The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Netanyahu has just sent the message that Israel does not want peace and does not want to negotiate.

He's just given the Palestinians an opening to throw up their hands once and for all and act unilaterally. The US response to Palestine's push for greater international recognition is that their statehood should come through negotiations with Israel. But Israel will not negotiate.

I'd expect more EU countries will go the way of Sweden and establish full diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine. You may see a push for economic sanctions on Israel, similar to the ones imposed on South Africa in the 1980s. Israel will continue down the path of right wing identity politics and insist that they are only defending themselves against "terrorists" - not unlike South Africa's fever paranoia about how the blacks were going to turn the place into a Soviet satellite.

Things will get worse for Israel's Arab population. As the Orthodox community and the settler community grow in political power, Netanyahu and whoever succeeds him will likely keep doubling down on current policies.

Israel's future as a fortified, isolated pariah state was already foreshadowed with Netanyahu's rhetoric. His nonsensical ramblings about "foreign influence" seeking to undermine him during the election sounded more like something a Third World despot would say before a ceremonial sham election than anything you'd hear from the leader of a country that likes to think it's a Western democracy.

Obama should instruct Samantha Power to abstain from any UN Security Council votes relating to Israel for the rest of his term. If the Israeli people want to reelect a man who comes to America, embarrasses our president and rhetorically spits in our face, they no longer deserve any protection from the heaping of scorn and retribution that the international community has been wanting to unleash on them.

Elections have consequences. Israel voted for it and now they deserve to get it good and hard.

Amen.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Very interesting to listen to a straight person rail against a member of the queer community for "not listening to the arguments" of people who are against same-sex marriage.

Um, we're the ones who are on the receiving end of this crap all the time. Whatever backwards justification a person can come up with to legitimize their opposition to marriage equality really doesn't mean anything. With respect, same-sex marriage is about people who have same-sex attraction, and only people who have same-sex attraction. So we're the ones who get to be the barometers for whether hate is an active part of the equation. While it may be true that some anti-SSMers genuinely believe they can be against SSM without hating gay people (and perhaps some actually don't hate gay people), what they believe in this situation is moot. Because their words and actions impact the LGBT community whether there's intentional hate or not. And those viewpoints are oppressive, unjust, spread misconceptions, fuel distrust, encourage harassment, beat gay people into submission, nurture self-hate and depression, and, in general, make life worse for people who are not straight. So, for the last time, whether a person "intends" to hate means piss-all. It's a consolation prize. Because their actions and attitudes are hateful either way.

So no, I will not accommodate this garbage just because a few bigoted imbeciles can't get over themselves and accept positive change that has nothing to do with them. If you oppose equal marriage, you are either a bigot or stupid. Prove me wrong.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

I thought this was a really good perspective on Nixon-Reagan-Bush

Building a base of moderates and corporations who are basically paid off via whatever ridiculous spending they sign off on allows them to go hard in the paint (as my JV basketball coach might say) on foreign policy. Also, I mean, even Nelson Rockefeller was considerably anti-communist while being for the most part liberal (not to be confused with genuinely "left-wing", and except for drugs, of course) domestically. It basically creates a "big government" ponzi scheme wherein money is flushed out of the treasury and into both wars and domestic spending, making voters content enough to continue signing off on whatever their leadership is doing. Winning candidates of the right have been using this playbook since at least Nixon, probably Eisenhower. I mean, did even Reagan ever really threaten the New Deal, or even legalized abortion?

Yeah, basically it pleases as many interest groups as possible.

The George W. Bush presidency would have been a better example were it not for the divisive lip service to SoCon causes and the fact that he was so intent on making people less supportive of big government by picking incompetent cronies to run everything.

My assumption for the time being would be that Dubya abused the Nixon Doctrine, and has ruined it, at least for the right. If or when the GOP re-emerges victorious will be the time to test that hypothesis. I do hope it's right, though I'm not entirely sure what it would be replaced with. Anything too actually conservative ("conservative" in the sense of actually conserving this country, not its modern, warped definition) is out of the question for reasons of electability and modernity, so they'll have to think of something.

Nixon didn't care about anything but foreign policy. Domestic policy was mundane to him and he never formed a coherent governing philosophy on domestic issues. Since he faced a center-left Congress, he signed off on the expansion of the regulatory and welfare state, and in return, Congress more or less looked the other way while he bombed Cambodia and went to China and conducted Cold War chess matches in the Third World. If there had been a Republican majority in Congress, he would no doubt have gone along with whatever they wanted (New Deal rollbacks or whatever) in return for a wide berth in foreign affairs. Nixon as our "last liberal president" is more an accident of history than any deliberate agenda on his part.

I don't think Dubya was a Nixon in the sense that domestic affairs were something worthless to him that he realized could be a useful bargaining chip. I think he was more like LBJ - someone with very clear and distinct objectives at home and abroad who reconciled them by pushing through a Santa Claus grab-bag of legislation and spending to keep Congress from stopping him. For LBJ, the Great Society was his "gift" to the liberals, while escalation in Vietnam assured Republicans that he wasn't going to give the farm to the Soviets. I think LBJ was genuine in his support of civil rights and in terms of the political damage it did to his party in the short-term, he wouldn't have signed that legislation if he didn't genuinely believe in it.

Bush subscribed to what might be called "romantic conservatism." He had this quasi-Reaganesque vision of a nation of homeowners with steady, well-paying private sector jobs who were also "people of faith" (not necessarily Christian faith), buttressed by a social safety net where private charity and faith-based groups played an outsized role. He didn't deify free-market capitalism as something to be exalted in and of itself the way the current Republican Party does; he believed it was merely the means to the end. His domestic agenda was his father's noblesse oblige and protection of the status quo, made more idealistic and given a moral framework.

His foreign policy was very much a throwback to Woodrow Wilson's activist idealism and the notion of "a world made safe for democracy." The Iraq adventure is the sort of thing Wilson would have endorsed. Reagan essentially did the same thing when he enacted a "regime change" in Grenada (obviously the circumstances made that endeavor far quicker and easier to accomplish). But it would have abhorred Nixon - to him, the logical thing to do would have simply been to find a general in the Iraqi army who was sympathetic to the US, load him up with money and weapons and wink and nod and let him stage a coup. Iraq would then be under the control of a pro-American military dictator rather than an anti-American military dictator.

Bush's foreign policy was a set of beliefs held by a man who was too young to believe, as Nixon did, that people in the Third World were essentially lesser beings who could simply be crushed under the heel of whichever authoritarian the Great Powers chose for them, but too old to believe, as most people of our generation do, that people in the Third World are not helpless noble savages, that they should have the power of self-agency and they do not need to be "liberated" by other countries.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Having said that, her run is historic and it will be an important watershed for women in public life. The issues she is campaigning on are, universal, but are based on her being a woman and her experiences. You cannot divorce her gender from her campaign. There is a way to do it well and right, because it risks alienating just as many, particularly along the lines of enthusiasm, if she starts to back-pedal too hard.

To me, what is interesting is that most female elected leaders run on the basis that their gender is, incidental, but one thing I'm enjoying is seeing a female-positive campaign. Being a woman is core to what she cares about and why. But she cannot risk putting people on the defensive unnecessarily. I suppose when someone is called "harpy" "shrill" "bitch" and "shrew" including by many so-called progressives, I kind of get why people are hyper-sensitive to anything that appears gender-based.