Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 881
January 27, 2016
“Cruel bastards hang together: All you need to know”: The world according to the New York Times
The long-anticipated all-parties conference on Syria was scheduled to open in Geneva Monday, but of course it did not. Now it is set to start Friday, except that it may not. Staffan de Mistura, the perspicacious U.N. diplomat trying to make this very large event happen, is now holding proximity talks with those who may or may not attend, meaning he shuttles daily between one group and another and another because some are not yet prepared to sit in the same room with counterparts. Meaning, in turn, that a peace-and-politics conference might begin later this week or it might begin next summer. Whatever the interim, be assured you will find it difficult to follow what progress there may be toward a resolution of the Syria crisis. This, of course, is by design. There are “narratives” and there is reality, and you, American reader, are by and large offered access only to the former. I just noticed, in this connection, how much of what I have to say in this column derives from non-American sources. One example will make the point plain. On the American side of the Atlantic we are still reading that Russia’s intent in Syria rests on its commitment to the Assad government in Damascus. This is the bedrock position, as we get it: Assad is Vladimir Putin’s man and must stay. “Russia and Iran, allies of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, are not eager to see a united opposition bloc,” the government-supervised New York Times advised in a long “explainer” published last Sunday. There are two dishonest parts to that sentence, but let us stay with “allies of Syria’s president” for the time being. Two days before the Times report, I read this: Sometime in December, Putin dispatched Colonel-General Igor Sergun, director of Russia’s military intelligence, to Damascus. Sergun, an old-line Syria hand from Soviet days, had a suggestion for the ophthalmologist who haplessly stumbled into the Syrian presidency: “The Kremlin…believed it was time for him to step aside.” This news was conveyed to the Financial Times, that English rag staffed with rapid Putinophiles, by “two senior Western intelligence officials.” It is an interesting report, and you can read it here. You cannot and will not ever read it in an American media outlet. The FT merely added detail to what the rest of the world already knew. Putin and his policy people have no particular regard for Assad. When I was in Moscow last month I heard repeatedly that the Kremlin finds him more or less as off-putting as the White House and the State Department. Russia fears another Libya were Assad to be forced out; its position, stated boringly often, is that it is for Syrians to decide their political future—and therefore Assad’s. The Assad question has no place in negotiations convened by greater powers, unless you think self-determination is passé. It is not a complicated distinction. I will not insult the Times by suggesting its foreign staff is too stupid to grasp it. The distinction is not made because it runs counter to house ideology—the narrative as we must have it. Assad is a cruel bastard and Putin another one. Cruel bastards hang together: all you need to know. * When the thought of an all-parties convention emerged late last year, it looked from the first like a spit-and-baling-wire proposition. Two questions weighed heavily, and it is these de Mistura, who issued his invitations late Tuesday, has yet to resolve. One, who is qualified to attend such a conference? By what criteria is this determined? Two, who is a “terrorist” and who sits among the “legitimate” “opposition”—two separate ideas—in Syria? This is the crux of it, plainly, and it proves a nearly intractable matter. Fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, the term “terrorist” is nothing more than an instrument anyone can wield for whatever reason. Hamas, elected to govern in Gaza, can be reduced to a “terrorist” organization. The Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt is “terrorist.” The Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine—my favorite example—are nothing more than terrorists. Emptied of meaning, in the Syrian context the term is nearly 100 percent a tool in the service of strategic, political and ideological agendas. Let us look at these and see if we can figure out what is what, who is worth taking seriously and who is up to no good. The U.S. position. The Obama administration set out in 2012 to ride a wave of civil unrest that had erupted in Syria the previous year, the object of policy being another “regime change,” as C.I.A.-backed coups are now politely known. If you want to talk about quagmires, what has emerged from this objective looks awfully like one. The Obama administration continues to insist, against voluminous evidence—and the advice of its generals at the Pentagon—that there are “moderates” among the militias fighting the Assad regime when they are not fighting among themselves. Just who these moderates are has never been properly explained. But, thinking historically, whether or not those backed in these kinds of operations are moderate has never much mattered at the agency and among the policy cliques. In my read, the music stopped for the Obama administration with the swift, aggressive rise of the Islamic State in mid-2014. At that moment the U.S. should have been smart enough to drop the coup plot in the face of a superseding danger; instead, it continued on as if the orchestra were still playing “God Bless America.” Last October, you will recall, the Pentagon shut down a $500 million program to train and equip “moderates,” having fielded all of five after a year’s effort. The rest of the training and most of the weaponry purchased ended up fortifying radical Islamist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. Two days later U.S. cargo planes airdropped 50 tons of munitions to the Syrian Democratic Forces, the formation of which had been announced a few hours earlier. At the time, Pentagon officials acknowledged there was no way of knowing in whose hands these weapons would finally be fired, which was decently honest of them. The SDF is a grab bag of militias; the best to be said about it is that it includes the YPG, the Peoples’ Protection Units comprised of Syrian Kurds, which have proven an effective ground force in the fight against the Islamic State. Note the timing of these two events. I will return to it. Ever so gradually so as to avoid embarrassment, the State Department has stepped back from its reckless insistence that Assad’s ouster is a precondition of any settlement. At this point, the U.S. position going into the Geneva conference, assuming it takes place, is a blur—as intended. Who does the Obama administration want to see show up in Geneva? We have no list, which is not very surprising at this moment. Washington has been notably obliging to its principal allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and these nations back armed extremists of the kind commonly known as “terrorists.” The Saudi position. As is widely understood, the Saudis view the Syrian conflict as one between Sunni Islam in its Wahhabist form and Shia Islam. Reflecting this, Riyadh is single-minded in its desire to unseat Assad. Until it was destroyed, Assad presided over a secular state. But he is Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam, and Iran supports him. In consequence, the Saudis’ role in the coalition Washington formed against the Islamic State was a duplicitous contradiction from the start: Their bombing raids against ISIS positions never amounted to more than gestures—and ended as soon as hostilities erupted in Yemen—while Riyadh’s ideological and material support for the Islamic State and other Sunni extremists has been and remains just short of overt. Positioning for the Geneva conference, the Saudis have formed what they grandly call a High Negotiations Committee comprised of those groups they think should represent the Syrian opposition in Geneva. This committee met in Riyadh Tuesday to confirm the willingness of members to attend the talks and, presumably, start strategizing. You can guess what sort of people are on the High Negotiations Committee. But beyond its composition, two other problems. One, Riyadh insists that no one who supports the Assad government can attend. This thought speaks for itself. (Reminder: Saudis do not participate in Syria’s political process.) Two, the Saudis assert that its High Negotiations Committee is to be the one, the only, the sum total of opposition representation. The thought that the Saudis are fighting for a free and democratic Syria has always been a touch too much to take. But this is beyond a touch. Where do the Saudis get off claiming the authority to declare illegitimate all who may back Assad for whatever reason and then to define the universe of Syria’s opposition? (It is another question why Washington is silent as its client and ally acts in this fashion.) The Turkish position. What you need to know about the doings of the Erdoğan government in Syria is captured neatly enough in events last week. Turkish media reported Tuesday that “a large number of Turkish forces” crossed the border and entered the Syrian town of Jarablus. This was the first such commitment of Turkish troops on Syrian soil and reflects 1) Erdoğan’s effort to position himself prior to the Geneva talks and 2) the recent battlefield successes of Syrian Kurds in northern regions of the country. “Eyewitnesses to the incursion,” according to an account in the Jerusalem Post, “reported that the Turkish forces have not encountered any resistance from ISIS fighters in the area. These reports once again raise the question of possible collaboration between Turkey and ISIS aimed at halting the advance of the Kurdish militias in north Syria.” This is Erdoğan. This is Turkey’s contribution to resolving the Syria crisis as Washington’s other major ally. The country’s support for the Islamic State has long been understood and grows ever balder, as explored at length in previous columns; reports that ISIS units shrug at the sight of arriving Turkish troops—as recounted in another report on this incident—should dispel all doubts even among the narrative’s true believers. Turkey stands with Saudi Arabia on the makeup of the Geneva conference, and Riyadh, in turn, with Ankara: Erdoğan enjoys Saudi support as he insists that any effort to include a Kurdish delegation is a deal-breaker. Saudi support and Washington’s silence, that is. Never mind the effectiveness of the Kurdish militias against the Islamic State, for this is not the first time Americans have betrayed the Kurds: There is a history of treachery extending back to the 1920s. The Russian position. Moscow stated its case in an eight-point plan released last November. It calls for an 18-month process with three principal steps: a ceasefire and negotiations that would include “a united delegation of opposition groups,” constitutional reform and presidential elections. The last would determine Assad’s future. “The president of Syria,” the document adds, “will not chair the constitutional commission.” So much for the second half of the sentence noted at the start of this column, to the effect that Russia and Iran “are not eager to see a united opposition bloc.” Don’t these people remember even a couple of months back? Then again, why read the documents when the narrative always takes precedence over reality? Lately the Russians have insisted on none other than a Kurdish presence in Geneva. Forget the thought that Washington, if it had any integrity in its Syria policies, would have beaten Moscow to the punch long ago. The Russian position now ranks among the stumbling blocks on the road to Geneva, we are to understand. “Russia and Iran,” that explainer in the Times last Sunday noted, “want to add groups that they say represent a broader section of society, but that the Saudi-backed coalition sees as closer to Mr. Assad’s government.” Will someone wake me when this is over? What is wrong with an all-parties conference that includes all parties other than the Islamic State and al-Nusra, the two groups de Mistura has so far excluded? If you are a supporter of the Assad government, does it follow that you cannot count as one “broader section of society”? These two are mutually exclusive? * It is interesting to watch as the official narrative evolves, as it always must when a collision with reality nears. We used to read that Russia’s intervention in Syria was “an aggression,” the invitation of Damascus never getting a mention. We used to read that Syria was fated to become another Russian quagmire. That the bombing campaign it began on September 30 was ineffective, that Russian jets were too old to go the distance, that they were bombing civilians and targeting hospitals. That Russia was not serious about the Islamic State. Of the peace plan advanced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov we read next to nothing—the narrative advanced in a negative field. Now we read things like this, in Tuesday’s Times:
“The talks would come after months of effort, lead by the United States and Russia, to end a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people….”What moochers our foreign policy cliques have become, having lost all imagination and agility, and what indulgent chroniclers they enjoy in the media they so subtly supervise. Never mind: The better historians will drain this swamp, and all such creatures will not survive the process. Things have changed, you see. We can date the process to September 30, when Russian planes began flying sorties over Syrian territory in support of the uniformed army. Now you know why the Pentagon dropped its $500 million training-and-equipping folly 10 days later and started to get serious. It is no longer possible now to pretend that the Russian air campaign is anything other than highly effective. The narrative of Russian cruelty and indifference to Syrian civilians, children, hospital dwellers and all other helpless people caved when Russia began airlifts of humanitarian aid to two towns Syrian troops took from the Islamic State a couple of weeks ago. (The aid drops were reported in German media; a day later the Times gave them a grudging line at the end of a story.) A blog called Sic Semper Tyrannis, published by a retired Army officer and former Middle East intelligence officer named Patrick Lang, tells the story. You find a healthy addiction to reality on it. The recent entry by Patrick Bahzad—a lot of Patricks at work here—explains in granular detail that Assad’s campaign against rebel militias is very near victory, first in Latakia province, which fronts on the Mediterranean and borders Turkey. “There can be various phases in a ground operation stretching over a period of several months,” Bahzad writes. “Once the strategic breaking point is reached, though, the side having gained the upper hand usually pushes through, which results in the opponent`s posture crumbling under the pressure. This is what happened with Salma, a former mountain resort in North-East Latakia that was taken over by Free Syrian Army groups in mid-2012 and had been turned into the headquarters of various groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra elements.” There are extraordinary ground-level specifics in Bahzad’s report, of the kind only the military-minded can manage. His conclusion:
“The almost total defeat of rebel groups in North-East Latakia does not mean an end to the fighting, though; far from it. Battles are currently under way in several places in Syria… Be that as it may, the changing fortunes of war in Latakia province certainly increase the likelihood of the outcome that Sic Semper Tyrannis has been forecasting for over three months. Things are shaping up for a showdown between [the Syrian army and its allies] and the conglomerate of Salafi, Jihadi and ‘moderate’ rebels….”Recommended reading, and you can find it here, under the January 25 posts. Thanks to Vladimir Signorelli, a reader and president of Bretton Woods Research, a firm that does what its name implies, for circulating the Sic Semper blog and drawing it to my attention. Given how quickly the pre-Geneva scene is changing, it is hard to anticipate events even 24 hours out. We now awaitnews of just who De mistura deemed worth flying to Switzerland. One cannot now even forecast who accept one of his invitations.
Let us all read about it—but carefully.
Footnote: I am a regular guest on a Portsmouth, N.H., radio show called "Keeping Democracy Alive" with Burt Cohen. It is always a lively, informative hour, chiefly because Burt does his homework and asks good questions. Our most recent exchange took up this column’s topics; you can listen here .The long-anticipated all-parties conference on Syria was scheduled to open in Geneva Monday, but of course it did not. Now it is set to start Friday, except that it may not. Staffan de Mistura, the perspicacious U.N. diplomat trying to make this very large event happen, is now holding proximity talks with those who may or may not attend, meaning he shuttles daily between one group and another and another because some are not yet prepared to sit in the same room with counterparts. Meaning, in turn, that a peace-and-politics conference might begin later this week or it might begin next summer. Whatever the interim, be assured you will find it difficult to follow what progress there may be toward a resolution of the Syria crisis. This, of course, is by design. There are “narratives” and there is reality, and you, American reader, are by and large offered access only to the former. I just noticed, in this connection, how much of what I have to say in this column derives from non-American sources. One example will make the point plain. On the American side of the Atlantic we are still reading that Russia’s intent in Syria rests on its commitment to the Assad government in Damascus. This is the bedrock position, as we get it: Assad is Vladimir Putin’s man and must stay. “Russia and Iran, allies of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, are not eager to see a united opposition bloc,” the government-supervised New York Times advised in a long “explainer” published last Sunday. There are two dishonest parts to that sentence, but let us stay with “allies of Syria’s president” for the time being. Two days before the Times report, I read this: Sometime in December, Putin dispatched Colonel-General Igor Sergun, director of Russia’s military intelligence, to Damascus. Sergun, an old-line Syria hand from Soviet days, had a suggestion for the ophthalmologist who haplessly stumbled into the Syrian presidency: “The Kremlin…believed it was time for him to step aside.” This news was conveyed to the Financial Times, that English rag staffed with rapid Putinophiles, by “two senior Western intelligence officials.” It is an interesting report, and you can read it here. You cannot and will not ever read it in an American media outlet. The FT merely added detail to what the rest of the world already knew. Putin and his policy people have no particular regard for Assad. When I was in Moscow last month I heard repeatedly that the Kremlin finds him more or less as off-putting as the White House and the State Department. Russia fears another Libya were Assad to be forced out; its position, stated boringly often, is that it is for Syrians to decide their political future—and therefore Assad’s. The Assad question has no place in negotiations convened by greater powers, unless you think self-determination is passé. It is not a complicated distinction. I will not insult the Times by suggesting its foreign staff is too stupid to grasp it. The distinction is not made because it runs counter to house ideology—the narrative as we must have it. Assad is a cruel bastard and Putin another one. Cruel bastards hang together: all you need to know. * When the thought of an all-parties convention emerged late last year, it looked from the first like a spit-and-baling-wire proposition. Two questions weighed heavily, and it is these de Mistura, who issued his invitations late Tuesday, has yet to resolve. One, who is qualified to attend such a conference? By what criteria is this determined? Two, who is a “terrorist” and who sits among the “legitimate” “opposition”—two separate ideas—in Syria? This is the crux of it, plainly, and it proves a nearly intractable matter. Fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, the term “terrorist” is nothing more than an instrument anyone can wield for whatever reason. Hamas, elected to govern in Gaza, can be reduced to a “terrorist” organization. The Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt is “terrorist.” The Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine—my favorite example—are nothing more than terrorists. Emptied of meaning, in the Syrian context the term is nearly 100 percent a tool in the service of strategic, political and ideological agendas. Let us look at these and see if we can figure out what is what, who is worth taking seriously and who is up to no good. The U.S. position. The Obama administration set out in 2012 to ride a wave of civil unrest that had erupted in Syria the previous year, the object of policy being another “regime change,” as C.I.A.-backed coups are now politely known. If you want to talk about quagmires, what has emerged from this objective looks awfully like one. The Obama administration continues to insist, against voluminous evidence—and the advice of its generals at the Pentagon—that there are “moderates” among the militias fighting the Assad regime when they are not fighting among themselves. Just who these moderates are has never been properly explained. But, thinking historically, whether or not those backed in these kinds of operations are moderate has never much mattered at the agency and among the policy cliques. In my read, the music stopped for the Obama administration with the swift, aggressive rise of the Islamic State in mid-2014. At that moment the U.S. should have been smart enough to drop the coup plot in the face of a superseding danger; instead, it continued on as if the orchestra were still playing “God Bless America.” Last October, you will recall, the Pentagon shut down a $500 million program to train and equip “moderates,” having fielded all of five after a year’s effort. The rest of the training and most of the weaponry purchased ended up fortifying radical Islamist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. Two days later U.S. cargo planes airdropped 50 tons of munitions to the Syrian Democratic Forces, the formation of which had been announced a few hours earlier. At the time, Pentagon officials acknowledged there was no way of knowing in whose hands these weapons would finally be fired, which was decently honest of them. The SDF is a grab bag of militias; the best to be said about it is that it includes the YPG, the Peoples’ Protection Units comprised of Syrian Kurds, which have proven an effective ground force in the fight against the Islamic State. Note the timing of these two events. I will return to it. Ever so gradually so as to avoid embarrassment, the State Department has stepped back from its reckless insistence that Assad’s ouster is a precondition of any settlement. At this point, the U.S. position going into the Geneva conference, assuming it takes place, is a blur—as intended. Who does the Obama administration want to see show up in Geneva? We have no list, which is not very surprising at this moment. Washington has been notably obliging to its principal allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and these nations back armed extremists of the kind commonly known as “terrorists.” The Saudi position. As is widely understood, the Saudis view the Syrian conflict as one between Sunni Islam in its Wahhabist form and Shia Islam. Reflecting this, Riyadh is single-minded in its desire to unseat Assad. Until it was destroyed, Assad presided over a secular state. But he is Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam, and Iran supports him. In consequence, the Saudis’ role in the coalition Washington formed against the Islamic State was a duplicitous contradiction from the start: Their bombing raids against ISIS positions never amounted to more than gestures—and ended as soon as hostilities erupted in Yemen—while Riyadh’s ideological and material support for the Islamic State and other Sunni extremists has been and remains just short of overt. Positioning for the Geneva conference, the Saudis have formed what they grandly call a High Negotiations Committee comprised of those groups they think should represent the Syrian opposition in Geneva. This committee met in Riyadh Tuesday to confirm the willingness of members to attend the talks and, presumably, start strategizing. You can guess what sort of people are on the High Negotiations Committee. But beyond its composition, two other problems. One, Riyadh insists that no one who supports the Assad government can attend. This thought speaks for itself. (Reminder: Saudis do not participate in Syria’s political process.) Two, the Saudis assert that its High Negotiations Committee is to be the one, the only, the sum total of opposition representation. The thought that the Saudis are fighting for a free and democratic Syria has always been a touch too much to take. But this is beyond a touch. Where do the Saudis get off claiming the authority to declare illegitimate all who may back Assad for whatever reason and then to define the universe of Syria’s opposition? (It is another question why Washington is silent as its client and ally acts in this fashion.) The Turkish position. What you need to know about the doings of the Erdoğan government in Syria is captured neatly enough in events last week. Turkish media reported Tuesday that “a large number of Turkish forces” crossed the border and entered the Syrian town of Jarablus. This was the first such commitment of Turkish troops on Syrian soil and reflects 1) Erdoğan’s effort to position himself prior to the Geneva talks and 2) the recent battlefield successes of Syrian Kurds in northern regions of the country. “Eyewitnesses to the incursion,” according to an account in the Jerusalem Post, “reported that the Turkish forces have not encountered any resistance from ISIS fighters in the area. These reports once again raise the question of possible collaboration between Turkey and ISIS aimed at halting the advance of the Kurdish militias in north Syria.” This is Erdoğan. This is Turkey’s contribution to resolving the Syria crisis as Washington’s other major ally. The country’s support for the Islamic State has long been understood and grows ever balder, as explored at length in previous columns; reports that ISIS units shrug at the sight of arriving Turkish troops—as recounted in another report on this incident—should dispel all doubts even among the narrative’s true believers. Turkey stands with Saudi Arabia on the makeup of the Geneva conference, and Riyadh, in turn, with Ankara: Erdoğan enjoys Saudi support as he insists that any effort to include a Kurdish delegation is a deal-breaker. Saudi support and Washington’s silence, that is. Never mind the effectiveness of the Kurdish militias against the Islamic State, for this is not the first time Americans have betrayed the Kurds: There is a history of treachery extending back to the 1920s. The Russian position. Moscow stated its case in an eight-point plan released last November. It calls for an 18-month process with three principal steps: a ceasefire and negotiations that would include “a united delegation of opposition groups,” constitutional reform and presidential elections. The last would determine Assad’s future. “The president of Syria,” the document adds, “will not chair the constitutional commission.” So much for the second half of the sentence noted at the start of this column, to the effect that Russia and Iran “are not eager to see a united opposition bloc.” Don’t these people remember even a couple of months back? Then again, why read the documents when the narrative always takes precedence over reality? Lately the Russians have insisted on none other than a Kurdish presence in Geneva. Forget the thought that Washington, if it had any integrity in its Syria policies, would have beaten Moscow to the punch long ago. The Russian position now ranks among the stumbling blocks on the road to Geneva, we are to understand. “Russia and Iran,” that explainer in the Times last Sunday noted, “want to add groups that they say represent a broader section of society, but that the Saudi-backed coalition sees as closer to Mr. Assad’s government.” Will someone wake me when this is over? What is wrong with an all-parties conference that includes all parties other than the Islamic State and al-Nusra, the two groups de Mistura has so far excluded? If you are a supporter of the Assad government, does it follow that you cannot count as one “broader section of society”? These two are mutually exclusive? * It is interesting to watch as the official narrative evolves, as it always must when a collision with reality nears. We used to read that Russia’s intervention in Syria was “an aggression,” the invitation of Damascus never getting a mention. We used to read that Syria was fated to become another Russian quagmire. That the bombing campaign it began on September 30 was ineffective, that Russian jets were too old to go the distance, that they were bombing civilians and targeting hospitals. That Russia was not serious about the Islamic State. Of the peace plan advanced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov we read next to nothing—the narrative advanced in a negative field. Now we read things like this, in Tuesday’s Times:“The talks would come after months of effort, lead by the United States and Russia, to end a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people….”What moochers our foreign policy cliques have become, having lost all imagination and agility, and what indulgent chroniclers they enjoy in the media they so subtly supervise. Never mind: The better historians will drain this swamp, and all such creatures will not survive the process. Things have changed, you see. We can date the process to September 30, when Russian planes began flying sorties over Syrian territory in support of the uniformed army. Now you know why the Pentagon dropped its $500 million training-and-equipping folly 10 days later and started to get serious. It is no longer possible now to pretend that the Russian air campaign is anything other than highly effective. The narrative of Russian cruelty and indifference to Syrian civilians, children, hospital dwellers and all other helpless people caved when Russia began airlifts of humanitarian aid to two towns Syrian troops took from the Islamic State a couple of weeks ago. (The aid drops were reported in German media; a day later the Times gave them a grudging line at the end of a story.) A blog called Sic Semper Tyrannis, published by a retired Army officer and former Middle East intelligence officer named Patrick Lang, tells the story. You find a healthy addiction to reality on it. The recent entry by Patrick Bahzad—a lot of Patricks at work here—explains in granular detail that Assad’s campaign against rebel militias is very near victory, first in Latakia province, which fronts on the Mediterranean and borders Turkey. “There can be various phases in a ground operation stretching over a period of several months,” Bahzad writes. “Once the strategic breaking point is reached, though, the side having gained the upper hand usually pushes through, which results in the opponent`s posture crumbling under the pressure. This is what happened with Salma, a former mountain resort in North-East Latakia that was taken over by Free Syrian Army groups in mid-2012 and had been turned into the headquarters of various groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra elements.” There are extraordinary ground-level specifics in Bahzad’s report, of the kind only the military-minded can manage. His conclusion:
“The almost total defeat of rebel groups in North-East Latakia does not mean an end to the fighting, though; far from it. Battles are currently under way in several places in Syria… Be that as it may, the changing fortunes of war in Latakia province certainly increase the likelihood of the outcome that Sic Semper Tyrannis has been forecasting for over three months. Things are shaping up for a showdown between [the Syrian army and its allies] and the conglomerate of Salafi, Jihadi and ‘moderate’ rebels….”Recommended reading, and you can find it here, under the January 25 posts. Thanks to Vladimir Signorelli, a reader and president of Bretton Woods Research, a firm that does what its name implies, for circulating the Sic Semper blog and drawing it to my attention. Given how quickly the pre-Geneva scene is changing, it is hard to anticipate events even 24 hours out. We now awaitnews of just who De mistura deemed worth flying to Switzerland. One cannot now even forecast who accept one of his invitations.
Let us all read about it—but carefully.
Footnote: I am a regular guest on a Portsmouth, N.H., radio show called "Keeping Democracy Alive" with Burt Cohen. It is always a lively, informative hour, chiefly because Burt does his homework and asks good questions. Our most recent exchange took up this column’s topics; you can listen here .
“Where’s my wife already?”: Reflections on sex and the single feminist
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.
***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem said in 1970, and I believed her. But a woman without a woman? That’s like a fish without gills. Born in the 1950s, I was an empowered, impatient girl. Thanks to Steinem et al., I grew up to be an empowered, impatient woman. I get right on it. I make things happen. I fix what’s wrong. Bad rules? Break them. Bad war? Protest it. Bad job? Quit it. Imperfect house? Renovate it. Friendship spat? Mend it. I’ve always maintained that the best way to know what a person really wants is to look at what she has. How many times have I told a friend that if she really wanted that career, house, relationship, she’d figure out a way to get it? “You must be ambivalent,” I’d tell her, or “Maybe you’re not ready.” Easy for me to say; I had what I wanted. I’d followed the feminist recipe with great success. First I became the man I wanted to marry. Then I married the woman of my dreams. Until four years ago I was blissfully, passionately coupled. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Now what I want is what I had. Turns out, it’s the one thing that all the empowerment in the world can’t get me.***
Some people—men, women, other—are made to be single. They couple up for a minute, decide it’s not worth the hassles, drift back into singlehood. Not me. I’m made for marriage. I’ve been married, in one way or another, to one gender or another, since I was 15 years old. At my certain age, I’m done trying to analyze or spiritualize or therapize myself out of wanting what I was built to have. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. No ambivalence. I’m ready. Hear me roar. So where’s my wife already?***
Divorce. It took a long time to come through that dark tunnel. The shock. The grief. It took years to get used to not doubling everything good (movie tickets, steaks on the grill, heads on the pillow), and halving everything bad (bills, worries, household chores). Finally I came back to myself, my marrying-type self. I did what there was to do. I told my friends I was looking. I looked. I posted profiles on several dating sites: cleverly worded descriptions; stylish yet casual pix. I dated men. I didn’t like it. I dated women. I didn’t like it. On Match.com I met a really good woman. I loved her ambivalently for a while. Ambivalent is good enough for some people, but I’m not one of them. I’ve known great love. I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t—I won’t—settle for less. Isn’t that what fifty years of feminism has taught us? Not to settle for less?***
I’m a good writer. A good hostess, hiker, conversationalist. A really good friend. But here's what I’m best at. I’m a gifted wife. I cook. I bake. I grow fruit and herbs and flowers and turn them into jeweled jars of jam. I can make my girl so glad it’s her birthday, she’ll wish she had two of them. I’ll give her two of them. I have lingerie, good lingerie, and I know how to use it. I can lie my lover back and make her laugh and cry and hum. I can let her lie me back. Bring home the bacon? Check. Fry it up in the pan? Yes. The only thing that makes me happier than nest-feathering is sharing my—our—feathered nest, sinking deep into that downy den for a lost weekend, a lost week, a found life.***
If I couldn’t write, my talent for writing would be wasted. I’d be wasted. Imagine the torment, if writing required me to find a woman to do it with. If writing required me to sidle up to a bar or be match-made by friends or, goddess help me, offer myself up on OK Stupid and Hinder. I’d be forced to spend my days “walking on my knees,” as Mary Oliver wrote, “for a hundred miles through the desert,” looking for the person who would enable me to do what I was put here to do. To be whole. To be fully who I am. Imagine this, then. Every night that I don’t make dinner for my lover; every night that I sleep alone, every morning that I don’t bring my sweetheart breakfast in bed, my greatest talents and my greatest desires are being wasted. I’m being wasted. Epic female-empowerment fail: I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.***
“We have to step up as women and take the lead.”—Beyoncé As mentioned, I make use of my birthright. I do what the bawdy boys do. I prowl parties, conferences, farmers’ markets like the sexual predator I’ve become, reducing each human I encounter to a potential mate. I scour my screen, push myself out of my self-feathered den, walk the world on Red Alert so as not to miss a glance, a wink, a sign. Friends advise me that the harder I try to find my missing person, the less likely I am to succeed. Friends advise me that the search for my princess will involve kissing a lot of frogs. My married friends, that is.***
It isn’t just me. “It’s been six years since I’ve been kissed,” says my friend Carla, a beautiful, bodacious 55-year-old novelist. “Being as desperate as I am for someone to marry goes against everything I believe in. But not looking means I’ll never find him.” “It’s too degrading, the dating thing,” says 63-year-old Hannah, whose husband of 20 years died last year. “The only more degrading thing is being single when I want so much not to be.” Amy, a brilliant staff writer at a prestigious magazine, is 42, never married, always wanting to be. She travels the world to report her stories, trolling Tinder everywhere she goes. “I’ve probably been on a hundred dates in the past year,” Amy says. “And not one of them has even come close.” She shakes her pretty head. “Not even close.” “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” —Nora Ephron My theory of powerful women—that if we aren’t happy with what we have, we can and should go out and get ourselves what we want—has a hole in it now. I feel that hole in the region of my heart. I can fix my garbage disposal, my holey sweaters, my manuscripts. But I can’t—I don’t want to—fix my desire to be married. Nor can I fix my inability to find the person I want to be married to. Even Beyoncé couldn’t just step up, take the lead, and materialize her Jay Z. That kind of match takes magic, the sweet song of angels’ harps. "It's the stuff that dreams are made of," as Carly Simon sang in her homage to the "slow steady fire" of lifelong marriage. My hard-earned, hard-edged feminist politics can’t make this greatest of my dreams come true. As the author of my own narrative, the heroine of my own life, that powerlessness rankles. Where, exactly, is the freedom of choice in that?
An indie rock Johnny and June: Paul Westerberg and Juliana Hatfield team up for vulnerable, truth-telling “Wild Stab”
Paul Westerberg opens his latest collaboration with Juliana Hatfield with a track called “Back,” on which the chorus states, “I’m back if you’ll have me.” On the surface, the song could be about reconciliation, not the run-through-the-meadow-while-birds-flit-around you reconciliation, but the more realistic, adult kind—“I’m back if you’ll have me now/if you’ll have me just as I am,” Westerberg sings at the last chorus. But through another lens, “Back” could also be taken as a statement of return by an artist whose presence in rock 'n' roll has been inconsistent at best over the last decade or so. The truth is that it’s most likely about both aspects, in equal measure. “Wild Stab” is the name of the record from Paul Westerberg and Juliana Hatfield, under the nom de plume the I Don’t Cares. It’s 16 songs that clock in just under an hour, and it is an almost uniformly delightful experience. Some songs are good; some songs are great; and there are only a few that probably should have been left as outtakes. There are hooks and riffs and clever turns of phrase; there are bold declarations, and much quieter ones. There is so much to like on the record, and it’s tremendously accessible and listenable. When artists brand their latest grouping as “the I Don’t Cares” it’s both a Boy Howdy and a fuck you; obviously, by releasing art into the world, artists obviously care or they would just record for themselves at home. Once you know that Paul Westerberg is attached to this particular concern, the attitude of the monicker starts to make more sense in some fashion. What does the artistic outfit not care about? Is it success? Is it critical opinion? Is it a sign of giving up, or a more zen-like release of resistance? In a conversation last week with Peter Wolf on Vanyaland, Westerberg makes the case that it’s probably (and unsurprisingly) all of the above. There are some tremendously vulnerable moments, such as “Kissing Break,” a beautiful acoustic duet, or “Born for Me,” which Westerberg already tried on his 1999 release "Suicaine Gratifaction." It’s moments like those, as well as Westerberg’s Phil Lynott tribute “Need the Guys,” that, combined, set a more Johnny-and-June tone for the album than Westerberg’s usual loner-in-a-basement vibe. It sounds like a love story, and once they both open that door musically, it’s hard to not remember that Hatfield dedicated a chapter of her 2008 memoir to Westerberg. In an interview with Peter Wolf on Vanyaland, Paul confesses to the romance, and that he’d originally written “Born for Me” for Hatfield back in the day, and that “Need the Guys” was also for her. There’s also an image inside the CD of the two holding hands that mirrors the two guitars on the front cover. All of that, charming as it might be, is exponentially less important than Hatfield’s role as a collaborator and facilitator. (Westerberg notes in the Vanyaland interview that she was essentially playing the role of an executive producer.) In addition to her instrumental and vocal contributions (and her voice is a lovely companion to Westerberg’s), Hatfield acts as a sounding board for Westerberg, providing a trusted second ear to help winnow through what sounds like a mountain of lost songs in his basement. “She brought a lot of this to life that otherwise would have sat in the basement and rotted,” Westerberg tells Wolf. While modern technology is freeing to an artist, allowing them to work at their own speed without the costs or restrictions of a recording studio, it’s also easy to get caught up in a feedback loop, both positive and negative or just neutral, in Westerberg’s case; he confesses to Wolf in the Vanyaland interview that “You don’t know your good stuff after a while,” or even what’s on some of the tapes. “Wild Stab” is a very warm-sounding record--the production is deliberately rough, and the guitars and vocals have great tone. But in the background, accompanying every track, is a drum machine. If you’ve listened to any of Westerberg’s recent one-off releases over the past decade, you’re used to it; it made sense that was the case with the dozen or so numbers that he knocked out at his home studio in his basement. But on this record, it does every single song a terrible disservice, despite Westerberg’s insistence in the Vanyaland interview that the drum machine is a deliberate choice: “It’s not putting the drums in such an important role that it takes over the song, it’s about the words and voices of the two singers.” The problem is that the tinny, mechanical quality of the drums does become overpowering on more than a few of the tracks, and detracts from the otherwise essential, bare-bones production that enhances the rest of the composition. The record is also sequenced well, and deliberately (which Westerberg also confirms in the conversation with Wolf) but the most artful sequence is in the final run, beginning with track 12, “King of America.” This is the section of the record where “Wild Stab” shifts from enjoyable to essential. Westerberg has never been overtly political, outside of the oblique and likely unintentional messages in songs like “Fuck School” or “Customer,” but this all changes with “King of America.” The message is wrapped in robust, rippling instrumentation, but the lyrics are bitter and direct:
“I clean your floors, scrubbed your toilets Man I swept under your feet Worked in your stores Every boy gets one chance, you’re laughing at me Now it’s my turn to bleed Shout it out: King of America”It’s one of the most profound, astonishing lyrics he’s released, and even more so when you remember that he was working as a janitor when he discovered the Stinson brothers and Chris Mars rehearsing in the basement of the Stinson house. The stark narration of the verses belies the singability of the choruses in an almost “Born in the USA”-like fashion, and makes one wonder what else in this vein is lost on a tape somewhere. “All the little people can go to hell” is the key line from the track that follows, “Little People.” And then the next track, “Whole Lotta Nothin’” signs and seals the sentiment of this three-pack. “I’m an icon/everyone hit delete/I’d really like some/whole lotta nothin’ like me. ” It’s this three-pack of brilliant compositions where listeners will find themselves fervently wishing for a larger production, for a real drummer, for a little more separation, for the best possible presentation. Westerberg insists in the Vanyaland interview that his guideline for the production was that he was looking for the goosebump moment, and the songs still do deliver because they’re good songs--but they could absolutely sound just a little better without losing the roughness and immediacy of the production. “Done Done Done” should have been cut, cut, cut, but it’s there as insulation, to stop people from getting to the end of the record, because it’s on the 16th track where Westerberg takes a deep breath and digs deep to tell listeners what the record is all about: “Hands Together.” It’s a vivid, intense, daydream of a lyric as abstract as it is heart-rending, backed by a shimmering melody. He even manages to get in one or two of those great Westerbergian turns of phrase, “Dinner with a cup of coffee that likes to be called a mug” or “The newspaper gets older every minute.” It’s stream-of-consciousness with a purpose, it’s giving away his secrets, telling his truths, it’s breathtaking and uncomfortable and he knows it. This is another track that Westerberg tells Wolf would have been lost, except for Hatfield’s skill in digging through the reject pile and pulling it out. Westerberg tried writing more songs for the last version of the Replacements, but it didn’t gel. There hasn’t been a proper solo record from him since 2004’s "Folker," or even much music at all since he released a series of one-offs and digital EPs in 2008 and 2009. It feels like what’s been missing is that second ear, a trusted collaborator who can help guide Westerberg through the maze he created for himself, and get his music out of the basement and into the world. Let’s hope that “Wild Stab” is not the last time that Hatfield (or anyone else) gets to dig around in Westerberg’s basement vault of lost gems and almost-songs.Paul Westerberg opens his latest collaboration with Juliana Hatfield with a track called “Back,” on which the chorus states, “I’m back if you’ll have me.” On the surface, the song could be about reconciliation, not the run-through-the-meadow-while-birds-flit-around you reconciliation, but the more realistic, adult kind—“I’m back if you’ll have me now/if you’ll have me just as I am,” Westerberg sings at the last chorus. But through another lens, “Back” could also be taken as a statement of return by an artist whose presence in rock 'n' roll has been inconsistent at best over the last decade or so. The truth is that it’s most likely about both aspects, in equal measure. “Wild Stab” is the name of the record from Paul Westerberg and Juliana Hatfield, under the nom de plume the I Don’t Cares. It’s 16 songs that clock in just under an hour, and it is an almost uniformly delightful experience. Some songs are good; some songs are great; and there are only a few that probably should have been left as outtakes. There are hooks and riffs and clever turns of phrase; there are bold declarations, and much quieter ones. There is so much to like on the record, and it’s tremendously accessible and listenable. When artists brand their latest grouping as “the I Don’t Cares” it’s both a Boy Howdy and a fuck you; obviously, by releasing art into the world, artists obviously care or they would just record for themselves at home. Once you know that Paul Westerberg is attached to this particular concern, the attitude of the monicker starts to make more sense in some fashion. What does the artistic outfit not care about? Is it success? Is it critical opinion? Is it a sign of giving up, or a more zen-like release of resistance? In a conversation last week with Peter Wolf on Vanyaland, Westerberg makes the case that it’s probably (and unsurprisingly) all of the above. There are some tremendously vulnerable moments, such as “Kissing Break,” a beautiful acoustic duet, or “Born for Me,” which Westerberg already tried on his 1999 release "Suicaine Gratifaction." It’s moments like those, as well as Westerberg’s Phil Lynott tribute “Need the Guys,” that, combined, set a more Johnny-and-June tone for the album than Westerberg’s usual loner-in-a-basement vibe. It sounds like a love story, and once they both open that door musically, it’s hard to not remember that Hatfield dedicated a chapter of her 2008 memoir to Westerberg. In an interview with Peter Wolf on Vanyaland, Paul confesses to the romance, and that he’d originally written “Born for Me” for Hatfield back in the day, and that “Need the Guys” was also for her. There’s also an image inside the CD of the two holding hands that mirrors the two guitars on the front cover. All of that, charming as it might be, is exponentially less important than Hatfield’s role as a collaborator and facilitator. (Westerberg notes in the Vanyaland interview that she was essentially playing the role of an executive producer.) In addition to her instrumental and vocal contributions (and her voice is a lovely companion to Westerberg’s), Hatfield acts as a sounding board for Westerberg, providing a trusted second ear to help winnow through what sounds like a mountain of lost songs in his basement. “She brought a lot of this to life that otherwise would have sat in the basement and rotted,” Westerberg tells Wolf. While modern technology is freeing to an artist, allowing them to work at their own speed without the costs or restrictions of a recording studio, it’s also easy to get caught up in a feedback loop, both positive and negative or just neutral, in Westerberg’s case; he confesses to Wolf in the Vanyaland interview that “You don’t know your good stuff after a while,” or even what’s on some of the tapes. “Wild Stab” is a very warm-sounding record--the production is deliberately rough, and the guitars and vocals have great tone. But in the background, accompanying every track, is a drum machine. If you’ve listened to any of Westerberg’s recent one-off releases over the past decade, you’re used to it; it made sense that was the case with the dozen or so numbers that he knocked out at his home studio in his basement. But on this record, it does every single song a terrible disservice, despite Westerberg’s insistence in the Vanyaland interview that the drum machine is a deliberate choice: “It’s not putting the drums in such an important role that it takes over the song, it’s about the words and voices of the two singers.” The problem is that the tinny, mechanical quality of the drums does become overpowering on more than a few of the tracks, and detracts from the otherwise essential, bare-bones production that enhances the rest of the composition. The record is also sequenced well, and deliberately (which Westerberg also confirms in the conversation with Wolf) but the most artful sequence is in the final run, beginning with track 12, “King of America.” This is the section of the record where “Wild Stab” shifts from enjoyable to essential. Westerberg has never been overtly political, outside of the oblique and likely unintentional messages in songs like “Fuck School” or “Customer,” but this all changes with “King of America.” The message is wrapped in robust, rippling instrumentation, but the lyrics are bitter and direct:
“I clean your floors, scrubbed your toilets Man I swept under your feet Worked in your stores Every boy gets one chance, you’re laughing at me Now it’s my turn to bleed Shout it out: King of America”It’s one of the most profound, astonishing lyrics he’s released, and even more so when you remember that he was working as a janitor when he discovered the Stinson brothers and Chris Mars rehearsing in the basement of the Stinson house. The stark narration of the verses belies the singability of the choruses in an almost “Born in the USA”-like fashion, and makes one wonder what else in this vein is lost on a tape somewhere. “All the little people can go to hell” is the key line from the track that follows, “Little People.” And then the next track, “Whole Lotta Nothin’” signs and seals the sentiment of this three-pack. “I’m an icon/everyone hit delete/I’d really like some/whole lotta nothin’ like me. ” It’s this three-pack of brilliant compositions where listeners will find themselves fervently wishing for a larger production, for a real drummer, for a little more separation, for the best possible presentation. Westerberg insists in the Vanyaland interview that his guideline for the production was that he was looking for the goosebump moment, and the songs still do deliver because they’re good songs--but they could absolutely sound just a little better without losing the roughness and immediacy of the production. “Done Done Done” should have been cut, cut, cut, but it’s there as insulation, to stop people from getting to the end of the record, because it’s on the 16th track where Westerberg takes a deep breath and digs deep to tell listeners what the record is all about: “Hands Together.” It’s a vivid, intense, daydream of a lyric as abstract as it is heart-rending, backed by a shimmering melody. He even manages to get in one or two of those great Westerbergian turns of phrase, “Dinner with a cup of coffee that likes to be called a mug” or “The newspaper gets older every minute.” It’s stream-of-consciousness with a purpose, it’s giving away his secrets, telling his truths, it’s breathtaking and uncomfortable and he knows it. This is another track that Westerberg tells Wolf would have been lost, except for Hatfield’s skill in digging through the reject pile and pulling it out. Westerberg tried writing more songs for the last version of the Replacements, but it didn’t gel. There hasn’t been a proper solo record from him since 2004’s "Folker," or even much music at all since he released a series of one-offs and digital EPs in 2008 and 2009. It feels like what’s been missing is that second ear, a trusted collaborator who can help guide Westerberg through the maze he created for himself, and get his music out of the basement and into the world. Let’s hope that “Wild Stab” is not the last time that Hatfield (or anyone else) gets to dig around in Westerberg’s basement vault of lost gems and almost-songs.
Oregon militiamen fell right into the feds’ trap: Sorry, liberals, the government was right to wait before taking them out
The minute that self-appointed militiamen stepped onto the property of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, liberals started worrying that these folks would not be held accountable for their criminal behavior. The group, led by the two sons of right wing radical Cliven Bundy, took over the refuge, demanding that the taxpayers turn over federal lands so that folks like the Bundys and other farmers, miners and other private interests could profit handsomely off the land without having to pay for it. It's clear that the militiamen expected the feds to rush the compound, causing a firefight in which they could be martyrs for the right wing cause of giving white conservatives a lot of free money while leaving the rest of us out to dry. But that didn't happen. Instead, the federal government seemingly didn't do anything for many weeks, letting these guys get comfortable at the refuge and even go back and forth from it for grocery-shopping, media events, and whatever else their hearts desired. Only one occupier was arrested, for using a stolen vehicle to drive to the store. This lack of interest in having a big ol' shootout right away on government property didn't just disappoint the militiamen. A number of liberal commentators were miffed that the feds seemed to be twiddling their thumbs, often arguing that if the occupiers were people of color, the shootout would have happened already. The criticism had some merit, of course, but the solution for such a double standard isn't to have more shootouts, so much as it's an argument against the quick-to-violence reactions law enforcement regrettably has when dealing with non-white suspects. The occupation was expensive and disruptive, of course, leading the Democratic governor of Oregon to ask for the feds to step in. This only reinforced liberal suspicions that the feds were blowing this off and were not going to hold these yahoos accountable for their actions. Well, those fears were proven most dramatically wrong Tuesday afternoon, when law enforcement confronted the militiamen on the open highway. A shootout did ensue, which was expected since these folks all have ridiculous martyr fantasies, and one person was killed. So far, there have been eight arrests, and the leaders of this fiasco are in custody. Now the feds have closed in on the refuge, closing roads and access. Without leadership or access to the outside, it won't be surprising if the rest of the people inside just give up soon enough. The worrywarts were getting all worked up over nothing. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether the feds were taking this seriously enough, in the end, it turns out that the feds were right and the worrywarts were wrong. Waiting this out a bit, while unfortunately disruptive to the area, ended up being a far more sensible way of dealing with this than trying to raid the wildlife refuge. Raiding the refuge was always a bad idea. For one thing it would give these wannabe martyrs exactly what they want, an opportunity to get hurt or die at government hands and become fuel for radical right wing propaganda. They even brought children onto the property to raise the stakes. In the past, federal raids under similar circumstances involving children---most notably in Waco---not only resulted in innocent lives being lost, but in providing right wing radicals even more justification to demonize federal authorities. And while the occupation was disruptive and expensive, it would have been far more costly to give the militia the shootout at the refuge they wanted. These guys bragged about how they anticipated violence. They openly threatened that this would become another Waco. Rushing them at the compound would have caused expensive damage to the building, and possibly a fire if the militiamen made good on these threats. Repairing that would have cost a fortune and kept the refuge employees on leave even longer. Instead, the feds let the militia get complacent and bored. They let the media attention drift away, forcing the militia to have to take more risks and leave the refuge more to get attention. What looked like federal inattention now looks a whole lot more like it was a trap being set to draw the militia members out. If so, it worked perfectly. The militia members felt emboldened enough to travel 100 miles away from the refuge, and it was out there, without the shelter of the refuge, the presence of cameras, or the ability to use children or neighbors as human shields, that they were finally nabbed by law enforcement. No expensive destruction of property, no dead kids, no officers killed. Only one would-be martyr lost his life. But this wasn't just a success from a damage control perspective, either. The federal strategy also kneecapped the propaganda value of this occupation. As I wrote earlier this month, the lengthy occupation gave the militiamen near-daily opportunities to show the world their true colors, proving that they aren't manly warriors taking a stand so much as a bunch of clowns playing dress-up. The arrest is more of the same. Instead of staging some Alamo-inspired last stand in the refuge, they apprehended in the middle of nowhere because they were stupid enough to go on a road trip. The only way this could have been more demoralizing for their cause is if they were wearing adult diapers when they got caught. The entire debacle isn't quite over yet. There are still some militia members holed up in the refuge. But their leaders have all been apprehended. Considering what idiots the leaders were, it's not unreasonable to think the people who were left to hold down the fort are even less capable of managing this situation. The federal strategy of being patient and waiting for an opportunity will most likely continue to pay off. Instead of being angry that the feds didn't rush this compound, liberals should use this story to push for smarter, less aggressive policing generally. We're in the midst, prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement, of a nationwide discussion about the dangers of the "shoot first" philosophy of policing. This story if a perfect example of why it's better for police to be patient and focused on minimizing damage rather than trying to strong-arm the suspects in every situation. It's not just the right thing to do, but it's often the most effective way to get the bad guys without hurting innocent people in the process. 
Check out the states with the most dry counties — as if Prohibition never ended
If you think alcohol Prohibition ended with its repeal in 1933, you would be wrong. As the map below shows, alcohol is still banned in a huge number of places in the U.S. Counties in red are where alcohol sales are forbidden, counties in blue are where it is permitted, and counties in yellow are "partially dry," that is, they are either wet communities within dry counties or vice-versa: 
After prohibition, two-thirds of the states allowed localities to ban the sale, and in some cases, the possession and consumption of alcohol, while three states—Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee—maintained Prohibition except by affirmative local option. It could be that states and counties still enforcing Prohibition are good predictors of places where it will be difficult to legalize marijuana. AlterNet's list of the nine last states likely to legalize it includes several Prohibitionist states (Alabama, Kansas, Oklahoma) and only fails to include two others (Arkansas and Mississippi) because citizens there have access to the initiative process. It's not a complete match: There are still dry counties in some Midwestern, Mid-Atlantic and New England states, and that's probably not going to stop Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Vermont from legalizing it within the next few years—maybe even this year in a couple of cases. And there are broad swaths of the Plains States and Intermountain West that are not dry, but are socially conservative and unlikely to be legalization leaders, such as the Dakotas, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. But in the Mid-South and the Southern Plains, the social conservatism that drove (and still drives) Prohibition remains in full flower. The heartland of Prohibition is also likely to be the heart of resistance to marijuana legalization. You'd think the Prohibitionist places would learn. As Atlas Obscura pointed out, Prohibition creates its own problems. University of Louisville researchers found that dry counties have significantly higher rates of meth lab seizures, while Texas researchers found that drug-related crime was higher in counties without legal access to alcohol. But don't hold your breath. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle. 
Republicans react to news of Oregon standoff with wild conspiracy theories and bizarre comparisons to Jesus
In the wake of an armed standoff with federal and state agents, members of an Oregon "militia" continue to occupy Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for a 26th day as their compatriots and sympathizers spread wild conspiracy theories to make martyrs out of the group. Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, has been identified as the only person killed in Tuesday's night standoff with the FBI. According to "The Oregonian," a group of militiamen was pulled over on their way to a community meeting and officials said Finicum, 55, failed to obey orders to surrender. Eight other militiamen were arrested. In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said that they had established checkpoints along key routes to the refuge and that anyone who tries to travel inside would be arrested, although several other members of the right-wing group remain on federal property. Reacting to news of the standoff and Finicum's death, supporters of Ammon Bundy's wayward revolt called for the "the resolve for principled liberty" to go on:
The resolve for principled liberty must go on.America was fired upon by our government and one of liberty's finest... Posted by Bundy Ranch on Tuesday, January 26, 2016Other supporters have taken to wild conspiracy theories in reaction to news of Finicum's death: https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/statu... https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status...
Levoy Finicum was Shot and murdered in Cold blood today in Burns Oregon by the FBI and State Law enforcement. He had... Posted by Bundy Ranch on Tuesday, January 26, 2016"He was on his knees with his hands up and they shot him," the group's resident IT guy told followers on a livestream today, pushing a story that was debunked by multiple witnesses. The conspiratorial right-wing website Infowars also pushed this theory, publishing an "eyewitness" account from a woman who claims to have been riding in the same car as Finicum:
[Victoria] Sharp claims that Finicum put his hands out of the car window and asked the police to allow the women to leave the car.
“They shot at him, but they missed him,” said Sharp, adding that the group then attempted to drive away in the car but were shot at again by police.
“When we crashed and stopped for a second, he got out of the car, he had his hands in the air, he’s like ‘just shoot me then’….and they did, they shot him dead,” said Sharp.
“He was just walking, with his hands in the air, I swear to God, and they shot him dead and after he was down on the ground, shot him three more times,” said Sharp, adding that the vehicle was again “bombarded with bullets” as well as tear gas rounds.
The notoriously incorrect conservative blogger Jim Hoft reported on his "Gateway Pundit" site a similar conspiracy from Ammon Bundy's father, Cliven: "LaVoy Finicum was murdered. Cold-blooded murder. They shot him with his hands up.”
Finicum's daughter also claimed in a Facebook post that her father's hands were in the air when he was shot:
I want the world to know how my father was murdered today. His hands were in the air and he was shot in the face by the American authorities. Ammon Bundy reported there are 6 witnesses to this evil. Posted by Thara Tenney on Tuesday, January 26, 2016Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro protested law enforcement's reaction to the nearly months long illegal occupation, writing that "it is worth noting the selective aggression of the federal government here":
The Hammonds aren’t a national issue because they’re ranchers fighting the Bureau of Land Management, not blacks in Ferguson fighting the “white establishment.” The Bundys claim that LaVoy Finicum “had his arms in the air” when he was shot, but there will be no mass movement, no protest photos on CNN -- an ironic counterpoint to the national movement that sprang up in the aftermath of the fully fictionalized account of thug Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson.Nevada GOP lawmaker Michele Fiore -- the woman who sent out delightful Christmas cards last year illustrating every member of her family toting a firearm -- also pushed the "hands up" theory: https://twitter.com/VoteFiore/status/... Fiore's right-wing rabidness was upstagged, however, by her fellow Nevada lawmaker. Republican Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton bizarrely compared Finicum to Jesus and Moses in a Facebook post mourning his passing. “For any who feel he was a criminal, like those who felt Moses and Jesus were criminals, I would implore you to investigate the peaceful work that Lavoy did in his life from the Bundy Ranch where thousands protested without a shot fired, to today in Oregon, where the shots fired came from the government at an unarmed Lavoy Finicum,” Shelton wrote:
In any given generation there are men who are willing to stand for what they believe. Most of the time they are... Posted by Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton on Wednesday, January 27, 2016In the wake of an armed standoff with federal and state agents, members of an Oregon "militia" continue to occupy Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for a 26th day as their compatriots and sympathizers spread wild conspiracy theories to make martyrs out of the group. Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, has been identified as the only person killed in Tuesday's night standoff with the FBI. According to "The Oregonian," a group of militiamen was pulled over on their way to a community meeting and officials said Finicum, 55, failed to obey orders to surrender. Eight other militiamen were arrested. In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said that they had established checkpoints along key routes to the refuge and that anyone who tries to travel inside would be arrested, although several other members of the right-wing group remain on federal property. Reacting to news of the standoff and Finicum's death, supporters of Ammon Bundy's wayward revolt called for the "the resolve for principled liberty" to go on:
The resolve for principled liberty must go on.America was fired upon by our government and one of liberty's finest... Posted by Bundy Ranch on Tuesday, January 26, 2016Other supporters have taken to wild conspiracy theories in reaction to news of Finicum's death: https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/statu... https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status...
Levoy Finicum was Shot and murdered in Cold blood today in Burns Oregon by the FBI and State Law enforcement. He had... Posted by Bundy Ranch on Tuesday, January 26, 2016"He was on his knees with his hands up and they shot him," the group's resident IT guy told followers on a livestream today, pushing a story that was debunked by multiple witnesses. The conspiratorial right-wing website Infowars also pushed this theory, publishing an "eyewitness" account from a woman who claims to have been riding in the same car as Finicum:
[Victoria] Sharp claims that Finicum put his hands out of the car window and asked the police to allow the women to leave the car.
“They shot at him, but they missed him,” said Sharp, adding that the group then attempted to drive away in the car but were shot at again by police.
“When we crashed and stopped for a second, he got out of the car, he had his hands in the air, he’s like ‘just shoot me then’….and they did, they shot him dead,” said Sharp.
“He was just walking, with his hands in the air, I swear to God, and they shot him dead and after he was down on the ground, shot him three more times,” said Sharp, adding that the vehicle was again “bombarded with bullets” as well as tear gas rounds.
The notoriously incorrect conservative blogger Jim Hoft reported on his "Gateway Pundit" site a similar conspiracy from Ammon Bundy's father, Cliven: "LaVoy Finicum was murdered. Cold-blooded murder. They shot him with his hands up.”
Finicum's daughter also claimed in a Facebook post that her father's hands were in the air when he was shot:
I want the world to know how my father was murdered today. His hands were in the air and he was shot in the face by the American authorities. Ammon Bundy reported there are 6 witnesses to this evil. Posted by Thara Tenney on Tuesday, January 26, 2016Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro protested law enforcement's reaction to the nearly months long illegal occupation, writing that "it is worth noting the selective aggression of the federal government here":
The Hammonds aren’t a national issue because they’re ranchers fighting the Bureau of Land Management, not blacks in Ferguson fighting the “white establishment.” The Bundys claim that LaVoy Finicum “had his arms in the air” when he was shot, but there will be no mass movement, no protest photos on CNN -- an ironic counterpoint to the national movement that sprang up in the aftermath of the fully fictionalized account of thug Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson.Nevada GOP lawmaker Michele Fiore -- the woman who sent out delightful Christmas cards last year illustrating every member of her family toting a firearm -- also pushed the "hands up" theory: https://twitter.com/VoteFiore/status/... Fiore's right-wing rabidness was upstagged, however, by her fellow Nevada lawmaker. Republican Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton bizarrely compared Finicum to Jesus and Moses in a Facebook post mourning his passing. “For any who feel he was a criminal, like those who felt Moses and Jesus were criminals, I would implore you to investigate the peaceful work that Lavoy did in his life from the Bundy Ranch where thousands protested without a shot fired, to today in Oregon, where the shots fired came from the government at an unarmed Lavoy Finicum,” Shelton wrote:
In any given generation there are men who are willing to stand for what they believe. Most of the time they are... Posted by Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton on Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Robert Reich: Bernie is our only hope for real political change
Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.Not a day passes that I don’t get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans. I don’t mind. I’ve been teaching public policy for much of the last thirty-five years. I’m a policy wonk. But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don’t have a chance of making it, as things are now. The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.” Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock. This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the choke hold of big money on our political system. I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change. The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge. Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout. If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero. Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump. At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election. If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do? Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off. Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy. In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people. You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs. You just want a system that works for you.
GOP burns to the ground: Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and the self-immolation of the Republican establishment
For the record, it wasn't Sarah Palin's rambling endorsement of Donald Trump last week that finally drove editors at National Review to launch the magazine's "Against Trump" push. The conservative media revolt had been in the works weeks prior to Palin's now-classic oratory display. Still, there was something fitting about the Right Wing Noise Machine's simmering civil war over Trump breaking out into open warfare in the wake of Palin's embarrassing speech; a comeback that had lots of Republican supporters publicly cringing. What's inescapable about the mounting GOP hand wringing is that Trump is a right-wing media creation. He's flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that National Review, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a litany of others, have helped seed for many years. There's little doubt that during President Obama's two terms they cultivated an anti-intellectual movement that now appears poised to seize control of the Republican Party. Today, scores of conservative commentators remain utterly baffled as to what's driving the popularity of the man who, in a matter of weeks, may control the Republican Party nomination. How astonishing is that? Not only that, but Trump's critics on the right are waging an all-out civil war with his fiercest media defenders, forcing media players to take sides in the slug fest. For a movement that has often displayed amazing discipline in terms of targeting its cannon fire on Democrats and liberals, the Right Wing Noise Machine now finds itself stuck in circular firing mode. On one side, Trump's denounced as a "vicious demagogue," a "con man," a "glib egomaniac," and "the very epitome of vulgarity." On the other side, Trump's army has derided National Review as out of touch, and accused the magazine of cozying up to "open border zealots," a cardinal sin on the right. None of that disguises the fact that Trump is the monster the Noise Machine created by encouraging bigoted and dishonest forces within the conservative movement; by giving credence to the three year Benghazi cover-up charade, the two year IRS witch hunt, by fueling ugly passions about Obama wanting to take away everyone's guns, and by arguing he's uninterested in defending America's national security. For years, lots of conservative pundits and talkers cashed large, and in some cases very large, paychecks feeding this ugly beast. Now the beast is beyond their control and they're going to whine all the way to New Hampshire? Call it the perils of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Conservative John Ziegler saw this media-enable crack-up coming months ago (emphasis in original):
Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, a website named "Breitbart," and certain elements of Fox News (all of whom have both pushed and ridden the Trump bandwagon for selfish commercial purposes), the conservative base is living under several important delusions which has allowed for "Trumpsanity" to foster and grow.Fact: The only entity that could likely stop Trump at this point would be a concerted effort by Fox News. But Roger Ailes and company are reportedly struggling with how to handle the Republican frontrunner, and have shown no interest in trying to take him down. The conservative shock and awe of a possible Trump nomination, and the long-term political implications itcould unleash, is now real. But the revolt likely arrives comically late to the game, since a September or October pushback would've made more sense. Indeed, the magazine is "telling the Republican Party to pull its ripcord long after we've hit the ground," noted GOP consultant Alex Castellanos. That delay certainly raises questions about the competency behind the "Against Trump" endeavor. Denouncing Trump, National Review editors insist he "is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones." But all of those things were telegraphed nearly half-a-year ago when Trump first sprinted to the head of the GOP pack. Why did it take National Review editors and nearly two-dozen writers six months to belatedly acknowledge the obvious and, most importantly, join forces to stop him? (National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote that the project was first launched in late December, but then had to be set aside because of the busy holiday season.) And who has the conservative nation turned its lonely eyes to in its hour of common sense need? Glenn Beck (Obama's a "racist"), Dana Loesch, Katie Pavlich, Erick Erickson, and Brent Bozell, who once likened Obama to a "skinny, ghetto crackhead." Talk about a rogues gallery of Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers who have now banded together to preach political clarity. But when the intellectual cupboard is bare, you make due with what's still left on the shelves and hope the expiration date hasn't already passed. The Right Wing Noise Machine was revved up to 11 during the Obama years in an effort to destroy his presidency. In the end, the Noise Machine's lasting contribution, in the form of a Trump nominee, may be assuring that Obama hands the White House over to another Democrat.
Noam Chomsky: The GOP is a threat to human survival
Renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky declared this week that the GOP and its far-right front-runners are "literally a serious danger to decent human survival.” Speaking with The Huffington Post on Monday, Chomsky cited the Republican Party’s refusal to tackle—or even acknowledge—the “looming environmental catastrophe” of climate change, thereby “dooming our grandchildren.” He went to rebuke the Republican party for its “abject service to private wealth and power” and dispossession of the poor. But Chomsky made it clear that his conviction that “the Republican Party has drifted off the rails” and must be stopped by no means amounts to an endorsement of Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton—who he has previously criticized as hawkish and opportunistic. In fact, he told The Huffington Post that the United States has what amounts to a one-party system—with both Democrats and Republicans united by business interests. Yet, within those parameters, he argued, small differences do matter, given the immense power of the American political system. And Senator Bernie Sanders, Chomsky recently told Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera’s UpFront show, “would--of the current candidates--be the one who would have, from my point of view, the best policies.” "I agree with him in a lot of things, not in other things," Chomsky said, calling him “basically a new dealer.” "I frankly think that in our system of mainly bought elections, he doesn't have much of a chance,” he continued. However, recent polling in early primary states bodes well for Sanders, and one survey found him more electable than Clinton when matched against Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. Whatever happens, Chomsky told Hasan, he plans to strategically vote against the GOP, which he says wants to “destroy the world.”
Renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky declared this week that the GOP and its far-right front-runners are "literally a serious danger to decent human survival.” Speaking with The Huffington Post on Monday, Chomsky cited the Republican Party’s refusal to tackle—or even acknowledge—the “looming environmental catastrophe” of climate change, thereby “dooming our grandchildren.” He went to rebuke the Republican party for its “abject service to private wealth and power” and dispossession of the poor. But Chomsky made it clear that his conviction that “the Republican Party has drifted off the rails” and must be stopped by no means amounts to an endorsement of Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton—who he has previously criticized as hawkish and opportunistic. In fact, he told The Huffington Post that the United States has what amounts to a one-party system—with both Democrats and Republicans united by business interests. Yet, within those parameters, he argued, small differences do matter, given the immense power of the American political system. And Senator Bernie Sanders, Chomsky recently told Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera’s UpFront show, “would--of the current candidates--be the one who would have, from my point of view, the best policies.” "I agree with him in a lot of things, not in other things," Chomsky said, calling him “basically a new dealer.” "I frankly think that in our system of mainly bought elections, he doesn't have much of a chance,” he continued. However, recent polling in early primary states bodes well for Sanders, and one survey found him more electable than Clinton when matched against Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. Whatever happens, Chomsky told Hasan, he plans to strategically vote against the GOP, which he says wants to “destroy the world.”
Renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky declared this week that the GOP and its far-right front-runners are "literally a serious danger to decent human survival.” Speaking with The Huffington Post on Monday, Chomsky cited the Republican Party’s refusal to tackle—or even acknowledge—the “looming environmental catastrophe” of climate change, thereby “dooming our grandchildren.” He went to rebuke the Republican party for its “abject service to private wealth and power” and dispossession of the poor. But Chomsky made it clear that his conviction that “the Republican Party has drifted off the rails” and must be stopped by no means amounts to an endorsement of Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton—who he has previously criticized as hawkish and opportunistic. In fact, he told The Huffington Post that the United States has what amounts to a one-party system—with both Democrats and Republicans united by business interests. Yet, within those parameters, he argued, small differences do matter, given the immense power of the American political system. And Senator Bernie Sanders, Chomsky recently told Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera’s UpFront show, “would--of the current candidates--be the one who would have, from my point of view, the best policies.” "I agree with him in a lot of things, not in other things," Chomsky said, calling him “basically a new dealer.” "I frankly think that in our system of mainly bought elections, he doesn't have much of a chance,” he continued. However, recent polling in early primary states bodes well for Sanders, and one survey found him more electable than Clinton when matched against Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. Whatever happens, Chomsky told Hasan, he plans to strategically vote against the GOP, which he says wants to “destroy the world.”
Renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky declared this week that the GOP and its far-right front-runners are "literally a serious danger to decent human survival.” Speaking with The Huffington Post on Monday, Chomsky cited the Republican Party’s refusal to tackle—or even acknowledge—the “looming environmental catastrophe” of climate change, thereby “dooming our grandchildren.” He went to rebuke the Republican party for its “abject service to private wealth and power” and dispossession of the poor. But Chomsky made it clear that his conviction that “the Republican Party has drifted off the rails” and must be stopped by no means amounts to an endorsement of Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton—who he has previously criticized as hawkish and opportunistic. In fact, he told The Huffington Post that the United States has what amounts to a one-party system—with both Democrats and Republicans united by business interests. Yet, within those parameters, he argued, small differences do matter, given the immense power of the American political system. And Senator Bernie Sanders, Chomsky recently told Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera’s UpFront show, “would--of the current candidates--be the one who would have, from my point of view, the best policies.” "I agree with him in a lot of things, not in other things," Chomsky said, calling him “basically a new dealer.” "I frankly think that in our system of mainly bought elections, he doesn't have much of a chance,” he continued. However, recent polling in early primary states bodes well for Sanders, and one survey found him more electable than Clinton when matched against Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. Whatever happens, Chomsky told Hasan, he plans to strategically vote against the GOP, which he says wants to “destroy the world.” 
Richard Dawkins, delete your account: The prominent atheist implodes on Twitter (again)
Richard Dawkins took his creepy brand of Islamophobia to new heights this week when he released a tweet praising Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan as a “good Muslim” for how she speaks, dresses, and wears her hair. The evolutionary biologist, writer, and champion of so-called New Atheism deleted his tweet soon after posting it on Monday, but not before a social media user preserved it for Internet posterity. This is not the first time that Dawkins has made bigoted statements about Islam or weighed in on what it means to be a “good girl.” The prominent figure has been called an imperialist chauvinist, a neo-Orientialist, and simply vulgar for issuing declarations like the following:Richard Dawkins made creepy tweet about Queen Rania of Jordan then deleted it: https://t.co/mW3rezL0pn pic.twitter.com/pOsr3x19Ro
— Steve Rose (@steveplrose) January 25, 2016
@ToddKincannon Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 1, 2013
What’s more, Dawkins has been slammed by Muslim feminists for disrespecting and undermining them. In fact, there are even signs that Dawkins is infuriating and alienating some New Atheists, whose other controversial thought leaders include Sam Harris—an open defender of racial profiling. But what makes Dawkins’ latest tweet particularly notable is his own 2013 memoir, Appetite for Wonder, The Making of a Scientist. Dawkins' musings on his colonial upbringing in then-Nyasaland, now Malawi, provide some insight into who he considers a "good" subject. “We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants… Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover weighted down with periwinkle shells sewn around the edges,” he wrote, going on to praise the head servant Ali who “loyally accompanied the family.” “Loyal servants turn up at several points in Dawkins’s progress through life,” John Gray noted in a review published in 2014 in New Republic. “The tone of indulgent superiority is telling. Dawkins is ready to smile on those he regards as beneath him as long as it is clear who is on top.”For me, the horror of Hitler is matched by bafflement at the ovine stupidity of his followers. Increasingly feel the same about Islamism.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
Richard Dawkins took his creepy brand of Islamophobia to new heights this week when he released a tweet praising Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan as a “good Muslim” for how she speaks, dresses, and wears her hair. The evolutionary biologist, writer, and champion of so-called New Atheism deleted his tweet soon after posting it on Monday, but not before a social media user preserved it for Internet posterity. This is not the first time that Dawkins has made bigoted statements about Islam or weighed in on what it means to be a “good girl.” The prominent figure has been called an imperialist chauvinist, a neo-Orientialist, and simply vulgar for issuing declarations like the following:Richard Dawkins made creepy tweet about Queen Rania of Jordan then deleted it: https://t.co/mW3rezL0pn pic.twitter.com/pOsr3x19Ro
— Steve Rose (@steveplrose) January 25, 2016
@ToddKincannon Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 1, 2013
What’s more, Dawkins has been slammed by Muslim feminists for disrespecting and undermining them. In fact, there are even signs that Dawkins is infuriating and alienating some New Atheists, whose other controversial thought leaders include Sam Harris—an open defender of racial profiling. But what makes Dawkins’ latest tweet particularly notable is his own 2013 memoir, Appetite for Wonder, The Making of a Scientist. Dawkins' musings on his colonial upbringing in then-Nyasaland, now Malawi, provide some insight into who he considers a "good" subject. “We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants… Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover weighted down with periwinkle shells sewn around the edges,” he wrote, going on to praise the head servant Ali who “loyally accompanied the family.” “Loyal servants turn up at several points in Dawkins’s progress through life,” John Gray noted in a review published in 2014 in New Republic. “The tone of indulgent superiority is telling. Dawkins is ready to smile on those he regards as beneath him as long as it is clear who is on top.”For me, the horror of Hitler is matched by bafflement at the ovine stupidity of his followers. Increasingly feel the same about Islamism.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
