Saturday Open Thread [8.9.14]
My Delaware season tickets should be coming soon. I better check on that. Especially since Delaware seems to be on the cusp of becoming a Division I school. Over the next few years, they are scheduling more games with the ACC, including games against Virginia Tech, Wake Forest and Pittsburgh.
The only thing funnier than those who (despite widespread mockery) continue to support the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Leadership is the phenomenon of the same people freaking out when the president assumes “leadership” to address a big problem.
Nobody is a bigger Green Lanternist than National Journal’s Ron Fournier, for whom the president, like God, is held responsible every time a sparrow falls to the ground. He’s now warning Obama not to take unilateral executive action on immigration policy. The Prospect’s Paul Walman skewers Fournier for blaming the “polarization” that might ensue on Obama alone; we abundantly know by now that savage GOP opposition to Obama will be at maximum levels no matter what he does or does not do.
From the primaries in Tennessee and Kansas, the narrative is that the Tea Party lost. Bull. The Tea Party always wins. Always. Paul Waldman:
[Y]ou might conclude that that the Tea Party is waning, beaten back by a Republican establishment determined to rid itself of this meddlesome faction. But the truth is that in some ways the movement continues to get stronger. The Tea Party wins when it wins, and it wins when it loses. Five years after it began and long after many people (myself included) thought it would fade away, it continues to hold the GOP in its grip. For a bunch of nincompoops prancing around in tricorner hats, it’s quite a remarkable achievement.
Talking Points Memo on why ISIL (ISIS)(Levant) has been so successful, and why they can be easily pushed back: the cowardice of the Iraqi army and Iraqis generally.
ISIL is successful because they understand that Iraqis will run in the face of boldness and brutality. If it’s a small outpost they defeat it, hold the site and link up with resupply from Mosul. The spear head forces now fighting the Kurds are the best of their group. A massive defeat on ISIL could decimate their professional spearhead of veterans and break the image of invincibility. Just one drone and a Special Forces forward control team with a B-1 bomber package with could do that with ease. However, absent US airpower on the offensive, it’s up to the Iraqi air force to strike as they cluster.
ISIL was allowed to thrive because Iraqis really had no love of their country. They have a love of their ethnicity, but not of country, which tends to happen when artificial lines are drawn on a map by imperialist occupation forces over the centuries, whether they be Ottoman, British, French or American.
It seems the location for the 2016 Democratic National Convention is down to Philadelphia or Brooklyn. Brooklyn seems to be the favorite, for obvious reasons (Hillary).
Tea Party as unstoppable and inevitable force in American politics? Look around, do you see the Baggers on either coast? Foaming away in Sussex perhaps but not a statewide force. The Baggers are powered by billionaire bucks and old white racists and homophobes, not much more. Sure, they may be around for another decade but the times they are a changin’, old white people livid with hatred or not.
True, but they still control one party and one House of Congress, and will continue to hold one party and one House of Congress for the foreseeable future. That gives them a seat at the table to throw temper tantrums.
Regarding Iraq, ISIS, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all of the other “istans”‘ I think there is some truth to the damage that arbitrary line drawing did. Some have argued that the line drawing was designed to keep those countries at each other’s throats so as to divert them from expanding their influence or reach outside their respective borders or the larger region. Maybe but it really gives too too much credit to the British.
Maybe the fix to the historical line drawing errors is to let them talk it out, exceedingly unlikely, or fight it out on their terms and by themselves. The problem, no matter which course they persue, is that they’ve tied religion into their understanding of statehood. Very hard to stop killing when your God is telling you to forge onward.