Sunday, June 12, 2005
Why I Don’t Like Howard Dean
Part 1 of what may become a long running series. . .
Matt Yglesias had some nice things to say about Howard Dean today. Matt seems to think he’s getting a raw deal. I don’t:
Dean cannot possibly be building an effective party because he’s repeating the same mistake that led us to nominate John Kerry: He puts “thou shalt not offend anyone who dislikes Bush” at the top of his list. There are plenty of Republicans with reasons to dislike their party’s current leadership. It’s hard to see how anyone who values social liberty, free trade, fiscal responsibility, or effective nation building can remain a Republican. On the other hand, other than those who elevate social liberty above all, there’s no reason that any of these folks should become Democrats either. Dean continues the Democratic Party’s post-Clinton slide into believing that Republican ideas are so bad that Americans will wake up one day and vote Dem. His unique contribution is to extend that nonsense from Republican ideas to Republicans themselves. Meanwhile, those of us who value free trade, fiscal responsibility, effective nation building have to wonder why we should remain Democrats. It’s fairly clear that, at this point in history, neither party much wants us. If Dean—or his successor—wants to build a winning party, he’s going to have to figure out how to convince disgruntled Republicans to cross the aisle.
Earned some more support from Petey, thank you very much.
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Foray into Controversy
Yglesias hit one of my political buttons yesterday. I decided to post something controversial--the beginnings of my take on the war in Iraq. It seems to have earned me my first fan.
Yglesias thinks that some of the effusiveness thanking Lindsey Graham, the war’s newest critic, is, well, effusive: “Liberals have developed a slightly unfortunate habit of praising to the skies every Republican legislator who goes slightly off-message in Iraq.” My comment?
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Saturday, June 11, 2005
Daalder and Gelernter, Obama and Disraeli
I wandered out of Matt Yglesias’s domain today into another of the TPMCafe blogs, America Abroad. Ivo Daalder posted an interesting thought playing off Barack Obama’s recent statements about American exceptionalism:
The neocon’s version of exceptionalism—and certainly the one propounded by our commander in chief—is a triumphalist one, suggesting that America is morally superiot to everyone else. Because our motives are pure and superior, the justice of our actions must go unquestioned—or so this form of American exceptionalism appears to imply.
I’m not particularly comfortable with this kind of muscular certitude of our supposed moral superiority. I much prefer the way Barak Obama talks about American exceptionalism. Here’s what the junior senator from Illinois had to say on this subject in his really quite extraordinary commencement address at Knox College last week:
[America is a] place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form “a more perfect union” on this new frontier. And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly—it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It’s answered by us.
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Yglesias and Woolsey
Got annoyed with an Yglesias post today. Seems that he doesn’t much trust James Woolsey. Which is fine, except that he tried to smear him with the label:
James “the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the ‘fascists’ of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda” Woolsey?
Not that Woolsey needs me to defend him, but I had to ask:
I’m sorry, but which of these three groups do you believe is not fighting us? Or is it simply that though they would like to fight us, they are too insignificant to warrant our attention? Perhaps we should simply “contain” them to keep their atrocities local? After all, as long as they do nothing more than oppress Muslims and murder religious minorities (or an occasionally insufficiently pious Muslim), what’s it to us?
I don’t really expect an answer.
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Friday, June 03, 2005
Patent Reform
Yglesias piques my interest yet again! Today he wrote a brief piece about patent reform. I added my own two cents:
It’s tough to know how to best motivate innovation. Many recent observers have concluded that our current patent system is too strong. If that’s true, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Not too long ago, the general consensus was that our patent system was too weak, and that it was hurting our competitiveness internationally. In the late ‘70s, Jimmy Carter set up a Domestic Policy Review committee to find the sources of our national malaise. One of its key recommendations was that we needed to strengthen our patent system. The Carter Justice Department ran with the idea, and in one of the few clean handoffs, the Reagan Justice Department finished the job.
That was 25 years ago. We need to fix the system again, perhaps in fundamental ways. The best bet would be to keep it where it is--with the ideological divide running orthogonal to partisan affiliation. While I don’t deny the benefits that the pharmaceutical industry enjoys under both the patent system and several of Bush’s domestic policies, I see this parallel as essentially coincidental.
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Thursday, June 02, 2005
The Greatest Country
I found another of Yglesias’s posts just screaming for a comment. He titled it with the provocative quesry, Which is the Greatest Country of All? In return, I asked Who Fits?
I had a conversation with a friend this afternoon. I have just returned from Portugal, he from Italy. I said that the more time that I spend abroad, the stronger my feeling that we’ve got something unique going in this country. He said that time abroad reminds him of how sick he’s getting of Americans--and how much he prefers Europeans.
Which of us is more representative of the Democratic intelligentsia? I’d like to think that I am, but I don’t. I suspect that he speaks for many affluent, educated, Democrats, completely apalled at Bush’s reelection, who prefer to seek the company of “sensible” Europeans. Personally, I’ve got my problems with Bush, but I’ve seen worse. Chirac and Schroeder come immediately to mind.
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Baby Steps into the Blogosphere
A colleague sent me a link to a blog called ”TPM Cafe,” which apparently grew out of something called the “Talking Points Memo,” and a suggestion that I “try to hook up with these guys.”
More specifically, he linked me into Matt Yglesias‘s post called ”Infopolitics as Metaphor and Reality.” Yglesias apparently questions whether or not the “information age” is real, or simply a useful metaphor:
[I]n all these contexts, “the information age” almost always serves as a kind of metaphor for the notion that the public sector ought to become more flexible, more consumer-oriented, and so forth. . . . All that’s fine as far as it goes (except when, as in the case of Klein’s enthusiasm for privatization it’s not fine), but it leaves what I think is a pretty noteworthy blank spot—the literal politics and policy of the information age. There’s a broad set of issues related to intellectual property law, telecommunications policy, the dispensation of the radio spectrum, and so forth that are actually about the information age where the policies we have nowadays are unsatisfactory and where mainstream liberal figures have tended not to show much leadership.
As a devout believer in the reality of the information age, I felt compelled to comment. And so, today I made my first official blog posting (my previous significant contributions to on-line discourse all having occurred before blogs were blogs), under the title ”Towards Coherence in Infopolitics”:
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The Education of a Baby Blogger
It occurs to me that as the proud owner of a new website and blog, I should spend a bit of time trying to understand this new phenomenon of blogging. I confess that I’ve fallen behind. Most of my work on Digital Phoenix took place before blogging was much of a phenomenon. I hate feeling behind the curve on an important information sector development, but keeping up to speed is a full-time job. So I’m going to spend the next month learning what’s going on.
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