Naturally, my pre-Thanksgiving turkey-bashing has proven controversial. But I would like to emphasize to readers and family members alike that leading food authorities support me on this. Here’s some Mark Bittman on the subject:

Let’s be candid: If turkey were not traditional at Thanksgiving it would probably be less popular than duck or goose, and we’d see a lot more capons in the market. [...] (I have yet to find a way to make turkey breast meat what you’d call delicious. If for no other reason, it’s why God put mayonnaise on this earth.)

Well executed, turkey can be okay. Which is fine. But it’s also the sign of a distinctly inferior food source. And note that you really never see turkey on the menu of a great restaurant — the world’s greatest chefs can presumably pull off something pretty good for an occasion that requires turkey, but they have no confidence in the ingredient.

Part of the effort to pull the wagon of conservatism out of the ditch into which Bush piloted the country is going to be an effort to deny that George W. Bush was a real conservative. In reality, Bushism should be understood as the highest form of conservatism. In particular, the High Bushist years of 2001-2006 represent the only time that the post-war conservative movement has had total control over the federal government. If the practical consequences of pre-Bush conservatism were less disastrous, that’s largely because conservative political power was more constrained in those earlier eras.

Meanwhile, it’s worth recalling that at the peak of his political power, when Bush was making his most disastrous decisions, conservatives not only thought he was a good president, but a great one. There was practically a line around the block to write paens to his genius. Here’s David Gelertner’s “Bush’s Greatness” from the September 13, 2004 Weekly Standard:

It’s obvious not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy. The “special quality” of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

Bush’s greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event–the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left us facing two related problems, one moral and one practical. Neither President Clinton nor the first Bush found solutions–but it’s not surprising that the right answers took time to discover, and an event like 9/11 to bring them into focus.

I hope to keep on revisiting some writings in this vein over the next few weeks, so if there’s any special pieces you recall or dig up, please get in touch (the form in the sidebar works) and give me a tip.

One impediment to streetcar construction in DC is that our local lords of historic preservation have decreed that there can be no overhead wires in the so-called “L’Enfant City” — the original planned City of Washington that includes the bulk of the offices and so forth. It’s worth pointing out that historic central cities in Europe seem to have no problem incorporating modern trams into their landscape. Here’s Berne:

And of course downtown Berne actually is historic, whereas the bulk of the L’Enfant City is composed of rather new and not-very-interesting buildings. A streetcar line to replace the heavily used north-south bus routes on 14th and/or 16th streets could be extremely useful and the lower operating costs would pay off relatively quickly on such heavily traveled routes.

E.J. Dionne says Barack Obama’s foreign policy might look a lot like George H.W. Bush’s. That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to those who recall that back in March Obama said he wanted a foreign policy like George H.W. Bush’s:

“My foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of in some ways Ronald Reagan,” he said Friday. A voter at the town hall in Greenburg had asked Obama to respond to charges that his foreign policy was naïve. [...] “Remember, people were saying why didn’t you go into Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein? The realists understood that that would be a nightmare. And it wasn’t worth our national interests,” Obama added. [...]

He described the conventional thinking in Washington on foreign policy as “bipartisan” and this “both ideological and highly political.”

That foreign policy he argued operated from the assumption that United States could act “as a lone super power” and said that “Senator Clinton is as captive to it in some ways as John McCain and George Bush.”

“I do think that Senator Clinton would understand that George Bush’s polices have failed,” Obama added. “But in many ways she has been captive to the same politics that lead her to vote for the war in Iraq. Since 9-11 the conventional wisdom has been you have to look tough on foreign policy by voting and acting like the republicans. And I disagree with it.”

Obviously, Obama seems to have warmed to Clinton’s approach to foreign policy since then. But the fact that he was putting things this way way back in March helps us understand the context in which giving positions to guys like Robert Gates and Jim Jones should be understood. Obama sees — correctly, in my view — this realist element of the Republican Party’s tradition as offering a useful corrective to the occasionally hubristic proclivities of some folks inside the Democratic coalition. For a while now there have been a lot of calls to try to produce a higher synthesis of realism with the liberal impulse — Futuyama’s “realistic Wilsonianism,” Robert Wright’s “progressive realism,” Anatol Lieven’s “ethical realism” — and Obama’s setting himself up to move in just this direction. One of my arguments in Heads in the Sand is that precisely such a synthesis has guided American foreign policy during its best moments.

Apparently someone’s opened a decent bagel shop in the DC area. Great news! I’ve now lived in DC long enough that I forget how much I like real bagels. But then I come back to New York for Thanksgiving and the whole sad little fantasy universe I’ve constructed for myself in which DC’s bad bagels aren’t a big deal collapses.

I don’t really know what to make of this Tariq Ali piece, but this here is a provocative point:

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

I don’t see any point in trying to get into a Kashmir-Tibet oppression olympics, but problems in Kashmir are real enough according to Human Rights Watch:

Violence erupted in Jammu and Kashmir after a state government decision in May 2008 to transfer uninhabited forest land to a Hindu trust to build temporary shelters during an annual Hindu pilgrimage called “Amarnath Yatra.” Once the decision became public knowledge in June, Muslim Kashmiris protested against the land transfer and the transfer order was revoked. This sparked off anger among Hindu Kashmiris. Demonstrations in the Jammu region have paralyzed the state in recent weeks.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir has been in conflict for the last two decades, and tens of thousands of civilians have died, caught between separatist militants and Indian security forces. While militants have been responsible for human rights abuses, Kashmiris have long complained about violations by Indian troops who go unpunished for serious crimes including extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances. The violence had reduced since 2003, but the recent protests show that the Kashmir issue is yet to be resolved.

You hear basically nothing about this in the United States. And surely Ali is right that the “instrumentalization” of concern for human rights is part of the story.