Those Wacky Conservatives

George Will would just as soon re-elect Barack Obama.

GOP Losing Its Will

Michele Bachmann (who I once predicted would be the right-wing dark horse in 2012; never listen to my political predictions) was quoted tonight as saying that Barack Obama's foreign policy made him the most dangerous president in history. George Will (who cut his teeth during the Cold War on the staff of Democratic super-hawk Scoop Jackson) has grown tired of such insubstantial fear-mongering:

Romney says: “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” that if he is elected, Iran will not get such a weapon, and if Obama is reelected, it will. He also says that Obama “has made it very clear that he’s not willing to do those things necessary to get Iran to be dissuaded from” its nuclear ambitions.” Romney may, however, be premature in assuming the futility of new sanctions the Obama administration is orchestrating, and Panetta says Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and “a red line for us” and if “we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.” What, then, is the difference between Romney and Obama regarding Iran?

Osama bin Laden and many other “high-value targets” are dead, the drone war is being waged more vigorously than ever, and Guantanamo is still open, so Republicans can hardly say that Obama has implemented dramatic and dangerous discontinuities regarding counterterrorism. Obama says that, even with his proposed cuts, the defense budget would increase at about the rate of inflation through the next decade. Republicans who think America is being endangered by “appeasement” and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.

George Will Really Gets Ugly On Obama

As reported by "The Daily Dish," he writes:

To the notion that Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview, the sensible response is: If only. Obama's natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America's academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson. A question for former history professor Gingrich: Why implicate Kenya?

The Anti-Gift Party

A grumpy, unsentimental columnist embraces the advice of a grumpy economist: Everybody should give everybody gift cards and cash at Christmas. Bah humbug.

"Come Home America" Watch, Day 37

Dick Cheney accused President Obama of dithering over Afghanistan. George Will (who, it must be noted, wants our troops out) has fired back. "The Huffington Post":

"A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction," Will said on ABC's "This Week. "For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action."

"Come Home, America" Watch

Andrew Sullivan on "the right's looming foreign policy war":

Before too long, the GOP will, in my view, come back to the conservative idea that we should withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq as soon as we responsibly can, even at some risk. You cannot return to limited government without unwinding the empire. The neocons will fight very hard and try to find some pliable hood-ornament to maintain their Christianist base for neo-imperial expansion. Watching these forces fight will be fascinating. Hagel could take on the neocons; maybe Huntsman. Ron Paul's conservatism is not dead. It's one of the few signs of life out there.

The White Queen Of Texas

In a column intended to portray President Obama as delusional (like Alice in Wonderland's White Queen), George Will inadvertently reminds us that Obama's Iran problem was made worse by his predecessor, who may have had some illusions of his own, about the irresistible attraction of democracy, when he invaded Iran's neighbor:

[Defense secretary Robert] Gates says "the only way" to prevent a nuclear-capable Iran "is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons, as opposed to strengthened." But to accept that formulation requires accepting two propositions that would tax the White Queen's powers of belief.

One is that possession of nuclear weapons would make Iran less secure. Question: If Saddam Hussein had possessed nuclear weapons in March 2003, would the United States have invaded Iraq? Iran's leaders probably think they know the answer.

Goodnight Kabul

George Will on Afghanistan:

[B]efore launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent re-establishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000 to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan...

Which of course would leave the Afghan people largely to themselves once again, even if the Taliban regain control of the national government. And that probably can't be helped.

In the 1990s there was a seminal article in the "New Yorker" about the ruling fundamentalist Muslim Taliban's savage policies, especially toward women. I remember thinking that it was too bad the U.S. couldn't do something, which, of course, it couldn't. American foreign policy can't be based on eliminating odious regimes. If it were, we would probably have to begin with our trading partners and bondholders in Beijing.

After Sept. 11, U.S. forces made seeming quick work of the Taliban. The successor regime, while hardly ideal when it came to women's rights, was a considerable improvement. If we hadn't undertaken the massive effort in Iraq, perhaps President Bush could have made Afghanistan into a model of modern nation-building while also doing a more thorough job of rooting out Taliban fighters and reducing their destabilizing effect on Pakistan. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Afghanistan is the rock on which great powers stub their toes in wearying succession. If there's one lesson of the last 150 years, it's don't get embroiled in a war there. As Will suggests, find other ways to battle al-Qaeda. But get our troops out.

To accomplish a deescalation, President Obama will need cover from like-minded Republicans who refuse and even pledge to forgo using it as a political issue. If that doesn't seem possible in this toxic political environment, perhaps everyone could think about how toxic it is for the men and women who have been sent to Afghanistan to do the near-impossible. And if anyone is thinking of making a Vietnam comparison, please don't. South Vietnam was Switzerland in comparison.

Losing Will

George Will is reportedly calling on the U.S. to withdraw its ground forces from Afghanistan.

Young Man Blues

George Will turns a nice phrase about Sen. Kennedy:

In the Senate, as elsewhere, 80 percent of the important work is done by a talented 20 percent. And 95 percent of the work is done off the floor, away from committees, out of sight, where strong convictions leavened by good humor are the currency of accomplishment. There Ted Kennedy, who had the politics of the Boston Irish in his chromosomes, flourished.

Since I read newspapers on-line (and on-Kindle, where I proudly pay for content), I rarely see the marvelous way great papers still express themselves in page layout and headlines. Here in a Starbucks in San Diego, I caught a glimpse of a grandiloquent banner headline in the New York Times: "Senator Kennedy, Battle Lost, Is Hailed as a Leader."

I wonder who wrote that: A baby boomer authentically mourning the end of an era, or a younger editor who had gotten himself or herself into the spirit of the moment. While the "battle lost" bit is elevating, it's a battle many of us will join as well. I'm in San Diego to conduct a committal service for a less-well-known man who battled cancer no less bravely, as millions do and shall. So perhaps that element could have been skipped, at least in the headline.

As for Kennedy as a great leader, all notable people should be given their due in the wake of their deaths, as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby does. But Jacoby's summary of Kennedy's foreign policy legacy is startling:

Abroad, he failed to take seriously the stakes in the Cold War. “Today, with the exception of East Germany, Russia has no more satellites,’’ he wrote in 1968, the year Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. He hailed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, as “a warm individual . . . completely committed to peace.’’ He fought to cut off aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 - aid that might have prevented a communist bloodbath. In recent years he was willing to consign millions to Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, opposing not only the 2003 liberation of Iraq but even the 1991 campaign to undo the occupation of Kuwait.

On domestic affairs, Kennedy used most of his influence promoting ways to spend other people's money. While Kennedy has been hailed this week for his courage, in politics, being a big spender is courageous only to the extent of sometimes exposing one to being voted out of office, which would have caused no meals to be missed in Kennedy's household.

As for the issue with which he is most closely associated, in 1971 he missed a chance to provide health insurance to virtually all Americans when he opposed President Nixon's national health insurance plan. His subsequent efforts amounted to de facto acts of expiation for failing as a young man to exhibit the bipartisan temperament for which he being so fulsomely if selectively praised today. The thing is, 38 years ago, he actually could've pulled it off. So whose fault is it that 43 million Americans remain uninsured?

Good Sense Will Hunting

I read George Will's column about Russia three times and couldn't figure out what it means. Then I realized that he doesn't know what it means, either. He accuses President Obama of being nostalgic for the Nixonian era of U.S.-Soviet detente by making the blunder of proposing arms control negotiations with Moscow. Without meaning to do so, he then shows why Obama is right.

Reprising arguments he made two generations ago from the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, Will says that arms control wasn't the ticket for combating rampant Soviet militarism. Ronald Reagan's tough policies were. Will's setup prepares the reader for the argument that Obama is overlooking the threat that Putin's Russia still poses to U.S. interests. Instead, marshaling his usual flurry of statistics, Will argues that Russia, drowning in vodka and stunted by declining fertility rates, is dying as a great power. He enumerates no threats posed by Russia to U.S. interests except one: The nukes that Obama's policy is aimed at reducing:

Today, in a world bristling with new threats, the president suggests addressing an old one -- Russia's nuclear arsenal. It remains potentially dangerous, particularly if a portion of it falls into nonstate hands.

But if it's dangerous to have several thousand thermonuclear devices aimed at us by a crumbling nation (which I would think Will would accept as an axiom), and if Obama can achieve reductions in their number at no risk whatsoever to our interests, why is it a bad idea to have arms control negotiations?

It's not Obama who's nostalgic for the Nixon era (which he barely remembers, of course). It's Will, who embarks on the same anti-arms control column he would've written back then, even though he ends up proving (in spite of himself) that U.S.-Russian arms control today makes abundant good sense. If things are really so bad for Russia, perhaps we'd even be doing it, and the stability of the Asia-Pacific region, a favor by helping relieve it of the cost of maintaining its arsenal.

Will Ford Be Company One?

As the feds profess no interest in running GM while replacing its CEO, packing its board, and chiding it for making too many big cars, George Will, who seems especially sardonic lately, writes:

The stunning shift in consumer preferences that should make the White House's freshly minted auto experts feel vulnerable has been reported under headlines such as "Like a Rock: Hybrid Car Sales Plummet" (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9) and "Hybrid Car Sales Go from 60 to 0 at Breakneck Speed" (Los Angeles Times, March 17). Absent $4 gasoline, customers, those nuisances with their insufferable preferences, do not want the vehicles the politicians want them to want, even with manufacturers now offering large rebates and other incentives.

The two best-selling vehicles in America this year are large pickup trucks (Ford F-Series and Chevy Silverado). In February, Toyota sold 13,600 Tundra and Tacoma pickups and 7,232 Priuses. It sells the Prius at a loss, which it can afford to do because it makes pots of money selling pickups. Has the Car Designer in Chief, aka the president, considered the possibility that what he calls "the cars of tomorrow" will forever be that?

If Ford can ride out the recession without government subsidy, it will be interesting to see how it fares in the long term, in comparison with its tw0 dole-full competitors, without Washington telling it what kinds of cars to build.

Hot Bats, Hot Planet

In his column today, George Will, a climate change skeptic, says there's been a cooling trend since 1998. Jonathan Chait cries foul, and in a comment on Chait's post, "Rhubarbs," a former Washington Post contributor or reporter, turns Will's passion about baseball against him:

Someone needs to forward this chart to Will:

baseballanalysts.com/.../was_the_1990s_h.php

Because it turns out home-run production has followed an eerily similar course to global warming over the last century. Except rather than hitting a record peak in 1998, home runs peaked in 2001. So using Will's logic, the fact that there were fewer home runs in 2006 than there were in 2001 proves that home runs are not increasing over time, even though five times as many home runs were hit in 2006 than in 1919.

Ergo the last twenty years of Will's bitching about the increasing offense in baseball is proved to be [BS]. QED.

Given that Will has written much more, and clearly cares more passionately about, baseball than global warming, I would think that applying the "logic" of his climate assertions to debunk his baseball assertions might just have a motivating effect on the man.

One Bulb To Light Them All

Environmentalists and bloggers hammered columnist George Will recently for getting some facts wrong in a column about climate change. He's hammering back.

Just A Third-Rate Column

Columnist George Will allegedly played fast and loose with accepted verities about climate change and now-discredited theories about global cooling in the 1970s. The Washington Post wouldn't repudiate him. So Matthew Yglesias, resorting to a guilt-by-publication variation on the Otter Defense, overheatedly proclaims that everything done by anyone at the Post is now in bad odor.

Of Lincoln And Darwin, One Was Indispensable

In an essay about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln -- we'll mark the 200th anniversaries of their births on Monday -- George Will manages a slap at the Endangered Species Act. He also writes:

[R]emember that Lincoln mattered more. Without Darwin, other scientists would have discerned natural selection. Indeed, Darwin's friend Alfred Wallace already had. Without Lincoln, the United States probably would have been sundered into at least two nations. Probably into more: Southerners, a fractious tribe, would not have played nicely together in the Confederacy for very long.