Columnist.
Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit this week has rekindled the familiar debate over American "decline." Our sole-superpower moment is over, we're told, and the 21st century will prove so much tougher than the 20th. I'm just not sure what all the fuss is about. Perhaps one source of confusion is this whole sole-superpower business. It's true that from the early 1990s until around now, America has been essentially alone at the top of the world heap. But that hasn't meant as much as a lot of folks claim. During this Pax Americana, a nasty war broke out in Europe, genocide materialized in Africa, and the United States was harassed and wounded by stateless Islamic terrorism.
Nine-five percent of the debris from the Haitian earthquake one year ago hasn't been moved. In other words, billions of dollars later, with none other than Bill Clinton serving as the foreman for a massive international cleanup and reconstruction effort, most of the country pretty much looks exactly the way it did when dust and screams still filled the air. Except, of course, for all of the tent cities.
In the wake of the horrendous shooting rampage in Tucson, why isn't anyone talking about banning "Mein Kampf"? Or "The Communist Manifesto"? Or for that matter, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "The Phantom Tollbooth"? After all, unlike Sarah Palin's absurdly infamous Facebook map with crosshairs on congressional districts that some pundits have blamed for the violence, we have some evidence -- suspect Jared Lee Loughner's own words -- that these books were a direct influence on him.
For years we've been hearing about how the peaceful religion of Islam has been hijacked by extremists. What if it's the other way around? Worse, what if the peaceful hijackers are losing their bid to take over the religion? That certainly seems to be the case in Pakistan.
"Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Time magazine in 2007. Bloomberg, according to Michael Grunwald's cover story, was the diminutive half of a dynamic duo revolutionizing American politics. The other partner: California's then still shiny governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they were "The New Action Heroes" who, according to Grunwald, were "doing big things that Washington has failed to do."
One of the best things I read all year came in a magazine I don't read, about a subject I don't follow, by an author I don't agree with on nearly anything. But Matt Taibbi's "The Jock's Guide to Getting Arrested" in the August 2010 Men's Journal was simply a great piece of writing. I bring it up because Michael Vick is in the news, and Taibbi's rule No. 1 for athletes who get arrested is "Don't Suck."
So now openly gay soldiers get to fight and die in neocon-imperialist wars too? David Brooks saw such ironic progressive victories coming. In his book "Bobos in Paradise," he wrote that everything "transgressive" gets "digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons that once were used to undermine middle-class morality ... are drained of their subversive content."
It's a festive time: singing on the sidewalks, good cheer erupting at home and the office. I'm of course referring to the revelry that descends on the library carrels and fluorescently iridescent cubicles around Washington when the census data comes out. Particularly giddy these days are the Republicans who've picked up a few more seats in Congress and a few more electoral votes for the presidential election, thanks to the demographic tide pulling out of the economically stagnant East and Midwest and moving toward the more vibrant South and West. (Note that this trend stops at the eastern California border, as that state, as well as Oregon and Washington, suffer from the Americanized version of what we used to call "Eurosclerosis.")
Who among us can contain their excitement? The GOP presidential primary season has begun! By my count, there are 24 people who are beneficiaries of nontrivial presidential buzz: Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, David Petraeus, Ron Paul, Jeb Bush, John Bolton, Bob McDonnell, Jim DeMint, Chris Christie, Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Judd Gregg, Marco Rubio and Rick Perry.
The gold standard in contemptuous politics remains emperor Caligula's appointment of his horse, Incitatus, to the Roman senate. Well, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is getting some long delayed senatorial payback. Figuratively speaking, Reid plans to drop on the president's desk a steaming pile of what Incitatus used to deposit on the stable floor. This sack of non-shinola goes by the technical name of an omnibus spending bill. It wraps together all of the appropriations bills of the last year into a single $1.2 trillion monstrosity so laden down with spending grotesqueries that it comes out to more than $623 million a page -- and it's 1,924 pages long. By my rough estimate, that's about $3.1 million per word.
You've got to give Barack Obama credit. His learning curve gets steeper and steeper, but he continues to climb. "I'm going to let him speak very briefly," Obama said Friday before making the fateful decision to allow a smirking Bill Clinton a none-too-brief moment in front of the cameras. It was the sort of famous blunder that comes after getting into a land war in Southeast Asia or getting into a contest with a Sicilian when death is on the line.
Most theories for why the president came unglued like a papier-mache doll in a steam bath during his press conference this week center on the fact that he can't stand having his liberal bona fides questioned. When Iran unveils its nuclear program or slaughters dissidents in the streets of Tehran, Barack Obama keeps a steadier hand than G. Gordon Liddy's over a candle. Question his citizenship, his patriotism, even his jump shot, and he's all Vulcan poise. But if you doubt his commitment to The Cause, he turns into Charlie Sheen without his Ritalin.
A group called "No Labels" is getting an awful lot of buzz these days, despite the fact it has raised only $1 million. (Though it sounds more impressive if you say it like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies: One. Million. Dollars.) The professed idea behind No Labels is that its members don't believe in labels, by which they mean things such as Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Some black-hearted cynics see No Labels as a Trojan horse for a presidential bid by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who finds the two-party system an unfortunate obstacle to his ambitions.
If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so? In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question: "If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire?
"Never mind." That, in a nutshell, is the White House's new position on domestic oil exploration. In March, President Obama announced that he would allow -- or at least entertain -- some new oil development off the Atlantic Coast and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. This week he reversed himself, saying such exploration is now off the table for at least five years. Only the most black-hearted cynics among us would even contemplate the notion that Obama had his re-election prospects in, say, Florida in mind when he made his decision. Then again, some believed that Obama's initial decision to consider expanded oil exploration was a political pander, too. So let's assume sincerity all the way down the decision tree.
Washington is reeling from the latest WikiLeaks document dump. The foreign policy wonks insist that there are few, if any, major surprises. "Much of what we've seen thus far," opined Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, "confirms more than it informs." And, in the end, what these documents confirm is that President Obama's foreign policy is a mess. Even if you're supportive of Obama's foreign policy efforts, the WikiLeaks dump is a bigger deal than the know-it-alls are suggesting. It's one thing to believe something as a generality; it's another to dispel plausible deniability for all concerned.
When it comes to understatements, "the Germans have made some mistakes" is in a class by itself. But one thing they're great at is words. They've got the best words, particularly for feelings of angst or woe. Most everyone knows schadenfreude, the feeling of joy one has at another's misfortune. A more useful term in the melancholy group would be weltschmerz: the sadness one feels when contemplating how far the real world is from an ideal world.
In the spring of 2005, Pope John Paul II died. My father, who passed away that summer, watched the funeral and the coronation of the current pope, Benedict XVI, from his hospital bed. My dad, a Jew, loved the spectacle of it all. (The Vatican, he said, was the last institution that "really knows how to dress.")
Should Obama pull a Clinton? This has been a burning question inside the Beltway ever since the polls showed the Great Shellacking bearing down on the White House. As most know by now, pulling a Clinton isn't anything kinky; it simply means moving to the center, or "triangulating" between the unpopular left and the unpopular right. That's what President Clinton did after the Democrats' historic drubbing at the polls in 1994, and it's what a lot of would-be sages argue President Obama must do now after the rout of 2010.
In 2008, when asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, President Obama responded, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." This reminded me of the wonderful scene in Pixar's "The Incredibles" in which the mom says, "Everyone's special," and her son replies, "Which is another way of saying no one is."
