Wouldn't you think...

...given the demographic trends and their acknowledged-by-all need to attract non-whites to the party, the Republicans would know better than to instinctively pile on a latina nominee?

There's a Future for You, Willie Pete...

...on yet another topsy-turvy day in the Obama administration, I'm thinking of white phosphorus, what it does, what it means, what it makes us do.

In response to local outrage over recent civilian casualties, among which are wounds inflicted by white phosphorus shells, on May 10 we issued a flat denial with a suggestion that it must have been somebody else burning little children, not us. Next day the Pentagon released summaries of incidents in which Taliban/Al Qaeda forces used white phosphorus against NATO/ISAF, rolling with the previous day's hypothesis. The release consists of one-line Pentagon accounts, without a timeline, eyewitnesses, photos, video or local Afghan government corroboration. Human Rights Watch isn't buying it.

This response is interesting to me: the pattern of denial is craven, where the Bush pattern was merely brazen. When confronted about WP use in Fallujah, the Bush DoD said first that it didn't happen, contradicting soldiers' accounts, then acknowledged use of white phosphorus but stressed that such use was legal. Sure we fired incendiary devices into civilian areas, devices whose contents chemically bind to adipose and burn until fuel or oxygen is removed, and it was legal.

The deny-and-shrug was also used in last winter's war in Gaza. The IDF's first response to charges that it had fired white phosphorus into densely populated areas in Gaza was a flat denial, followed by a promise of investigation. When the investigation concluded, Israel determined that any such use was legal.

The NYT piece covering the investigation's release called the dispute over the use of white phosphorus a "proxy" for larger discussions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, Israeli fears about Iran, usw.

Which is funny because civilian casualties are the whole ballgame. The "larger issues" boil down to civilian casualties. Israel's vision of itself as a willing partner in peace is put into question by its own perpetration of war crimes. (And that's not me, that's HRW again.) The threat that Hamas-Iran pose is mooted by white phosphorus. White phosphorus is a battlefield illuminator. What interested parties then need is their own paper trail, a counterargument, any counterargument.

Debate, no matter how absurd, excuses the main issue from our concern. As soon as two sides can set up camp -- HRW vs. NATO, UN vs. IDF -- the issue is up for grabs. It is only at the level of debate that discussion of things like war on innocents can be taken up neutrally. No one can be pro the execution of civilians; there has to be some other thing to talk about. Only then can writers point to "the broader picture," revealing brutally burned children to be part of a "proxy argument."

SO, congratulations to the Obama administration -- the "blame the other guy" response creates a much more interesting debate than the Bush administration's "when we do it it's not illegal" response. Now, instead of asking Is Hamid Karzai governing anything?, or Can we begin finally to distinguish friend from foe?, or How do we get reconstruction aid / hearts-and-minds work going?, or Why are we making Afghanistan safe for a bunch of opium barons?, or What the Christ are we doing in a place that crippled Alexander the Great?, we're busy figuring out whose WP shells those were, what size the Russians used thirty fucking years ago, etc., etc. And there's definitely a future in that...
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The Plan Cannot Fail!

Are those men at an Olive Garden?

Mitt, to praise the android, gave off the odor of introspection in that interview: Republicans lost because they behaved like Washington insiders, spending heedlessly. It was an answer that absorbed Jeb Bush's point of attack and had the added benefit of steering the conversation back to taxes and spending, away from culture, ideology and region.

Does the current crisis of American conservatism run deeper than being the by-product of rampant success? Doesn't this look a lot like the Althusserians-vs-Student-Radicals of Les Evenements? Rush Limbaugh is calling for a "teaching tour"? That's pure Althusser, just from another political pole! The people have been duped, bamboozled! Educate the ignorant masses so that they can take control of / comprehend the means of their subjection! Then, depending on your political cup of tea, the newly-enlightened former plebes will take control of the means of production / reduce marginal tax rates and capital gains to zero. Same paternalism, different face.

My concern, dude, is that Democrats need the same kind of introspection. Sure, their nominal adversaries appear doomed to become a regional party; now would seem to be the time to gloat. But the gloating disguises how the Party made its gains. It's funny to bust out GOP Survivor and imagine Cantor and Steele fighting over the party's corpse. But Democrats don't have anything to say about Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter, Jim Webb (Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, thanks), Tim Kaine (pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, pro-business), Rick Boucher (pro-coal for the love of God)...when, really, was the last time a liberal democrat won a close race?

Yeah, Mitt is funny, but he's smiling because he won: he purged the yellowbellies from his party and watched as his enemies bit off more identities than they could chew; watched while this incoherent behemoth staggered from crisis to crisis, inarticulately blathering about fiscal restraint one day and limitless bailouts the next; watched the liberal wing bank on massive turnout in black and brown precincts countrywide...in short, banking on massive turnout _forever_ from groups of Americans who vote at 3/5 the rate of white voters -- the political equivalent of subprime lending. The conservative wing of the party, of course, thinks that pandering to "downscale whites" will preserve its majority, when all it constitutes is further rightstreaming...

Either way, the Android wins. Perhaps it's time for a teaching tour for Democrats. A lesson from that famous android fighter, John Connor...wherever you are, you are the resistance...
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If this is the republican repair steering committee...

...these guys are dead in the water. I don't know what it is about Mittens, but he continues to hold onto some godforsaken idea that he can be president. That this sort of thing is not just possible in a just world, but likely within the next eight years. It's the sort of lunacy one usually sees reserved to the guy on the National Mall yammering on about how JFK steals water from his bathtub. And Cantor's no better. If these guys can't admit in the media that they screwed up, if they just shift the blame onto the economy/big spending/neutrinos, then they've got no shot for a -long- time.

...again... if a major American political party was mortally wounded or dead, would we recognize it?