Aggrepost: On the Other Hand ...

Well, it looks like the server move went nicely. My biggest qualm is that the server has a different configuration than your run-of-the-mill host around Silicon Valley. So it's been a little getting accustomed to. And yet, even if I wanted to blog up a storm, the calendar is pretty booked.

» Suffice it to say, there's a Special Election going on in HD29 (Pearland, Matagorda County). I'll be the house pessimist and suggest that there isn't going to even be a runoff in this sucker. Standard disclaimer here: I hope beyond hope to be wrong on this one. I know there's loads of people doing the Lord's work down there. And to their immense credit, the TDP is even putting what resources it can in the field. But since I haven't gotten a sense of what the dollar estimate is to the resources put in (the candidate himself has raised something like $15k to Mike O'Day's $100k), I'm doubtful that it's enough to combat the very understandable lack of attention to the contest. The Chronicle, once more, underserves the reading public by rolling out their first story in December on the contest, penned by Richard Stewart. It credits the photo of the Democratic candidate as being from the "DiNoro Campaign." Previously, they ran a November 27 story on the lineup of contestants as well as a November 22nd report that there would be a special election. I realize that State Rep races aren't the biggest resource demand at 801 Texas, but that's just pure crap for coverage (pardon my French). It might have been nice to get at least one story on what a campaign day with DiNovo and O'Day was like. What party resources were behind each? Who had support from whom? What kind of issues does each view as important to HD29? Ya know ... stuff that sorta matters in a campaign. Just saying is all. I'll predict about 7,500 total votes, O'Day clearing 50% by about a handful or so.

UPDATE: Well, I was off by a bit, but it won't really matter. 7,320 total votes and there will be a runoff, albeit between two Republicans: Mike O'Day and Randy Weber. I think I'll pick the lesser of two evils and go with the Republican who has the backing of two Democrats in O'Day. It might be fun to cheer on Weber and pray for him to demonstrate how out of touch he is with the district at a later point in time with a Dem better suited to hold the Matagorda County base. But who knows how long that'll be before it happens.

» CJR's Paul McLeary once more rings true with some quality blogging:

One of the criticisms we level regularly at journalists is that they're often possessed of pretty short memories.

We've seen this in some respects in the coverage over the last couple days concerning the proposal -- put forward by John McCain, Joe Lieberman and the American Enterprise Institute's Fred Kagan -- for the United States to increase the number of troops in Iraq in order to secure and stabilize that savaged country.

Missing from virtually all of the coverage of this proposal is a little thing called Operation Forward Together, which was launched during the summer of '06 in Baghdad. It's an odd omission, since Forward Together was pretty much exactly what the advocates of the "go big" strategy have in mind, and there are lessons in what happened. As part of the operation about 6,000 Iraqi security forces were sent to Baghdad, along with about 5,500 additional American troops, to try and tamp down the spiraling violence in that city.

But despite McCain, Lieberman and Kagan's conviction that more troops equals victory, Forward Together didn't work out so well. On October 20, the Washington Post reported that according to the Army itself, the tactic failed ...

» Add Fred Hiatt's conclusion to this mix and you've got my own dilemna ...

You can't help but be impressed as you listen to Rice discourse on how the region has changed and why the old approaches won't work. You feel less certain, when she's finished, that she or her boss have come up with any alternatives that will.

Read the whole thing, though. It's brilliant.

For my own record, I still cannot bring myself around to saying it's time to leave Iraq. Why? Simply put, if we leave, we're going to have to come back to an even uglier mess in maybe 10 years or so. The challenge is to bridge the current disaster towards a point of stability. Easier said than done, though. And as Hiatt points out, it's a huge "if" as to whether anyone in this adminstration has a clue at how to accomplish that. I do, however, think that can be accomplished with few forces than we presently have, but probably not by much. McCain makes a point when he suggests that for some to complain about the shortage of troops at the initial stage should find merit in his call for more troops today. Unfortunately, what McCain fails to grasp is that the mission today is not the mission it was two or three (or four or five) years ago. For someone staking his claim to the Presidency on his understanding of world affairs, that's a rather critical lapse of judgement.

» Peter Beinart has a great TRB in the New Republic. As inane as Silvestre Reyes' understanding of world affairs is, I've always thought it ironic that all of the sudden Republicans care how a public official answers pop quiz questions about world affairs. I seem to recall a certain ambivalence to such things back in 1999. Funny how they all come around on that ... independently of one another, of course. What Beinart captures is a far deeper problem of civilian and military leaders failing to grasp similar intricacies ...

When it comes to foreign policy, suspicion of experts is particularly strong on the right, where it is nourished by stylized memories of the cold war. In the conservative memory, the United States reached its foreign policy nadir under Jimmy Carter, a technocrat whose mastery of detail concealed an appalling absence of strategic vision. The United States gloriously rebounded under Ronald Reagan, who got individual facts wrong but big ideas right. From the beginning, George W. Bush has marketed himself as Reagan's heir: another guy who doesn't let minutiae interfere with his grasp of the big picture.

This actually does a disservice to Reagan, whose knowledge of the Soviet Union dwarfed Bush's knowledge of the Middle East. (Between 1976 and 1980, for instance, Reagan personally wrote dozens of radio commentaries--including six in a row summarizing neocon academic Eugene Rostow's critique of salt II.) But, more generally, it misreads the broader lesson of the cold war, which is that cultural knowledge is critical to foreign policy success. One reason the Truman administration fashioned such wise policies toward the Soviet Union was the influence of men like George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and Chip Bohlen, all of whom had served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. By contrast, as David Halberstam notes in The Best and the Brightest, the United States stumbled into Vietnam "with virtually no input from anyone who had any experience on the recent history of that part of the world." By the 1960s, the McCarthyite campaign against officials supposedly complicit in the communist takeover of China had cleansed the State Department of its best Asia hands. And, as a result, most of the men (and they were all men) making Vietnam policy saw Southeast Asia as a blank canvas onto which the United States could transpose containment policies developed in Europe.

In much the same way, the Bush administration has treated the Middle East as intellectually derivative--a repository for theories of rogue-state rollback derived in Europe and Asia during World War II and the cold war. History can be a source of inspiration and guidance, but only when carefully adapted to present realities. And, from the beginning, the Bush administration proved hostile to the very Mideast experts (concentrated at the State Department and CIA) most aware of those realities. To head up the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the White House initially chose Jay Garner, who, when advised to contact Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani--the most powerful man in the country--responded, "Why? Who is this person?" Garner's successor, L. Paul Bremer--according to Larry Diamond's book Squandered Victory--knew who Sistani was but considered him politically insignificant until January 2004, when Sistani sent tens of thousands of Shia into the streets to protest Bremer's plan for a caucus system to choose Iraq's constituent assembly. It took U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian who had spent almost his entire career in the Middle East, to convince Sistani--in Arabic--to accept a compromise. Again and again, as Diamond and others have detailed, the knowledge gap between U.N. officials and their American counterparts in post-Saddam Iraq was not merely large; it was downright embarrassing.

» Newsweek's cover story on HRC & Obama is pure drivel if there ever was one. Not that it necessarily hammers away on negatives for two folks I like. It doesn't engage in much of that, really. It's just the style of writing itself that serves for some rather unintended comedy.

To wit ...

It's impossible to separate the abstract question of whether America is ready for a woman or a black from the concrete matter of whether we're ready for Hillary or Barack. Historically, the odds favor a woman over an African- American; psychologically and generationally, they may favor Obama over Clinton. Both are now expected to launch their campaigns early in the new year, which has created a level of political novelty and intrigue that goes beyond gender and race. "People don't view her first as a woman—they view her as a Clinton," says one of Bill Clinton's longtime advisers, who did not wish to be quoted assessing her candidacy. "And he looks like he may have the secret formula to unlock partisanship—a mixture that's broader than race."

...

While no analysts say electing a woman president is impossible, some still make that case about a black candidate. They suggest discarding analogies to the broad appeal of Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods: "There's a willingness to be entertained by African-Americans, but to be governed by them is a completely different story," says Lawrence Otis Graham, an African-American author. "White men have socialized and worked under women, but much more rarely under blacks. Whatever they say, when they go in the polling place, they won't go for it." Focus groups sponsored by Wilder during his abortive 1992 presidential campaign found that such hidden racial feelings continued to play a big role.

On the other hand ....

Seriously, how many hands does Jonathan Alter have? Obama's race isn't a factor ... but here's some evidence that it might be ... but on the other hand!!! Was this such a slow news week that such work warranted the cover of Newsweek?

» It's been a very musical week for yours truly. The Inifinite Record Convention was held last Sunday and I truly realized how limited my taste can be sometimes. I left with a rather small, but enjoyable bounty of 80s material: "Sport of Kings" by Triumph; "Breakout" by The Romantics; and "Vinnie Vincent Invasion" by ... well ... you know. Follow that up with a visit to see Zappa Plays Zappa at the Verizon Wireless, which was a treat in the truest sense of the word. My main draw was seeing Steve Vai play the music of his inspiration and he failed to disappoint. But it was also my first chance to see Dweezil Zappa live. From the looks and sounds of the Zappa purists in the audience, his showing was more than a little appreciated. This one has to rank in the Top 5 concerts I've witnessed and I'm not a big Zappaholic by any means. My partner in crime for the nite was long-lost sideblogger, Uber. His ticket was my Christmas present. Mine apparently was a double treat of yet more tunage - "Twisted Christmas" by Twisted Sister and "Love Their Country" by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Both of those have now loaded up my MP3 player. Adding even further to the overdose was my thirst for a good female singer to listen to over what I hope to be a slow holiday weekend. I picked up Erin O'Donnell's "Wide Wide World" from the Lakewood bookstore and have enjoyed it ever since as well. For those of you keeping score at home, that's six new CDs and a Zappa concert in the span of a week. I have precious little to complain about after a week like that.

UPDATE: Another musical note here, but while on the topic of female singers to listen to over the weekend, I should note that Jennifer Ringwald makes her return to the stage at the Continental Club, fronting (and masterfully so, I might add) Molly & the Ringwalds for their weekly free show. After Christmas is over, there's another great show at the Continental ... The Aqua Velvas, a B-52's tribute band, hit the stage on the 26th. That puts the perfect bookends on my weekend. Whether you love the 80s or hate them, the Ringwalds are sure to entertain. And since I cannot claim to be a B-52s fan, I let my fandom of the Aqua Velvas speak for itself as a testimony to their entertainment value.