reflectivepundit

Someone Should Tell Bush What "Appeasement" Really Means

by David Epstein

The discussions so far of the outrage caused by Bush's remarks in Israel center around the President's breaking the norm of not conducting domestic politics on foreign soil. What has received less attention so far is the fact that Bush is using words that he -- and his speechwriters -- apparently doesn't know the meaning of.

Read the statement in question again:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

The senator in question is William Borah (R-ID), and if you know what you're talking about, then the word you expect to hear describing his comment is "hubris," not "appeasement." To appease someone is to concede something to them in return for the expectation of future concessions; this was Chamberlain's mistake in the Munich accords. What Borah was suggesting was -- well, it's hard to know exactly what he was thinking of, but he certainly wasn't saying that we should have bought Hitler off in return for promises of good future behavior.

So what should we make of Bush's remarks? Do they mark a shift in US policy that we will no longer have talks with bad guys since this is nothing more than appeasement? Will we break off all communications with North Korea tomorrow? Will we disavow the negotiations with Libya that recently bought us success? Of course not -- no one expects Bush to make sense any more. And it's probably better that way; we're much better off for the next eight months having the rest of the world ignore all of Bush's comments regarding US international policy.

By the way, Bush's stupidity has a ripple effect on all the right-wing drone commentators -- they don't know what they're talking about either. One of them got called out, hilariously, by Chris Matthews here.

Clinton's Argument in a Nutshell

By David Epstein

With her big victory in West Virginia, Hillary has reminded the punditocracy of her considerable strength in certain sections of the country. Yes, West Virginia is overwhelmingly white and Protestant, but more important than that, it's also one of the states that Democrats lost narrowly in the last election.

And this, in a nutshell, is the crux of Hillary's argument to the superdelegates. Take away all the race-related aspects of the situation for a moment and just concentrate on a simple truth: to win in November, Democrats will have to do well among the states in play; the swing states, that is -- those states that were the most evenly divided in the past two elections.

To determine which candidate is best equipped to win in the swing states, I took the primary results to date, dropped Michigan, and compared Hillary's percent of the vote vs. Obama this year against the percent won by Kerry in 2004. As the graph below shows, there is a clear trend: Clinton is strongest in the swing states, and Obama is strongest both in states that Democrats won handily last time, and in those states that they lost heavily last time.

Clinton is especially strong in the big swing states. Look, for instance, at the states which were within 3 percentage points of being split 50-50 in 2004. Twelve of these states have had their primaries to date, and Clinton has won 8 of these to Obama's 4, representing 114 electoral college votes to Obama's 36.

This is not to gainsay Obama's obvious strengths as a candidate, or his proven ability to get support from voters of all races. But it is the superdelegates' job to pick the candidate most likely to win in November, and in a race that's a virtual dead heat in the popular vote -- after the West Virginia results Obama leads 50.3% to 49.7% -- there's a strong swing state argument in favor of Clinton's getting the nod.

Hillary versus Barack: Gender Bias Stronger than Racial Prejudices

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Mothers Day seems the perfect occasion to bemoan the now obvious fact that I was wrong all along to assume or hope that this was the year in which Americans would finally elect a woman to the highest office in the land. Had I not ignored the lessons of history, I would have avoided the disappointment over what is now inevitable—that another man—Senator McCain or Senator Obama and not a woman--will be sworn in as the next president of the United States. After all, African-American males got the constitutional right to vote many decades before women--regardless of their race. Little wonder, then, that contrary to every day life bias against strong and successful females has been more pervasive than prejudices against black males, when it comes to competitive advantage in politics, business, education, the arts, and other walks of life.

The deeply seated bias against and the subsequent stereotyping of successful women struck me the other day, when I read a story about the fall of Zoe Cruz, the most successful female Wall Street executive, who had been in line to become the boss of the investment firm Morgan Stanley.  These are a few excerpts of Joe Hagan’s excellent article: 

”Of all the recent firings on Wall Street, Cruz’s is the one that’s still vehemently debated… The fascination comes from the fact that Cruz is a woman, and that she had climbed further up the Wall Street food chain than any other woman ever had. She was fired at a time when women on Wall Street were starting to wonder—after more than a quarter-century of getting M.B.A.’s and slugging it out in the firms’ trenches—when one of them was finally going to make it to the CEO’s office… 

From the beginning, she had the uncompromising ferocity that seems to be characteristic of nearly all women who achieve great success.

Cruz was more “alpha” than most of the women she started out with at Morgan Stanley. She wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Wall Street, especially at the time, was dominated by men, but she was determined not to acknowledge it. She loved the game, and she was good at it—she didn’t see what her gender had to do with it.”

If that sounds a lot like the portrayal of women who manage to climb up the ladder in local, state and, particularly, in national politics, the reactions of males (and, I assume, some of their female collaborators) at Morgan Stanley is even more revealing in understanding the fall of Zoe Cruz and the failure of the once favored Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Pundits Close to Get their Dream Contest: McCain versus Obama

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The pundits, the correspondents, and the boys and girls on the bus(es) on the roll for John McCain and Barack Obama are now close to realize their dream for this election year: media darlings McCain and Obama will face each other in November. While the stars of television, print, and blogosphere rejoice, I couldn’t stop laughing when I read Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times article “Pundits Declare the Race Over,” in which he mentions Tim Russert and Walter Cronkite and the Drudge Report as if they were one of a kind. Nothing could be further from reality: Russert and Drudge are no Walter Cronkite! Nor are the other non-journalists among the fourth estate who love to call themselves “correspondent,” “journalist,” or “press.” But whether one likes it or not, today’s pundits have enormous power—because of their  perceived and real influence on the general public, on voters, and on the media-obsessed political class.

I wonder when the know-it-all guardians of our national interest will begin to second-guess their concerted efforts to demonize Hillary Clinton and their contribution to her now all but certain defeat. Soon, they will not have Senator Clinton to kick around any more to feed their constant stream of irrelevant but hyped up “breaking news” about the presidential contender they love to hate.

Without Hillary Clinton in the mix, the mainstream media and especially the cable networks' political infotainment casts will soon need to pick a Hillary substitute to keep their good-versus-evil campaign narrative going.

Much Talk, No Action on the Need for Energy Independence

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In his latest column in today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman addresses once again our dependency on foreign oil and the “need to do everything possible to develop alternatives…” I couldn’t agree more. This country’s dependency on oil imports and the leading petroleum exporters in the Middle East and elsewhere has influenced important aspects of U.S.foreign policy for a long time and, more recently, the so-called war on terror as well. Senator McCain was right, when he recently admitted—albeit inadvertently, what others said before—that oil was at the root of the Iraq invasion. Our leaders’ refusal to work towards independence from oil and invest in alternative energy sources is closely related to their ties to “big oil” authoritarian governments and to oil corporations—not only since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney moved into the White House. The current debate on the pro and con of a summer moratorium on the federal gasoline tax avoids once again a public debate about the larger problem, namely, to make the development of renewable energy sources one of this country’s top priorities.

For years, Tom Friedman and some of his colleagues have written and spoken in favor of changing our energy policies. But even the most urgent appeals were not heeded by our leaders. During the current campaign, the news media could have played a crucial role in elevating energy independence and related environmental protection to one of the major policy topics and forced candidates to spell out their positions in great detail. Instead, air time, column inches, and blogosphere posts have been devoted to superficial coverage of this important topic and irrelevant campaign incidentals. So far, the golden opportunity to fully inform and educate the electorate and force the candidates’ hands on putting energy high onto their agendas was missed by the media. And few seem to care—in spite of the rising price for gasoline.

I am convinced that nothing will change unless we, the people, take the lead. Most of us and perhaps all of us can make small and by now well-known but not yet widely embraced changes in our daily lives to save energy. If millions of car-drivers would embrace a “drive less this summer” habit, this would impact our gasoline consumption measurably. If millions would at least some of the time use public transportation instead of their own cars, this would decrease gasoline consumption as well. 

But more is needed, namely, a from-below movement for energy independence through clean and renewable alternative energy sources. The Internet is an ideal vehicle to start such a movement that would depend on the interest and enthusiasm of the young generation. One of my students wrote a term paper this spring on the “One Million Voices” demonstrations against the FARC in Colombia that began with an initiative on the social network site Facebook.

Why not try to initiate and organize along the same lines to create a movement for clean and renewable energy to free us from our dependence from petro-exporters and at the same time protects our environment?

I am hoping that a reader of this blog thinks along the same lines and takes the lead on this.