The Year In Takedowns

I stumbled across this post by the editors of Foreign Policy – “The year in takedowns.” Here’s their list:

10. Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Rosen’s profile of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in The New Republic.

I love that one, it’s totally sweet!

9. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on airport security

8. Stephen Holmes on Chris Caldwell for The American Prospect: “If Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached Europe’s defenses and created ‘beachheads’ behind enemy lines….Some may object that this way of seeing Europe’s immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense.”

7. David Rieff on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen for the National Interest: “It is hard to believe that the erstwhile-Harvard political scientist turned full-time moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.”

6. Barney Frank at a town hall meeting, responding to a protester who said he supported a “Nazi policy”: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?…Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”

Loved that one by Barney Frank!

5. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs

4. Jacob Heilbrunn on Ban Ki-moon in Foreign Policy

3. Rory Stewart in the London Review of Books on Afghanistan counterinsurgency jargon

2. Betsy Kolbert in The New Yorker on Superfreakonomics: “To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that SuperFreakonomics takes, even as its authors repeatedly extol their hard-headedness.”

We didn’t talk about the Superfreakonomics controversy on this blog, but it was big in the science blogs. Basically, the Superfreakonomics authors did a chapter on global warming and completely misrepresented the views of some scientists interviewed for the book. They also came up with the idea that it would be easier to cool the earth with sulfate aerosols than to make emissions reductions (which will do nothing at all to combat ocean acidification). This is actually pretty common in my line of work – I call it, it’s easier to do what you know least about. We know a lot about emissions reductions and we know the challenges. Sulfur aerosols seem so much easier because we know nothing about them. If you want more detail about the Superfreakonomics controversy, I recommend these posts by Deltoid, Real Climate and Climate Progress.

1. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora: “Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan.”

Perhaps “tough on terror” Cheney needs to be reminded of some of his big failures in fighting terrorism. This one, along with pulling our forces from Afghanistan to focus on phantom weapons in Iraq rank among some of the Bush administration’s worst mistakes.

The article also has some runner-up takedowns, including some of my favorites – Jon Stewart’s takedowns of Jim Cramer and Betsy McCaughey and Ezra Klein’s takedown of the Republican budget plan that had no numbers.

The Republican proposal, as you might expect, doesn’t actually have a health care plan. But it does have this: “Republicans will be on the side of quality versus mediocrity, affordability versus unsustainable debt, and freedom of care versus bureaucrats in control. And we will be on the side of patients, doctors, and the American people.” They are also in favor of good things rather than bad things, moving forward rather than going backwards, the hobbits rather than the orcs, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. That said, the GOP does understand that some voters might be looking for specificity on their health plan. So they included this graphic:

It’s like someone showed them a flowchart. Once. And only for a few seconds. And refused to explain it. My editor Ann Friedman just walked into the room. “It looks like they’re building a budget molecule,” she said.

A budget molecule. Maybe that’s what they were doing.

The posters and commenters at Balloon Juice had a great time with the Republican budget proposal, riffing on this Fark thread.