2011 archive

Harold Meyerson considers the wingnuttiness of most of the declared candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination and wonders who’s responsible.

Then he suggests an answer:

How did the Republican Party become at once so insular and unmoored that winning its presidential nod requires an extremism that would give Barry Goldwater the creeps? Many are responsible for the Republicans’ descent into madness, but pride of place surely goes to Fox News chair Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon aide who created a counterfactual network that in turn helped create a counterfactual Republican Party. Ailes, we now learn from a recent article in New York Magazine, despairs over the current crop of Republican candidates, but he has no one more to blame than himself for driving more electable Republicans from the race. The man who gave Palin (as well as Huckabee, Santorum, and Gingrich) a regular gig at Fox, according to one Republican close to Ailes who’s quoted in the article, now thinks “Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.”

Via DelawareLiberal.

In Mitt World, it’s always Opposites Day.

Joan Venocchi considers Mitt’s position on the auto industry (first, criticizing McMaverick during the campaign of the Republican nomination for proposing nothing, then criticizine President Obama after the election for doing something) and on Michigan’s overall employment situation (not so hot, despite the improvement in the auto sector):

If they (jobs numbers–ed.) stay that way and Romney is the Republican presidential nominee, he will try to use them to make Michigan voters forget that first, he criticized McCain for doing nothing. Then, he criticized Obama for doing something.It’s classic Romney — in favor of something and nothing and on the side of everything.

One could argue the Mitt the Flip is a weather vane/vain (either spelling works) blowin’ in the winds of whatever the hell sounds good today.

Aside: I might have posted this before, but it’s worth a reminder, so I’m not going to check.

Via The Richmonder.

Asia Times interviews Sebastian Gorka, a military affairs analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy regarding the complex politics of Pakistan. As is normally the case with Asia Times stories, the article is long and wonky.

It’s also worth at least a skim to provide a frame of reference to the cross-currents and internal contradictions of Pakistani politics.

Here’s a nugget (RFE/RL stands for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty):

RFE/RL: What does it say to you about Pakistan’s military when you hear that instead of hunting down the people who helped Bin Laden hide in their country, it is instead hunting down the people who helped the United States find and kill him?

Gorka: I think this is a wonderful example of why one cannot talk of Pakistan as a unitary nation. After Bin Laden was killed, the immediate comment one heard in the American media and internationally was, “Clearly Pakistan must have known. Or if Pakistan didn’t know, they were incompetent.” This is a misunderstanding of the reality that is today’s Pakistan. There is no one political elite in Pakistan.

You can quite easily imagine, for example, that the political leadership – the civilian leadership in Islamabad – had no idea that Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. But at the same time, you could imagine, for example, that the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] or that members of the military were well aware of it because, let’s be honest, he was within a block and a half of the equivalent of the [US Military Academy at] West Point for Pakistan.