The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705
Sunday
Sep072014
The Commentariat -- Sept. 8, 2014
Internal links, graphic & related text removed.
Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama will use a speech to the nation on Wednesday to make his case for launching a United States-led offensive against Sunni militants gaining ground in the Middle East, seeking to rally support for a broad military mission while reassuring the public he is not plunging American forces into another Iraq war." See also video of Chuck Todd's interview of the President in yesterday's Commentariat.
David Remnick of the New Yorker: "As the Middle East disintegrates and a vengeful cynic in the Kremlin invades his neighbor, Obama has offered no full and clarifying foreign-policy vision.
His opponents and would-be successors at home have seized the chance to peashoot from the sidelines. What do they offer? Unchastened by their many past misjudgments, John McCain and Lindsey Graham go on proposing escalations, aggressions, and regime changes. Rand Paul, who will likely run for President as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides.
Julie Davis & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "What had once looked like a clear political imperative for both parties -- action to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants -- had morphed instead into what appeared to be a risky move that could cost Democrats their majority.... [Angus] King, a Maine independent who is a member of the Democratic caucus, warned Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, [that] ... unilateral action by the president might undermine the prospects for bipartisan agreement on a broad immigration overhaul for years to come. It was that concern..., White House officials said, that ultimately prompted the president to break the promise he made on June 30 in the Rose Garden to act on his own before summer's end to fix the immigration system."
Lobbying Tanks. Eric Lipton, et al., of the New York Times: "More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors' priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.... Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.... The line between scholarly research and lobbying can sometimes be hard to discern.... The think tanks ... have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law...."
The Mind of Mitt. There’s no question in my mind that I think I would have been a better president than Barack Obama has been.... I think the president is really out of touch with reality when it comes to what's happening in the world.... I don't know whether you can't see reality from a fairway, but the president has not seen the reality internationally and domestically.... No question ... in my mind [that I would make a better president than Hillary Clinton].... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are two peas in the same pod. -- Mitt Romney on "Fox 'News' Sunday"
William Finnegan of the New Yorker: A "Berkeley-University of Illinois study, commissioned by Fast Food Forward (a workers' association), found that American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance.... According to the progressive think tank Demos, fast-food executives' compensation packages quadrupled, in constant dollars, between 2000 and 2013.... Their front-line workers' wages have barely risen in that time, and remain among the worst in U.S. industry. The differential between C.E.O. and worker pay in fast food is higher than in any other domestic economic sector -- twelve hundred to one.... In Denmark McDonald's workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour -- they are also unionized -- and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States."
Charles Blow: "A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.... As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.... The effects of these [mis]perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for society in general and black people in particular.
Jonathan Chait: The worst government in the U.S. is local government. "... police militarization bore only the faintest responsibility for the tragedy in Ferguson.... Old-fashioned policing tools were all the Ferguson police needed to engage in years of discriminatory treatment, to murder Michael Brown, and to rough up journalists covering the ensuing protests. Police militarization was a largely unrelated problem that happened to be on bright display. Over the ensuing days, it grew apparent that demilitarizing the police might save the government some money but would not address the crisis's underlying cause, and the momentary consensus evaporated.... The town of Ferguson, while tiny in scale, is an Orwellian monstrosity. Its racially biased Police Department is the enforcement wing of a predatory system of government...."
Robert O'Harrow & Michael Sallah of the Washington Post continue the Post's fascinating -- and disturbing -- series on "Stop & Seize." "A cornerstone of Desert Snow's instruction rests upon two 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that bolstered aggressive highway patrolling. One decision affirmed the police practice of using minor traffic infractions as pretexts to stop drivers. The other permits officers to seek consent for searches without alerting the drivers that they can refuse and leave at any time."
David Cole, in the New York Review of Books, reviews Zephyr Teachout's Corruption in America. "Teachout's important new book reminds us that corruption -- in its more expansive sense of excessive private interest undermining public virtue -- poses very real risks to a functioning democracy, risks that were foreseen at the founding, and that have preoccupied politicians, statesmen, and jurists for the entire course of our nation's history. Today's Court has sought to deny those concerns through a definitional strategy that cannot be squared either with that history or with the actual effects of money on our politics.... Only when the Court begins to grapple with the full extent of the dangers of corruption will its campaign finance jurisprudence truly reflect the competing values at stake." Teachout is running in the Democratic primary against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a poster-boy for enabling political corruption. The primary is tomorrow; Cuomo -- who tried unsuccessfully to keep Teachout off the ballot -- is expected to win by a landslide.
Paul Krugman: "I have a message for the Scots [who will be voting on a referendum next week for independence from Great Britain]: Be afraid, be very afraid. The risks of going it alone are huge. You may think that Scotland can become another Canada, but it's all too likely that it would end up becoming Spain without the sunshine.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Driftglass writes a lovely remembrance of yesterday's morning shows. ...
... AND Driftglass reflects on receding local and state government reporting, which fits in nicely with Jonathan Chait's post, linked above. As Chait writes,
Since 1910, state house elections almost perfectly track U.S. House elections. The correlation, to be precise about it, is 0.96. Which is to say virtually none of us -- even those of us who bother to vote -- form judgments of any kind regarding our state legislators.
... Support your local newspaper!
Marie's Sports Report
Andrew Keh of the New York Times: "Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, informed N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, effectively cutting short a league investigation into an email that Mr. Levenson sent two years ago to fellow Hawks executives detailing his thoughts on how the team could attract more white fans." ...
... Margaret Hartmann of New York takes a cynical view of Levenson's "self-reporting." Want to spend more time with your family AND make wads of money? Just dig up one of your old racist e-mails!
Congressional Election
Elizabeth Drew of the New York Review of Books: "Whether or not the Republicans take control of the Senate, the ground there has already shifted to the right." CW: This is a long piece which provides an excellent review of "where we're at" politically. Drew is a master of the form. Her assessment of Hillary Clinton's critique of President Obama's Middle East policy is noteworthy.
A discouraging -- but not surprising -- note from Greg Sargent: "The new NBC/Marist polls released over the weekend put Mitch McConnell up over Alison Grimes by 47-39 and Tom Cotton over Dem Senator Mark Pryor by 45-40 in Arkansas, while Dem Senator Mark Udall leads GOPer Cory Gardner by 48-42 in Colorado."
Beyond the Beltway
Kimberly Kindy & Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post: "Instead of telling grand jury members what charges they believe police officer Darren Wilson should face [in the killing of Michael Brown, St. Louis county prosecutors] are leaving it open-ended for now and involving the grand jury as co-investigators. The prosecutor's office is also presenting evidence to the grand jury as soon as it receives it, rather than waiting until the St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI have completed their investigations. Police probes are typically completed before a case is presented to a grand jury, county officials said." (Link missing).
Jon Swaine of the Guardian reviews the differing accounts of the police killing of John Crawford III in a WalMart in Beavercreek, Ohio. Ronald Ritchie, the "witness" who called 911, has a credibility problem. State AG Mike DeWine (R) has refused to release surveillance video to the public, although Ritchie says he has seen it, & the Crawford family & their attorney also have viewed it. Another shopper, Angela Williams, died of heart failure after collapsing during the melee inside the WalMart that followed the shooting.
Kenneth Lovett of the New York Daily News: "In what many say is an alarming first, a private eye hired by Assembly Republicans placed a GPS device on a Long Island assemblyman's car for two months in an unsuccessful effort to prove the pol didn't live in his district. According to court transcripts, investigator Adam Rosenblatt said he was hired in March by attorney James Walsh, repping the Assembly Republican Campaign Committee, to find out where Assemblyman Edward Hennessey (D-Suffolk) actually lives. Walsh that same month was paid $3,000 by the GOP campaign committee.... State police say placing a GPS device on a vehicle is legal in mostcases...."
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Under huge international and domestic pressure, Iraq swore in a new government on Monday, opening the way for an expansion of U.S. military support to fight Islamic extremists in the country. The vote to approve a new cabinet came during a fiery late-night parliamentary session. Key positions, including those of the defense and security chiefs, were left open amid controversy over who would fill them. Now confirmed as prime minister, Haider al-Abadi said he would name candidates for those positions within a week."
Washington Post: "Hospitals in Colorado, Missouri and potentially eight other states are admitting hundreds of children for treatment of an uncommon but severe respiratory virus. The virus, called Enterovirus D68, causes similar symptoms to a summer cold or asthma: a runny nose, fever, coughing and difficulty breathing. But the illness can quickly escalate and there are no vaccines or antiviral medications to prevent or treat it."
Guardian: "US warplanes have carried out five strikes on Islamist insurgents menacing Iraq's Haditha dam, witnesses and officials said, widening what President Barack Obama called a campaign to curb and ultimately defeat the militants.... The leader of a pro-Iraqi government paramilitary force in western Iraq said the air strikes wiped out an Isis patrol trying to attack the dam -- Iraq's second biggest hydroelectric facility that also provides millions with water."
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Reader Comments (15)
The article on the think tanks is riveting. This coupled with Connie Bruck's extensive piece in the New Yorker (linked here some time ago) re: AIPAC's influence on Congress makes one wonder if anyone can actually think for themselves anymore much less advocate what is best for this country. Case is point: Some months ago I wrote about a freshman Democrat from El Paso, Beto O'Rourke, who had impressed me with a verve and a determination to serve his people rather than others with big money to put in his pocket. During the vote to give more money to Israel for their Iron Dome Beto voted against the funding. Within days he got slews of emails from AIPAC members castigating him for his vote. The next day, the El Paso Times ran a front page story with the headline "O'Rourke Vote Draws Criticism." This followed by emails sent out saying things like Beto chooses to side with tunnel builders over Israel.
So much for being one's own person.
Re Elizabeth Drew's piece: Don't believe it. Her analysis doesn't take into account that Republicans, since the Usurper's re-election, have doggedly made sure that Democratic voters are disenfranchised. If the country is going right, which I do not believe for a minute it is, it is because Republicans have corrupted and rigged the system. That and Fox News, the 24 hour fear and loathing channel.
So The Rat thinks he'd make a great President. Better than Obama, better than Hillary. It's always easy from afar, but when you have to call the shots, it's a lot tougher. Of course, he was such a serial liar during the campaign, were he President (perish the thought), he'd just lie his way out of any situation.
@Nancy. Bear in mind that Drew wrote an overview -- she doesn't necessarily address every single variable. However, she does write about voter suppression, contrary to your contention:
"The Republicans are so uncertain of victory in elections to federal offices that they’re still resorting in several states to passing laws that make voting more difficult for minorities and other groups who would ordinarily vote for the Democrats. Some of these laws are even stricter than those adopted in 2012."
Neither does she suggest that the country is drifting rightward. She does write, accurately, that Republican incumbents who won their primaries -- often by fairly narrow margins against Tea party-type challengers -- did so by moving right. This does not suggest that the general voting public has moved right.
Her point -- the same that most analysts have made -- is that this year's elections favor Republicans:
"As of now, the turnout this November is predicted to be uncommonly low, even for midterms, which traditionally attract fewer voters than do presidential elections. Midterm voters are older, whiter, and, since they include fewer and fewer veterans of the New Deal era, over time they have come to represent more conservative values than the voters in presidential contests."
She also notes that the Senate "map" is bad for Democrats this year & that the party of presidents in their sixth year generally loses seats.
Drew is a careful writer. I think you've misrepresented what she wrote.
Marie
A few grim thoughts on anyone's and everyone's inadequate foreign policy.
Obama's is inadequate because, well, it's Obama's. We knew that.
Israel's isn't adequate because it's based on the tribal fiction that Palestinians would be better off if they didn't exist, but darn! they do, always underfoot and in the way.
McCain's (and his goofy buddy's) won't work because there aren't enough bombs.
The UN's won't work because it doesn't currently have one. (Secretly taking over the United States doesn't seem to have worked.)
Russia's foreign policy, like Israel's and for that matter ISIL's, is also tribal.
When ethnic and religious boundaries don't coincide with lines on the map, bullies have a ready excuse to push and shove, and if a little self-aggrandizement happens to be part of the package for the leaders, who's to complain?
And, of course, when we have the technology to project the miserable consequences of tribal disputes hundreds and thousands of miles and destroy thousands if not millions of lives while we're about it, the way our governments are currently organized, no one nation or political entity can possibly exert effective control over all the competing tribal (and corporate) interests.
In short, without some major changes in the way we organize ourselves--not likely within our lifetimes, I'm afraid--to approach international problems, we'll continues to muddle miserably along.
But maybe things on the international scene will miraculously improve over the next few weeks while I'm again away from the web.
Suspect I will miss you all more than I will miss the news.
I'd like to double down on Barbarossa's umbrage at the Rat declaring what a stellar president he'd have made.
All you have to do is notice the puerile snipe he throws in about the president (the actual president--the guy far more Americans, rightly, believed was the best man for the job) being unable to discern reality "from the fairway". I suppose it's easier to recognize reality from the cabin of a Gulfstream, or a hand tooled Moroccan leather chair in an well protected corporate board room.
Has Romney anyone ever been mistaken as a man of the real world?
When has he demonstrated how "in touch" he was with real world problems? When he dismissed half of all Americans as worthless moochers? When he insulted the entire country of England for not "being ready" for the summer Olympic games? When he ran off at the mouth about how he would have handled the Benghazi situation without knowing a single fact? When he thought he'd impress NASCAR fans with his everyman qualities by bragging that he knew several NASCAR owners? When he sniffed that he "wasn't concerned about the very poor"? When he declared that his sons weren't picking up a gun and fighting for their country in a war he supported because they were serving the country by trying to shove his useless ass into the White House? When he responded to a question about how he defined the middle class as people who made a quarter million dollars a year? When he said that he stood by his comments on a particular subject even though he couldn't remember what it was he actually said?
Or, my favorite, when visiting Michigan, he demonstrated his connection with reality by informing his audience that in that state "the trees are the right height".
Oh, you mean that kind of being "in touch" Mittens?
And with the same sort of non-committal generalization, to say that you'd have done it better is no more than ignorant juvenile bragging.
Do "what" better, Mitt? And how exactly would you have done things differently?
I didn't watch the "interview" but I'm betting the Fox-bot didn't challenge him on either of these points.
I'm reminded of a scene from the great Warner Brothers 1938 production of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland. John, brother to King Richard, is feasting with his cronies when Robin Hood appears. All hell breaks loose and as Robin humiliates one hapless soldier after another, the rotund, cowardly Sheriff of Nottingham, hiding behind a large chair, declares that it would be different if only he could get his hands on Robin.
Romney needs to shut up and go away. A serious person can have serious disagreements with the president over serious issues, but declaring, from the safety of the sidelines that it would different if only he could get to those problems is silly. And stupid.
And cowardly.
@ Akhilleus wrote, re: Romney, " I didn't watch the "interview" but I'm betting the Fox-bot didn't challenge him on either of these points."
Video & transcript of the interview is linked at the citation. Chris Wallace -- who conducted the interview -- mostly fed Romney questions that invited criticism of President Obama.
But Wallace did whack Romney with a "parade of horribles," as Romney called it, or "a montage of Romney elite-speak from the 2012 campaign," which is the same thing. When Romney didn't explain why he said all that stuff that would turn off any normal voter, Wallace told him he was ducking the question. I found the whole interview amusing, right down to the part where Romney said how bad he felt for Bob McDonnell & ever-so-obliquely suggested that during the veeps vetting process, he discovered something unsavory in McDonnell's closet. "I've called him. I've expressed my sympathy, blah blah."
Marie
Marie,
Thanks for that information. I suppose I'm so used to Fox being a rubber stamp for right-wing idiocy that I took it for granted that they might not challenge the Rat.
Moral: don't take nothin' for granted.
Assumptions, even warranted ones, can get you into trouble if you're not careful.
(But Romney is still an asshole.)
Ken,
Some years ago I read a book by the historian Phillip Bobbitt, "The Shield of Achilles" in which he laid out the connections between war and constitutionalism, peace and national and international strategies, and the conflicting understandings and operations of a variety of conditions for how states and nations are constituted. It was a challenging but enlightening read.
Although I found some of his conclusions on the extreme side (at the time), some of what he predicted as the next phase of national construction is coming to pass. He begins with the idea of princely states, the various duchies and principalities that made up much of Europe in the middle ages, moves on to kingly states, constituted largely after the Peace of Westphalia, ending the bloodbath of the Thirty Years War, through territorial states and state-nations to our current incarnation of nation states. These various states of state, so to speak, were created out of the ashes of conflict and re-constituted by peace agreements.
Perhaps the most interesting connection Bobbitt makes involves the way laws were changed and constitutions adjusted to align with the new realities required to help the new orders maintain, or acquire, the legitimacy necessary to protect the state (specifically, the ability to exercise the violence of military power during episodes of conflict seen as threats to the state).
The next iteration of statehood Bobbitt sees as the market state, something that is already happening. The current Supreme Court has quickly been adjusting our laws to ensure that markets are served, not the interests of the state or citizens. In Bobbitt's estimation, the nation state, at least in its liberal democratic form, existed to ensure that its citizens would be protected and given a say in the operation of the state. The market state does no such thing. It doesn't even pretend to be able to protect anyone or anything except its profits.
It exists, says Bobbitt, to maximize opportunity for citizens, and this it does, but what Bobbitt misses, somewhat, is that only some citizens will matter. He offers a much more idealized concept of the market state wherein rational action in matters such as health care and environmental protection is considered absolutely necessary. What he didn't take into account was that corporations exist only for their own well being.
They don't care about nations or states or individuals (even though they should). They care about profits. If environmental concern or health care impact those profits negatively, even if only in the short run, they are considered unnecessary risks.
The Iraq war is a perfect example of market (or highly personal, corporately influenced, extra-state) interests, taking over the direction of national policies that should have been maximized for greater security, not less. The Bush Cheney debacle demonstrates the heel of Achilles, rather than the shield, which endangers us all (and I should know! That damn Paris!)
This brings us around to your list of chaotic foreign policies at work in the world today.
The world is still dominated by nation states, but in order for those to operate efficiently and predictably, we must be able to make sense of the many and varied actors who no longer abide by any international "rules" or even a sense of them. One can make an argument that rules have always been subject to breaking, but the market state mentality (the idea that only profits and personal motives matter on the international stage) introduced into an already difficult situation by the Bush/Cheney corporate adventurism (and don't even try to claim that oil and oil profits and war profiteering didn't enter into their calculations) has thrust us all into a vast realm of chaos, perhaps Hamlet's "undiscovered country".
Bobbitt maintains that the biggest victor from what he calls the "long war", the period from 1914 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union (thus answering the larger question of which type of nation state would emerge to claim legitimacy), the United States, must accept its role in helping to direct the move into a new paradigm, a new collection of rules for a new international community. But in order to do that, the US would need to maintain its own legitimacy in the eyes of other nations and extra-national actors.
This legitimacy was thrown into the dumpster of history by Bush and Cheney and their neo-con supporters and backers, many of whom, like bombs away McCain, now demand that we replay the same failed and idiotically dangerous policies, an inchoate, but definitely market-interest based approach, that still offers less, not more, security.
It is unclear how all this will play out at this point. What is clear is that powers in this country are forcing our move to a complete market state which only seems to be operating as a traditional nation state, a state working in the interest of its citizens, not those of corporations.
This is another reason why shows like Meet the Press will never discuss these issues openly, and why foreign policy chaos will continue.
But, as Bobbitt also points out, nothing is certain. As much as those who believe in American Exceptionalism and who believe that god or Jesus or the flying spaghetti monster will come to our aid if and when we fuck up (but we can't fuck up, can we? We're AMERICA) and protect us no matter what, the move to a market state guarantees the diminution not only of the nation state, but of democracy itself.
The Tragedy of Bob
I missed the chance to comment on Marie's excellent précis and commentary on the Tragedy of Bob.
It occurs to me that in many ways Bob McDonnell is a model Modern Republican. He demonstrates the most common traits of that species and holds fast to its most treasured self-images and psychological paradoxes.
First, and most importantly in GOP world, he's a man (well sort of a man, not exactly a man like, say, my dad, but you know what I mean). He's white. He's a holier than thou Christian bible beater, he considers women to be of lesser importance. So far, all good. A stellar right-winger.
But more than all of that, he sees himself as a weird Janus. Like so many conservatives, he considers himself a hero and a victim at the same time. Why is this so strange to anyone remotely familiar with classical literature? Because even if a heroic figure was tragic (and they all are), they would not act like whiney babies and complain about how everyone is out to get them. Yet this is a staple characteristic of the conservative mindset. On the one hand they see themselves, as Marie puts it, as avenging heroes, out to rid the nation of commies, liberal pukes, traitors, immigrants, blah people, and annoying women's libbers. And on the other, they whine, and moan and cry about how no one appreciates their wonderfulness and the terrible price they pay to be Real Americans. The media hates them, and blah, blah, blah.
Classical heroes certainly go through fire and suffer, but they usually do it without complaint. They also don't, as Bob and his conservative breed do, reject personal responsibility for their actions and their fate.
Let's look at the depiction of the biblical Jesus, and the right-wing depiction, via Mel Gibson, of that same character. In none of the gospel stories of the suffering and death of Jesus does he castigate anyone or point fingers, even subtley, or reject his role. He asks, in the Garden of Gethsamane if it would be possible for him not to have to go through with it all, but once the answer is clear, he sucks it up and meets his fate. This is the road of the hero. The stories no doubt drew on centuries of similar hero tales when being crafted. Mel Gibson's Jesus, on the other hand, as well as almost all of Mel's film roles, is a woe-is-me, everyone, especially those awful Jews, hate me and are out to get me. Look at how I suffer for being a good person. Isn't it awful? Now where's my check?
And it's more than just a difference of tone. It's a complete shift in moral stance.
Is Bob McDonnell a tragic figure? Is his story, as Jen Rubin would have us believe, a "tragedy"? I'm pretty sure Aeschylus wouldn't have shelved the "Oresteia" to write "The Tragedy of Bob".
Heroes don't act like Bob McDonnell. They don't blame others for their own transgressions and hope to "beat the rap". They act with authority and with power but they also suffer for their position as someone who acts stoically either for personal reasons or on behalf of a community who cannot or will not act as the hero must
Does this sound like most Republicans? Like Dick Cheney? Like George Bush? Like Ted Cruz? Of course not, but you can bet they all think of themselves as suffering heroes who are misappreciated, as the Decider might whine.
There is so much personality dysfunction, so much self-deception, so much self-pity, and delusions of grandeur in the conservative mindset, it's hard to see how they can get through the line at the grocery store without freaking out.
But never mind all that. Vote for them because they're sure to be able to set aside all those personality paradoxes in time to successfully run a state or a country.
Yup. And Ted Nugent is locking up the guns and running for president of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters.
Bob McDonnell will be his secretary.
"Spain without sunshine."
Line of the day.
Akhilleus,
Turns out it's about to snow on the upper Missouri, where I was headed today, so am homebound for at least one more day and have been blessed with the time for a little more RC. Truly appreciated your concise history of the nation-state in partial response to my early morning snit. Have been talking about these issues for some time, once or twice with Stan Sorscher, whom I have had as an occasional guest on our leftish radio program. Stan sent me his most recent (and very apropos) Huffington Post contribution this weekend.
Here 'tis:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-sorscher/a-really-good-reason-to-o_b_5
As Stan quotes Stiglitz so aptly in the article, we're heading toward market-based global governance without global government.
Interesting times. I'd like to live long enough to see how some of what we're talking about turns out.
But short term, I'd be satisfied with improving weather in Montana.
@ Akhilleus: I think if you define "tragedy" in the classical sense -- a self-inflicted reversal of fortunes -- then Bob fits right in, albeit it's hard to say which of the many flaws you point to is his "Akhilleus's heel." Because he is so flawed, as you document, he doesn't make much of a classical hero or even a good modern literary character. Even when the reader knows the hero is bound to get caught, even though the reader disapproves of some aspects of the hero's character & actions, the reader still has to be invested in the hero's progress. The reader still has to hope the hero will somehow escape the fate to which he is almost certainly doomed or at least that the hero can be redeemed.
The hero himself (or herself) also has to have some realization that his own actions caused his downfall. You can bet Bob is still blaming his wife & cursing the jury & the judge & the lawyers and and and.
There's a difference between a tragic figure & a jerk.
Marie
Yes, Marie, McDonnell is definitely a jerk, but I think twerp comes closer to his oily essence.
I have long been (at least since the elevation of Bush II to the national political stage) puzzled about the everyday, red-blooded American's (male and female, but mostly male) apparent inability to recognize instantly the essential twerpiness political figures like Ryan, McDonnell, Cruz and Bush II exude. Even a peripheral acquaintance with a classroom, not to mention a locker room or any field of endeavor whatsoever should have taught the most inexperienced voter (is it possible to become an inexperienced adult?) such sniveling, insubstantial characters do not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone other than the face they see in the mirror. Not even their loving mothers, perhaps.
Clearly damaged goods, these types (not coincidentally these days, mostly Republican) make my skin crawl.
All about Bob stuff: The first time I viewed and listened to this man I thought, wow!, a perfect facsimile of the Ken Doll including the absence of the package. There was something about this guy that spoke religious fervor mixed with a creepy absence of real conviction. I imagine those that are close to him see all this as tragic, but tragedy is reserved for much bigger things and for people who deserve that connotation. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't make the cut.