See the update below…

Laura Rozen has his own response to the controversy and explanation of his withdrawal. And I’ll tell you that based on this one paragraph alone, we dodged a major bullet today:

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

I received no emails from AIPAC nor any Israli or Jewish organizations. I’m perfectly capable of reading the man’s recdord and raising my own concerns.

Even when he tries to exculpate himself – as he does in this ‘explanation’ of his comments on Tienamin Square – he presents himself as a tireless courtier for typrants wherever they may be.

For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy.

I hope Obama gets a genuine iconoclast in the role. But I’d like one not in the pocket of other countries, please – especially of other countries led by murderous tyrants. We must, by necessity, share a planet with them. But I’d rather not share my government with them.

Update: … it just gets better and better. Go check out Martin Kramer’s blog and read about how Freeman flatly misrepresented Saudi interviews with jihadi who – Freeman claimed in Congressional testimony – joined the jihad to fight Israel and then were diverted to Afghanistan (or Iraq, it implies). Kramer check the source, and…not so much.

…from the ever-fresh genius of Berke Breathed, back in the go-go 1980’s (I can’t find the exact date, or I’d link to it in his library).

Saturday night, after seeing Watchmen with TG and LG, I commented on Facebook that it was a “magnificent disaster.” After letting it sit for a few days, I think I’ll let that stick.

Why?

Really, two reasons.
First, because simply the acting was horrible (not helped by the dialog which was lifted directly from the comic and not smoothed to make it sound like real humans were speaking). With the exception of Jackie Earle Hayley, who was magnificent – as good as Cagney in ‘White Heat’ – even though I kept seeing Mooch when he spoke (my problem, I’m a ‘Breaking Away’ fanatic), the acting was consistently subpar.

Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Patrick Wilson (Night Owl II) needed to be realistic people – part of the story is how they fall in love – and just weren’t. When you see Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, you see something in him that makes you believe that he really could be going out at night and kicking bad guy ass. Wilson left me remembering that I need a new accountant.

The problem extends throughout the movie; no one except Hayley really feels like a grounded character at all.

That works for Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, because he’s playing an archetype, rather than a person (he also gets the grin-inducing line of the film, when he says “I haven’t had this much fun since [I’m assuming he meant to say “I killed”] Woodward and Bernstein.”)

And that’s the other problem – the core problem – with the film.

Great comic-book movies break into two groups – the fantastic (‘300’, ‘Sin City’, ‘Kill Bill’) and the realistic (‘Spiderman’, ‘Batman Begins’, ‘The Dark Knight’). the realistic films are real human dramas that involve situations that require CGI. The fantastic films are not human dramas, they are about the conflicts between archetypes that we can nontheless relate to – Leonidas, The Bride, Hartigan.

Watchmen tried, I think, to stand in the middle of that gap, and failed on both counts as a consequence.

It’s a magnificent, ambitious, failure. It’s probably worth seeing if you love visual spectacle and can relax about story and character. If you loved the comic, you’ve already seen it, so I’m not writing to you. But if you haven’t, in these hard times, I might consider picking up the graphic novel instead and saving $20.

Others have commented on the politics of the movie; it’s a period piece politically, but it’s worth remembering that the archetypes in the story (even if badly presented in the film) do have something to do with what America is about. They don’t represent all of it, by any means at all. But the comic was powerful because it was archetypical and because we see those in our national character.

Dispassionate science, and the power that comes from it. Casual brutality (read ‘Born Fighting’). The desire to help, and somehow make the dark and chaotic world a better place.

–

You’re kidding me…

The Telegraph has a column up about how Obama’s lukewarm reception was explained by the fact that Obama is simply exhausted.

Let’s put that aside for a moment, because buried in the article is this quote:

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

I’m going to go knock my head against the wall for a little while…

I just wrote my Congresswoman, Jane Harman, to ask her to aggressively support the IG investigation of Freeman’s appointment as Director of the NIC, and I’d suggest you write yours as well.

I’ve been reading Freeman’s writings and listening to his speeches. Here, Freeman talks about Taiwan and China.

Now I don’t see what he suggests as somehow outside the bounds of policy discourse; but I interpret this as saying that he believes that it ultimately is our interest to support the reintegration of Taiwan into China. For a variety of reasons (many of them set out in Robert Kaplan’s article in the current Foreign Affairs), I think that a China that divides its attention between Taiwan and the Indian Ocean is a China that I’d personally be happier with – and one in a situation that better suits the interests of the United States.

Here’s is Freeman talking about Iraq, in late 2007.

Note that – even on the tail end of the success of the Surge, he’s talking about a level of disorder and rick of civil war that have – in the months since his speech – declined dramatically. Iraq is certainly not “done” but it’s certainly on the road to there. If we had adopted his policies and announced withdrawal in 2007 – instead of pressing forward with the Surge – would Iraq be better or worse off? Would US interests in the region be better or worse off?

And here’s Freeman talking about Hamas (the opening audio is choppy, but it gets better)

Again, Hamas is ‘besieged’; they are a passive victim of outside forces. But my favorite is that “while Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, they do recognize that Israel does exist”. Not a word about the murder of Fatah political rivals; not a word about the plunder of aid that is then diverted to military resources.

And, I’ll point out Martin Kramer’s neat catch of Freeman’s reversal on the meaning and role of Israel in Middle East politics:

How important has resentment of Israel been to Al Qaeda’s terrorism? Here is one side of the argument, by an American who knows Saudi Arabia well:

The heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friends that on Saudi TV there were three terrorists who came out and spoke. Essentially the story they told was that they had been recruited to fight for the Palestinians against the Israelis, but that once in the training camp, their trainers gradually shifted their focus away from the Israelis to the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and to the United States. So the recruitment of terrorists has a great deal to do with the animus that arises from that continuing and worsening situation.

And here is the opposing view, by an American who knows the Kingdom equally well:

Mr. bin Laden’s principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

So now you’ve heard two sides of the debate. Who made the first statement? Charles “Chas” Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Obama administration’s nominee to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Who made the second statement? Charles “Chas” Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Obama administration’s nominee to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC).

The first quote dates from January 2004, the second from October 1998. The difference between them is 9/11, when it became the Saudi line to point to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as the “root cause” of the September 11 attacks. The initial promoter of this approach in the United States (well before Walt and Mearsheimer) was Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed. “At times like this one,” Alwaleed announced a month after 9/11, “we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause.” That statement led then-mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani to return a $10 million check Alwaleed had just presented to him for a special “Twin Towers” relief fund.

There’s is no question that Freeman is a smart and experienced man. But there are questions about his vision of America and America’s interests.

Now the defenders of Freeman’s views – most recently James Fallows – point out that he’s a ‘call it like he sees it’ contrarian. Quite possibly, and that’s a good thing in many cases.

But in this political environment – are his views all that contrarian? Really?

Possibly President Bush would have been well-served by having someone like Freeman in the intelligence process. But I’ll suggest that President Obama isn’t likely to be.

–

In the City of Los Angeles, a labor union and environmental coalition assembled an ill-considered effort to have the public utility add electricity from rooftop solar and add a bunch of really highly (over?) paid union jobs.

It appears that the measure was defeated (a good thing, for a lot of reasons). Here’s LA Mayor and 2010 Gubernatorial candidate (if you disagree, want to bet?) Antonio Villaraigosa’s response:

As Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Measure B seemed poised for a narrow defeat Wednesday, he held out hope that uncounted votes would save the solar-energy proposal.

“I hope it passes, but if it doesn’t even those who are opposed to it said we should move ahead with the solar program, notwithstanding the vote of the people,” Villaraigosa said. “I agree.”

So – remind me why we bother to have elections, again??

Note that it was a front-page quote in the local Daily Breeze, but I can’t find it anywhere on the Los Angeles Times website.

So a few people mentioned that we’d broken their RSS feeds when we upgraded.

True, and sorry about that – I’m not sure what we could have done (although I welcome people using this as a teaching moment and telling me in the comments).

But we’ve dropped from over 900 sbscribers in Bloglines to 2 today (including me). So you may want to consider resubscribing, using the url on the bottom of the lefthand column.

By the way – what do people think of the changes??

The look is still a little cluttered and messy (we’ll work on that), but in terms of function??

One of my “guilty pleasure” movies is the James Caviezel version of ‘The Count of Monte Christo.’ There are a few great scenes in it; in one Caviezel, having gathered the wealth left at Monte Christo by Abbé Faria, sits morose in a carriage with Jacopo (played to perfection by Luis Guzmán). When asked why, with his newly wealth, he isn’t happier, Caviezel explains that he wants vengeance. Jacopo answers

“Why not just kill them? I’ll do it! I’ll run up to Paris – bam, bam, bam, bam. I’m back before week’s end. We spend the treasure. How is this a bad plan?”

“How is this a bad plan?” is now a standard phrase in our house…

There’s another line which was pretty sharp as well.
Caviezel has just swum from the Chateau d’If, and washed ashore on an island beach were a group of pirates is camped.

The leader of the pirates explains that he must fight and kill one of the pirate group or be killed himself. And then explains that: “Oh, and by the way, Jacopo is the best knife fighter I have ever seen.”

Caviezel replies, with a perfect deadpan – “Perhaps you should get out more…“

I had exactly that thought – perhaps they should get out more – reading Yglesias and Will Wilkinson writing about the problem of income inequality today.

Yglesias realizes that we can’t raise enough money via taxing the rich to really balance income inequality. His response?

The most important thing is to just have lots of tax revenue. Public expenditures are pretty progressive in their impact everywhere, and the difference between a very progressive and a not-so-progressive system is mostly that the more progressive ones are bigger. So while liberals have no reason to give in to conservative demands to make the existing revenue scheme less progressive – by adopting a flat tax, say, or replacing the income tax with a consumption tax – there’s very good reason to basically be looking for revenue by any means necessary. If it’s easier, politically, to get some center-right politicians on board for new consumption taxes than for higher income taxes, then it’s incumbent on progressives to walk through that door and take the revenue.

Wilkinson amplifies the point, in a post delightfully called…wait for it…’Will Coddling the Middle Class Kill Obama’s Plans?‘ Here’s the key graf:

So Yglesias is right (though he doesn’t quite put it this way). Democratic strategists need to be looking at clever ways for the government to take a lot more money away from middle-class families without thereby making the GOP look golden again. Obama’s been behaving as though he’s much less fiscally constrained than he really is. But by catering to the idea that middle-class taxes shouldn’t ever go up, he’s making it even tougher on himself. Unless he’s in the middle of some kind of ten-steps-ahead rope-a-dope wherein reaffirming the middle class’ right to not pay taxes is a way of softening them up to accept huge tax increases, he may be making a mistake.

Now I don’t begin to have an idea of when Yglesias is being serious or not, and Wilkinson is someone I’ve read a few times – not enough to make any judgment about whether the colossally lame post above is a brain fart or a core belief.

But I have one comment to both of these fine gentlemen – perhaps you should get out more…

Look, I’ve written a bunch about inequality – most centrally in 2002 in a post Google archived here (right now www.armedliberal.com exists only as a tar file, sadly – I’ll get it reposted sometime soon)

Look, you can’t have enough traffic police to enforce the laws everywhere. So obedience to traffic rules comes from two sources: First, a sense of “correctness”; a belief that the rules make sense, that we all benefit from the rule being followed, and that others will also follow the rule; Second, fear of punishment, either through direct consequences (an accident) or through the actions of other citizens or agents of the state (being threatened by someone you cut off, or being cited and fined by a police officer).

It ought to be obvious that the first source works better than the second. It works all the time, regardless of the state of enforcement; it is internalized so that each driver can freely respond to current situations. I’ll argue that it is morally better, as well, because it treats each driver as a responsible actor, rather than just a subject for enforcement.

But the first source depends on something which is in ever-shorter supply; a sense of the legitimacy of the rules, and a sense that one is connected to the others who are also bound by those rules. So why not run red lights?

Habra and Schaar each have a different vision of why legitimacy is in short supply; they are rich and difficult to summarize, so I won’t right now. To those, I will add the simple fact of inequality as it exists today (and here I’ll poach from Montesquieu as noted by Bertram, above).

I’m talking about a level of ‘Gilded Age’ inequality that gives us Lizzie Grubman and all she represents, a sense of separation, entitlement, and inheritance which is mirrored by the people who read about her and are convinced that modern American society is structured for people like her, and not people like them.

The kind of separation between people in the SkyBoxes and the rest in the cheap seats.

And the consequence isn’t just bad views or a mild sense of disengagement between classes. It is a profound corrosion of the relations that tie society together, as those in the SkyBox decide that they are above the law, and those in the nosebleed section see no reason to obey, as the law does nothing for them.

So as the light turns yellow, they just gun it, and the rest of us just have to be very, very careful because we are the ones they hit.

I believe passionately that we have to reduce the level of inequality – in wealth, income, and power – in this country.

But to me that means we grow the middle class, not try and hammer it with taxes just as the global hand is wiping it flat into Neal Stephenson’s Pakistani mud.

How do we do that, if we’re not going to follow the suggestion above and just have everyone work directly or indirectly for the state?

Well, for one, we can sit down and look hard at the rules which we’ve allowed to be continually rewritten from the late 60’s through today to advantage capital and disadvantage labor, to advantage investment income over earned income, to tilt the tables away from the working middle class and toward the politically wired wealthy and powerful.

I’m sensitive to the need to make investment more attractive than consumption; neither am I insensitive to the need to make investment more attractive than speculation.

‘Cause we’ve seen how well we do in an economy built on speculation, rather than investment.

Government doesn’t need to put men on the field to play the game; it just needs to take it’s role as a ref seriously.

That’s “smart power,” paid for with “smart taxation.”

Here’s the conclusion to his – great – piece in SWJ, “Crunch Time In Afghanistan-Pakistan”:

To conclude, it might be impolite but it’s certainly not inaccurate to say that our policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan have, until early last year, been marked by woolly and wishful thinking, and a tendency to seek quick, neat solutions to intractable, messy and long-standing problems. The vital requirement now is to be clear-eyed about what we need to do, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. We need to be straight with the American people and our allies (including Afghans and Pakistanis) about this.

In Afghanistan, we have an immediate crisis to deal with. We need to stop the rot and regain the initiative before we can hope for long-term progress. That progress will come at a cost, and it will involve the four key tasks of preventing another 9/11, protecting the Afghan people, building sustainable institutions and then handing-off the effort to them.

In Pakistan, we need to stop asking ourselves the question “Is Pakistan an enemy or an ally?” Pakistan is NOT the enemy. But we have enemies – as well friends – in Pakistan. We need to identify those friends and enemies, and empower our friends to deal with our enemies. This is a classic diplomatic strategy, and an essential enabler for it is to build a willing partner in Pakistan – something that will mean, amongst other things, that we need to help Pakistani civilian politicians gain control over their own national-security establishment, and we need to impose a much more stringent set of limitations on strikes into Pakistani territory.

Things aren’t hopeless, but they are extremely serious. This is the critical year: the situation is still salvageable, but we must act now to put the AFPAK enterprise onto a sound footing before it’s too late.

Go read the whole thing, right now.

Then read TM Barnett’s reply.

I’m working on a piece on Afghanistan, but I have a few books to read first.

–

A conference in Kansas City. Food is eaten.

Oklahoma Joe’s wins handily. Arthur Bryant’s loses handily. Others are close.

I need to go to Kanas City, I fear…