Farewell to Katalusis Readers

Update: I just learned that Google has been experiencing an outage and that visitors have been unable to post comments. If that continues to be the case, you may email me at vbergman422@comcast.net.


Dear Katalusis readers,

I started getting error messages a couple of weeks ago whenever I tried to post here. It seems that Google has set a limit for the total number of labels that one blog using this program can have and once you’ve reached the limit, there’s not much you can do about it. It’s not possible to delete previously used labels, and evidently there are no other workarounds.

I had been thinking of retiring Katalusis for several months as I’ve got a couple of other writing projects going that are consuming most of my time and creative energy; the error messages pushed me into making that final decision.

I’ll surely miss my regular readers, and I wish all of you the very best. My thanks to each of you for stopping by Katalusis now and again.

Sincerely,

Virginia

Secretary Clinton Rescues Landmark Peace Accord Between Turkey and Armenia

Laura Rozen at Politico has the story:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon working the phones in the back of a limo in Zurich Switzerland today, to rescue a landmark peace accord later signed by the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia.

Read more:

Nobel Committee’s Preemptive Peace Prize to Barack Obama

On Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace prize, Peter Bienart, senior political writer for the Daily Beast says it best:

George W. Bush launched a “preemptive” war. Now the Nobel Committee is trying for “preemptive” peace. I had always thought the way these things worked was that you helped bring peace or democracy to some corner of the globe first, and then you won the Nobel Prize. But this year, the Nobel Committee has turned that logic around: It clearly likes what Obama is trying to do: on nuclear disarmament, climate change and Middle East peace—and so, in a “preemptive” strike, it’s giving him the award now, in hopes that doing so will boost his chances of success later. It’s an interesting idea. Perhaps next they’ll start giving Oscars not to the people who have made the best movies of last year, but to the people who have the best chance of making the best movies next year. After all, once you’ve already made the movie, you no longer need the encouragement.

I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce. He’s done nothing to deserve the prize. Sure, he’s given some lovely speeches and launched some initiatives—on Iran, Israeli-Palestinian peace, climate change and nuclear disarmament—that might, if he’s really lucky and really good, make the world a more safe, more just, more peaceful world. But there’s absolutely no way to know if he’ll succeed, and by giving him the Nobel Prize as a kind of “atta boy,” the Nobel Committee is actually just highlighting the gap that conservatives have long highlighted: between Obamamania as global hype and Obama’s actual accomplishments.

Beinart concludes:

But Obama will survive this award. The damage to the Nobel Committee itself will be greater. They’ve clearly fallen in love with celebrity, and with the idea of shaping the course of history—in other words, they’ve fallen in love with an absurdly grandiose conception of their role. The Nobel Prize Committee should be in the business of conferring celebrity on unknown human-rights and peace activists toiling in the most god-forsaken parts of the world; the people who really need the attention (and even the money). It should be in the business of angering powerful tyrants by giving their victims a moment in the sun. Choosing Barack Obama, who practically orbits the sun already, accomplishes the exact opposite of that. Let’s hope Obama eventually deserves this award. And let’s hope the Nobel Committee’s decision meets with such a deafening chorus of chortles and jeers that it never does something this stupid again.

Couric to Clinton on Afghanistan: “People will understand what you’re saying”

Toward the end of Katie Couric’s interview with Hillary Clinton the other day, the two had this exchange:

QUESTION: They're giving me a wrap. Can I ask you one other question?

SECRETARY CLINTON: (Laughter.) Sure.

QUESTION: I love talking to you because it's actually really great, because I think people will understand what you're saying.

Read the complete transcript of the interview and take Katie’s word for it, you’ll come away with a better understanding of what’s going on in Afghanistan and President Obama’s decision-making process following General McChrystal's leaked report requesting more troops for that war-torn country.

The Administration’s Unfaithfulness to a Public Option in Health Care Reform Enrages Progressives and Weakens Its Bargaining Position

E.J. Dionne’s column in today’s Washington Post offers a reasonably balanced and fair defense of a public option in the yet to be formulated health care reform plan. However, he follows the lead of his fellow punditry on both the right and the left in implying that Social Security and Medicare are government handouts to the elderly. Neither Dionne or his peers ever bother to mention that the elderly paid into Social Security and Medicare throughout their working lives and post-retirement are still forced to pay a hefty monthly Medicare premium from their usually meager benefits.

But in this opinion piece, Dionne first targets the opposition of centrists to the public option saying they should actually love it, and he strains to make his case.

In taking on the Republican right, Dionne argues: “Unfortunately, the debate over the public option has rarely concentrated on the substance of the idea. Instead, it has been almost entirely ideological.”

But he goes after the Democrats as well and heaven forefend, the former “all Obama all the time” supporter even criticizes the administration’s role: “As for the Obama administration, it's been too ready to hint that it would throw the option overboard. Its highly public unfaithfulness to the view it purported to hold simultaneously enraged progressives and weakened its bargaining position.”

Dionne concludes:

Schumer and Rockefeller were right to insist that this week's votes will not end the battle for the public option. Its final form will be subject to negotiation and might involve a "trigger" to bring it into being in uncompetitive markets -- as long as the trigger is not a meaningless sop. But the fight is worth waging to keep the issues of competition and affordability at the top of congressional minds.

And one more pragmatic consideration: Americans wonder whether all this noise around health care will do anything to change their lives. By offering a genuinely new insurance product, the government would be acting as an innovator, a prod for change and, to borrow a phrase, an insurer we could believe in. As Max Baucus has taught us, there's a lot to like about that.

Will President George H.W. Bush Be Our Last “Legitimate” President?

Tom Friedman’s column in today’s NY Times differs from the usual drivel we’re accustomed to reading by both so-called liberal and conservative pundits who most dramatically revealed their shoddy journalistic standards throughout the 2008 Democratic primary.

Friedman’s main concern is the over-the-line attacks by right-wing extremists against President Obama that he justifiably fears might incite another presidential assassination. These two paragraphs in particular leapt out at me:

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

What surprises me about Friedman’s comments is that he actually acknowledges the right wing’s attempts to destroy Bill Clinton’s presidency. What Friedman doesn’t mention, however, is that the media (both left and right) went crazy amplifying those attacks and continue to do so to this day. The media - even the highly esteemed Jim Lehrer - seldom mention either Bill or Hillary Clinton without a lip curled in contempt.

I was also surprised to read Friedman’s acknowledgement that the left-wing’s attacks on George W. Bush were nothing to be proud of.

Which leads me to repeat a conclusion I reached in 2008 that the fascist tactics of both the left and right wing in American politics, amplified by their media allies, are deplorable.

When the “Normally Calm Mr. Obama Erupted with Anger…”

George Packer’s piece in the New Yorker titled Down with Stratcom! is a must-read for those who seek deeper insights into Barack Obama and his associates, and it doesn’t really matter whether you’re an Obama supporter or not – it’s still interesting material, especially if you follow the links where I discovered that on at least one telling occasion the “normally calm Mr. Obama erupted with anger.”

Packer’s overriding concern, however, is how tightly the Obama Administration controls the media and what that might mean for America in a time of war:

A profile of Valerie Jarrett recently appeared in the Times Magazine, quoting several officials, named and unnamed, taking slight shots at the subject of the piece. Afterward, the President decreed that there would be no more profiles of staff (rather than simply that officials should not speak ill of one another). This overreaction to a few nuggets of not-entirely-favorable publicity is bound to be self-destructive.

In a campaign, which is a battle for nationwide perceptions, this kind of control is understandable, and it has a better track record than the alternatives (compare the Obama press operation with Hillary Clinton’s or McCain-Palin’s and you have at least one part of the reason for his victory). But government is something entirely different. For policies to work, they have to be explained to the country, not once but again and again, and not just by the President in infrequent speeches but by the senior-level officials who helped establish them and are charged with carrying them out. Otherwise, public confidence can turn to dust in a hurry. Afghanistan is a case in point.

People in the Administration tell me that the horror of unauthorized press accounts is of a piece with the no-drama Obama campaign. They say that Obama hates “process” stories because they end up focussing on trivial matters of personality. They also say that the White House wants to give the impression that everything flows from the top.

This last is the one that troubles me most. Even if such a thing were possible, it isn’t healthy. I’d even say it’s undemocratic. Something as vast and complex as the U.S. government cannot be presented to the public along the same lines as a Presidential campaign. In the end—I saw this happen to the Bush Administration in Iraq—the result is that the White House doesn’t seal information in, but, instead, it seals itself off from information. The levers of government eventually stop working because no one in the bureaucracy wants to explain what’s going on for fear of the White House press office, which means the ability to think clearly grows sclerotic.

My November worry has now become a September alarm. I want the President to succeed in Afghanistan, and I don’t think he’s well-served by a philosophy that treats policy as one more variation on stratcom, and that fears a few slips more than an unexplained war.

Read more: