proposals are pitched narrowly to the white liberal guys who dominate political blogging.

And he's not very aggressive about those.

What about correcting the tremendous income disparities between the super-rich and the rest of us?

What about penalizing the takeovers that line the pockets of Wall Street and corporate hierarchies while eliminating jobs for the rest of us?

What about taxing the crap out of the golden parachutes for failed CEOs?

What about articulating strategies for addressing inner-city poverty?

What about reviving the Civil Rights section of the Justice Department?

What about developing a bully pulpit to combat the relentless stereotyping of African-Americans in the media?

When is something going to be done about sexual violence?

What about immigration policy?

What about language teaching to the children of immigrants?

What about articulating a more muscular ethic of multi-culturalism to combat the assimilationism of the right?

What about gay rights?

If Gitlin is going to advocate a "big tent," he needs to do two things. On the one hand, he needs to articulate a political ethic that incorporates all the groups in the tent. On the other hand, he needs to develop policy prescriptions that address the real needs of the groups in the tent.

Gitlin does neither.

Posted at September 3, 2007 8:48 AM in response to The Bulldozer and the Big Tent

The Feith controversy isn't just a minor "gotcha" catching Feith in a false claim. It's a big "gotcha." Thinking about this closely, Feith practically admitted that he lied about the purported Saddam/al-Qaeda link. Above all, Feith implicitly admitted that the allegation of a Saddam/al-Qaeda link was not true. This is huge. Nobody in the Bush administration has coped to false allegations since the "sixteen little word" confession about Nigerian yellowcake. By denying that his office made the Saddam/al-Qaeda claim, Feith was admitting the falseness of the claim. Feith was also implicitly admitting that anyone who put out that claim was lying. Given that Feith was the person responsible for leaking the claim to the Weekly Standard, he was the one who was lying.

Posted at February 11, 2007 7:49 PM in response to Doug Feith, Reinventing History

The Bush Administration was never set to win elections by big margins. The question instead is how they lost the 51% that they were leveraging so ferociously.

Katrina was one tipping point because it confirmed everything war opponents had been saying about Bush's incompetence in Iraq. Katrina was not only a monumental domestic disaster for the Republicans, it served to bring home the failure of Bush foreign policy much more sharply.

Another big break point was the big rise in sectarian violence after the March bombing in Samarra. The enormity of the set-back made Bush's words seem empty and self-deceptive to even the most casual observer.

But the Democrats still might not have gained majorities in both chambers if the Foley story hadn't broken. The overturning of the Republican majorities had several tipping points, but it was Foleygate that drove the stake through the heart of the monsters.

Posted at December 26, 2006 12:50 PM in response to Event of the (Two) Year (Cycle)?