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"My father always said that government is like watching
another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you."
— Orson Scott Card
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Abbas wants to join the International Court so he can push for Israel being declared a criminal nation.
Israel captured Gaza in a war and then returned the land and Hamas, upon the return of Gaza, destroyed the entire infrastructure Israeli agricultural producers established, built tunnels with concrete meant to build homes for their own citizens and started launching rockets on Israel. Israel responded, and the world attacked Israel for using disproportionate methods to defend themselves against these unprovoked attacks.
Meanwhile , if you go to the site below you will find a story about medical technology this criminal country called Israel is developing to improve world health and suffering.
One of the reasons Israel and Georgia have such close commercial relations is due to my friend, Tom Glaser's efforts. He established The Israeli Chamber of Commerce many years ago in Atlanta and built outstanding ties between Georgia's governors and Israeli Commercial Interests. As a result many Israeli companies now ship goods through the Savannah port and a new Israeli company making an exclusive type of counter tops in a new factory being built in Pooler, Ga. and will be sending some 10 or more Israeli technicians and their families over and eventually employing 200 or more local Georgians to run and manage the business.
Tom and his wife, Connie, are moving to The Landings.(See 1 below.)
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An interesting story about Macon "Red State" Radio Commentator, Erik Erickson.
"...Erickson built his career on stoking populist rage. But now the man, who steers the Tea Party, says conservative anger has grown toxic and self-defeating..." (See 2 below.)
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And now for a video pictoral of "That'sEntertainment.:"http://www.youtube.com/embed/
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JEB Bush must rethink his support of Common Core! I am not as concerned if he becomes president but, what about those who would follow. We need to get government out of education and we need to shut The Department of Education! (See 3 below.)
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It is only a matter of time before The Saudis begin to have closer relationships with Israel. Why? Because their strategic interests are merging. (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)The Top Twelve Israel Medical Innovations of 2014
Israel is a powerhouse in medical innovation. We give you a dozen standouts from a field with many exciting, game-changing candidates.
Israeli ingenuity is responsible for some of the world’s most amazing medical advances.
Whether they’re futuristic, such as Given Imaging’s PillCam capsule endoscopy or Itamar Medical’sfingertip monitors for sleep disorders and cardiac issues — or cleverly simple, such as First Care Products’ Emergency Bandage – blue-and-white inventions are changing the face of healthcare in hospitals, doctors’ offices, homes and even battlefields worldwide.
“It’s almost a cliché to say Israel is an excellent place for medical innovation,” says Eran Perry, managing director at Israel Health Care Ventures (IHCV), one of the largest venture capital funds in the country.
“But if you look at [global] statistics, it’s evident — from total expenditure on civilian R&D, where we are ranked first; to human infrastructure and entrepreneurship, where we rank in the top five. You can see the results in patents. We are first in the world for medical device patents per capita, and second in Europe for bio-pharma.”
About 1,000 Israeli companies are in healthcare or life-science products, including 700 in medical devices. Approximately half are already generating revenue.
“There has been an ecosystem created for life sciences, so these 1,000 companies don’t exist in a vacuum but in an environment where they have access to everything they need — engineering, labs, regulatory consultants, manufacturing consultants,” Perry tells ISRAEL21c. “Many young companies can be a one-man show until they get to the clinical trial stage, relying on this excellent ecosystem around them. You can see Israeli companies reaching the same stage as American ones with a fraction of the capital investment.”
IHCV reviews 200 to 300 new opportunities per year. Perry estimates that 60 to 70 Israeli healthcare companies are founded annually. Proceeds from mergers and acquisitions involving Israeli healthcare companies totalled around $1 billion in the past year.
That’s why ISRAEL21c had a hard time narrowing the field to this top 12 list of the most significant recent Israeli contributions to the medical field.
We have chosen products already on, or very near, the market. If you’ve got other companies you think also deserve a mention please don’t hesitate to add them to the comments section below.
And watch for a future top 10 list of the most exciting Israeli medical-device and pharmaceutical developments just around the corner.
And now … ISRAEL21c’s top 12 Israeli medical innovations, in alphabetical order.
1. ApiFix system to correct severe curvature of the spine (scoliosis) minimizes risks, scar size, complications, recovery time and cost. The miniature ratchet mechanism has successfully been implanted in 15 patients so far. Limited sales of the product have begun while clinical trials are in the last stages.
2. Argo Medical Technologies’ Rewalk robotic exoskeleton from was featured on the hit TV show “Glee” and enabled paraplegic runners in London and Tel Aviv to complete marathons. The ReWalk Rehabilitation model currently is used by patients in rehab centers from New York to Dusseldorf. ReWalk Personal, for everyday home use, is available throughout Europe and awaiting FDA clearance in the United States.
3. Gamida Cell is developing stem-cell therapy products to treat blood cancers, solid tumors, non-malignant blood diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, autoimmune diseases and genetic metabolic diseases. On Sept. 9, the first patient was successfully transplanted at Duke University Medical Center (North Carolina) in the second Phase I/II study of NiCord, Gamida’s experimental treatment for blood cancers.
4. GI View Aer-O-Scope disposable colorectal cancer screening device, now in US trials, will make lifesaving colonoscopy screenings cheaper, safer and more accessible worldwide. The self-navigating, flexible Aer-O-Scope removes the risk of perforating the colon, provides superior imaging and can be used by a trained nurse or technician so a gastroenterologist does not have to be present.
5. IceCure Medical’s IceSense3 has been used by US doctors since 2011 to remove benign breast lumps in a 10-minute ultrasound-guided procedure that penetrates the tumor and engulfs it with ice. The system is being clinically tested over the next few years against small malignant breast tumors as well. The procedure is done in a doctor’s office, clinic or breast center, and the patient can get up and leave afterward with no recovery period or post-care.
6. InSightec’s ExAblate OR uses MRI-guided focused ultrasound to destroy tumors and uterine fibroid cysts without surgery. The company has begun a Phase III trial of its next product, ExAblate Neuro, to cure essential tremor — a common movement disorder – using the same non-invasive technology to significantly lower risk of infection, hemorrhage and brain damage.
7. IonMed’s BioWeld1 bonds surgical incisions using cold plasma — instead of painful stitches, staples or glue – within minutes, sealing and disinfecting the wound with minimal scarring and recovery time. The CE Mark is expected in October, with European sales and US FDA approval process starting in early 2014.
8. Nano Retina’s Bio-Retina, a tiny implantable device inserted into the retina in a 30-minute procedure, turns into an artificial retina that melds to the neurons in the eye. Activated by special eyeglasses, the device transforms natural light into an electrical impulse that stimulates neurons to send images to the brain. The prototype is advancing quickly through clinical trials.
9. NanoPass Technologies’ MicronJet is a unique, FDA-approved single-use needle for painless delivery of vaccines into the skin using semiconductor technology. The product has been proven to generate superior immune response with less vaccine, because it does not go past the skin level. Licensed last year to Janssen Pharmaceuticals, MicronJet is being used by the US Center of Disease Control (CDC) in a large trial of polio vaccine for infants in Southeast Asia.
10. OrSense’s NBM-200 non-invasive monitor is relied upon by blood donation centers in 40 countries for continuous and spot measuring of potential donors’ hemoglobin level (to check for anemia) and other blood parameters. This device eliminates the need for finger pricking as well as biologically hazardous equipment and waste. Studies show that donors screened this way are more likely to become repeat blood donors. OrSense recently completed successful trials using its technology to detect hemorrhage and anemia in pregnant women.
11. Surpass Medical’s NeuroEndoGraft flow diverters redirect blood flow from a brain aneurysm (a bulge in a weak artery wall), so that a stable clot can form and the potentially fatal aneurysm no longer is in danger of rupturing. The family of devices has the CE Mark and has been used successfully in dozens of patients. US medical device manufacturer Stryker acquired Surpass for $100 million in October 2012.
12. VitalGo Systems’ Total Lift bed is the world’s only hospital-grade bed that can elevate a patient from a lying to a fully standing position — and all points in between — for treatment and transfer with no lifting required of the caregiver. Two major companies are distributing Total Lift in the acute-care and home-care markets in the United States.
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Is the Most Powerful Conservative in America Losing His Edge?
Erick Erickson built his career on stoking populist rage. But now the man who steers the Tea Party says conservative anger has grown toxic and self-defeating.
Molly Ball
To be clear, the wings Erickson ordered when I visited him in Macon, Georgia, last May were boneless wings, which are really glorified chicken nuggets. Erickson, a fastidious man who dislikes getting his hands messy with finger food, apologized for not taking me to a more authentic local restaurant—“one of Macon’s meat-and-three places” (where you get a choice of three sides to go with a serving of meat). But he had promised his 5-year-old son, Gunnar, a serving of the smiley-face fries at the Wild Wing Cafe. So there we were, at a beer-and-wings chain in a characterless exurban mall. “Father, we ask you to bless this meal,” Erickson said, elbows propped on the table, hands clenched, head bowed as we prepared to dig in.
Over the past decade, Erickson, who is 39, has emerged as a driving force behind the Tea Party. In addition to serving as RedState’s editor, he is a paid contributor to Fox News, a syndicated newspaper columnist, and the drive-time host on Atlanta-based WSB, the nation’s fourth-largest talk-radio station. He was a CNN contributor from 2010 to 2013, and he occasionally guest-hosts Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show. Limbaugh, in turn, often cites RedState.
When I visited Erickson in Macon, he welcomed me into his home and showed me around his city. A chubby, neatly dressed man of medium height, he has spiky strawberry-blond hair, narrow eyes, and a grin that scrunches up his broad face. He was an easy conversationalist, jovial and unguarded, with an eagerness to put others at ease that helped explain why so many people spend hours in their cars listening to him. Above all, he was polite.
Which was interesting, because Erickson is famous for saying things that are not polite. There was the time, in 2009, when he called retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester.” During the Occupy protests, he said his heart was gladdened by “watching a hippie protester get Tased.” He nicknamed Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, “Abortion Barbie.” And in a blog post considering whether President Obama was “shagging hookers,” he called Michelle Obama a “marxist harpy” who “would go Lorena Bobbit [sic] on him should he even think about it.” (The press, Erickson wrote, wouldn’t care: Obama “could be a serial killing transvestite and the media would turn a blind eye.”)
His attacks sting most when aimed, as they often are, at fellow Republicans he sees as too ready to compromise. In 2009, for example, he claimed that then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had “lost his testicles” and called on his readers to send the senator “balls.” Erickson later reported that more than 100 toy balls had been sent to the senator’s office using the Amazon link he’d provided.
“Nationally, people think of me as a Tea Party person, and I am,” Erickson told me. “But in Georgia, the Tea Party can’t stand me.” The local movement, he explained, is dominated by libertarian followers of former Congressman Ron Paul, and Erickson has opposed many of its chosen candidates. Erickson’s conservatism is of a more traditional bent, deeply informed by his evangelical faith. He believes Republicans must not yield in pursuit of small government, strong national defense, and the primacy of the traditional family.
Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation.
Erickson dismisses criticism of his vulgar taunts as pearl-clutching by politically correct prigs with no sense of humor. (Offensive as some of his comments may be, he makes them in a tone of mockery, not spit-flying rage.) But he also has grown more reflective in the past year, at times even calling out his own readers and listeners for their excesses. In August, he wrote, “I increasingly find conflict between my faith and some conservative discourse.” He cited the right-wing furor over undocumented minors, Ebola, and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after I visited him in Georgia, he announced that he had been accepted to the Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, to pursue—part-time, between radio broadcasts—a master’s degree in biblical studies.
He told me about a man who had come up to him to rant about immigrants ruining schools and neighborhoods. “I’m like, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ” He thinks conservatives suffer from a persecution complex. “I hear it in radio. I see it in comments at RedState and in e-mail and on Twitter. When you as a conservative go out there and pound your fist on the table and say, ‘They’re coming to get me,’ who wants to say, ‘Yeah, I’m coming to your side’? I mean, be happy!”
Don’t you get angry?, I asked. Well, sure, he said: at Republicans, for not keeping their promises; at the president, for not doing his job; at the political system. But he explained that he was pointing to something more pervasive. “What I mean is that conservatives are in a constant state of hair-on-fire, yelling anger,” he said—a toxic mind-set that prevents them from seeing straight. “That anger has spread outside the normal bounds of political issues into everything” from the food they eat to the movies they watch.
This didn’t sound anything like the Erick Erickson people think of as Limbaugh Lite, and some have begun to wonder whether he has changed. Could he be mellowing as he nears middle age? Perhaps success—going from a little-known, unpaid blogger to a major power broker on the right—has taken some of the fire out of his belly. Maybe he’s even ready, as Republicans assume control of the Senate, to adopt a more conciliatory approach.
Don’t let his smile fool you.
RedState’s mission statement, posted on the site, explicitly one-ups the famous motto of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.“RedState does not stand athwart history yelling stop,” it says. “We yell ‘ready,’ ‘aim,’ and ‘fire,’ too.”
RedState draws about a quarter of a million unique visitors a month, according to comScore—a fraction of the audience of conservative sites like Newsmax and The Daily Caller. Erickson himself is not nearly as visible a pundit as, say, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove. But he may be more influential: His pronouncements can decide whether a policy lives or dies. His anointment can lift a candidate out of obscurity. Members of Congress have him on speed dial.
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he consults Erickson regularly, and the conservative faction of the House GOP looks to RedState for guidance. “A lot of times those articles actually steer the direction of members of Congress as we’re making decisions in Washington, D.C.,” Jim Bridenstine, a first-term congressman from Oklahoma, told me, citing gun background checks and immigration reform as two recent areas where many Republicans were leaning toward compromise until RedState urged them to resist.
Erickson’s influence stems from the fact that he’s not just a pundit—he’s an activist who gets involved in contentious primary battles, bestowing endorsements that draw attention and cash to little-known candidates. In 2009, he came out for Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race when the former state legislator was polling nearly 50 points behind and the whole GOP apparatus was backing Charlie Crist, the former governor who has since switched parties. More endorsements for Rubio followed, including from the deep-pocketed Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth, and Crist dropped out of the primary to run as an independent. Rubio ended up winning the general election by 19 points.
Other conservative challengers who benefited from Erickson’s endorsements in the 2010 cycle include Mike Lee, who took down Bob Bennett, a three-term Republican senator from Utah, and Rand Paul, who ran in the Kentucky Senate primary against Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate, Trey Grayson.
A South Carolina state lawmaker named Nikki Haley was considered a long shot for the 2010 gubernatorial nomination when she caught Erickson’s fancy with her conservative zeal. For 10 days straight, RedState featured her on its front page, urging readers to donate. Haley gained momentum, and a late endorsement from Sarah Palin helped catapult her to the top of the field. “RedState was there in the very beginning,” Haley, who considers Erickson a “dear friend,” told me. “I was ‘Nikki who?’ ” Haley was just reelected to a second term as South Carolina’s governor, and has been on the longer lists of potential 2016 vice-presidential nominees.
Ted Cruz came from 3 percent in the polls and a three-to-one cash disadvantage to win his 2012 Senate primary in Texas, thanks in part to Erickson’s boosting. Cruz has attended every one of RedState’s annual “Gatherings” since they began in 2009. Cruz and Erickson have become friends, and Erickson has said Cruz is as great as “all the Beatles in one person” and called him “the leader of the conservative movement.” (Cruz returns the favor. “RedState gives people a voice,” he told me.)
As Erickson sees it, the conservative movement and the Republican Party are two different things, and the former is more important. For 50 years, the conservative movement has alternately abetted and tormented the Republican Party. It has provided an intellectual framework and activist passion to the GOP, but—from the John Birch Society of the 1960s to the Tea Party of today—it has trained its fire just as often within the party as without, fueling primary battles and a spirit of with-us-or-against-us absolutism. Sometimes it has even won, as with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, which did not go so well, and that of Ronald Reagan (although some conservatives began complaining about Reagan almost immediately after he was elected). Party mandarins have long regarded those on the far right as useful idiots who helped win elections but could not be allowed near the levers of power.
In the Goldwater era, the conservatives communicated through newsletters and direct mail. With the Internet, they gained a megaphone and a better way to talk to one another. RedState was founded just before the 2004 Republican convention, by four young conservatives who saw a need for an analogue on the right to the left-wing blogs, like Daily Kos, that were upending the Democratic Party. “There were a lot of good writers with a lot to say on the right, but the left had a dominant hold on the format,” recalls Ben Domenech, one of RedState’s co‑founders, who is now the publisher of an online magazine called The Federalist. Like Daily Kos, RedState was a site where anyone could author a post.
Almost immediately, Erickson became one of RedState’s stars. Blogging for free while he practiced law in Macon, he began drawing more traffic and responses than the site’s founders. He had a conversational style and a penchant for provocation. Most of all, Domenech says, he wrote what a lot of people were thinking but didn’t see reflected in normal political discourse. “Erickson is your conservative father-in-law at the Thanksgiving table,” Domenech told me.
An early success came in October 2005, after George W. Bush nominated his own lawyer, White House Counsel Harriet Miers, to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Bush had enjoyed reliable support from right-wing media outlets like Fox News and National Review. After his reelection, less than a year earlier, he had announced, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” There was little reason to believe the nomination would run into serious trouble.
But trouble came fast. Erickson was among Miers’s earliest and loudest critics. From his point of view, conservatives had worked hard for Bush’s reelection—he himself had been a volunteer lawyer for the campaign—and in return they expected Bush to nominate a conservative heavyweight like the recently appointed John Roberts. Miers, Erickson believed, was both ideologically suspect and lacking in credentials. “This is a profoundly disappointing nomination, a missed opportunity, and an abdication of responsibility to make sound, well qualified nominations,” RedState proclaimed on October 3, the day the nomination was announced.
Erickson dug up dirt on Miers—such as the fact that she had donated to Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign—that helped persuade better-known conservatives, like Limbaugh and Coulter, to come out against the nomination too. The backlash “baffled” members of the Bush administration, Matt Latimer, a former Bush speechwriter, recalled recently. “They just didn’t understand how you could have a principled objection to something the administration wanted to do and still be a conservative,” he told me. “Their definition of conservative was whatever they said it was.” Erickson spoke for a GOP base that was tired of being told to fall in line. By getting Republicans elected, grass-roots conservatives, too, felt they’d amassed political capital, but Washington didn’t seem inclined to let them cash it in.
Eventually, even establishment voices on the right, such as David Brooks and writers for National Review, came to oppose Miers. Bush withdrew his nomination on October 27. It was the beginning of a split that would come to define Bush’s second term and dominate the Republican Party into the Obama era: the revolt of the conservative grass roots against the party establishment.
Erickson was born near Jackson, Louisiana, but when he was 5 his family moved to Dubai, where Conoco sent his father, a production foreman, to work on oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. The family didn’t move back to the United States until Erickson was 15. His father worked offshore for seven days at a time, returning for seven days before leaving again. “It would be the second or third day before he got out of bed,” Erickson recalled. Perhaps in reaction to his own father’s absence, Erickson is an involved dad to his two children. His wife, Christy, stopped working a few years ago due to fragile health (she has respiratory problems and a genetic disorder that causes blood clots), and she was resting most of the day I visited. Erickson and I spent the afternoon entertaining Gunnar and picking up Evelyn, who is 9, from school.
“I grew up walking through a high gate into my school, with a guard who would make me remove my sandwich from my lunch bag to inspect it for explosives,” Erickson told me. Terrorist threats were a repeat occurrence; an explosion once shook the ground. “We could see the smoke on the horizon because the Iranians were blowing up oil platforms near where my dad worked.” (This was during the Iran-Iraq War.) As the Ericksons saw it, the American military—and President Reagan—were the only things standing between them and chaos.
Spending so much of his childhood overseas also made him an outsider to American racial dynamics, Erickson says. He claims that, unlike Americans who grew up here, he lacks an intuitive understanding of racial politics. It’s a slightly absurd claim, reminiscent of the parodic color-blindness of Stephen Colbert (“I don’t see race!”), but, unlike some others in talk radio—Limbaugh, for instance—Erickson does not pepper his show with racial provocations. As we drove to get Evelyn from her private Christian day school, where acres of neatly trimmed sports fields gleamed in the sunshine, he told me, with a sad shake of his head, that he believed only time, not government intervention, could heal America’s racial wounds.
When Erickson returned to Louisiana for high school, he was, he says, a “nerd,” unathletic and obsessed with politics. After graduating, he moved to Macon to attend Mercer University and stayed there for law school, figuring he would wind up in D.C. working on Capitol Hill. Instead he got a job with a firm in Macon and married Christy, who made it clear she had no desire to live in the big city—meaning Atlanta.
By the time of the Miers nomination, Erickson knew there were people in the White House reading RedState—some of them were sources who fed him intel on Miers. But the blog was not widely known; many publications still put blogger in quotation marks or spelled out blog as web log. I wondered how he got the nerve to make thunderous, this-shall-not-stand pronouncements from his obscure perch. What made him feel he had the standing to tell the president what to do?
To Erickson, the question didn’t make sense. “I was just a guy in Georgia writing what I thought,” he said. “If they didn’t like my opinion, they didn’t have to take it. But I was writing for people at RedState, not the White House.” From his readers’ reactions and the growth of the site, he knew a lot of people out there shared his views.
In his gray Chevy Tahoe, Erickson gave me a tour of his neighborhood, a tony community of custom homes just this side of McMansions. Macon is dense with churches, and we drove past one whose marquee referred to the week’s primaries: vote for those who will seek wisdom from god.
“This is all new in the last five or six years,” Erickson told me. He moved here from closer to downtown a few years ago, and says he misses the character of the city. But a formerly friendly neighbor had turned hostile after Keith Olbermann declared Erickson “the worst person in the world.” The neighbor, Erickson said, would glare at him from behind his lawn mower, shouting, “How many people did you and Dick Cheney kill today?”
“Generally, the right gets mad at me more than the left,” Erickson told me. “But the worst stuff, the angry-death-threat-level stuff, that tends to come from the left.” The hate mail was relatively mild until Erickson became a CNN contributor in 2010. “That’s when I first got someone saying they were going to tie me up, cut off my eyelids, and rape and murder my wife.” In 2012, a SWAT team was called to Erickson’s house by a harasser claiming it was the site of a violent crime, a dangerous practice known as “swatting.”
Though the Sarah Palin–Ted Cruz wing of the GOP loves him, Erickson has few fans in the Republican establishment. One Washington-based operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid provoking Erickson, described him as a “true believer” and a bully who had become “drunk with power.” This operative and other Republicans believe Erickson’s hectoring has helped lead the party into self-destructive crusades.
“He’s part of a very small cabal of people who guided the shutdown,” another D.C. consultant told me. In September 2013, Erickson directed readers to call their senators and urge them to “stand with Cruz” in the push to defund the Affordable Care Act. When the government shutdown followed, in early October, Erickson cheered it, insisting that Republicans were winning and urging the party’s lawmakers to hold their ground.
Erickson especially enjoys needling Mitch McConnell, whom he regards as spineless and ineffective, “a cancer on the Senate Republican caucus,” “emblematic of all that is wrong with Washington, D.C.,” and “a complete and miserable … er … mitch-erable failure.” McConnell loyalists regard Erickson as a major obstacle. “He and others have turned compromise into a dirty word,” Billy Piper, a lobbyist who served as McConnell’s chief of staff until 2011, told me. “He has worked to foster an environment that demonizes that effort in such a way that some members operate on the basis of fear.”
Erickson is unmoved by such criticism. “These guys who think I am a bully are used to a certain Beltway etiquette and hate to be held accountable,” he told me. Nor does he apologize for his opposition to compromise, citing the maxim—attributed, apocryphally, to the former Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen—that there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, who occasionally get together and do something both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship.
Also running that year was Larry Schlesinger, a Democrat and rabbi who was seeking an at-large council seat. Schlesinger had seen Erickson speak at a local Rotary Club meeting; he sought Erickson’s advice when he decided to enter the race, and continued to consult him after getting elected. “I basically didn’t do anything without speaking to Erick first,” Schlesinger told me.
Macon, a former railroad hub, has a population of about 200,000, roughly split between an economically depressed, largely African American inner city and predominantly white suburbs and exurbs. By the time Erickson took his seat, the city council had long been riven by racial, partisan, and personality conflicts. “It was perceived as a circus,” Schlesinger said.
Erickson’s main project on the council was cleaning up the Asian massage parlors that operated as fronts for prostitution and human trafficking in Macon’s downtown. Police raids didn’t work: the women working in the parlors either didn’t speak English or were afraid to talk to the cops. Erickson sought new regulations to drive out the illegitimate massage businesses without burdening the legal ones by, for example, requiring them to keep a log of visitors.
Some of the massage parlors had African American landlords, and Erickson was accused of trying to hurt black business owners. He enlisted an ally to reach out to black churches, asking them to help fight sin in their communities. After three years, his regulatory scheme passed, and for the most part, it has been a success.
Schlesinger described Erickson as a constructive force in city hall, someone who would say what was on everyone’s minds and call out the professional politicians on their posturing. Although Erickson was one of just two Republicans, he wasn’t perpetually at odds with his fellow members. The council passed budgets without tax increases, privatized the operation of the local airport and train station, started a campaign to tear down abandoned properties, and devoted new funding to after-school programs. Erickson’s biggest failure, as he saw it, was not convincing his fellow members to sell off the city-owned golf course. For the most part, he said, “it was an interesting exercise in coalition building.”
The irony is not lost on Erickson: “Yeah, I know, the free-market Republican who ran for office and started passing regulations to put all these businesses out of business,” he told me, chuckling. But he believes more government functions should be performed by local bodies rather than by an overreaching federal bureaucracy, and he does not consider local government an inherently partisan endeavor. (“There’s not a partisan position on trash collection,” he said.)
When I pressed him on whether his zeal for regulation while on the city council was at odds with his less-government philosophy, he said he believed human trafficking was a problem that government should have a role in solving. “I’m not a libertarian,” he said. Even small-government absolutists, after all, can agree that sexual slavery ought to be prevented.
A little before 5 o’clock, Erickson strapped in for the evening’s radio show, putting on headphones and pulling his chair up to the microphone. He broadcasts from a home studio decorated with paintings by Steve Penley, a Georgia-based artist beloved by conservatives for his impressionist-style renderings of patriotic subjects. Erickson has one of Lincoln and one of the American flag. RedState T‑shirts spilled out of a box on the floor; a bookshelf held volumes by Haley and Coulter.
During the January 2014 snowstorm that paralyzed Atlanta, trapping commuters in their cars overnight, Erickson stayed on from 4 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., minus a two-hour break when he contributed to Fox News’s online State of the Union coverage. “At 2:30 in the morning, I sent my call screener home. I said, ‘Just fill up the board with calls, and I’ll take as many as I can. I’ll just keep talking until I can’t talk anymore.’ ”
When CNN first announced him as a contributor, in March 2010, liberals were not thrilled. The progressive Web site AlterNet dubbed Erickson “the new CNN go-to bigot, misogynist and homophobe” and speculated that the network “needed an angry old white guy to fill out their lineup” after the departures of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs. The Boston Globe ran an editorial criticizing the introduction of “one more screamer on cable.” In early April, when Erickson was just a few weeks into his new gig, then–White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Erickson’s statement that he planned to pull out his wife’s shotgun if a census worker came to their house. “It should concern CNN,” Gibbs said. (Erickson made the comment on talk radio, not CNN.)
Paul Begala, the Bill Clinton strategist turned Democratic analyst, first encountered Erickson early in 2010, when they were on CNN together and Erickson disparaged the memory of the recently deceased Senator Edward Kennedy, saying Democrats wouldn’t have lost his Senate seat if Kennedy had resigned when he learned he had brain cancer instead of trying to be a “martyr.”
“I got very, very upset,” Begala recalled recently. “I lit into him.” Begala told the CNN brass he would no longer appear on the air with Erickson. But in the run-up to the 2012 primaries, the men got to know each other while riding around Iowa on the CNN campaign bus, and they became friends. “I realized we needed his perspective,” Begala told me. He came to respect Erickson as a man with the courage of his convictions—unlike Rush Limbaugh, whom he regards as poisonous—and someone who could channel the views of conservative America. And, Begala added, “I love that he serves bourbon at his Bible study.”
Erickson left CNN for Fox News in 2013. He regretted how often CNN had to defend its decision to put him on the air. “I liked to think of myself as job security for the public relations department,” he wrote at RedState the day of his departure. “About the only thing the far right and far left could agree on was that I did not belong at CNN.”
But Erickson also wrote that he had forged unlikely friendships at CNN, with liberal commentators like Begala, James Carville, and Donna Brazile. “I’ve learned that some of the people I grew up thinking were in the enemy’s camp, so to speak, are spectacular people who share many of the same interests and opinions I do,” he wrote. “Because of CNN I’m not just better at my job, but I’m a better person.”
Reflections like these have prompted some to ask whether Erickson has gone soft. The day before my visit to Macon, Mitch McConnell had defeated his conservative primary challenger in Kentucky, Matt Bevin, whom Erickson had supported, and Erickson had announced that he’d sent McConnell a check. Erickson’s inbox filled up with e‑mails calling him a traitor. But Erickson—perhaps stung by the criticism from establishment Republicans that he’s interested only in hurting the party—wanted to demonstrate solidarity against the Democrats. He also wanted to point out a double standard: moderate Republicans expect conservatives to rally behind them come November, but, he believes, when conservatives win primaries, the establishment abandons them.
Still, it was a surprising move considering his longtime antagonism toward McConnell, I noted. With a laugh, Erickson agreed. He explained that he supports conservatives—period. In the primary, the conservative choice had been Bevin, but in the general election (in which McConnell eventually defeated his Democratic opponent and became the Senate majority leader) it was McConnell. It was a logical but uncharacteristic gesture that naturally made one wonder whether he was becoming more pragmatic in other ways, too.
Erickson’s authority has always come from his status as an outsider to the Washington political class. But these days, he has better access to certain politicians than the K Street lobbyists do, and allies like Cruz often seem to wield more power than the GOP’s nominal leaders. Erickson began charging for speaking gigs through an agency this year. He has been known to ride the Acela. Isn’t he turning into one of them?, I asked.
He worries about this—he claims he has turned down “bigger platforms and better jobs” in New York and Washington because he wants to keep his family and his sensibility grounded in Georgia. He has also told the radio station that when Gunnar starts Little League next year, he will need a new time slot.
He knows he has a tendency to get worked up and take things too far. He regrets calling Souter a child molester—he apologized for the comment back in 2009 and still considers it his biggest mistake. “At times, I need to do better,” he told me. But he is of two minds about this, because he also refuses to kowtow to the perpetual-outrage machine of modern politics, and he suspects that many of his critics only pretend to be offended in order to discredit him. “I could say the sky is blue and someone somewhere would get mad,” he said.
He also told me he has matured under the public eye. “If you read my more recent stuff, as opposed to my older stuff, I’ve grown up,” he said. During the Ferguson protests in August, he wrote a sensitive and outraged blog post titled “Must We Have a Dead White Kid?” decrying police-state tactics. “Given what happened in Ferguson, the community had every right to be angry,” he wrote. “Just because Michael Brown may not look like you should not immediately serve as an excuse to ignore the issues involved.” Many RedState commenters objected, insisting that Brown was a lawbreaker who got what he deserved.
“A lot of conservatives are now where liberals were after 2004—hysterically angry about things they have no business being angry about,” Erickson told me. “I think if you believe in a heaven, a hell, a savior who died and rose again, and a last day on which you’ll win because he wins, you probably should spend a lot less time getting worked up over the temporary politics of the here and now.”
I asked him about his increased focus on religion. What was he searching for? Erickson said he felt “called” to learn more about the faith that forms the backbone of his world view. “Some of my most-read posts involve faith,” he said. “At some point, I just accepted that I have a ministry, even if I never get in a pulpit.”
In November, when Republicans won the midterm elections in a landslide, Erickson was jubilant. He stayed up all night talking on the radio (5 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.), appearing on Fox (on and off from 4:30 a.m. to 7 a.m.), sending celebratory tweets (“Remember Republicans, tears are just water so no calories. Feast on the tears of Democrats tonight with no guilt”), and dealing with RedState glitches—an influx of traffic kept crashing the site.
But despite this display of GOP fellow feeling, Erickson remained suspicious of the party leaders. The next morning, having yet to sleep, he convened a conference call with more than 1,000 RedState diehards.
“The Republican establishment made it very clear that they hate conservatives this year,” he proclaimed. “I am willing to declare a truce with the Republican establishment so that we can sit back and have a glass of bourbon together and watch the Democrats tear each other apart.” But, he said, he was not going to “stand idly by” and watch the party roll over on social issues and the fight for smaller government.
Many observers have chalked up Republicans’ success in the midterms to their having kept the Tea Party in check. The establishment spent tens of millions beating back intraparty challenges, and not a single incumbent GOP senator lost a primary, for the first time since 2008. In his RedState posts, Erickson has argued against the idea that the Tea Party is on the ropes: “I do not expect to have to win every one of the races, but then the brilliance of this effort is that the establishment must win them all and we don’t have to.” Just as terrorists don’t have to blow up every bus to have the intended effect (my metaphor, not Erickson’s), conservatives don’t need to overthrow every incumbent in order to move the GOP’s agenda to the right.
When I caught up with Erickson two days after the midterms, he was about to depart with Evelyn for a father-daughter trip to New York City. He was scheduled to appear on Fox’s Outnumbered—the network’s answer to The View, on which a panel of female pundits spar with a rotating male foil. Evelyn, who has an interest in theater and music, was excited to tour Fox’s makeup and wardrobe facilities, and to check out a fabric store that had been recommended by one of Erickson’s friends: Jane Hamsher, the blogger behind the archliberal Firedoglake. “Not a lot of people know that we’re friends,” Erickson said of Hamsher. “Often we hate the same people.”
Erickson agreed with many of his conservative colleagues that finding creative ways to undermine the Affordable Care Act should be a top priority for the new Congress. Above all, he thought Republicans ought to undertake investigations—of the IRS, of Benghazi, of the “Fast and Furious” firearms scandal. His message to conservative activists, he said, was “be vigilant”—keep an eye on your newly elected Republican representatives; don’t let them sell you out.
Given his prosecutorial zeal, I asked Erickson whether he, like a lot of other conservatives, believed that Republicans should try to impeach Obama. “Oh, God, no,” he said. “Good lord, it would be insane to do that—to foist Joe Biden on the public.” His reasons were practical, political, and substantive: Obama was legitimately elected, he’d committed no provable crime, and the potential backlash—particularly among black voters—would be ruinous for Republicans. “It’s a rabbit hole,” he said, adding happily: “I get a lot of people angry at me when I say that.”
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The unrest and the “change” we are seeing in the attitudes of the young is the result of several different factors, one being what is taught in the public schools. For example, History used to teach civics and love of country. Nowadays, history isn’t even considered an important subject. History teachers and the history curriculum do not show America positively. Children used to learn about the history of America in a way that instilled pride. These children grew up to build America, the most desirable country ever to exist. Instead of continuing the lessons which made America the envy of the world, we are presenting a picture of America that causes our children to question its’ goodness.
As a public school teacher, I have noticed the same broken record played over and over. I remember watching a movie about Emmet Till with a class of 11 year olds. The movie shows Till, an innocent, black 14 year old, who whistled at a white woman in Mississippi in the 1950s. As punishment, he died at the hands of white men in a gruesome way. The school movie spared no horrific detail. The white cops were vile. Their disdain for Emmet and his family was revolting. The screen showed us the actual photo taken at Emmet’s wake, of his face swollen from being beaten and left in the river for days, for far too long. The all-white jury took an hour to come back with a “not guilty” verdict. The murderers laughed and celebrated after the verdict was read. When the movie was over, my class of mostly black students wanted to “kill white people” over the sad injustice. No doubt this was the desired reaction.
Since February is also presidents’ month I decided to show a movie about Thomas Jefferson. While all my students knew Emmet Till by fifth grade, none knew Jefferson. I got a movie from the school library. I was sharing with the class some wonderful things about Jefferson, some of his famous quotes and why he is my favorite president. The kids were interested, receptive, and impressed. The movie was going well until…. Slaves built Monticello. A black boy turned to me and asked if Jefferson owned slaves.
Over and over we see the same pictures in the schools. Beginning in kindergarten, we see hundreds of Africans chained together on slave ships and being forced to America, many of them dying miserably during the voyage. We aren’t told they were sold by other Africans. There are many more examples. Even if the worst is true, it’s at the point where I wonder what the point is. I know many black teachers I work with will say that these horrific events occurred and that these things need to be taught. OK. Are we all happy with the results? Are we portraying America fairly? Or are we (obviously) trying to make a political point?
Michael Brown is not Emmet Till. Today’s cops are not the cops of the 1950s. The grand juries of today are not the grand juries of 1950. Yet truth doesn’t matter. To these (black and guilt-ridden white) kids, now is the time to avenge these acts. They are being encouraged by our political leaders, teachers, athletes, celebrities, and the media. None of this is good for any kid, black or white. What good is tearing down and the country that they call home and dividing people?
There is an antidote to this mind poison our children are being fed. I have had opportunities to teach American history the way I learned it. It is easy and natural to teach children the story of America in a way that fills them with pride. I know this because I’ve done it. I’ve had classrooms children from every background. By June they were proud to call themselves American and crying when listening to the “Star Spangled Banner”. But I am one teacher in a school district with 1.1 million kids. Besides, Common Core tells me exactly what to teach. My students are tested on exactly what the experts want them to know. I am rated on whether they have “learned” the information that the creators of Common Core have deemed is a proper education.
There is no doubt that the “peaceful protestors” feel justified and empowered. They are true believers and have been programmed from an early age (Let’s get them even earlier with universal pre-K). Where we will be as a country if we allow the progressives to have full control and even more time to teach this hate for America via Common Core? Do we want a United States of America? These things have been put into motion and we are seeing the results. What’s it going to take for people to connect the dots?
Mary Anne Marcella is a parent and public school teacher who wants the best for her children and her students. She resides in New Canaan, CT with her family. Her views are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of others in the education field. maryannem@optonline.net or Twitter
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On December 30, 2014, the Saudi daily Al-Watan reported that Saudi
authorities are now allowing people of all faiths, including Jews, to work
in the kingdom, and added that this was proof of the country's openness to
other religions and cultures.
It should be mentioned that the Saudi religious establishment is divided
over the issue of foreign workers in the country, due to differing
interpretations of a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad that states, "Remove the
Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula."
In this context it is also worth mentioning that Saudi Arabia is the only
Gulf state that still bans the establishment of houses of worship for
religions other than Islam, despite pressure from the Vatican on the
matter.[1]
Following is a summary of the report in Al-Watan.[2]
Al-Watan stated that the Saudi Labor Ministry website, which deals with
"importing [workers] for institutions and companies," lists a number of
options for foreign workers' religions: Zoroastrianism, Communism, Judaism,
Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and no religion. The paper
said that "the labor authorities in the kingdom have permitted the import of
people who practice Judaism for working on its soil" and called this "a move
that emphasizes openness to all monotheistic religions and to people from
other cultures."
Saudi Labor Ministry website, which includes Judaism among its list of
options for a foreign worker's religion. Source: Al-Watan, December 30,
2014.
The paper cited a knowledgeable unnamed Labor Ministry source as saying that
there is no prohibition against people of any religion, including Judaism,
entering Saudi Arabia, and that the Labor Ministry's visa application
process focuses on a worker's nationality, not his religion. The source also
said: "We bar entry [into Saudi Arabia] only to those with Israeli
citizenship. Other than that, we are open to most nationalities and
religions" and added that Saudi law does not prohibit its citizens from
forming ties with anyone of any religion, pointing at the King Abdallah bin
Abdul Aziz International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural
Dialogue as proof. The source added: "For example, if a worker is a citizen
of Yemen but practices Judaism, the [Saudi] Embassy [in Yemen] would not
object to issuing him a work visa for the kingdom."
Saudi Shura Council Foreign Affairs Committee member Sadaqa bin Yahya Fadhel
expressed his support for the Labor Ministry's decision, saying, "We Muslims
have no problem with the Jews." He added, "Our biggest problem, as an Arab
and Islamic nation, is with the Zionist movement, and not with the Jews or
Christians." The Zionist movement, he explained, exploits Judaism in order
to attain its goals.
He continued: "We are permitted to have a connection with Jews, and
importing a Jewish worker is exactly the same as importing [a worker] of
another faith. I think the Labor Ministry's decision is correct. So long as
we have no relationship whatsoever with Israelis, then there is no problem
with this."
He concluded: "It is difficult for us, as a Saudi Arab kingdom, to ban ties
with a particular religion. The ban must apply only to Israeli citizens,
because Israel is linked to the Zionist movement, which is an imperialist
colonialist movement that exploits the Jewish faith and is therefore
unrelated to Judaism and is totally different from it."
Endnotes:
[1] See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 460, Debate on Churches in Gulf States,
August 7, 2008.
[2] Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia), December 30, 2014.
© 1998-2015, The Middle East Media Research Institute All Rights Reserved.
Materials may only be cited with proper attribution.
In the course of an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep released earlier this week, President Obama tried to flatter the Supreme Leader and other assorted higher-ups in Tehran. Will it work?
NPR released yesterday a presidential interview, taped December 18, that bears on many issues, not least the Middle East. I probably should let the opportunity to comment pass, but I can’t. I probably should eat much less ice cream too, but I can’t seem to do that either. Well, more on New Year’s resolutions anon.
Two globules of presidential language in particular catch my attention, both foreshadowed by a Reuters article on December 28. Let me take the two in turn.
In the interview President Obama praises the “incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of Iran” and adds that if Iran agrees to curb its nuclear weapons ambitions Iran “would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules—and that would be good for everybody.” The President offered that Iran has “legitimate defense concerns” and “suffered from a terrible war with Iraq” in the 1980s, but he criticized it for regional “adventurism, the support of organizations like Hizballah, the threats they’ve directed at Israel.”
The Reuters story commented in demur, drive-by style that, while the President thinks an agreement is still possible and perhaps likely, Vice President Biden said earlier this month that he gives the negotiations a “less than even shot” of succeeding. POTUS can’t so easily dump Biden like he dumped Hagel, because Biden got elected—besides which, the VP’s own “can’t-help-myself” problem, which manifests itself most often in his predilection for “committing a truth” (as he sees it) in public, is under better control today than at any time since his election to the Senate in 1972. (For those unaware, just by the way, the phrase “to commit a truth” is a key element of speechwriting wit; it means that one should not say something in public just because it’s true, unless it serves a particular purpose. Political speech is not a pedantic exercise; it is inherently about controlling and manipulating impressions.)
Ah, but back to that other member of the Executive Branch who got elected, the President. What to make of these, one hopes, non-scripted remarks?
It’s clear—actually a little too clear—that President Obama is trying to flatter the Supreme Leader and other assorted higher ups in Tehran. Someone no doubt explained to the President in another, earlier drive-by incident that these guys believe they deserve more respect for their sovereignty, history, and culture than they get. He wants to assure them, insofar as he can, that regime change is not high up on the U.S. want list with regard to Iran, though he cannot explicitly rule it out without cutting the knees out from future U.S. policy options. He wants to let them know he’s sensitive to how the world looks from their perspective.
All of this publicly articulated respect is designed, it seems likely to me as a recovering Executive Branch speechwriter, to reduce the heat on the roiling pot that contains the conspiracy theories Iranians cook up and consume on a depressingly regular basis. The practical purpose? To get the Supreme Leader to authorize the concessions he needs to make to let the deal happen, in return for which we promise not to betray his trust. Respect worked for Aretha Franklin; maybe it’ll work for Barack Obama, too.
But note that, in the list of Iranian sins, the President did not even mention Iran’s role in Syria, or in Yemen. Note, too, that he omitted mentions of Iranian-supported terrorist and insurgent-war acts that have claimed American lives. He never warns that we now intend to link the nuclear negotiations with Iranian regional behavior, as we should have been doing all along. Note too, however, that if we have already secretly consummated a “big deal” with Iran to split U.S. regional security responsibilities with Tehran largely at Arab expense—as some commentators here but especially in the region think is a done deal already a few years ago—it would be harder to make sense of this sort of klutzy fawning language.
The Administration may still yearn for such a deal, however, which now, as in 2009, gives off the sound of one tongue flapping. Here we are, it would seem, at the second coming (or third or fourth coming, depending on what evidence you credit and how you count) of the original outstretched hand offering engagement to mutual benefit for the future. The first time the Administration did this, the Iranian “Green movement” protesting a rigged election was a victim, and our hand got slapped. (Or as Shel Silverstein once wrote: “Cast your bread on the water and what do you get? Another day older, and your bread gets wet.”) Nor did the Supreme Leader deign to answer the first of now three private presidential letters.
It remains to be seen who will suffer this time around, but one thing is certain: When the Saudis, Israelis, and other U.S. associates in the region hear presidential language like this, they head for their mental bunkers and hunker down. Meanwhile, President Obama should not be watching his mailbox for a letter from Tehran.
It will all be judged wise and worldly, perhaps, if the tactic succeeds and we get in due course a nuclear deal worth having. Me, I’m with Joe Biden on this one, as an earlier post explained in some detail. But will it succeed?
Some clever folks in the White House are sensitive to Iranian insecurities and have coached the President on how to make the Iranian lion purr. Alas, they can’t turn the Iranian lion into a vegetarian, and they have a long way to go to evoke any genuine purring. I do not think this will succeed, and let me explain why by speculating on how the Supreme Leader and other Iranians of his ilk will probably hear this sort of language.
“So”, says the Supreme leader to President Rouhani over mint tea one afternoon, “the Americans think they get to judge whether we can be a successful regional power! They presume their dominance, these upstarts, as they speak to the heirs of the Achaemenid dynasty, the Sassanid dynasty, the Safavid dynasty—as these historical adolescents speak to the very founders of civilization. They speak to us not as equals but as masters. They are not and never will be our masters.”
“Yes, sir”, answers Rouhani. “You will remember when Judge [William P.] Clark, one of the NSC Advisors during the Reagan years, characterized Iranian statesmen as ‘a bunch of rug merchants’, do you not? Despite all their failures since, the hubris in Washington is undaunted. This young and inexperienced man speaks of how everyone will benefit if Iran submits to America’s will, as if life on earth can be like paradise. He speaks of international norms and rules as though everyone accepts them, despite the fact that most people in the world have suffered from the Western arrogance and oppression they symbolize.”“So”, says the Supreme leader to President Rouhani over mint tea one afternoon, “the Americans think they get to judge whether we can be a successful regional power! They presume their dominance, these upstarts, as they speak to the heirs of the Achaemenid dynasty, the Sassanid dynasty, the Safavid dynasty—as these historical adolescents speak to the very founders of civilization. They speak to us not as equals but as masters. They are not and never will be our masters.”
Yes, there is no doubt that Khamenei and Rouhani remember Judge Clark’s comment, for they assiduously collect every insult cast their way in faithful expectation of historical revenge; and you can bet your bottom dollar that the President and his advisers, including current NSC Advisor Susan Rice, lack that particular datum in their active memory banks. And much more important, yes, the Iranian government is full of geostrategic realists who know what a revisionist state is. And they are people who, for the most part—whether we can them moderates or hardliners—sincerely project the Shi’a martyrology complex onto the imagined political sociology of the world. This precisely was the Ayatollah Khomeini’s creative and expansive act of ideological genius; it still defines Iranian foreign policy ideals just as it sustained the revolution in its infancy, particularly during very hard times. So when Barack Obama tells Iranians how much they suffered during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, he comes across like a trespasser on sacred cemetery soil. “Who is this idolatrous man who presumes to narrate our holy suffering?”, the Supreme Leader asks the President.
When Robert Browning wrote, “O would God the gift to gi’ us, to see ourselves as others see us”, he weren’t just whistling Dixie folks, or suggesting that short Cliffs Notes courses in cultural studies would suffice for serious purposes. He really meant it.
The NPR interviewer asked the President whether in his last two years in office he would help war-torn countries like Libya, Syria, and Iraq. His answer was that these countries have to take the lead: “We can help, but we can’t do it for them. I think the American people recognize that. There are times here in Washington where pundits don’t; they think you can just move chess pieces around the table. And whenever we have that kind of hubris, we tend to get burned.”
Well, obviously the President is reading the wrong pundits (and in my view he acts unpresidentially even to mention them publicly). He should be reading me. I don’t want us to be engaged in a bombing campaign against the Islamic State if it is premised on a counterproductive half-strategy. I don’t want U.S. combat troops aiding the Abadi government in Baghdad, along side of Iranian Revolutionary Guard units, trying to reclaim for a unitary Iraqi state what it cannot firmly reclaim. I never argued for boots on the ground in Syria, or anything on the ground or in the air with respect to Libya. I and The American Interest with me over the years have been sympathetic to not “devoting another trillion dollars” to misbegotten foreign wars because, yes, as the President said, “we need to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding our schools, our roads, our basic science, and research here in the United States.” We at TAI used the phrase “nation-building at home” before he did (you can look it up—just check out the lead section of volume 4, number 3, published just before Obama’s inauguration).
So then what’s wrong with this picture of presidential remarks on Libya, Syria, and Iraq? What’s wrong is that the President is apparently unable or unwilling to connect his own damned dots.
Did Libya’s troubles today, by which I mean in brief that it has not one dysfunctional government but pretenses of two, just fall out of the sky one day? Unless you mean the U.S. cruise missiles targeted on Tripoli that kicked off a war in March 2011, no. If that is what you mean, as the NPR interviewer had the temerity to suggest, than yes. It was U.S. policy that caused the destruction of the Libyan state, such as it was. U.S. policy, from starting a war to failing to plan for its Phase 4 post-combat aftermath, explains not only the god-awful mess that Libya has become, but also what happened to Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Libya has to get its act together to deserve our help?! What Libya? There is for all practical purposes no Libyan state for us to help.
Did Iraq’s troubles today, by which I mean the state’s collapse back into roughly the three Ottoman provinces cobbled together to create it in 1920, just sort of happen, too? Like Libya, Iraq was a nasty, authoritarian hellhole before U.S. policy made it even worse. We may blame that on the Bush Administration for mis-starting a war that had not been properly planned, but Iraq would not be quite the mess it is today had the Obama Administration not mis-ended it by yanking our presence out without a SOFA agreement. Iraq has to get its act together to deserve our continued or expanded help?! What Iraq? There is, very nearly, no Iraqi state for us to help.
Did Syria’s troubles fall out of the sky, too? Here U.S. policy is mostly guilty of sins of omission rather than sins of commission, some of them circling back to our hands-off-Iran supinity, but it is guilty all the same. As we have said here atTAI many times over the past three years, a judicious early use of U.S. power and leadership well short of kinetic action—difficult though it always was, true—could have averted the still evolving worst-case calamity that Syria has become. Syria is well on its way to complete Somalization. So Syria, too, has to get its act together to deserve our help?! What Syria? There is, very nearly, no Syrian state for us to help.
Far be it for me to advocate the use of U.S. force in any of these places. We cannot put these states back together at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure. As I have stressed in earlier posts (for example, here), what is happening, at base, is historio-structural in nature and no mere policy nipping and tucking can restore the status quo ante. I am no more in a mood to move chess pieces around on a table than the President is, especially if I have to do it with bombers, APCs, and Aegis cruisers loaded up with SLCMs. But to pontificate about the need for Arab self-help in these three cases, as though U.S. policy had nothing whatsoever to do with their present plights, very nearly surpasses credulity. It reminds me of a three-year old not yet well experienced at hide-and-go-seek who covers his face and thereby imagines that others cannot see him. Who in the region does the President think he’s fooling?
I have commented in recent weeks about the dropping away of relevant context in the reporting of important news stories, which I suspect is linked to the generic disappearance of even relatively recent historical memory in our IT-addled, radically segmented collective cognitive state (see, for example, this). But this amnesic babble really takes all, and coming from the President of the United States it frankly makes me a bit uncomfortable.
One of my secular New Year’s resolutions is to read and think more, write and speak less. Another, however, is to write more quickly on the heels of breaking stories, as I’m doing now. Another is to cut back on the ice cream; I like to think that will buy me an indulgence for a bit more single malt, which is more conducive to thinking than to writing, and so the circle of my resolutions comes to completion.
I wish Vice President Biden success in his effort to cut back further on committing truths in public. I’m always here for you, Joe, if you need me.
As for the President, I hope he will add a resolution for 2015 to stop saying stupid “stuff” to his previous determination to not do stupid “stuff.” Since saying and doing are mingled behaviors, especially when they emanate from the Oval Office, a truth that even non-speechwriters can appreciate and that this President seems implicitly to credit more than most, there’s reason to expect both resolution and redemption. Happy New Year!
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