The cheap thrills always seem to fade away:

— This US-India nuclear deal from years back has always struck me as bizarre.

— Cato says drug reimportation will undermine foreign price controls not import them to the US.

— Michael Cohen thinks Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacy was a small price to pay for stepped-up labor market regulation.

— John Boenher’s lack of vision.

— Wall Street and climate change.

— Maybe Pakistan understands its own threat environment perfectly well.

— What happens when Irish parliamentarians stop being polite and start getting real.

Today WOXY went back in time and played their top 30 songs list from back in 1994. Was an awesome year for music featuring, among others, Toad The Wet Sprocket’s “Fall Down”.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable. For example, here’s Steven Pearlstein on minority leader Mitch McConnell:

The bad Mitch, as most Americans know by now, is the charmless and shameless hypocrite who offers up a steady stream of stale ideology and snarky talking points but almost never a constructive idea. McConnell has decided that the only way for Republicans to win is for President Obama to lose, and he will use lies, threats and all manner of parliamentary subterfuge to obstruct the president’s programs.

Pearlstein contrasts McConnell with the good Mitch, Mitch Daniels, “a principled but practical conservative who respects the intelligence of voters and would rather get something done than score political points.”

One can only imagine how Republicans could have reshaped health-reform legislation in the Senate if it had been Mitch Daniels rather than Mitch McConnell running the show, striking deals with the White House and moderate Democrats to win concessions in exchange for a pledge not to filibuster.

I think this is largely right, but I agree with Ezra Klein that it vastly underrates the structural issues at work: “Governors have to make their state work. Minority leaders have to win seats in the next election. Telling this story in terms of good people and bad people doesn’t give enough weight to the structural incentives that make people of all sorts do good and bad things.”

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

Something that I don’t think is well-understood in the American conversation is that Pakistani perceptions of what’s going on are very divergent from the narrative that exists here in the states.

For example, Shahid R. Siddiqi had a piece in the Pakistani paper Dawn earlier this week arguing that Barack Obama’s plan to have US forces leave Afghanistan in 2011 to be replaced by an Indian garrison is doomed to failure:

The US-Indian belief that India can hold the fort for the US in Afghanistan is a fallacy. The Afghans being fiercely opposed to foreign occupiers, it would be naïve to expect that Indian forces would be welcome to stay after the Americans withdraw. Notwithstanding the support of the Northern Alliance and Karzai’s weak government, The Taliban, who are bound to gain political influence in Kabul sooner or later, will reject Indian military presence on their soil, as it will represent American interests.

Now this argument seems sound enough, except you may be wondering what this plan to have India “hold the fort” is. But as he explains:

The announcement by President Obama that his administration would begin to pull out its troops from Afghanistan after 18 months has given rise to apprehensions in Pakistan that he may install India as a proxy power to protect US interests.

Motivated by its sinister designs to weaken Pakistan, India is actively promoting an East Pakistan style insurgency in Balochistan. Once its military gains a foothold in Afghanistan it will squeeze Pakistan from the western border, while using rogue elements from the tribal belt, which it has already recruited, to destabilise Pakistan. Ample evidence of these activities was handed over to Indian prime minister by his Pakistani counterpart.

As far as Americans are concerned, this is crazy talk. And, indeed, it’s crazy talk. But the existence of the crazy talk is a reality, and it seems to me that US policymakers don’t have a real plan for it. I keep hearing that one objective of the war is to reassure the Pakistan government that they don’t need to cut a side deal with the Afghan Taliban to secure their interests in the region. But what you hear from Pakistanis is that the US, Hamid Karzai, and India (and possibly domestic insurgents in Pakistan) are all in cahoots.

Apparently John Bolton deems it objectionable to cite conflict-reduction as any kind of worthwhile aspirational value:

BOLTON: He says we have to acknowledge the hard truth we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. Well, no kidding. You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence. Doing it as a primary means of subsistence, as opposed to a hobby, has become even more marginal. Doing it with stone tools is even more marginal, though it does of course still happen.

In much the same way, the murder rate in contemporary industrialized societies is dramatically lower than what it was before the industrial revolution. And as Benjamin Friedman observed in his post on Obama’s speech, the reality, documented by the Human Security Brief, is that both interstate and intrastate wars have become rarer and less deadly in recent decades.

These are important elements of human progress. Whether or not it’s ever possible to truly eliminate violent conflict will have to remain a subject for speculation, but violent conflict has been massively reduced in the recent past and all signs point to the possibility for future large reductions. There’s a real danger than an attitude of cynicism will create self-fulfilling prophesies of violent conflict and renewed superpower rivalry.