Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Nate Silver retweeted:
Comments
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 1:35am
Thread, starting here, on the whole "oil" and Gulf War thing:
FWIW, rings true to me as majority of "greatest generation" thinking.
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 1:42am
I thought the first Gulf War was a pretty good stick in the sand, and similar to trying to maintain sine order w/o overreach. He could have easily gone on to Baghdad, but he stopped - a good half-appreciated symbol that we weren't trying to be imperialists. And 10 years of overflights was better than the mess his son launched.
It's also worth noting what a mess Nicaragua is under Ortega et femme now, and all the unappreciated Russian intrigue and military threat what Bush had to deal with with all the criticism. And in the end it came down to a doubtful gaffe about grocery scanners.
by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 2:09am
The first gulf war illustrates the complexity of foreign policy choices. Kuwait was a country created out of nothing over a vast amount of oil given to several desert sheiks and their families. It seems likely that Iraq had a legitimate complaint in that Kuwait was probably doing diagonal drilling from Kuwaiti territory into Iraq and Iraq couldn't get any international body to find a way to deal with that theft. Yet it doesn't justify the invasion. A large part of the propaganda effort to push for war was based on lies of atrocities committed by Iraq i.e. the lie that Iraqi soldiers went in to hospitals and dumped babies out of incubators onto the floor and took them to Iraq. Yet the only option was to drive Iraq out and give the country back to the ultra rich sheiks and their families. The least bad of a slew of bad options.
Bush navigated this difficult situation well not just in his choices but in that he got most major nations to back his choices. As a republican he didn't advance the democratic policies I would have liked but he was a good president.
by ocean-kat on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 12:46pm
The way I looked at the first Gulf War is that his coalition building thing was so impressive that it was nearly impossible for anyone to protest effectively. There's no arguing when most world leaders are on board, it is what it is when that happens, it's just reality. If you don't like what they all decided to do, it's a long haul major change that you are confronted with. I.E., make your own alternative United Nations, i.e., pie in the sky.
On domestic policy, he was noblesse oblige personified. That does have its known downsides, but compared to what we have now (a thousand points of darkness,) it puts those downsides in perspective.
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 1:06pm
Perfect example of how the civility issue is in fact real, and that the problem does include liberals:
I expect angry warmongering partisan language from gungho conservatives, but I will never get used to seeing it come from people who are angry about war. They know not what they do to their own cause.
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 2:37pm
this one commenter at least shows the grownup way to counter an obit hagiography, quoting The Intercept. Which is right on duty, as one would expect, to supply an adversarial system response, one where there is not a single redeeming quality to this dead president, pretty much pure evil:
I for one find it refreshing to see Bernie play the basic social etiquette game, once again proving he's not Chomsky. (And maybe that's why he gets elected and re-elected as a Senator, ya think?)
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 4:36pm
here's the civility thing summed up well in this tweet, it's about an approach to politics
And I happen to agree with those that claim that Bush helped begin much of the extinction of his kind by employing Lee Atwater. But then there was also that deathbed confession/conversion by Atwater....
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 4:52pm
not just happening to Bernie:
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 9:37pm
Saw this in the comments, "Bush Sr had a lot of faults. And let’s not canonize him. But at the same time he is so far above Trump that the urge to applaud the good that was in Bush Sr is understandable."
But it's more than that. Bush Sr was so far above his son, Reagan, Nixon, and of course Trump. I'm not forgetting his failings but I don't think it's wrong to acknowledge the good or even to focus on it on the day he died.
A case can be made that he was better than Clinton though I don't see it quite as cut and dried as the author.
by ocean-kat on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 10:03pm
The neocon freaks were nipping at Bush's heels and went full postal with Clinton under Gingrich (thus the Whitewater nonsense this guy spews).. If Bush had been in, they would have trapped him into a much more neocon position, as they were already pissed about the tax increases. But yes, there was some continuity between Bush père and Clinton. But I doubt Bush would have assisted the rise of the internet oh-so-well, and the first attempt at universal health care was important, and no, welfare and high crime rates could not have continued as structured, but the bad stuff on welfare happened not under Clinton but under Bush Jr, whou wouldn't even stimulate a dot-com crashed economy, instead stealing from social security to pay for tax cuts - the bitter son with not much empathy and under the influence of Cheney, Rove and Norquist.
by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 9:12am
by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:47pm
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 2:41pm
by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 4:42pm
High praise for a Dowd piece when Jane Mayer tweets it and Ryan Lizza "likes":
by artappraiser on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 8:10pm