A video.
Starring Miley Cyrus.
Monday, September 09, 2013
"What it do?..."
An Ongoing Discussion/Moment of Clarity.
words.
"The Administration’s case for making Assad pay is as practically flawed as it is morally defensible. The war-weary American people overwhelmingly oppose it, and the debate in Washington is not winning them over to President Obama’s side. There’s also a problem with the debate itself: Obama seems to be reserving the right to ignore Congress if it fails to deliver the verdict he wants, which has led Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, to accuse the Administration of “making a joke of us.” In the meantime, a number of Republicans talk about the Syria crisis as if it were an overseas extension of the debt crisis—another chance to thwart a President they despise. The geopolitics of military action are just as problematic: the United States, supported by a handful of mostly silent partners, is upholding a collective standard single-handedly, and preserving the mission of the United Nations by ignoring it.
...There’s an easier case to be made for doing nothing—letting the war burn on for years. That policy would have the virtue of being clear and consistent, which cannot be said of what the Administration seems poised to do. But fires are hard to contain. The conflict is already spreading to Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps the wider region. In the end, there’s no way for a conflagration in the Middle East to spare American interests."
THE NEW YORKER: Limited Options
words.
"The Administration’s case for making Assad pay is as practically flawed as it is morally defensible. The war-weary American people overwhelmingly oppose it, and the debate in Washington is not winning them over to President Obama’s side. There’s also a problem with the debate itself: Obama seems to be reserving the right to ignore Congress if it fails to deliver the verdict he wants, which has led Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, to accuse the Administration of “making a joke of us.” In the meantime, a number of Republicans talk about the Syria crisis as if it were an overseas extension of the debt crisis—another chance to thwart a President they despise. The geopolitics of military action are just as problematic: the United States, supported by a handful of mostly silent partners, is upholding a collective standard single-handedly, and preserving the mission of the United Nations by ignoring it.
...There’s an easier case to be made for doing nothing—letting the war burn on for years. That policy would have the virtue of being clear and consistent, which cannot be said of what the Administration seems poised to do. But fires are hard to contain. The conflict is already spreading to Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps the wider region. In the end, there’s no way for a conflagration in the Middle East to spare American interests."
THE NEW YORKER: Limited Options
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Friday, September 06, 2013
maps.
words.
"He’s there in every corner of Congress where a microphone fronts a politician, there in Russia and the British Parliament and the Vatican. You may think George W. Bush is at home in his bathtub, painting pictures of his toenails, but in fact he’s the biggest presence in the debate over what to do in Syria.
His legacy is paralysis, hypocrisy and uncertainty practiced in varying degrees by those who want to learn from history and those who deny it. Let’s grant some validity to the waffling, though none of it is coming from the architects of the worst global fiasco in a generation.
Time should not soften what President George W. Bush, and his apologists, did in an eight-year war costing the United States more than a trillion dollars, 4,400 American soldiers dead and the displacement of two million Iraqis. The years should not gauze over how the world was conned into an awful conflict. History should hold him accountable for the current muddy debate over what to do in the face of a state-sanctioned mass killer.
...Until the Syrian crises came to a head, we had yet to see just how much the Bush fiasco in Iraq would sway world opinion. We know now that his war will haunt the globe for decades to come. Future presidents who were in diapers when the United States said with doubtless authority that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction will face critics quoting Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney with never-again scorn.
The parallels are imprecise and many degrees apart: Iraq was a full-scale invasion, Syria is a punishment. But there it is — the Bush hangover, felt by all..."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Bush Burden
Capitol.
words.
"...I think it’s important to realize how badly policy failed and continues to fail. Right now, Washington seems divided between Republicans who denounce any kind of government action — who insist that all the policies and programs that mitigated the crisis actually made it worse — and Obama loyalists who insist that they did a great job because the world didn’t totally melt down.
Obviously, the Obama people are less wrong than the Republicans. But, by any objective standard, U.S. economic policy since Lehman has been an astonishing, horrifying failure."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Years of Tragic Waste
Puttin' on the Ritz.
words.
"...One of the main problems with proposed American military action in Syria is Washington’s inability thus far to control its message internationally. The minute Obama began proposing strikes in response to the use of chemical weapons, much of the world’s news coverage, not to mention the political blame game abroad, shifted from Assad’s culpability to the prospect of U.S. “aggression.” And somewhere there, in limbo, it remains.
There are a good number of people in the world who still believe that Syria is telling the truth with its denials of using chemical weapons, and that the United States is simply lying about what it knows. This is a real problem for Obama, and one that must be tackled head on.
The disconnect is eloquent testimony to the degree to which the U.S. has undermined its own credibility in the wake of the false W.M.D. claims made in the run-up to the war against Saddam Hussein a decade ago. In the succeeding years, it has become a globally shared perception that the U.S. had other reasons to invade Iraq—that it has never come clean about its real motivations. With the ongoing N.S.A. revelations in the air, there is a sense that the United States is an all-seeing, all-knowing power, determined to preserve its hegemony.
...If, on the other hand, Putin and Assad’s other backers cannot be prevailed upon to bring him around—and, sadly, it seems unlikely that they will—then what we will have instead in Syria is a larger and more dangerous war, with unforeseeable consequences. The U.N. announced this week that a third of Syria’s population is now displaced by the war, with two million refugees calculated to have fled to neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon. It has become, officially, the worst refugee crisis in the world. That’s a reality that no state of denial or conspiracy theory can erase."
THE NEW YORKER: Putin and the Syria Conspiracy-Theory Problem
Schoolin' Life.
words.
"...I thought about Tom the other day, while I was watching my fourteen-year-old twins play soccer. It was the day before school began, but they had already been going to J.V. soccer practice two hours a day for nearly two weeks. I wondered what would have happened if their math teacher had tried to call them in two weeks before school started to hold two-hour drill sessions. My sons would have been livid, as would every other kid in their class. Perhaps even more significant, I suspect that parents would have complained. What was the math teacher doing, trying to ruin the kids’ summer? And why should they have to make a special trip to the high school so their kids could study trig identities?
That American high schools lavish more time and money on sports than on math is, I know, an old complaint. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my own experience with high-school sports was limited to being cut from the tennis team.) But, as another school year starts, it is a lament worth revisiting. This is not a matter of how any given student who play sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities.
...One of the ironies of the situation is that sports reveal what is possible. American kids' performance on the field shows just how well they can do when expectations are high and they put their minds to it. It’s too bad that their test scores show the same thing."
THE NEW YORKER: Have Sports Teams Brought Down America’s Schools?
Thursday, September 05, 2013
whatzupwitu(?).
For your consideration...
ROLLING STONE: Listen: Eddie Murphy and Snoop Lion Unveil Laid-Back Reggae Single
ROLLING STONE: Listen: Eddie Murphy and Snoop Lion Unveil Laid-Back Reggae Single
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)