Longtime readers know that - as discussed here - I'm a very big fan of the Saw Doctors, the great Irish pop/rock band, who in a just world would be international musical superstars. Anyway, here is a study in contrasts for you: among their more recent releases, which hit the top of the Irish pop charts last fall, is a cover of "About You Now," originally recorded in the U.S. by the Sugababes, but translated into something rather different by the Saw Doctors (a cover tune is a departure for a band that typically writes their own stuff, but this one was originally done to raise money for a cystic fibrosis charity...and yes, writing that made me think of Dean Barnett again). Check out three versions of the song. First, we have the Sugababes' decidedly R&B flavored original, which I will confess is not at all to my taste, here. Second, a version by teenybopper singer Miranda Cosgrove, here, which is basically the same thing but slightly less funky and more...well, for lack of a better word, white. Then we get the Saw Doctors' guitar-driven version, which of course is more rock n' roll and also, naturally, less girly and more wistful:
One side note: I think I mentioned on Twitter that I learned when assembling the Kelly Clarkson profile quite how much of today's pop music is written by the same handful of people regardless of who the singer is, especially female singers. This tune is no exception, having been co-written by Cathy Dennis and Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, who between them have been involved in numerous hit singles by Clarkson, Britney Spears, Pink, Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne, and the Spice Girls, among many, many others. In a way, everything old is new again: the concept seems alien to people who came of age in the 70s and 80s (although the name "Burt Bacharach" may come to mind), but if you go back to the days of Elvis and Motown, stables of professional songwriters who worked with large numbers of different singers were quite common.
A couple of thoughts on the Brewers as they move in for the sweep of the Mets and surge into first place.
1. This team is pretty good, but man do they have deplorable starting pitching aside from Gallardo - they seriously miss Ben Sheets. Looper, Suppan, Bush and Parra have been healthy enough that the Brewers have given just 3 starts to pitchers outside their front five, but the results are ghastly: a 5.60 ERA, with mediocre K/BB numbers (3.65 BB/9, 6.00 K/9), and more importantly 1.6 HR/9. It's hard to see a whole lot of room for improvement there, although if Parra (7.62 ERA) can get straightened out and throw strikes, they'd be in less of a hole. They're still going to need a #2 starter eventually.
2. Trevor Hoffman having the second-best ERA of his career is definitely a surprise. Before the season I'd thought he needed to be restricted to a ROOGY role, but he's held lefties to a manageably soft .300/.364/.300 while slaughtering righthanded hitters at a .116/.130/.163 clip (he's faced about a 50/50 mix). The main reason for the low ERA is that he hasn't been taken deep yet this season; his other numbers are good but not exceptional.
3. Mike Cameron is a textbook example of a guy who transformed from a talented underachiever to a respected veteran simply by doing the same thing every year for enough years. He's always been a guy who would give you some power and speed, great defense and a little plate patience, strike out a ton and hit for a low average. As a young player, people focused on the whiffs and what he could accomplish if he made more contact. At 36 and still striking out at a clip of 140-160 times a year, he is what he is.
4. I have JJ Hardy on one of my fantasy teams, and for the fantasy owner, Hardy is maddening because he's so incredibly streaky that you hate to bail on him even though he's batting .233/.308/.368. Last season, for example, Hardy was batting .242/.319/.343 on June 10; by July 7, he was batting .296/.364/.493. In 2007 it was a hot start; he batted .323/.371/.628 through May 16, but finished at .277/.323/.463.
Needless to say, he's just as frustrating for his real owners/fans, although in Milwaukee's case there's no serious thought to be given to replacing him; they just have to grit their teeth and wait for him to catch fire.
Chris Jaffe looks at the 10 hardest and 10 easiest lineups ever no-hit. The Nomo no-hitter might go to #1 if you only looked at home batting averages, but #1 is indeed hard to top, especially since it was no-hit by a guy who that season struck out 83 batters while allowing 294 hits.
Seriously, anybody who expected Obama wouldn't behave like this needed their head examined.
This whole flap, by the way, underscores one of my longstanding arguments, which is that the various Inspectors General and periodic should be replaced by a single Cabinet-level official charged with investigations of public integrity. A strong, prominent IG would have a couple of institutional advantages: harder to fire by virtue of his or her prominence, yet still directly accountable to the President; able to bring the perspective that is lacking in ad hoc special prosecutors; able to remove public integrity cases from DOJ, freeing up the Attorney General to focus on less politically-charged law enforcement priorities. Granted, this means yet another Cabinet department, but even aside from the issue of eliminating departments, you could make room by combining a bunch of the currently redundant departments, like Commerce and Labor or Interior and Energy.
I'd always expected Michael Jackson to go by slipping into the Cracks of Doom while clutching his Precious....Seriously, I never had any sympathy for him, given that he was a pedophile or something very like it (leave for another day the people who thought it was a good idea to send their children over to his house), but Jackson was a figure deserving mainly of pity. His family, especially his father, wrecked him, and he spent most of his life mutilating himself and indulging his increasingly bizarre fixations, and seeking the company of children, old women, animals, basically anyone but adults who could have dealt with him as a peer. I have to wonder if his death was more or less intentional, especially given some of the financial problems the Wall Street Journal had been reporting he'd been having lately.
Musically, Jackson wasn't my cup of tea - I loathed him when he was big in 1983, and other than some of the pure Motown-ish Jackson 5 stuff, once the craze was gone the only one of his songs I liked (which is on my iPod) was "Beat It," his collaboration with Eddie Van Halen, which really does rock after all these years. But I came to appreciate the fact that he was a great musical talent and, in his day, a great entertainer. But his personal wierdness did that in as well - an entertainer needs some sort of connection with the audience, and after Thriller, Jackson was just too bizarre for anybody to identify with or connect with him at all. Smeagol was long gone by then.
POLITICS: Sanford Steps Out, But The Battle Continues
Perhaps the most telling moment in the past few days' controversy over South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's absence and subsequent revelation that he'd been visiting his mistress in Argentina came during the period when his staff was putting out the story that Sanford was hiking the Appalachian Trail, and the Democratic National Committee rushed out a press release blaring that the Trail had received stimulus money, and therefore Sanford - as an ardent opponent of the stimulus bill - was a hypocrite for walking on ground that had been touched by Obama's pork-barrel bill. Once the reach of the federal fisc had touched that ground, no possible alternative is permissible but to agree with the political dictates of the hand that holds those purse strings.
The incident speaks volumes about the peril the nation faces to its way of life, and the depth of the trust Sanford breached by engaging in a reckless affair at a time when he was one of the small handful of people in the country well-positioned to do something to stop it.
We live in a time when the governing majority in Washington is pressing to weaken or coopt every institution that could stand, as De Toqueville would put it, as an independent bulwark against the power and pervasive influence of the federal government - private businesses bought off with no-exit bailouts and subsidies or coerced with regulatory threats, the states bribed with no-exit stimulus money and compelled to accept it, private charities subsidized or supplanted, universities, newspapers, schools, churches, the family - everyone ensnared in the influence of Washington and expected to dance its tune, and none permitted to stand against the one, singular set of value judgments imposed by the cultural and economic Left. The push to insert the federal government far more deeply into health insurance and health care is now the critical inflection point. Health care involves a person's most basic, private, intimate, familial and life-and-death values and relationships. "Health" can be and is used, by the Left, as an excuse to regulate everything else - the argument being that if the taxpayer's involved in your medical care, Uncle Sam has a financial interest in whether you smoke, wear a seatbelt, own a gun, eat fast food, watch too much television, etc., etc., etc.
We sometimes hear the much more modest ambitions of the Right - prohibiting abortion, maintaining existing legal definitions of marriage - described as if they were some sort of massive conspiracy to meddle in other people's private lives. Libertarians complain, in the same-sex marriage debate, that really we'd be better off if the government was out of the marriage business entirely. But of course, such things are inconceivable as long as the federal government keeps expanding - with ever more programs directed at 'families,' government is incapable of staying neutral on how to define a family, as it would in a nation with more liberty and less government. On issue after issue, we get cultural flashpoints precisely because government has already moved in and set up shop, and is now just quibbling over the price.
For all of that, there is still, out there in the public, a fair amount of sentiment in support for the traditional American way of life - having liberty and taking personal responsibility for your own decisions, the bad ones as well as the good ones. But what that public sentiment is missing is a leader. A lot of the burden of speaking out on the issue has fallen on older right-wing war horses like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, but while Rush and Newt are formidable spokesmen, neither holds elective office or is likely to again. And the battered Beltway GOP has lost many of its leaders and most of its authority on size-of-government issues. That's one reason why so many hopes have devolved on the next generation, the 50-and-under Republicans, many of them in state government or in the House: Sanford, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey.
Among that younger generation, Sanford stood out as the most experienced, and has compiled a strong record not only of principle but of public integrity, from leaving Washington after three terms in Congress to battling his own party back home over spending. It's too early to pick a horse for 2012, but a lot of us had already put valuable time and energy into studying up on Sanford and promoting his views: I'd interviewed Sanford and written up a long profile of him when I could have been doing something else with my time, just as I'd pored over video clips of him last summer. Erick Erickson stuck his neck out during Sanford's absence, passing on his staff's explanation about being on the Appalachian Trail. Even to those of us already jaded about politicians, Sanford seemed, however quirky, to be a true believer in the good fight and a solid if unexciting guy to possibly line up behind.
And Sanford betrayed us, just as he betrayed his family; he lied to us and wasted our time. But that's not what is so frustrating - it's that at a time and place when the nation desperately needs champions of our traditional liberties, he was one of only a few people who could really have made a difference. To read his emails to his mistress, you can sense that Sanford was in the hold of a deep infatuation, and any of us who have been lovesick teenagers can understand that, but the man's not a teenager; he's a married father with responsibilities not just to his family and his State but to the nation as a whole. He's not easily replaced, and the American people will be poorer for his abandonment.
The Left, of course, sensing the removal of an obstacle to ever-greater social control, is ecstatic at Sanford's downfall. It's amusing to watch, given that these are the same folks who told us a decade ago that an executive's affairs - even felonies committed to cover them up - are nobody's business and only the concern of people with some sort of mental problem (I believe it was Sid Blumenthal who argued that anyone remotely disturbed by Bill Clinton's affairs must be a closeted homosexual), but then they always just assume nobody remembers what they said back then, having no principles but the pursuit of power. The convenient excuse is that it's only hypocrisy when Republicans act immorally, on the theory that Democrats don't believe in right and wrong anyway, an argument whose counter-factual nature and fundamental depravity I have dealt with at length before and won't rehash here. Republicans, while we may disagree among ourselves about precisely the impact of Sanford's affair, aren't switching sides on this the way the Democrats do, and have all but unanimously written him off for the office Clinton once held; nobody is planning a pep rally on the Statehouse lawn to celebrate in his honor. (I had more thoughts on the significance of marital infidelity to executive and legislative roles in this post on John McCain last fall).
The fight to preserve the American people's independence from Washington control will continue. But for now, the people will have to fight on without one of their best leaders. Shame on him for that.
POLITICS: Questions That Have Very Obvious Answers
This is from Obama's press conference yesterday:
President Barack Obama on Tuesday squared off with the insurance lobby over industry charges that a government health plan he backs would dismantle the employer coverage Americans have relied on for a half-century and overtake the system....
"If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care ... then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?" Obama said in response to a question at a White House news conference.
"That's not logical," he scoffed, responding to an industry warning that government competition would destabilize the employer system that now covers more than 160 million people.
As usual when Obama has to respond to a serious criticism, he acts like a snarky left-wing blogger rather than a serious adult, throwing off a one-liner that seems to his die-hard supporters like a clever parody of Republican arguments but doesn't stand up to even the most minimal of scrutiny. Typically, it's pointless to debate whether Obama is being astoundingly ignorant or deliberately mendacious; the point is that no sane person could defend his response. Daffyd offers a long list of screamingly obvious ways in which the private sector would be unable to compete with a government plan even though the government plan is inefficiently run, including the obvious-to-everyone-but-Obama fact that a profit-making enterprise has to make a profit, whereas a government agency or government-sponsored entity can afford to lose money pretty much indefinitely (Francis Cianfrocca points out to me that the proposed new healthcare GSE, which he refers to as the Consumer Health Management Corporation or "Charlie Mac," would start with something on the order of $10 billion in capitalization, many multiples larger than the market cap of even large insurers, and with an endless credit line from Uncle Sam). There is even - you may know this, but presumably Obama does not - a whole body of antitrust law dedicated to preventing large companies in certain circumstances from driving competitors out of business by undercutting their prices to sell at a loss, then jacking prices up when the competition is dead and buried. Profit-making private entities don't actually act like that very often, for obvious reasons: but governments can and do, at the taxpayer's expense. As Phil Klein notes, one of the main arguments by supporters of the government plan is that it will use its vast size to obtain cost savings at the expense of health care providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, all of which are presumed to continue providing the same level of goods and services without regard to profit motive), cost savings that far smaller private insurers could not obtain. That's an argument Obama himself has made repeatedly, yet he now professes ignorance of it. Because, of course, he retains at all times the confidence that nobody will ever call him on this sort of thing.
I don't read interviews with Bruce Springsteen all that much anymore - although Bruce's music is still mostly only vaguely political, as I discussed at some length back in 2002, in recent years he's gotten sufficiently actively partisan that I prefer to just listen to the music and tune out the politics. But this interview has some telling (if in a few places overly grandiose) musings on the thing that - other than the music itself - I've always loved and admired about the Boss, and that's the fact that the man truly gives a damn about connecting with his audience, and works at it, which is why he remains the best live showman in the business:
The idea of a show was delegitamised [in the late 60s] through that bohemian notion of selling out, which I always felt was somewhat misguided. Because once you're onstage, you're in a show, my friend, whatever you're doing. There's certain kinds of people I wouldn't want to see put on my show, because it's not who they are. But the idea - and it remains a good one, and a bridge to your audience - was putting on a show with the intent of reaching a deeper level of communication and getting at a deeper truth.
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An excited audience is an exciting audience. The audience is a very decisive factor in our show. It is a place of communion, that's the point. You are in concert, truly, with the audience - they're the other instrument you're playing.
That's something I've learned and studied since I was very young from the very first band I was in, The Castilles. It's a survival mechanism. We played to all kinds of audiences - supermarket openings, drive-ins, to all black audiences, to all rocker audiences ... And we knew how to survive in each situation by reading that audience and, within the realm of what you wanted to do, reaching them. So I go out at night, I know everything I can know about the instruments I have onstage. I go out every night cold about the most important instrument - the audience. It makes it interesting.
Perhaps the single, common life goal of every intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, and intellectual aspirant, is to be a true Renaissance man - a genius whose force of will and flexible, dominating intellect allows him to master or nearly master not one or two, but a whole host of related and unrelated fields of study and practice.
Sadly, not everyone can be Leonardo da Vinci or Karol Wojtyla. Or Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan, who has worn dozens of hats in his lifetime, is truly unique. He stands astride the worlds of politics, journalism, theology, foreign policy, and applied obstetrics like the Colossus of Rhodes. A former editor for The New Republic - a publication that benefited from his razor-sharp insights on, among other things, the early masterpieces of Stephen Glass - columnist-about-town for Time, the Atlantic, and various Fleet Street rags; a Ph.D in the works of Michael Oakeshott, recognized by true conservatives everywhere as the only conservative thinker of the last four hundred years; and an itinerant blogger whose once-eponymous site has migrated to Time and now the Atlantic, Sullivan is one of those Washington fixtures that fit unusually well on the late-night talk show circuit, as he himself likes to demonstrate. Like a real-life, hyper-garrulous Forrest Gump, Sullivan has been present for, or at least has shared his thoughts - stray, organized, rational, and delusional - on most of the major events of the last twenty five years, at a rate that has only increased since he began blogging (before it was cool) and taking long vacations after pledge drives (which has been cool forever). More impressive than his output is his utter lack of fear of self-contradiction, flights of laughter-inducing hyperbole, public obsessiveness, repeated self-contradiction, betrayals of utter ignorance, and failed attempts to mimic the Bard by coining bizarre neologisms to match his wandering moods.
Few among us have the raw intellectual firepower to go where he has. Fortunately, the internet tubes allow us to track his movements over time - an otherwise dizzying effort made more vertiginous by Sullivan’s kaleidoscopic mind. As with all things Sullivan, the best place to start is with human genitalia.
As a general matter, while I write a fair amount about national security strategy, I'm usually hesitant to wade into military tactics, a subject best left to the professionals. Even among those who know their stuff, military tactical decisions often involve difficult tradeoffs on which reasonable people can and do disagree, plus people who lack a military background (as I do) often make hilarious mistakes when attempting to lay out the facts of such stories, let alone dissect them, without running them by someone who knows their stuff. I'd prefer to avoid the kind of armchair generalship we had among so many on the Left during the Bush years who were hair-trigger quick to accuse U.S. tactical decisions of being (1) incompetent or (2) atrocities.
The top U.S. general in Afghanistan will soon formally order U.S. and NATO forces to break away from fights with militants hiding in Afghan houses so the battles do not kill civilians, a U.S. official said Monday.
The order would be one of the strongest measures taken by a U.S. commander to protect Afghan civilians in battle. American commanders say such deaths hurt their mission because they turn average Afghans against the government and U.S. and NATO forces.
Civilian casualties are a major source of friction between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. The U.N. says U.S., NATO and Afghan forces killed 829 civilians in the Afghan war last year.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who took command of international forces in Afghanistan this month, has said his measure of effectiveness will be the "number of Afghans shielded from violence," and not the number of militants killed.
McChrystal will issue orders within days saying troops may attack insurgents hiding in Afghan houses if the U.S. or NATO forces are in imminent danger and must return fire, said U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith.
"But if there is a compound they're taking fire from and they can remove themselves from the area safely, without any undue danger to the forces, then that's the option they should take," Smith said. "Because in these compounds we know there are often civilians kept captive by the Taliban."
McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, issued rules last fall that told commanders to set conditions "to minimize the need to resort to deadly force."
But McChrystal's orders will be more precise and have stronger language ordering forces to break off from battles, Smith said.
As the article notes, there are reasons why the U.S. military needs to be careful about civilian casualties, because casualties make us unpopular with the Afghan public and cause friction with the Karzai government. But then, the "Team America" image of left-wingers to the contrary, our military is always more careful about civilian casualties than it would be if it was 100% focused on killing the enemy. That's the nature of our military even without formalizing an order in the rules of engagement, and moreso when you consider the rules of engagement typically ordered in most circumstances.
But McChrystal's order strikes me as going way too far in taking us out of the business of fighting the enemy. First, we know full well that our jihadist enemies love to use innocent or captive civilians as human shields; that particular war crime is their standard M.O. and has been for many years (as it is against the Israelis as well) - I can recall that being their standard tactic at least as far back as Mogadishu. To give them a complete sanctuary by virtue of committing a war crime is a very bad precedent that diminishes the U.S. military's effectiveness - thus prolonging the war - and only encourages more of the same barbarity. Second, publicly announcing that the strong preference for not shooting at people hiding behind civilians is being codified in a hard and fast rule only gives the enemy more encouragement and advice as to how to nullify our forces.
McChrystal "has said his measure of effectiveness will be the 'number of Afghans shielded from violence,' and not the number of militants killed." Now, it was true in Vietnam and Iraq and is true in Afghanistan that enemy body counts alone are rarely the sole measure of success. You win by breaking the enemy's will to fight and belief that it can accomplish anything by fighting, and while attrition alone can occasionally win a war, in the usual course you have to demonstrate the futility of resistance in other ways as well. But in any military engagement, simply playing defense cedes too much initiative to the enemy, and an enemy with the initiative and secure places to hide can always talk itself into continuing the fight.
What finally worked in Iraq was a 1-2-3 punch - more U.S. and especially local troops, expanded rules of engagement, and a dedication to clear and hold areas of the country and deny safe havens among the Iraqi people. McChrystal's new rules, if accurately described here, seem to be a move in the opposite direction on both of the latter two scores, and a repeat of some of the less successful tactics tried in Iraq. That's bad news all around.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd recently gotten into the music of Kelly Clarkson. Well, I ended up digging up enough material on her to turn out a fairly exhaustive profile for The New Ledger of her formula for success and place in the culture (consider it a counterbalance to all the Bob Dylan content on the site). I've always had a soft spot for people who made a career path where one didn't exist before, and Clarkson isn't quite like anybody else in the music business. I also came to the conclusion that she is, with the exception of Justin Timberlake, probably the naturally funniest person in the music business.
[T]his incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.
As Bill Clinton might put it: it's the mullahs, stupid. Krauthammer, as always, looks at this from the broader perspective of regional/global strategic dynamics. The stakes, if the regime falls:
Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism -- leave it forever spent and discredited.
In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt -- was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.
Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception -- Iraq and Lebanon -- becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.
All hangs in the balance.
Krauthammer does oversimplify a bit; there are forces in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that are also crucial to the counterrevolution against democratizing and liberalizing the region. But in neither of those states do the reactionaries have full control of the government the way they do in Iran (internal Saudi and Pakistani politics being deeply Byzantine), and changing the Iranian regime would put those forces in a much weaker position within their own states in the same way it would isolate Syria.
Not that there's anything wrong with that; we conservatives have been standing up for Justice Scalia's view of the unitary nature of executive power - and the democratic accountability it promotes - for years. It's the people who blathered about it during the Bush years who didn't know what they were talking about, and now have to pretend that they were in favor of this kind of thing all along, much the way they only learned to despise the Independent Counsel when they found themselves on the receiving end of it.
In and of itself, there were already many reasons to be concerned about the Cairo speech, as Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Andrew McCarthy and Erick Erickson have all detailed at length - its factual distortions and omissions of history, its false equivalencies, its acceptance of the legitimacy of treating "the Muslim world" as a collective political construct superseding national interests or popular sovereignty, its contrast between Obama's deferential words towards Muslim nations with his meddling in the affairs of the world's lone Jewish nation. In the speech, Obama embraced the role of a defender of the Islamic faith, even going so far as to speak of where Islam "was first revealed," a statement that explicitly endorses Islam's claim to theological truth. Obama proved the old saw that a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument: on every issue on which there is a pro-American (or pro-Western or pro-Israeli) set of factual assertions and arguments and an opposing set of anti-American (or anti-Western or anti-Israeli) factual assertions and arguments, Obama accepted the anti- premises and ignored the pro-. Thus, as Peretz details, he accepted the notion that the State of Israel owes its legitimacy entirely to European guilt for the Holocaust, and wholly ignored the pre-1945 history of Zionism. Thus, he accepted the notion that the U.S. properly bears the baggage of historical guilt for the sins of Europe, while refusing to claim credit for the blood Americans have shed repeatedly for Muslim peoples. Thus, Obama blamed tensions between Muslims and the West on "colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims" - even though many of the core regions of the Islamic heartland (such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Levant) were either never Western colonies after the rise of Islam or were only briefly under British control between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Second World War. As a whole, while the speech's historical and political narrative departed from the pro-American view of the world, it dovetailed neatly with the views of Egyptian-raised scholar Edward Said, a professor at Columbia during Obama's time there and mentor to Obama's friend and Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi. (Perhaps that's one reason why Obama chose Cairo as his location and why he's taken every available opportunity to offer petty diplomatic snubs to the British in particular.) In short, Obama spent the speech accepting, rather than challenging, the views of his audience, and leaving to someone with a job other than President of the United States the task of defending the United States against the arguments made against it.
There is, of course, an argument to be made, and that has been made by Obama's supporters, in favor of giving such a speech. Certainly, if you want to persuade people, it's easier to do if you start your remarks by buying into their view of the world, even if this requires the embrace of demonstrable untruths. (The definition of diplomacy is the art of not speaking the truth). By setting himself up as the arbiter of two contending parties - America and the Islamic world - and above both, Obama banked on using his own personal popularity with Muslims to establish a separate brand identity, the Obama Brand (count the number of times the word "I" appears in the Cairo speech, as well as the references to his own biography), with a base separate and distinct from the American Brand with all its historical associations. As Andrew Sullivan expressed the argument, back in 2007, for the value of having Obama as a distinctive representative for America rather than an advocate for its values or a defender of its record:
A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man - Barack Hussein Obama - is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America's estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama's interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.
All of this raises a question. If the Obama Brand is to be sold to Muslim populations in various nations, to what purpose? What do we hope to accomplish by having an American President who is more well-regarded for his identification with the views of Muslims than is America itself? If Obama's charm initiative can pay some dividends to the United States, when do we collect them?
The Iranian crisis reveals the hollowness of the entire effort. Here we have a situation in which the truth is obvious: the Iranian people, a majority Muslim population, are being oppressed by their government. And in which the ideal outcome is obvious: anything that weakens the control of the mullahs over Iranian society is a positive, and with the legitimacy of the regime now staked on the victory by the odious Ahmadenijad, any outcome that undermines that victory is a step in the right direction.
Under a presidency, like that of George W. Bush, that single-mindedly pursued American interests and American values, the answer would be to speak that truth and lend public support to the Iranian people against the mullahs. That doesn't mean offering explicit support for Mousavi, the dissidents' candidate who is only slightly less a tool of the mullahs than Ahmadenijad, but it does mean acknowledging the legitimacy of the people's grievances. The downside if President Bush took that step is the risk of a backlash: that Ahmadenijad in particular could rally anti-American public support against the protestors by portraying the whole enterprise as an American puppet. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that backlash would be a serious problem (certainly the people behind the Iron Curtain always approved of Ronald Reagan speaking the truth about the oppressive nature of the regime they lived under), but it's the cornerstone of the Obama supporters' argument for why the President should keep out of this one.
But what if President Obama did it? If Cairo was about anything, if it was worth anything, if the Obama Brand could ride to the aid of the interests of the United States in a situation where a more explicitly pro-American president could not, Obama should be willing and able to put that brand to work in a situation where the obvious objective truth is that he was acting to favor the interests of an Islamic population. He should be able to draw on his personal favorability in a crisis when something real is at stake.
There are two possible answers to why Obama hasn't done that. One is that when push comes to shove, the Obama Brand in the Muslim world isn't actually worth anything when there are real stakes. That people everywhere are savvy enough to know that nations and peoples don't change their inherent interests simply because they've hired a new front man, that personalized diplomacy doesn't do anything to budge the basic dynamics of international relations, and thus that efforts like Cairo are just meaningless piffle in terms of their practical effect on America's ability to pursue its foreign policy objectives when there are opportunities presented to alter the status quo in our favor.
The darker possibility is that Obama views strengthening, rather than weakening, the Iranian theocrats as America's predominant foreign policy objective in this crisis, and thus he would regard action on behalf of the Iranian people as counterproductive. That case is laid out by Robert Kagan and Francis Cianfrocca. Low an opinion as I have of Obama, I'd prefer not to believe that he actually wants the mullahs to win, although Kagan and Cianfrocca make a compelling argument at least that Obama's strategy prior to this crisis was to offer more American-conferred legitimacy to the mullahs and Ahmadenijad as a carrot in arms control talks (the opposite of the Reagan strategy).
In either event, this much is clear. Cairo was only words, in a situation when words alone would mean nothing, cost nothing. When words could make a difference, President Obama won't speak them. The Iranian people aren't deemed worthy of change they can believe in.
I'm as disappointed as the next guy with how things have gone for the Mets this season, but I seriously can't believe people are starting to call for Jerry Manuel's head. I don't love Manuel as a manager, and yes, like his predecessor he's on some thin ice after a late-season collapse (albeit a slightly less epic one in 2008 than in 2007). But really, what more could the man have done this year? It's not Manuel's fault that Reyes, Delgado, Church, Schneider and occasionally Beltran have been injured. It's not Manuel's fault that Perez, Putz, Pelfrey and Maine have as well. It's not Manuel's fault the team has no legitimate corner outfielders, an overpaid, aging slap hitter at second base and little offense from the catching position. All things considered, this team could be doing a lot worse with all the adversity.
If anybody deserves to be sacked, it's the training staff. You can't eliminate injuries, but the Mets rather persistently seem to have trouble diagnosing them and getting people back in the lineup quickly without getting reinjured. Maybe that goes higher up the organization than the trainers, but dammit Jim, Manuel's a manager, not a doctor.