Henley's foresight pays off

Jim Henley takes a moment from his busy cable news/talk show circuit schedule to review some of the reasoning behind his decision to oppose the Iraq War before it started.

. . . you didn’t have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with Iraq made even less sense than driving home to East Egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. Any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out, each for different reasons.

. . .

What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.

Before the war, Henley was laboring in obscurity on his blog, raising doubts about the veracity of the government's reports and questioning the intelligence and sincerity of the government's most faithful supporters. And just look at him now!

steno yave: Atrios edition

I can't improve much on this:

For various reasons I've been rather uninterested in getting into the weeds of the Wright issue, though obviously it's the case that we've had decades of prominent and popular white conservative preachers blasting the evils of America and no one has much cared.

Aside from disparate treatment of left and right and black and white in our mainstream discourse, there's also a difference in the basic narrative provided. The narrative from the Right - and its representatives in the conservative religious community - is of an America which was once the garden of Eden, until its tragic fall at the hands of (feminists, liberals, civil rights movement, whatever), and they wish to bring the country back to its former state. Thus they can hate the America that is while dreaming of the perfect America that was. Thus there's no conflict between their unquestioned patriotism and their hatred of the country, as their patriotism is for the True America that was, not its current corrupted incarnation

While the mirror image rhetoric from the Left is about a country which was flawed, often tragically so, but which has the capacity for improvement. Be disgusted with the country as it was and is, while hoping for an evolution to a better country.

everyone knows nothing at all

IOZ, when not warbling about the transcendence of abstention, tells the story of Big Shitpile in a way we, the newly (or oldly) cynical, can understand:

Consider Bear Stearns, who was once as handsome and tall as . . . Well, consider anyway this throwaway line and quite common sentiment these days:

“The problem is bigger than the Fed,” said Meredith A. Whitney, an Oppenheimer financial services analyst. "Trillions of dollars of securities were underwritten on the false assumption house prices could never go down on a national basis. That falsehood has put the entire financial system in a tailspin."

Right. And we all believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he kicked out the inspectors, and oil would pay for the war, and there will be no permanent military bases. Ladies and gents, boobs and rubes, the falsehood Ms. Whitney--and plenty of others--identifies is a fine tall tale for house-flippers and the jerks who think they're going to hit it Buffet style on eTrade, but the people who run all those "financial services" know that there's no such thing as economic escape velocity. That which goes up must come down. Anyone who knew anything, admittedly a vanishing category these days, knew not only that housing prices could go down on a national basis, but banked on the fact that they would. The run-up was all smoke, mirrors and profit-taking, and the downturn, even in these early stages, will be all about the massive transference of wealth from the public coffers into the so-called private sector.

John McCain tips 9%

Yes, it’s true. Also:

• John McCain cheats at computer Scrabble.
• John McCain wants you to open a Roth IRA.
• John McCain reuses plastic utensils.

So does my dear grandma, but she doesn’t want to bomb Iran!

Via Yglesias.

an important point

From Yglesias:

Reacting to the news that the U.S. government has been supplying arms to the Palestinian Authority (so they can fight Hamas), the Armchair Generalist wonders "why is it that the Bush administration's first answer to every regional conflict is to throw more weapons into the mix? You'd think that, by now, they'd have figured out that hard power doesn't solve these long-term conflicts."

I think they actually do understand this pretty well. After all, if the conflicts were "solved" that would reduce the need for American weapons, and htus reduce the opportunities for American influence. The essence of the approach is to create a series of standoffs where our proxies have the bulk of the guns, but their enemies of the bulk of the legitimacy (in part because they're not serving as our proxy), and thus the guns-without-legitimacy side is able to maintain a permanently tenuous grasp on power that leaves them ever-more-dependent on external American support. The identity or background of the proxy doesn't really matter, and can include ex-insurgents in Iraq, the same Fatah groups we were trying to freeze out of Palestinian politics a few years ago, Iranian-backed Shiite parties in Basra, sundry Somali factions, whatever.

It’s a racket, and with the U.S. government as head racketeer. There's a lucrative side-effect of this process: our national arms exporting business helps keep client states loyal, which keeps the proceeds from weapons sales flowing back to the U.S., creating incentives for the U.S. to perpetuate the conflict—a self-reinforcing process.

It’s quite a scam when you consider that aggressive p.r. efforts to paint the U.S. as the godfather of global democracy lend the whole project just enough legitimacy to stave off complete collapse. People are starting to see this for what it is—modern imperialism—so we’ll see how long the U.S. can maintain the status quo.

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Via Nicolle--thanks for the tip!