Conventional Folly

It’s Hillary

David Donadio — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:51:59 +0000

Mike Allen reports that Obama’s tapped Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State. I’m skeptical of the pick, and I think she’d make a better Secretary of Defense. The military loves her, and it would allow Obama to name the first female SecDef.

Hillary is a fighter. She’s cold, calculating, and remorseless — the kind of person you want to represent you if you’re being taken to court. Some say it’s better to have her inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, which I can appreciate, but let’s not forget that there’s no real Republican opposition right now, which means that as intra-administration conflicts inevitably arise, and the media delights in reporting them, things are liable to get pretty ugly.

Remember Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, selling sensitive satellite and missile technologies to China? Well, Hope and Change just brought those folks back into the cabinet room.

In two months, Rahm Emanuel is going to learn what it’s like to lose control of the message.

Daniel Kennelly — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:59:01 +0000

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match…right now, dammit!

A jaw-dropper

David Donadio — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:42:19 +0000

When it comes to the war on drugs, here are two awfully good reasons not to be a supply-sider:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA obstructed inquiries into its role in the shooting down of an aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries in Peru in 2001, the agency’s inspector general has concluded.

The inspector-general’s report said a CIA-backed program in Peru targeting drug runners was so poorly run that many suspect aircraft were shot down by Peruvian air force jets without proper checks being made first.

Unclassified portions of the report were made public for the first time on Thursday by U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, who criticized the CIA for the “needless” deaths.

These ludicrous policies got started in Clinton’s second term, when he brought Barry McCaffrey out of retirement to become the new drug czar, and apparently the Bush administration continued them. Unless the plane had been on the outskirts of a major population center, and there was good reason to believe it had weapons of mass destruction on board, there’s simply no excuse for something like this.

Water on Mars

Daniel Kennelly — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:22:52 +0000

This sounds like pretty big news: “NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.”

A Loss of Shared Teleology

Daniel Kennelly — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:01:55 +0000

Rod Dreher, with a little help from Alasdair MacIntyre, pins the source of the impasse in the gay marriage debate: a loss of a shared teleology, hence much of the mutual outrage we’ve been seeing on this issue (and others, too): “We no longer possess a belief that marriage has a purpose beyond itself, that it signifies something greater than the will of individuals wishing to be married. This is the result of a radically individualist culture that views ethical truths as little more than statements of preference. What we’ve lost is, to use a philosophical term, a teleology – that is, the belief that our actions are all geared toward a final goal, and must be judged by whether or not they lead toward, or away, from this goal. Absent a shared teleology, however general, our politics become even more fractious and combative, as rational argument – which democratic deliberation requires – becomes all but impossible.”

Getting out of Gitmo

David Donadio — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:01:55 +0000

A U.S. judge has ordered that five Algerians captured in Bosnia after the September 11th attacks be freed from Guantanamo. My colleague Chris Boucek does groundbreaking work on counterterrorism and detainee issues at Carnegie, and I drew on his expertise in my remarks at last night’s AFF roundtable.

Hitler only had one

David Donadio — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:43:55 +0000

So they say, anyway, at Bild.

For the love of underpants

Daniel Kennelly — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:19:28 +0000

A video and song extolling the virtue of “Big Underpants“, aka China Central Television’s physics defying headquarters in downtown Beijing. (H/T to Kelani Chan for the link and translation.)

Libertarian Thoughts on Prop 8

Daniel Kennelly — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:26:26 +0000

Richard Epstein: “Today’s harsh skirmishing over Prop 8 starts from the common assumption that the state has the right to issue marriage licenses, so that the only question worth asking is whether it can discriminate between gay and straight couples. But to the libertarian, the antecedent inquiry is whether the state has any proper role in issuing marriage licenses at all.”

When a flight attendant asks the passengers if they know how to fly a plane…

David Donadio — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:32:01 +0000

…be someplace else.

In related news: