This week's No Duh Moment from the GOP, and why they haven't got a prayer

Politico is not exactly the most high-brow publication out there. But today's article, "GOP reality check: Obama looking tougher to beat in 2012", if it's accurate, shows that the Republicans still really don't get it. The premise of the article is that the Republican optimism of the last two years that Obama would go the way of Jimmy Carter in 2012 was perhaps misplaced. Why? Well let's let the Republican frontbench explain it:

Mike Huckabee: “You just don’t go against a billion-dollar mountain of money, a guy who’s already won the presidency once – but he gets to fly in on Air Force One and make all his campaign stops with the trappings of the office.”

Haley Barbour: “Incumbent presidents don’t lose very often, particularly if it’s a president who has taken over from the other party.”

Chris Christie: “He proved he could win once, so that’s one more time than anybody else who has run.”

That last is a staggeringly stupid thing for a pretty smart guy to say. So never mind Obama's policy successes, never mind his statesmanship, never mind any of the man's actual talents. And also never mind the GOP's lack of coherent policies, lack of desire to govern rather than score points, lack of party coherence and above all lack of a candidate. Obama will win because he's already president. I mean, like, duh.

There are more sensible people who offer their opinions in the article. But, significantly, none of them are running for president. It seems like the smart folks in the Republican Party are sitting this one out. So who does that leave us with? Seems to me like a whole slate of not-yet-candidates who each have at least one big reason that they're unelectable. Here's my breakdown, for what it's worth:

England, England über alles...

Most days I spend my time wondering why America can't be more like Europe. Today is not one of those days. From The Guardian:

Huge numbers of Britons would support an anti-immigration English nationalist party [...], according to the largest survey into identity and extremism conducted in the UK.
A Populus poll found that 48% of the population would consider supporting a new anti-immigration party committed to challenging Islamist extremism, and would support policies to make it statutory for all public buildings to fly the flag of St George or the union flag.

Statutory?? It gets worse:

According to the survey, 39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that "immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country". Just over half of respondents – 52% – agreed with the proposition that "Muslims create problems in the UK".

The one thing that I have always found beyond disgusting in Europe is the casual xenophobia of a kind that, in my view, does not really exist in the United States (how do you have xenophobia in a country of immigrants?). But this is shockingly vehement. I mean, "all immigration into the UK to be stopped permenantly"? Really? Really??

Gens du voyage

Those of you in the UK will have heard about the Channel 4 TV show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, one of the more offensively racist offerings on UK public television recently. The Guardian has a moving piece on the lives of Gypsy and Traveler women in its lifestyle section today, and the effect that show has had on people's perception of them.

I often find myself thinking that there is not much development work to be done in Europe these days, outside of the truly poor countries in Southeastern Europe. But it strikes me that many of the issues facing Roma and Travelers are traditional development issues: things like poverty, illiteracy, education, violence, domestic abuse. I think there is also a large gap in understanding between gens du voyage (the French term for Roma and Travelers, which I like) and what the article calls "Settled people". Who of us could possibly identify with this kind of experience:

When Traveller girls are growing up, they are only allowed to go out with other family members, and once married, her husband rules the roost. "The men would never allow a woman out with her friends," says Kathleen. "That's why we want to live on a site, for company." Kathleen, after spending time in a refuge after finally managing to escape her husband, was initially allocated a house, as opposed to a plot on a site. Almost immediately her children became depressed. "It's like putting a horse in a box. He would buck to get out," says Kathleen. "We can't live in houses; we need freedom and fresh air. I was on anti-depressives. The children couldn't go out because the neighbours would complain about the noise."  

Please don't mistake  me - I do not pull that quote out for the sake of romanticizing Gypsy life or to talk about how they are naturally free spirits who should not be tied down or some other nonsense. I just think that someone who hasn't lived that way would have a hard time understanding what someone in such a situation would need, and what would be the best way to help them. This is really about being shut out of a world that doesn't see you as a part of it - what Žižek calls the part of no-part, the essential element of his definition of the Proletariat.There is hard, hard work to be done here - not to integrate gens du voyage into our world, but to expand our vision of the world such that it includes them.

Libya after Qaddafi

Slate does a pretty good job of laying out the challenges in a post-Qaddafi Libya (if we ever get there - which is no sure thing).

Unlike in Egypt, "the army" is not a coherent institution. Qaddafi took care to politicize the military and divide its commanders in order to prevent a coup or other challenges to his rule. Moreover, the army was involved in interventions, such as a disastrous war in Chad, that tarnished its credibility—its battlefield record is not a source of pride. So the military is less able to lead the country out of the mess.
Nor is there a bureaucratic structure that can simply resume basic government functions under new leaders. Qaddafi created one of the world's most bizarre governments, with "people's committees" playing important roles at the local level. Indeed, Qaddafi himself did not hold a government position in any formal sense, even though he was clearly recognized as "the leader." This personalized and politicized system is part of what Libyans hate; it should not survive its creator. But removing Qaddafi's regime demands more than just change at the top.

My suspicion right now is we're looking at a Romania-type scenario in Libya - Qaddafi is gone (in my view he'll probably get the Ceauşescu treatment), but all the old stalwarts of the regime are still in power. That's the game I see them playing with all of these resignations - people like the ex-Interior Minister can claim to have been opposed to Qaddafi all along and introduce a kind of pseudo-democratic one-party rule. But who knows at this stage - almost anything could happen.

The philsophical failure of the Left

Peter Hallward's pseudo-obituary of Neoliberalism in light of what he calls the Arab Spring of 2011 is a classic example of the Left completely failing to take the argument anywhere past banalities about people power and capitalist corruption. The points he makes are good:

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.

But this is nothing new. He hits all the usual Leftist buttons about the decline of American power and the war of imperialism against democracy, also proffering the kind of sickening praise of Hugo Chávez that seems mandatory on much of the Left. But here his critique seems simply to stop. He celebrates the uprisings in the Arab world without saying a word about what should come afterward - he decries the bank bailout without so much as hinting at an alternative.

Hallward is a political philosopher and one of Alain Badiou's protégés. He is part of the contemporary Leftist intellectual establishment. And he, like Badiou, like Žižek, has nothing positive to offer.

In my view this is the greatest challenge that the Left faces today. The collapse of the Soviet Union obliterated the philosophical argument for Socialism as a practical political-economic system, and the Third Way politics of the Blair and Clinton school only offered palliative care for those ground up in the gears of global Capitalism, rather than offering a challenge and an alternative to the existing economic and political order. We on the left have still not gotten past that. I believe task no. 1 for intellectuals like Hallward, Badiou and Žižek is to construct a program, a manifesto of concrete proposals that can be implemented to create a more just political-economic system. If the political theorists of the Left cannot do that, then what exactly are they there for?

Banksy on the Oscars

Banksy will not be allowed to attend the Oscars ceremony in disguise, sadly. But he is keen to win:

"I don't agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I'm prepared to make an exception for the ones I'm nominated for," he said, adding: "The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me."

In defense of teachers' unions

Slate has a great piece on former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose anti-union teacher witch-hunt was one of the reasons that Andrew Fenty lost reelection as DC's mayor. I've always been deeply skeptical of the anti-teachers' union argument - it strikes me that urban public schools have been so badly underfunded for so long that it's impossible to assess whether teachers are bad or not based on student performance, and if you just fire teachers without addressing the funding issue, you're not going to make any progress. This evidence backs this up:

If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven't charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire? Why did the nation's most comprehensive study of charter schools, conducted by Stanford University researchers and sponsored by pro-charter foundations, conclude that charters outperformed regular public schools only 17 percent of the time, and actually did significantly worse 37 percent of the time? Why don't Southern states, which have weak teachers' unions, or none at all, outperform other parts of the country?

The secret is that like every public spending issue in the United States, education funding is wrapped up in issues of race and segregation. So until someone can convince affluent whites to spend money on poor blacks, you're left fiddling around the edges of the problem. Which in my view is exactly what Michelle Rhee was doing - just in a particularly obnoxious way.

U-turn if you want to

Caroline Spelman announces a u-turn on the government's plans to privatize forests in England. Proof that if you fight these people hard enough in an organized way, you can get them to back down. Let's just hope that this is only the first of the government's unworkable policies to fall apart. This gives me hope in particular for a climb-down on Theresa May's draconian, probably unenforceable immigration proposals, which would do huge harm to British companies and universities (as well as to my own chances of getting back into the country...).

And the world changes

From The Guardian's liveblog of the events in Egypt:

Egyptian state TV has bowed to the inevitable and is just showing al-Jazeera's feed.

Pretty much sums it up, really.

"The Playboy of the Western World", J.M. Synge

The Playboy of the Western World is the most fun I've had reading a play in a good while. I often find good plays that don't read well, but this one certainly does - the lively, manic characters combined with the flowery Irish peasant-English makes it hard to put down. The language he uses is remarkable: take Christy's opening speech from Act II.

The Kremlinology of North Korea: "Furry Hat Offers Clues to Progress of N.Korean Succession", Chosun Ilbo

Chosun Ilbo reports that Kim Jong-Eun has now graduated to wearing the same kind of ugly, furry hat that his father does.

A senior South Korean government official last Friday said Kim Jong-un seems to have moved up to the same rank as his father. "The most conspicuous sign is that Kim Jong-un has started wearing a top-quality furry hat that only Kim Jong-il has been wearing so far," the official added.

A former senior North Korean official identified as Choi, who has defected to South Korea, said, "The hat was customized by a foreign master craftsman using top-quality otter fur. It's an unwritten rule that nobody else can wear such a hat, so if Kim Jong-un is also wearing one, it means he has now reached almost the same status as his father."

Just kind of underscores how little concept we have of what's going on in the North Korean government, don't you think?

Ted Haggard 2.0: " Is This a Face You Can Trust?" by Andrew Harmon

The Advocate's cover story on Ted Haggard's reincarnation as a kind of, almost gay-friendly preacher is an interesting read. His new relationship with The Gay is nothing new or interesting, but there's some good thoughts in there about what exactly Christianity is for. I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Ted Haggard, but his criticism of evangelical groups like the Christian Broadcasting Network and Focus on the Family is spot-on:

“The number 1 way they can raise funds is not to encourage people to be more loving, not to encourage people to be less greedy, or to encourage people to be more kind. It’s to say there’s a secret homosexual agenda to siege America, and fund us so we can battle this agenda, to save the family.”

That's my biggest problem, I think, with evangelical Christianity. It's not so much that I disagree with their beliefs, although I do. It's the charlatanry of it all.

"The Countess Cathleen" by W. B. Yeats

You've gotta love Yeats.

Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

"World War Z" by Max Brooks

As a bit of a break from proper literature in between the first and second books of the Raj Quartet I decided to pick up World War Z by Max Brooks, for some light reading. I was pretty disappointed - the prose is, of course, bad, but I don't necessarily mind that. The book is written as a series of interviews with different participants in the war, and each of them is a one-dimensional cardboard cutout; it is extremely uninteresting, although it picks up a little at the end.

"The Jewel in the Crown" by Paul Scott

When I went to India in Seventh Grade my grandmother and my parents bought me a whole load of books about India, all of them classics - Passage to India, Prince of Tides, a few others, and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. All of them have sat on my shelves unread for some time. The Raj Quartet books have been on top of my reading list for a while, but due mostly to the fact that there are four of them and they are large and heavy and therefore do not travel well, I did not have much occasion to read them. I finally decided, however, to hunker down and do it. And having finished The Jewel in the Crown, I am extremely, extremely glad I did so.

"Armenia: Egypt Events Energizing Opposition in Yerevan" by Marianna Grigoryan

News from Eurasianet.com (the best website ever) of the Egypt Effect spreading to Armenia:

Inspired by recent developments in North Africa, Armenia’s largest opposition coalition is preparing for “large-scale rallies” in Yerevan’s Freedom Square starting on February 18.
The government’s public response to the announcement by Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress (ANC) has been muted. But official actions suggest that authorities are taking the potential for an “Egypt Effect” in Armenia seriously. Soon after the ANC revealed its protest plans, Yerevan city officials countered that Freedom Square would be off limits because it would be the scene of “sporting and cultural events” from February 15-March 15.
ANC leaders say that if they can’t secure permission to rally in Freedom Square via PR efforts and official application procedures, they will simply protest without a city permit.

From The Guardian's Egypt protests live blog

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad posted on the Guardian live blog some responses to the protests in Egypt from the rest of the Arab world. The most interesting response is from Iraqis:

The Iraqis I have talked to all expressed a sense of shame. A friend told me on the phone from Baghdad: "We Iraqis looted and gutted our museum in 2003 while the Egyptians protected theirs. They protected houses and public buildings while Baghdad was reduced to rubble within days of the fall of the regime. Egyptians love their country; they are patriotic; we weren't."

"The View from Tahrir", by Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof writing on his blog about what he saw on Tahrir Square today:

In my area of Tahrir, the thugs were armed with machetes, straight razors, clubs and stones. And they all had the same chants, the same slogans and the same hostility to journalists. They clearly had been organized and briefed. So the idea that this is some spontaneous outpouring of pro-Mubarak supporters, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, who happen to end up clashing with other side — that is preposterous. It’s difficult to know what is happening, and I’m only one observer, but to me these seem to be organized thugs sent in to crack heads, chase out journalists, intimidate the pro-democracy forces and perhaps create a pretext for an even harsher crackdown.

This sounds like a classic case of agents provocateurs. I think it's fair to say that this kind of thing is in the standard repertory of your tinpot dictator - empty the jails, pay off the poor to protest in your favor and coordinate the whole thing with plainclothes policemen, that kind of thing - and I had expected that a lot of the looting that was going on in Egypt already was an instance of government-sponsored mischief-making to simulate a security crisis.

I'd thought the situation was so far gone that Mubarak had no control over the security forces anymore, but this might suggest otherwise. If these are agents provocateurs, then this means that the police are still on Mubarak's side. Again, the actions of the military will be key. There's every chance Mubarak could send them in to arrest a lot of protesters, or, at worst, shoot a lot of people. I don't think it would come to that, but if it does it will mean Mubarak has completely given up on any pretense of a popular mandate. Another option is he could try to send them in, and the military could refuse. But the soldiers in Tahrir Square not intervening is not a good sign.

In my view, Mubarak is trying to hold onto power so that he can ensure a smooth succession to his new Vice President and make sure that the regime survives without him. I would guess that the Obama administration implicitly supports this, as in their view it would be the next-best thing to the status quo ante: a stable, pro-American, pro-Israel Egypt with the Islamists shut firmly out of power. We'll see what happens. I am very suddenly much less optimistic for the chances for democracy in Egypt.

Big society tsar Lord Wei 'doesn't have enough time to perform role', by Polly Curtis

Irony much?

The man appointed by the prime minister to kickstart a revolution in citizen activism is to scale back his hours after discovering that working for free three days a week is incompatible with "having a life".