Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Fox News and Media Bias

Recently, Rolling Stone did a piece about Fox News: “The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.”  Yet many FNC viewers see other networks as political propaganda camouflaged as independent journalism.  I see FNC as a parody of the concept of independent journalism.  Its conservative bias is less subtle than other networks’ left leanings, but like them it presents an authoritative, objective surface.  The difference is that other networks pretend not to be biased, and FNC just pretends to pretend.

I don’t think people should go to Fox seeking objective truth, but I don’t think they should go to other stations for that purpose, either.  A lot of effort went into creating the trappings of independent journalism, which then gave the political biases of independent journalists great authority.  That authority has waned in recent decades, and Fox News represents the great triumph of an alternative narrow-mindedness and dogmatism.  RS doesn’t criticize Fox against a standard of individual pursuit of truth; it treats news consumers as passive, which means their only hope is to be fed the “objective truth” by a non-Fox network.  RS criticizes Fox against a standard of “objective journalism” that really just conceals left-leaning biases. 

For instance, RS claims “[Fox News] helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators.”  For Rolling Stone, the Tea Party ought to be a joke; an “objective” news organization would treat them as one.   

It’s one thing to say that FNC observed the Tea Party and decided that it was good business, or politics, to hitch its wagon to the movement, to make its broadcasting consistent with the developing anti-establishment mood.  But is there really nothing that’s happened in the last few years that would cause people to become anti-establishment?  Is there nothing that government has done that violates at least some people’s long-held assumptions about what government ought to do?  RS doesn’t even consider these possibilities. 

I agree that conservative propaganda exists, but think that like liberal propaganda, it responds and attempts to shape attitudes people already have; it doesn’t create these attitudes out of nowhere.  RS actually acknowledges this at one point, contradicting the main theme of the article: “Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama,” the Stone intones before informing us that 84 percent of Hannity’s viewers believe that government does too much (who could have guessed?)  “’He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,’ says a former News Corp. colleague.  ‘He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.’”

So when RS wants to use a poll as evidence of FNC giving people what they already want to hear, they do this.  But when they want to use a different poll as evidence that FNC causes people to believe things, they do this: “The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship.” 

Apart from the way RS interprets similar polls differently throughout the same piece depending on what story they want to tell, there are a number of problems with this.  To begin with, correlation is not causation.  People who are more likely to be open to birtherism are surely more likely to watch FNC, but that doesn’t mean the network itself promotes birtherism.  I haven’t seen it doing so, and you’d think RS would have mentioned it if that were the case. 

Secondly, the article only cites polls of conservative “misinformation.”  If you’re trying to see what audience is most misinformed, wouldn’t you poll liberal and conservative false beliefs? 

Finally, who’s to say someone thinking the stimulus caused job losses is misinformed?  Agreeing with progressives doesn’t mean you have a well-formed reason for your opinion, and disagreeing with them doesn’t mean you have a poorly-informed opinion.

Another indication of RS’s view of objectivity comes in their treatment of the Willie Horton ad- Roger Ailes’ “dirtiest move.”  For RS, the ad is an example of Ailes using television “to skew public perception.”  Again, Rolling Stone has an idea of what public perception ought to be.  But Willie Horton, objectively speaking, did what he did.  Nobody disputes this.  Rather, Rolling Stone doesn’t think we should have a certain opinion about this. 

For RS, it was “a precursor to the modern Tea Party” when Ailes “conspired with the tobacco companies to unleash angry phone calls on Congress- cold-calling smokers and patching them through to the switchboards on Capitol Hill”; RS presents widely accepted engagement in the political process, such as protesting and calling one’s Congressman, as a sinister conspiracy when people do it for purposes they do not approve of.  And, again, it assumes that grass roots activism, at least conservative grass roots activism, is inauthentic and cannot stem from people’s “real” beliefs and interests.

Rupert Murdoch, we learn from RS, attempted in his pre-Fox News days to create “a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program.”  But 60 Minutes itself is known for going on the attack against its subjects, and few people seem to think this is sinister.  When they do it, it’s “hard-hitting journalism.”

 

Political Journalism

Pundit Peter Beinart recently wrote the following:

Less than three years ago, the American financial system virtually collapsed, leaving an economic disaster that still blights the lives of tens of millions of Americans. That collapse may be partly the result of federal efforts that pushed too hard to make Americans with lousy credit become homeowners.

But it was also undoubtedly a result of the fact that under Presidents Clinton and Bush, the U.S. government egged on Wall Street as it created new and largely unregulated financial markets. Then, in 2010, after a BP oil spill almost destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, reporters discovered that the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service, which supposedly regulates offshore drilling, was as toothless as the agencies that supposedly regulated derivatives trading.

That was last summer, and yet, amazingly, the GOP is more adamant today in its support of deregulation than it was during the Bush years. Every single Republican in the House opposed Dodd-Frank, the 2010 bill aimed at modestly strengthening America’s financial regulatory system—and Mitt Romney has said he would consider repealing it. Not to be outdone, Tim Pawlenty has proposed repealing all government regulations except for those Congress expressly votes to retain.

Deregulation is, to be sure, one of the American right’s longstanding principles. But it was one thing to demand deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s after many years of slow growth and increasing government intrusion into the economy. It is quite another to demand it now, after decades of deregulation that have helped produce two of the greatest disasters in recent U.S. history.

This piece is completely representative of political punditry- I could have chosen many like it to make the same points.  We, the reader, are asked to accept the idea that because a specific (although unspecified) regulation would have prevented the financial crisis from being so bad, that regulations in general are a good idea; and that therefore, the Dodd-Frank bill, being a species of regulation, is a good idea.  What's missing is any analysis of the merits of the Dodd-Frank bill.  Beinart wants his readers to think "Government: Good", and favor Dodd-Frank because it is an instance of government activism.

Now of course two can play this game.  What about the conservative case that regulations easing home ownership caused the crisis?  Conservatives can make a general case that since one instance of government regulation is harmful, regulation as such is bad, and therefore Dodd-Frank, as an instance of regulation, is a bad bill.  Where does that leave us?  Beinart gets around this by saying that while regulations easing home ownership may have contributed to the crisis, lack of (again, unspecified) regulations of financial instruments undoubtedly did so.  He does no analysis supporting this distinction on which so much rests.  

He also emphasizes that homeownership policy only partly explains the crisis, while he does not emphasize this about the lack of regulation of financial instruments, even though they can't be the whole explanation if homeownership policy is part of it.  There are two easy stories about the crisis, and neither one can wholly explain it, and probably together they can't wholly explain it, but people always want total explanations.  That's what opinion journalism is for.  I often see progressives go to lengths to demonstrate that homeownership policy cannot wholly explain the crisis, while forgetting that this doesn't mean that their explanations can.

Beinart believes the "Republican Party is united behind an antigovernment theology powerful enough to survive virtually any combination of real-world events."  I don't know what Beinart is talking about, except that the belief in limited government is big in Republican circles right now.  That means that some things are the proper role for government, and others are not.  People will disagree on its answers, but the Tea Party is attempting to answer a sensible question: "What is government's proper role, and what isn't?"  Beinart is attempting to ascertain whether government in general is good or bad, which is an almost meaningless question and as such allows him to answer however he wants.

Sports Journalism

What would sports be without journalists to moralize about them?  One Bill Plaschke took the occasion of the success of the U.S. women's soccer team to idealize American female athletes, then to criticize male athletes for not living up to that ideal. 

Women have a higher level of sensitivity and recognition that they might not be able to overcome errors with strength, speed or reaction," she said. "Men always think, oh, I'll get there."

In other words, women athletes believe they need one another, and men sometimes don't.

I could have told you that much from sitting on a ragged lawn chair for hours as my two daughters and one son played soccer when they were children. Watching my girls' teams was an unforgettable delight. Watching my son's teams was an unrequited pain.

The girls would hold their positions and make the right passes and constantly encourage. The boys would all chase after the ball and yell at one another.

Ah, those silly males.  But if men and women are naturally different in their approach to sports, why not appreciate each on their own terms?  Or, if Plaschke prefers women's sports, why can't he just enjoy them on their own terms, rather than using them as a vehicle for criticizing male athletes?  Why does a man have to be more like a woman?  Isn't it kind of cruel to hold men to a feminine ideal they cannot possible live up to?  Why do women's accomplishments have to be about men?

The women shouldn't take it too personally.  For most sportswriters, sports is only an excuse to pass moral judgment on athletes, teams, entire sports and even entire societies.  Of course it all goes far beyond vulgar wins and losses, except that ultimately the moralizing sportswriter is a frontrunner who sees athletic success as the measure of character.  Thus:

"If I was [sic] asked to assemble a team of American athletes to compete against similarly composed teams from the rest of the world in any sport...I would take a team of women.  I would take a team that would play like a team [bla, bla, bla]...I would take a group like the U.S. women's soccer team, and not because it is playing Japan on Sunday for the World Cup championship, but because of how it played in reaching this stage..."

yet

"I would take groups like the women's teams that have won three of the four Olympic soccer gold medals, six of the nine basketball gold medals, and three of the four softball gold medals in such overpowering fashion that the International Olympic Committee eliminated the sport."

So you'd take them becaues they win.  Which is true: U.S. female teams are better relative to international women than male teams are relative to international men, or at least it seems like it.  This is an apples and oranges comparison, in that it says nothing about the female teams in comparison with the male teams.  Moreover, if women are innately morally superior, this should be the case throughout the world.

Contradicting his innate superiority argument is his obligatory Title IX mention.  If it is true, as all sportswriters believe and none demonstrate, that that legislation is responsible for U.S. women's athletic dominance, then you can hardly blame our men for the fact that U.S. women are better relative to international women than U.S. men are relative to international men.  The government simply gives U.S. women a huge boost relative to other women.  Another explanation in the article, also contradicting the innate superiority thesis, is that money and fame have corrupted men- another sports journalism cliche.  Are people trying less hard because there is money and glory involved?  Glory has been the motive behind athletic success since 776 BC.  Why else would you compete?

One thing we could consider is the transition from individual to team sports.  We still have individual sports, of course.  Women now play them (tennis, golf, car racing, boxing), complicating Platsche's argument. But men play team sports- even if they haven't integrated the individual to the team to the extent Platsche would like, the attempt at team sports is a step in the right direction by Platscheite standards.  By the nature of the game of basketball and the natural distribution of talent among males, one player will often dominate the game in a way that may not be true of women's basketball; but when one player imposes his will, that is no less real basketball than the women's game, or the brand of basketball played by men's teams who have no really good players and turn to teamwork by necessity.  Baseball/softball is a series of one-on-one matchups; a pitcher can dominate the game if the fielding is at a high enough level to make him/her the main variable, but a hitter cannot dominate very much because hitters have to take turns.  You can of course bunt, usually on the coach's orders, but whether you should do so is a strategic, not a moral, question.  (Is stealing bases selfish or unselfish?  It is strategically similar to a bunt.)  In football, offensive linemen have to, and do, work together as a team (and do not usually get much individual glory), while receivers can pretty much be as selfish as they want (although it helps marginally if they block well).  Quarterbacks are complicated, as they can get inordinate amounts of individual glory, but have to pursue team goals in order to do so. 

 

CNN.com: America Not a Religious Nation

A writer at Cable News Network Dot Com, one Kenneth C. Davis, had a piece arguing that the U.S. is not a Christian nation.  It is poorly argued.

He speaks of "the ongoing debate between those who see America as a 'Christian Nation' and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July", and although it wasn't really all that hot here this weekend, I take it he thinks he is addressing a highly contested question.  Given that, I wish he had defined his terms, to make clear for us the implications of the debate.  If we're a secular nation, does that mean we have to take "In God we Trust" out of the pledge?  If we're a Christian nation, does that mean the government needs to set up an Inquisition? 

Although he does not make clear what the debate is about, the Davis gamely joins it:

While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... " 

Now, Jefferson was allowed to speak on behalf of the nation, after a fashion, once, as Davis emphasizes (that's why Davis published the piece on the Fourth); but this didn't give him lifetime license.  Jefferson's interpretation of the First Amendment derives its authority from the First Amendment itself; although Jefferson is a famous person, he was not at the Constitutional convention.  If Davis has an idea about the interpretation of the First Amendment, he should tell us what it is himself.

Davis may not be fully comfortable relying on Jefferson's name recognition to bolster his argument, because he quickly adds: "The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a 'hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.'"  Davis here moves away from making a claim about interpreting the Bill or Rights, ratified by the people, part of the Constitution that forms our government, to merely talking about the opinions of various people.  What do these people's opinions tell us about what America is?  Are we talking about French English or American Enlightenment figures, or some of each?  Davis doesn't tell us any of this.

He continues: "Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the 'shining city on a hill' where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death."

If we're going back to 1644 to find the founding purpose of our country, why do only dissidents' opinions count?  You could find quotations from Pilgrims and Shining City on a Hill types from that period, and the largely Christian purpose of the earliest Americans in New England becomes really not even a close call.  Which colony/state has, historically, been more important in defining America- Massachussets or Rhode Island?  Moreover, Williams goes quite a few steps beyond Jefferson, calling for the church to avoid the world altogether- something the church rarely does in practice, in America or anywhere else, and which in any case isn't any of the state's business.

Davis is probably throwing the Shining City on a Hill vision back in the face of its conservative adherents, showing how such visions can lead to persecution and other forms of overzealousness.  His problems are, first, that he has framed his argument as whether the U.S. was, in reality, founded as a Christian nation, not whether it ought to have been so founded; and second, that, again, he hasn't really defined the competing visions for America.  There's a good argument to be made about how conservatives' religiousity is connected to their continued belief in natural rights, and emphasis an American Exceptionalism, which sees our country as obligated to show the world that people can govern themselves without needing to be sedated by a European style welfare state, and alternates between the belief that we need to lead the world militarily to fulfill our destiny and the belief that we need to stay clear of the world and of the constraints of alliances and corrupt international law and opinion; and how progressives' secularism is connected to the opposite views.  Davis has not done any of this, because, again, he hasn't defined the debate that is taking place.

 

Common

A rapper called Common went to the White House for some sort of confab celebrating American poetry.  Because he has had friendly things to say about cop-killing and has said "Burn a Bush", right-wingers and police organizations object to the invitation.  The Daily Beast's Chris Lee covers it thusly:

Sarah Palin went after the Chicago MC on Twitter. Karl Rove, former President George W. Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, called Common a “thug” on Fox News, claiming the performer urged the assassination of President Bush and promoted violence against police in his poem, "A Letter to the Law," during a 2005 Def Poetry Jam performance. And conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website referred to Common (government name Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr.) as a “controversial” rapper.

Meanwhile, fans familiar with Common’s contributions to hip-hop were like, Really? Common a Thug? Controversial! Nah.  Call it the latest evidence of a widening divide between Red State America and the hip-hop nation....Outside the Fox News set, Common’s mild-mannered demeanor, his charitable work for AIDS awareness and PETA, even his preppie garb and neatly trimmed beard are seen as a repudiation of gangsta rap’s scary chest thumping and egocentrism.

So hip-hop nation thinks one thing, Fox News nation thinks another, but Daily Beast readers know this means hippidy-hoppidy people get it, while Common's critics don't.  Common doesn't cultivate an image as a thug or a controversial figure, so people who find him controversial must be making a mistake. 

But if people don't like what you say, then it's controversial.  Image doesn't really matter- people's objection is "someone who said x is being invited to the White House", not "someone who projects the image of a thug rapper is being invited to the White House."

Furthermore, Lee admits "just about every MC...has...said something...specifically intended to piss off the mainstream", including Common.  So being anti-anti-Common is just a cheap way of identifying yourself as independent of the mainstream- cheap because you have your own mainstream of blue-state America, which includes the current President of the United States, to lean on. 

If you're part of the Red State/Fox News mainstream, you by definition don't get it.  If you're part of the Blue State mainstream, you are conscious, you understand that Common is conscious, and that he says the things he says to shock the Red State/Fox News mainstream into that same elevated consciousness.  Lee notes that Common is "best known as a 'conscious rapper'"; Provokation, Lee says, is "a well-traveled route to provoking discourse.  And, obviously, discourse raises consciousness. 

Too bad Common sold out, not only by appearing at the WH, but by saying "The one thing that shouldn't be questioned is my support for the police officers and the troops that protect us every day."  Sarah Palin could hardly have put it better.

Values

Anna Holmes in the Washington post writes about how pro-lifers are sexist:

These ideas about women have explicitly political implications as well, echoing the ideology at the core of the antiabortion movement’s recently heightened assault on women’s reproductive rights, which found expression in the near-shutdown of the government over contraception, STD testing and the specter of pregnancy termination. The message is clear: Women can’t be trusted to define, or control, their own bodies, so it’s up to men to do it for them.

Jon Chait at The New Republic responds:

I object to the automatic equation of opposition to legalized abortion with sexism. Opposition to abortion rights can reflect a desire to control women, but it can also simply reflect a belief that a fetus is a human being. That's not a belief I share, but it's a values question and I can't say that those on the other side are wrong. The notion of letting women decide whether or not to have an abortion only comes into play if you think the fetus does not have human rights, or if the question is murky.

It is to Chait's credit that he rejects the link between sexism and pro-life views, but let's consider something else. 

For Chait, you can't really say whether a fetus is human, you can only form beliefs on the matter.  A fetus exists in a factual sense, but it is up to a person whether to place the fetus in the category "human being", or in another category, and no person's interpretation is better than another's; or, if there is an objective moral reality, it is something humans aren't capable of knowing (and how can it be binding on us if we don't know it?)  If Chait is right about all this, then the question becomes which arbitrary position should have authority.

Holmes says that women themselves have the authority to "define...their own bodies".  It follows that for Holmes, a fetus becomes a part of a woman's body if she defines it as such, and on the other hand becomes an unborn baby if she chooses to define her body as not including the fetus. 

Now I would guess that neither Chait nor Holmes believes that a person has a "right to define" his or her arm, for instance, as a separate person; nor, on the other hand, to define a next door neighbor, a house, or the entire universe as part of his or her person.  In these matters, they would accept that some interpretations are superior to others. 

The difficulty around abortion comes from the fact that interpretation of the status of a fetus is complicated, not from a generalized values relativism that treats all interpretations anywhere as equally valid.  Obviously, a born person has a right to life, and parents have an obligation to provide sustenance and care.  And nothing about a baby really changes the instant a mother gives birth, except for its physical position relative to the mother.  On the other hand, development of a baby is a gradual process, and pro-choice people will argue that conception, or various other points, are morally arbitrary as well. 

When people disagree between interpretations, it may be that one interpretation is superior to another, but not obviously so, so that, because of human fallibility, some people come to mistaken conclusions.  In this case, you CAN say that "those on the other side are WRONG", because you can see the flaw in their thinking.  It may be that the interpretations are equally valid; but this itself requires an argument to prove it, a measurement by which to judge each interpretation, in the same way that the superiority of one interpretation over another requires argumentative proof.

The identical argument, by the way, applies to Constitutional interpretation.  Saying that two interpretations of a clause are equally valid requires an argument, every bit as much as saying that one interpretation is superior to another requires one.

Religious right vs. religious left

Some religious left guy at the Huffington Post, calling himself Chuck Currie, doesn't like some religious right organization:

If you have ever heard of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and thought it was a religious organization, you would have been mistaken. Names can be deceiving.

Why would you think it was a religious organization?  It has "Democracy" in it, which is a form of government, so it sounds like it's about politics.  It has the preposition "on", which suggests a distance from religion- as does the word "religion," actually.  You have religion departments, comparative religion studies, and so forth; on the other hand, you have churches, synagogues, mosques, sacrifices to the gods and the like.  People talk about other people "practicing religion", and describe other people as religious.  I would expect an institute on religion and democracy to advance a certain perspective about religion and its relationship to democracy.  If the author hadn't suggested the idea, his readers probably never would have thought the organization was an apolitical religious organization.  First paragraphs can be deceiving.

the IRD was busy denouncing Christian advocacy on behalf of the poor this week as worshiping "big government."

Usually people don't denounce "advocacy on behalf of the poor" generally; they may disagree with Chuck Curry specifically about the best way to do so.  For Curry, the whole question of how best to help the poor is largely a phony controversy; that's why he puts "big government" in quotes, to show that the debate over the role of government is for him a sideshow, while the debate over whether to help the poor at all is real.  The question for Curry and his ilk is one of will to do the right thing rather than knowledge of how to do it, or trading off between competing goods.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the United Church of Christ (UCC) and a plethora of religious leaders from across religious traditions have been calling on Congress and the president to "put the poor and vulnerable first" as difficult budget decisions were made for the remainder of FY11 and next year's federal budget.

Sadly, those calls largely went unheard in the budget compromise reached late Friday evening. Those most vulnerable will suffer as we continue tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while cutting critically needed domestic programs. The "least of these" that Christians are called on to defend are being left behind. For the IRD, however, that is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Most taxes don't come from high-bracket taxes on the rich; a lot of them come from the rich, because the rich have a lot of income, but whether the top bracket is 35 or 39 percent doesn't make a lot of difference.  (You could of course tax at 70% and drive everybody into shelters.)  Conversely, most of what government does isn't targeted at the poor.  Most government activity is directed at helping the public generally (government funds roads because people like to drive, disease research because people don't like getting diseases, education because people want to be educated) or to benefit whatever special interests happen to take control of it.  Consequently, the main political question is always how much money we want to devote to collective action and how much to our own goals, rather than how much the rich should give to the poor.  Curry promises to show us that the budget doesn't do enough to help the poor, but he changes the subject to the top marginal tax rate rather than telling us what we need to do to help the poor and how we are failing to measure up.

Mark Tooley, IRD's director, wrote this week for Front Page Magazine, a far-right publication with morally troubling leadership, that the "Religious and Evangelical Left":

...assume that only centralized, coercive government can guarantee "justice" and provide "charity." Other social actors, like families, churches, private charities, philanthropies, and civic groups, not to mention private business, are all to submit unquestioningly to government supremacy in every human arena. Here is the Religious Left's vision of "God's Kingdom," administered from Washington, D.C.

That isn't true, of course. So why write it? Tooley, a former analyst for the CIA, has his reasons.

[Me again; typepad doesn't let me double outdent after a double indent] Curry does assume, at least, that opposition to government efforts to help the poor is equivalent to opposing help for the poor (or, since few people oppose all government aid to the poor, that opposition to the levels and method of spending that Curry happens to favor is immoral.)  We should also consider at least the possibility of government action crowding out or altering the course of private action in negative ways.  But Mark Tooley used to work at the CIA, and is therefore a bad person!

most Christians come together over the issue of poverty. For conservative political leaders, this is troubling. And so they use IRD as a vehicle for attacking faith leaders and organizations, like the National Council of Churches, whenever Christians work in common cause to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty, to advocate for an end to war or for policies that would reverse the impact of human caused global climate change.

This isn't true, of course.  So why did Curry write it?  Because, again, he believes we have it in our power to bring "an end to war," to "help the poor lift themselves out of poverty", and the like, and that anyone who disagrees with his methods simply doesn't want to accomplish his goals.

Jingoism

Over in Pakistan, David Cameron declared that Britain would not become very involved in Pakistan's dispute with India over Kashmir, saying "As with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place."  Andrew Stuttaford at the National Review gets upset, and notes that the righty Daily Telegraph does likewise.

Neither Stuttaford nor the Telegraph disputes the merits of Cameron's claim.  Britain left a mess on its exit from its former colonies on the subcontinent, as it did with its Palestinian protectorate.  Rather the question is one of attitude: the Telegraph pines for the prickly nationalism of Gordon Brown, who declared that "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over," and Stuttaford declares that Cameron's remarks reveal an "underlying set of beliefs." 

There is a certain kind of person who does not want a leader to criticize his country's history, even if that country has been in the wrong.  In some cases, a country may want to make clear that it doesn't see itself as deficient in moral authority, but if the rest of the world does see it as deficient, then that doesn't matter.  Soft power isn't just a matter of self-assertion.  Britain and France have nuclear weapons and Germany does not largely because everybody understands that the world trusts the former but not the latter with nuclear weapons.  Russia and China are less worried about America's security umbrella at their doorsteps than they would be about Germany or Japan, respectively, possessing similar economic strength.  Moreover, the ability to grovel a bit about one's past is an excellent excuse for not taking on a diplomatic or military quagmire. 

The always sanguine Brits can pull this off much better than the Americans, because, the Telegraph notwithstanding, they seem to have far fewer prickly, hypersensitive nationalits.  "Oh, no, I'm afraid we can't take that on, chaps.  Seem to always be making a mess of things.  Really you're best off working things out on your own." 

But why should Americans be hypersensitive about criticisms of Britain?  Stuttaford is a native of Britain, but is now an American writing for an American audience.  Nor is he the only American conservative reacting this way.  "But it's a Western Civilization thing. The Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman tradition and all that."  Come now, you're not serious.  This has nothing to do with Shakespeare or Michaelangelo.  "No, but the West as a political civilization."

But Western civilization, like all other civilizations, is responsible for countless horrible crimes.  Caesar's invasion of Britain, for example.  Beginning with the destruction of Troy over what appears to have been a consensual elopement, continuing with the Athenians' treatment of Melos, Alexander's inhumanity in Persia, the Romans' crucifiction of the Savior of Mankind, their unprovoked destruction of Carthage, the German Holocaust, the Communist Russia's genocides, and the whole invention of totalitarianism, the Spanish massacres in the New World, and the like- the West really has quite a bit to answer for even before you consider "politically correct" subjects like Hiroshema, Nagasaki, the Crusades and colonialism.  No point in getting defensive about it.

Another War

We're in one, and the WSJ's Bret Stephens is giddy.  Every time we promise to reduce our role in the world to something affordable and in our interests, another cause comes along that absolutely demands our championing it.  Bret Stephens gloats about the revival of neoconservatism, his metric of success apparently being how many humanitarian wars we can get involved in.  He explains how it happened:

"The moment the Libyans revolted, the U.S. could not have remained silent without doing violence to bedrock American values. And so President Obama said Gadhafi must go.  The moment Mr. Obama said that, the administration could not be indifferent to the outcome...The moment Gadhafi turned the tide and threatened to massacre his opponents, the administration was bound to try to stop him for purely humanitaryian reasons.  And so Mr. Obama pressed for international action, even as he hoped the U.S. would not have to be directly involved.  The moment it became clear that there would be no such intervention without U.S. involvement, the U.S. became involved...Sooner or later [the administration] will figure out that any road that doesn't lead to Gadhafi's death, imprisonment or exile...can only mean the de facto partition of Libya, or Gadhafi's survival, or a long civil war from which the West cannot easily disentangle itself....Put simply, regime change is the only viable option..."

Doing violence to bedrock American values is kind of a vague phrase- Gadhafi has been a tyrant decades, and for the last several years he has been a guy we've tolerated; and people are slaughtered all the time all over the world without us bothering about it.  Bill Clinton won re-election after the Rwanda genocide happened, "violence to bedrock American values" or not.  Specifically what would happen if Obama didn't speak out about Libya is a bunch of people would harrangue him to do so, as was the case with Iran.  But if you give the humanitarians an inch, as Stephens indicates, they'll take a mile.  And no amount of failure or cost or loss of life resulting from our wars is enough to prevent them from dragging us in the next time, as Stephens also suggests.

Deeply discredited

Jon Chait, at The New Republic, commenting on the violent political swings of the Midwest, which turned viciously on the GOP in 2006-08, then furiously on the Democrats in 2010, and where now GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are unpopular:

The big picture is that the Republican Party was deeply discredited by the end of the Bush administration. Then you had Democrats running the government everywhere at the moment of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, so they managed to win power in a bunch of states. But this fact seems only to be reminding people why they hated Republicans in the first place.

Why doesn't he just say that the economy has constantly been bad, and that this has hurt whichever party has been in power?  That would be a more straightforward reading of the evidence.  Because that's not what Chait wants.  He prefers to think that the GOP was "deeply discredited," whereas the Democrats were only shallowly discredited; and that now the GOP is deeply discrediting itself again.  But what can it mean to "deeply discredit" if deep discrediting is forgotten in two years, just like the shallow kind?  I'm not playing with words, Chait is; there's a reason he used the words he did. 

It could also be that both parties overreached when in power; I think there's plenty of evidence that this is the case with the Democrats after 2008.  Barack Obama wasn't as personally unpopular as his policies, or as Nancy Pelosi- the exact opposite of what you would expect if the economy were dragging down the Party in power.  Similarly, Scott Walker's unpopularity in Wisconsin appears to be linked to his overreaching on labor policy more than any kind of violent surprise that the economy hasn't improved in two months.  I don't know about Kasich in Ohio, but note that Mitch Daniels in Indiana won a legislative majority in 2010 despite being governor during bad economic times, so it might not only be economics that's driving swings.