Here I am, arguing with Andrew Lazarus that the modern GOP really isn’t all that racist, when I read the news and get some cold water tossed in my face.

GOP Congressman from Kentucky, Geoff Davis, refers to Obama as “that boy”. Now my first reaction was, well that’s a little bit understandable, Obama’s young, this guy is probably one of those crusty old pols from the South in his 60’s or whatever, I’m not gonna over-react.

Then I go to Wikipedia. The stupid SOB was born in 1958. Obama was born in 1961. What a tool.

So yes, Andrew, there are racists in the GOP, even in the 21st century.

In spite of my “oh my God, it’s tax time, I can’t spend any money casually” mood that typically takes place during March and April, I did buy myself an autographed copy of Michael Yon’s book, ‘Moment of Truth in Iraq.’ It looks like there are still some available, so you may want to get one for yourself, and support Yon’s groundbreaking independent journalism.

The book is currently #47 in all books on Amazon, so you might consider getting it there and driving up the rating.

Michael is also asking people to recommend the book to their public libraries; I’ll do that tomorrow morning.

I haven’t had much bandwidth to blog at all, but have been reading with interest (and a little depression) the hoohah about God and guns that Obama has triggered.

Most of the obvious points have been covered, but I had a thought which I haven’t seen addressed, and it opens an interesting line of argument for me, so I thought I’d toss it out.

Here’s Obama’s original quote:

So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…I think they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is — so, we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American. So we’ll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

A firestorm erupted – predictably – and Obama responded:

“Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter,” Obama said Saturday morning at Ball State University. “They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they’re going through.”

“So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country or they get frustrated about you know how things are changing.”

After acknowledging that his previous remarks could have been better phrased, he added:

“The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation those are important. That’s what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don’t feel like they are being listened to.”

“And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream.”

My own take on it is well-covered by Big Tent Democrat:

Personally, I have never seen a pol say what Obama said. Political scientists, bloggers, intellectuals, ME, yes. But pols? Never. See, pols have a different job – get votes. Obama already has trouble getting white working class votes. This statement certainly does not help him. But I think he will ride it out – precisely because of his “Creative class”/Media Darling status.

and Mickey Kaus:

Because Obama’s comments are clearly a Category II Kinsley Gaffe–in which the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks–it will be hard for Obama to explain away.

Here’s another thought: Obama believes that the people he’s discussing – poorer, gun-owning, church-going economic left-behinds in rural America are bitter and negative toward government because it hasn’t delivered.

There’s an alternate hypothesis, which is that they don’t think it’s supposed to. That there are a solid body of Americans who believe – with whatever justification or historical validity – that government’s role is to leave them alone. I’ll bet that people who believe those things tend to migrate away from major cities or never move to them, tend to go to church a lot, believe in guns, and in American culture. They are – wait for it – culturally conservative.

I think liberals can reach them, should reach them, and must reach them. I think they can because I think there are ways to reframe the ‘values’ issues that have divided us, and because I think that there is a key issue to bridge – the perceived value of what those poorer, gun-owning, church-going folks in small towns actually get from the government.

I think that the grandparents of these voters voted solidly Democratic because they remember that they got electricity from a Federal program, and paved roads from a Federal program, and home, business and farm loans guaranteed by Federal programs. They might not have been comfortable with elitist East Coast politicians, but they had some concrete sense of what they got for voting for them.

I’ve asked for a long time what, exactly the Democratic Party has done in the last 20 years for a typical 35-year-old single mother who works as an administrative assistant in a big city. The answer: not a hell of a lot. Not anything I can think of.

To that I’ll add the question of what the Democratic Party has done in the last 20 years for the 35-year-old son of a factory worker who manages to get temp manufacturing jobs, alongside his wife, and tries to support his three kids doing it. He’s getting by because his dad had a great retirement plan and equity in his house. To him, the government wants to close his hunting areas to protect spotted owls, let his 14 year old daughter get an abortion without his consent, and charge him more and more for the priviledge.

So in a way, I’m agreeing with Obama – without the cultural baggage, which may be devastating to his candidacy.

What I hope to hear from Obama – and what will excuse his middle-class raised, Harvard-educated elitism to those folks is a simple statement of what he proposes to do for them. What’s the value they get from voting Democratic.

Because they’ve been ripped off for twenty years by parties in hock to the wealthy, who have tipped the economic tables in favor of capital, and the cultural tables in favor of Cambridge and Marin. A GOP that continues to tip the tables in favor of capital and substitutes Scottsdale and Buckhead certainly isn’t any better.

OK, we’ve had the endless debate about the “Top Ten Bands” of all time. Let’s toss some chum into the water and see what kind of a debate we can have.

Name the best ten musicians or bands that first recorded in 2000 or later. We’ll settle this by going to Amazon and using their dates as the definitive release dates…

UPDATE: Got the 50, thanks! The list is now closed.

Sorry to be so silent, but I’ve been heads-down at work on a v cool project. One of the features is a career profile test similar to one that typically costs $300 to take; we’re going to be taking the data from this and doing some cool collaborative filtering with it.

To test our math, we need a bunch (1,000 records) of real-world data, and we are 50 women (we need a 50/50 balance) away from having that. So if you’re a woman in IT, finance, or engineering (or know one), and want to take a test for free that will give you some interesting career insights (the results will go nowhere except to our testing lab), please email me at the address on the sidebar above with you first name, last name, and an email address. I’ll get back to you with login information for the test.

I’m working on a long post on Iraq that I’m confident will enrage people on both sides, but time has been scarce…look for it this weekend.

Good Guy veteran/lawyer Phil Carter moves his blog into the Washington Post site. It’s well-deserved good news for him and for us in the reading public. While Phil’s certainly a mainstream liberal – I always wish for more iconoclastic views – he’s a million times better than Arkin.

Congrats to the Post for landing him, and to Phil for continuing to be someone I learn from constantly.

The Washington Post says:

Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will disband his Mehdi Army militia if top Shi’ite clerics including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani order him to do so, a senior Sadr aide told Reuters on Monday.

Aide Hassan Zargani told Reuters that Sadr had told his representatives in both the holy Iraqi city of Najaf and also the Iranian city of Qom to ask top Shi’ite religious leaders for advice on whether to dissolve the militia.

“If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders,” said Zargani, who was speaking from Iran.

OK, a few interesting things here – first, it does seem to support the notion that Sadr’s forces didn’t do so well against the central governments; next the question of Iran’s involvement – and their interests – are going to be very interesting to ponder; next it means we’ll have a bunch of armed ex-militia guys wandering around to add to the Anbar crowd of newly unemployed gunmen.

In general, it seems very positive; the goal is a national government, and this is an important step on the way toward one. But I’ll watch things closely in the next few days.

John Quiggin posts on the issue of cease-fires again, expanding his focus because it appears that McCain made essentially the same argument that I did (yeah, yeah, whatever…I’m still not supporting him).

Now I’ve acknowledged that the facts on the ground (i.e. who asked for the cease fire, who has the upper hand) in Basra are too complex to submit to snap judgments such as the one I made (note that I’m not saying that ‘Maliki lost’). But Quiggin is misinterpreting the historical record and my (and McCain’s I guess) statements so profoundly that I can’t let it pass without comment.In his comments here and in his post, he confuses the issue of what happens when a side perceives itself in real time to have the advantage – and whether they are likely to offer a cease-fire and terms in that moment – with whether, with historical hindsight, they should have.

Now he does mention one case where he states the victor imposed a cease fire, India in the 1971 India-pakistan War. But a few minutes of Googling the historical record suggests that he’s wrong:

Dacca, December 14, 1971, 1250Z.

5637. Subject: Niazi Cease-Fire Proposal.

1. Lt. Gen. Niazi telephoned me at 1720 hours today to ask that I receive him urgently in my office. He appeared in company of Major General Rao Farman Ali and said that bombing of Dacca city this afternoon had convinced him that the fighting must be stopped immediately to prevent further bloodshed, even though, he said, his troops were still in good positions and were not in danger at the moment.

2. General Farman Ali had in his possession a rough draft of a proposal he wished me to transmit to New Delhi so that it could be communicated through Indian channels to the Indian field commander in East Pakistan. After some discussion, the following proposal was drawn up in the form of a letter to me, signed by General Niazi and his signature attested by General Farman Ali:

“In order to save future loss of innocent human lives which would inevitably result from further hostilities in the major cities like Dacca, I request you to arrange for an immediate cease-fire under the following conditions…

India set out a unilateral cease fire on Dec 16.

Back to Quiggin’s core point, there’s an old name we’re all familiar with for the latter, and it’s hubris – I’m sure the Mesopotamian had a name for it as well, so it antecedes the Greeks. It implies that overreach is a bad thing – in retrospect, when it has been seen to fail (Quiggin should read “Fooled by Randomness,” by Taleb, though).

Here’s Quiggin:

Even more relevant to the argument presented here are the many cases when initial success in war could have been followed by a cease fire and a peace deal on favorable terms, but was not, with disaster as the common aftermath. Two examples:

* At the end of 1792, the French revolutionary armies were everywhere victorious against the invaders of the First Coalition. Against the arguments of Robespierre and others, the government pressed on, converting a defensive war into one of unlimited expansion. When the fighting ended more than 20 years later, with the restored Bourbons replacing the Bonaparte dictatorship, the millions of dead included nearly all of those who had made the decision to go to war.

* After four months of fighting in Korea, the US/UN forces threw back the North Korean invaders. A peace at least as favorable as the status quo ante could easily have been imposed unilaterally at this point. Instead MacArthur invaded the North and brought the Chinese into the war, resulting in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by US forces (until the greater disaster of Vietnam). Three years and countless deaths later, the prewar boundary was restored.

I don’t deny that being strategically modest is a good thing; I’ll also suggest that the reality of history is that it has been made – and politics shaped – by the unreasonable and immodest.

We can shape our historicity (in Troillot’s sense) of war around the successfully unreasonable – hence overvalue heroism and aggression – or around the failures – and so overvalue prudence and surrender. Both (and neither) are true, and to flatly argue, as Quiggin does that one is simply misrepresents history.

Why does he make that mistake? Well, because he has strong feelings about war:

More importantly, the implicit analysis here, and in nearly all pro-war thinking is that of a zero-sum game, in which one side’s gains equal the other side’s losses. The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early cease fire will regret it in the end.

Hmm; so if the British had offered and Hitler had accepted a cease fire shortly after Dunkirk, would the world have been better off? Was Russia better off because of the Ribbentrop Pact?

I think we can go back through history and pick apart a number of cases where an early cease-fire would have been a disaster. Quiggin’s response is likely to be that by extending the timescale enough we can show that even winners in conflicts eventually lose. But, I’ll suggest they would have lost sooner if they had not been willing to fight.

Had our species evolved in a more collegial and less conflict-laden way, we’d be better off in many ways, I’ll certainly agree. But sometimes you have to take things as they are, rather than as you hope them to be.

It does look like my kneejerk reaction – that Maliki got the upper hand – may be a matter of insufficient data. Or at least the consensus across the moderate blogs seems to support that.

And there are more than a few reports that Maliki’s side opened the negotiations – which might support my contention in principle, but switches the outcome in reality.

Let’s hope we don’t have to wait for historians to sort this one out…

The Liberal Journal thinks it’s a shame that some pro-Hillary blogs are quoting Republicans. So does Brad at Sadly, No! “You know who you are,” says Nelson M. of the LJ.

With all due respect to these fine publications, perhaps they had better consider what this means about the extent to which pro-Hillary bloggers have been alienated by the relentless scorn, sanctimony, and contempt with which some progressive blogs have treated Hillary Clinton and her supporters during the last few months. For one campaign and one segment of the party to drive Clinton supporters to this level of disgust with their fellow Democrats is also no small feat—and nothing to boast about. I am not sure what further instances of finger-pointing are intended to accomplish. Perhaps it would be more productive to ask how a large number of Hillary’s supporters have reached the stage where they feel that their traditional enemies—even Scaife, even Karl Rove— are speaking more rationally, objectively and justly than our fellow Democrats. Matter for reflection, guys.

…from Buck Naked Politics: A Note from the Pro-Hillary Blogs to the Pro-Obama Ones

When the kind of anti-apostasy fury that is pointed at people like me is pointed at Hillary and her supporters, it’s not a good thing (note that I consistently think it’s a bad then when applied to people like me or Joe Lieberman…). I know that makes me a concern troll; then again it may make 40% of the Democrats out there concern trolls as well. Which kinda sucks, unless you’re John McCain.