Mike McGavick, Republican Senate candidate from Washington, is being mighty slippery about phasing out Social Security:
Social Security benefits must be maintained for current retirees and those near retirement. I support examining phasing in voluntary personal accounts for younger workers to both ensure the long term future of the program and to help create more ownership over individual retirement. I do not support privatizationâSocial Security must remain a government program.
In other words, he does support privatization (i.e., “voluntary personal accounts for younger workers”) but he’s not prepared to admit it. Nor is he prepared to take responsibility for his views:
Itâs time that we move Social Security reformâso long bogged down in political gamesmanshipâto a more thoughtful and productive place. I propose the creation of a commission, like the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which makes decisions about the closure of military facilities, be enacted for Social Security reform to remove the partisanship and create results on this crucial issue.
In other words, vote McGavick and he’ll try to get an unaccountable commision to phase Social Security out, but one way or another he won’t be up front about what he’s doing.
The latest in the ongoing battle between Pennsylvania Democrats and the Green-Republican alliance….
A perk too far: one midwestern congressman has been traveling on the dime of a foreign terrorist organization. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Once upon a time, I thought the neoconservative right was sincere in its dedication to democracy-promotion. Then I came to the view that they were cynically lying. But then I started to come back around on this point, especially after I started living in Washington and gaining the ability to soak up a bit more of the atmosphere. They seem to be genuinely confused.
Give this Cliff May post a read. He’s writing about yesterday’s op-ed from Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a well-known Egyptian democracy activist and writing who’s quite widely admired in DC circles across the board. Ibrahim’s op-ed expresses what would can only call the Arab conventional wisdom — Israel is primarily to blame for the problems in which it finds itself enmeshed, the war in Iraq was primarily designed to bolster American regional hegemony, and thanks to the unpopularity of US policy, democratic movements in the Middle East are likely to be hostile to the United States. So far so good.
May reads the op-ed, however, and reaches the conclusion that this is a data point in favor of the proposition that “fostering freedom and democracy in the Middle East” may be impossible, “akin to trying to establish orange groves in Siberia.”
But how so? Why? It only makes sense if you assume a perfect congruence between the idea of democracy and support for US-Israeli regional security priorities. May doesn’t say that Ibrahim’s hostility to these priorities makes him doubt the desirability of fostering democracy, which would be a coherent conclusion, he says it makes him doubt the possibility of doing so. It’s a perfect storm of confusion.
At any rate, while it’s not strictly relevant let me also state for the record that while I’ve actually seen an orange grove not in Siberia, but in Iceland. What they do is construct greenhouses on top of geothermal vents. Foolishly, I failed to take a photo of the oranges growing but here’s tropical flowers. This was the photo I took of small Icelandic oranges sitting in the supermarket before I saw the greenhouse. The whole “let’s grow citrus fruit on a sub-arctic volcanic island” plan is a result of what I would characterize as the world’s craziest agriculture policy. Point being — I’m fairly certain you could grow oranges in Siberia if you really wanted to, but I don’t think it would be advisable.
Interested in a webcast of me debating Pluto’s demotion to non-planet status with Ann Althouse? Of course you are! Whole thing here. I think I get unusually indignant here.
Another Charles Krauthammer column, another brazen effort to mislead his readers: “North Korea went nuclear a long time ago. Our time to act was during the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations.”
Really? Well, no, not really.
Fred Kaplan’s 2004 article remains the best accurate account of what went down with North Korea. Krauthammer, as usual, has an admirable rhetorical flair but dubious analytic skills and a tenuous grasp on the facts.
My little disquisition on growing oranges in Siberia seems to have engendered some understandable confusion. Unlike Cliff May, I was just speaking totally literally when I said putting an orange grove in Siberia was possible but not advisable. That’s just a whimsical aside about citrus fruit, not an effort to promote a foreign policy analogy.
August is a hard month for journalists, since not much is happening. The good news, however, is that editors tend to be on vacation, so you can get a little goofy. Take, for example, the conclusion to this New York Times account of the marketing campaign being waged by the new CW network in the wake of the UPN/WB merger:
The solution, Mr. Haskins said, was to focus on what the predecessor networks had in common, which was their younger viewers, âand create an environment that was relatable to their lives.â
Someday, there will be an article about television in which no executive uses the word ârelatable,â industry jargon for something with which viewers are supposed to identify or connect. Alas, this is not that article.
Be that as it may, the network’s lineup will include the unjustly low-rated Veronica Mars, which is far and away the best show on broadcast television. It’s eminently “relatable.”
Were I a more interesting writer, I would have written an article about Veronica Mars and class conflict, but apparently Chris Hayes already did it.