ThinkProgress Logo

Culture

Da Bulls

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 11:59 pm

Chris Mannix comes forward with a bold proposition: The Chicago Bulls will win an NBA championship in the coming season. It’s a bold prediction, but not one that he seems to have supported with very much argument. I agree with him that we can expect to see the team improve considerably, but it’s worth keeping the baseline in mind. The 2006 Bulls were a mediocre team at best, putting up a .500 record in the weaker conference. They were good defensively, but at sixth in the league not super good. And they were actually quite poor (22nd out of 30) on offense. Nothing they’ve done this offseason looks to me likely to dramatically improve the offense, and even if you think adding Ben Wallace would suddenly make them the best defensive team in the league a championship seems like a longshot.

I think that were one to be inclined to make a preseason wager, the smart bet is for a Miami repeat. Not necessarily because they’re the best team in the league. But I expect the post-Wallace Pistons to decline quite a bit, and don’t think anyone else in the East has improved to that level. So of the top four teams in the league, three (Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio) are all in the West which winds up making Miami’s odds look pretty good.

Security

Middle East Nuclear Dominos

By Guest Blogger on Sep 23, 2006 at 10:34 pm

Last week in an op-ed for the Boston Globe, I warned about Iran’s nuclear program and asked the following question: “The real danger is what happens next [in the region]. What do Iran’s rivals — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey — do if it declares itself a nuclear power?”

A partial answer to the question didn’t take long. The very next day, Gamal Mubarak, the son of Egypt’s president, announced in a public address that Egypt should begin its own nuclear power program:

The carefully crafted political speech raised the prospect of two potentially embarrassing developments for the White House at a time when the region is awash in crisis: a nuclear program in Egypt, recipient of about $2 billion a year in military and development aid from the United States, and Mr. Mubarak succeeding his father, Hosni Mubarak, as president without substantial political challenge.

Simply raising the topic of Egypt’s nuclear ambitions at a time of heightened tensions over Iran’s nuclear activity was received as a calculated effort to raise the younger Mr. Mubarak’s profile and to build public support through a show of defiance toward Washington, political analysts and foreign affairs experts said.

Egypt abandoned a nuclear weapons program in the 1970s and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But with the Bush administration’s weak support for the treaty, its recent sweetheart deal rewarding India for building nuclear weapons outside the treaty’s limits, and its failure to contain the Iranian program, Egypt seems to be recalculating its own nuclear options.

How long until others follow suit? And how bad will it get before the administration admits that its radical strategy for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons has instead accelerated their proliferation?

– Joe Cirincione

Yglesias

Now With Data

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 5:47 pm

tower.jpg

David Bell offers up some information on France’s alleged ignorance of American history: “Of the roughly 100 French universities and graduate centers in the humanities, fewer than ten presently employ any historians of the United States at all. The principal French center for North American history, CENA, currently has 46 members and associates, of whom less than a third hold full-time faculty appointments. By contrast, the North American Society for French Historical Studies has 886 members, of whom the large majority hold full-time faculty appointments teaching the history of France.”

France’s population, conveniently, is almost exactly one fifth of the United States’ so it’s easy to see that even when you scale up, NASFHS is substantially larger than CENA. On the other hand, I believe CENA is an actual institution (like Harvard’s Center for European Studies) rather than a professional association, so I’m not sure how comparable this is at the end of the day. But, to return to my original point, French higher education and American higher education are so different that it’s hard to know how to generate legitimate comparisons. Generally speaking, though, American higher education is widely regarded as the best in the world along a variety of dimensions, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see that American universities really do cover France substantially better than French universities cover America.

The flipside would be that at the primary and secondary level, French kids seem to receive a pretty strong level of instruction in the English language, whereas American foreign language education is famously weak.

Media

Chris Wallace Never Asked A Bush Administration Official Why They Demoted Richard Clarke

By Judd Legum on Sep 23, 2006 at 5:17 pm

Wallace head shotDuring his interview on Fox News, Bill Clinton asked Chris Wallace how many times Wallace asked a Bush administration official, “Why did you fire Dick Clarke?” By all accounts, Clarke was one of the people most concerned about al-Qaeda in any administration. Shortly after taking office, the Bush administration demoted Clarke, eliminated his staff and removed him from the Principals meeting.

Since 2001, Wallace has interview the top national security officials from the Bush administration — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley — 42 times. According to a Lexis-Nexis database search, he never asked any of them why Clarke was demoted.

The one time he brought up Clarke’s name with a Bush administration official — during a March 28, 2004 interview with Rumsfeld — he repeatedly attempted to smear Clarke as political motivated and untrustworthy. Some excerpts:

WALLACE: I think a lot of people in Washington are trying to figure out, to understand Richard Clarke, to make sense of what he has said and of apparent contradictions in his story — is he telling the truth, or is he pushing an agenda.

WALLACE: Let’s switch, if we can, to a different aspect of this. There is a move now by congressional Republican leaders to declassify Clarke’s testimony before one of their panels in 2002 to see whether or not it contradicts what he is telling the commission and what he writes in his book now. As I understand it, the Pentagon has to approve any such declassification. Do you think it’s a good idea?

WALLACE: Do you worry at all that, whether it’s the debate over Dick Clarke’s credibility, his charges, whether it’s the fact that we’re in the political season, that the important work you say the commission could do is going to get caught up in partisanship?

After Clinton brought up the issue, Wallace claimed “we asked” and shot back “Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday, Sir?“

Media

Fake Inconsistency

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 3:47 pm

I have various points of agreement and various points of disagreement with this review, but let me note its deployment of one of the world’s most annoying rhetorical tropes:

Recall how during the 1990s, it was taboo in liberal circles in the United States, Canada, or Western Europe even to suggest that the Balkan wars might be the result of centuries-old ethnic hatreds. That was wicked conservative realism voiced by morally indifferent Republicans such as Brent Scowcroft, and denounced with eloquence by progressive internationalists such as Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power. I made speeches to this effect myself when I worked for Human Rights Watch – insisting, with Kantian moral certainty, that wars are never ascribable to ancient ethnic hatreds (Yugoslavia), and that there can be no peace without justice (Sierra Leone), and that impunity always rebounds (Chile). The progressive position was that ascribing the Yugoslav wars to ancient ethnic hatreds rather than the manipulations of present-day politicians was an immoral and cynical ploy to avoid getting involved. Today, on the other hand, a card-carrying liberal realist such as the Democratic Party’s Kos Moulitsas can write, “It’s clear that in the Middle East, no one is sick of the fighting. They have centuries of grudges to resolve, and will continue fighting until they can get over them”.

Ha, ha — that crazy left, always changing its mind! But, look, Samantha Powers, Michael Ignatieff, and “the Democratic Party’s Kos Moulitsas” are different people. By contrast, there are only two political parties. Consequently, a bunch of people who are all “liberals” or “Democrats” or what have you are bound to disagree about a bunch of things. For evidence that people are changing their minds, or changing their tunes, or becoming hypocrites, you need to identity actual individuals who changed their minds, not different people disagreeing with each other.

Yglesias

Torture as Investigation

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 3:04 pm

Vladimir Bukovsky:

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

It goes on, including tales of Bukovsky’s own experiences as a victim of Soviet torture and deserves to be read in its entirety. But this here is essentially the key point at hand. While you can obviously imagine or gerrymander or stipulate a situation in which torture might yield useful information, in practice the systematic authorization of torture creates an army of butchers, not a crack investigative team. Bush, Cheney, and those around them remind me of Nietzsche’s line about staring too long into the abyss. They’ve become transfixed, hypnotized almost, by the evils they believe themselves to be fighting. Obsessed to the point where they’ve clearly developed an admiration for the brutal methods, ruthless dishonesty, and utter secrecy with which the enemies of liberalism conduct themselves.

But these things they’re so eager — determined, really — to cast aside aren’t frivolous luxury to be abandonned in times of peril. They’re the very essence of what makes our system of government work. They’re what makes it worth preserving, as a matter of ethics, but also as a matter of practice vital to the preservation of our way of life. Liberal democracy isn’t a fluke occurrence that just so happens to have survived despite its drawbacks. It’s actually a superior method of organizing a state. The idea that the country is being run by people who don’t understand that is sad and frightening. The idea that the very same people claim to be embarked upon a grand mission to spread our system of government around the world is like a horrible tawdry joke, but doubly frightening in its own way.

Media

Chris Wallace Has Never Asked A Bush Administration Official About The USS Cole

By Judd Legum on Sep 23, 2006 at 2:39 pm

Cheney FoxThe USS Cole was bombed on October 12, 2000. As Clinton noted in his interview with Fox, “The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that Bin Laden was responsible” until early 2001 which foreclosed the possibility of a full response during his administration.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, had 8 months prior to 9/11/01 to respond to the USS bombing and did nothing.

In an interview to air Sunday, Fox News Host Chris Wallace asked Bill Clinton why he didn’t respond to the USS Cole. Clinton said it was a “legitimate question” but challenged Wallace: “I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked why didn’t you do anything about the Cole.” First, Wallace responded, “we asked.” When pressed further by Clinton, Wallace demurred: “I — with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.”

Neither Chris Wallace, nor his predecessor, Tony Snow ever asked anyone in the Bush administration why they failed to respond to the bombing of the USS Cole, according to a Lexis-Nexis database search. Wallace and Snow have had plenty of opportunities:

– Vice President Dick Cheney has been on Fox News Sunday 6 times.

– Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been on Fox News Sunday 9 times.

– Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been on Fox News Sunday 23 times.

– National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley has been on Fox News Sunday 4 times.

For the record, this was Bill Clinton’s first solo appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Yglesias

[Expletive Deleted]

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 12:29 pm

Good to see macho posturing coming to the Department of Education. Lurking inside this Inspector General’s report (PDF):

Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR, never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags.

Via Andrew Rotherham.

Culture

American Exceptionalism

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 23, 2006 at 12:18 pm

Darrin McMahon observes that “Whereas you can go to almost any small college in America and find, say, a professor or two of French or German history, you will be hard-pressed to find a professor of American history anywhere in France or Germany.” Kevin Drum puts this in the “things I didn’t know” file. Yesterday, I made some vague efforts to ascertain whether or not it’s true, at least as applied to France where I sort of speak the language. It was a bit hard to say. At ENS one of the thirteen historians on the faculty is an Americanist.

Delving beyond that, though, I couldn’t really tell what was going on. The truth of the matter is that the American system of higher education and the French system of higher education are very different so I don’t even know what a valid comparison would be.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up