After Lehman declared bankruptcy and the government did not move to bail out the company, I noticed a little-remarked story that AIG had refused an infusion of private capital because it came attached with the price tag of yielding control of the company.  Here are the details from a more recent report:

AIG turned down a capital infusion from a group of private-equity firms led by J.C. Flowers & Co. because an option tied to the offer would have effectively given them control of the company, an 89-year-old giant that does business in nearly every corner of the world. Other private-equity firms also floated various options in helping the company. 

Now the Fed has essentially bought the company, which will result in replacing existing management, which makes it unclear why the government backing was that much more acceptable than the private investment.  It is even more unclear why the Fed found it acceptable for AIG to reject a private takeover that would have apparently made the government support unnecessary.  Of course, AIG could say that it is within its rights to turn down private money, but it seems to me that it was in no position to refuse assistance and then cry for help from the government.

On Tuesday, the Pakistan’s military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan. The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty. ~Robert Baer

What is remarkable about this is that these incursions have been administration policy for the better part of a year, and they are the recommended policy of a future Obama administration, and the conventional wisdom among both Bush and Obama supporters is that this is a brilliant idea.  Trotskyites and Obamacons agree–stand up to Pakistan!  By stand up, of course, they must mean fight, since that is what implementing their plan will require.  What else is there to say about this view except that it is more belligerent and confrontational than the one held by John McCain?  In fact, there is a good deal more to say, but we might start with the frightening truth that McCain represents the voice of reason on whether or not to launch strikes inside Pakistan.  If McCain is the voice of reason, the others have pretty clearly gone mad. 

Why is Pakistan taking this position now?  First of all, while we should not discount the existence of dangerous elements in the ISI that continue to support the Taliban and Al Qaeda just as they support jihadis in India (including possibly the latest bombings in Delhi), Islamabad is not “giving refuge” to these forces.  The Pakistani government is, however, insisting that its sovereignty be respected in the wake of the Bush administration’s egregious violations of it, and one would think that a major non-NATO ally’s sovereignty would be something that would not be taken so lightly.  I am well aware of how dangerous elements of Pakistan’s government are, and I have been quite clear in my views that Pakistan has been a poor ally, but there are larger considerations here.  

Partly because President Zardari is weak, and because Sharif broke up the coalition with the PPP and weakened Gilani’s government, the government has evidently felt compelled to take a stronger line on Pakistani sovereignty than Musharraf did to shore up its position.  Besides, the new government has been provoked and humiliated, since Gilani was in Washington not two months ago stating that American strikes inside Pakistan without their permission were unacceptable.  The main reason why Washington and much of Obama’s cheering section have had no problem with violating Pakistani sovereignty is that they seem to have assumed that there would be no hostile reaction on the part of the Pakistani government.  Musharraf was eager to show his patrons in Washington that he was cooperating–or at least that he was not stopping U.S. forces from operating inside Pakistan–in order to give the administration some reason to keep backing him, so I suppose many people were misled into thinking that what an enormously unpopular dictator would allow our forces to do would also be permitted by an elected government.  This is clearly wrong, and the situation now requires much more than tete-a-tetes between Mullen and Kayani. 

It requires reconsidering what U.S. interests dictate, and it seems fairly clear that they do not dictate entering into open conflict with the Pakistani military.  Were our forces to engage Pakistan’s military, the consequences would be dire for the cohesion of the country, which is indeed every bit as artificial and unstable as Iraq, and for regional stability.  Let’s be very clear about this: if we stir up Pakistan against our presence in that part of the world, we will end up losing whatever gains we have made in Afghanistan and will turn one of the largest Muslim states in the world, and the only one with nuclear weapons, from an unreliable ally to an open enemy.  Remember the Pakistani boy Andrew thought would look at Obama’s face and be overwhelmed by American soft power?  If Obama follows through on the war policy that he would now have to endorse to continue launching raids into Pakistan, that boy will see Obama’s face as the face of the enemy and will react accordingly.   

It is telling that it was mostly opponents of the invasion of Iraq who saw Pakistan for what it was years ago, understanding that it sponsored terrorism against India, engaged in nuclear proliferation and had been exploiting the military aid we provided to build up its forces on the border with India.  The warmongers, Hitchens included, were indifferent to Pakistan then, preferring instead to back a war against a government that had no ties to Al Qaeda and had no weapons programs.  Having plunged into that war for no reason, they are now quick to discover what we have known all along, and, of course, their solution is always escalation.

Brooks’s main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office [bold mine-DL]. ~Laura Ingraham

Er…what?  This is what Brooks said:

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

In other words, as Matt Lewis managed to pick up, Brooks objects to the logic of the Palin pick because he thinks it resembles the approach to governing that typified the Bush years.  Lewis finds the comparison to Bush offensive and wrong, but that is at least what Brooks said.  Like James, however, I find the idea that the Bush years represented an anti-establishment attitude bizarre.  It is impossible to think of Bush, the legacy President with his administration staffed by the relics veterans of Republican administrations past, and conjure up an image of a foe of the political establishment.  James writes:

Bush simply tried as hard as possible to ignore, brush off, and sideline criticism. It just so happened that the establishment media was one such source of criticism, and Paul O’Neill was another, and there are lots of examples to draw from of ‘insidery’ voices being silenced and establishment dissent frowned upon. But these things are like peas clustered at the base of a mountain of evidence that Bush had no problem at all with establishmentarianism so long as it suited his basic purposes. For every Scowcroft that was left out on the doorstep there was a Cheney given the run of the house. We can try as hard as we like to insist that cronyism, secrecy, and vindictiveness are anti-establishmentarian, but as a rule they are the products of establishments, and the pathologies of bureaucratic institutions.

This is right, but this entire debate about the anti-establishment populism Palin supposedly represents and its similarity or lack of it to Bush’s style simply reproduces McCain campaign propaganda that presents Palin as an anti-establishment reforming champion.  Challenging and throwing out incumbents are not enough–if that constituted being anti-establishment, Macbeth would be one of the great anti-establishment heroes of all time.  Bush, too, claimed to be an outsider and “reformer with results,” but we understand that this was all a lot of nonsense that he felt compelled to say as the nominee of the party out of power.  His experience was limited, he came from outside the city, but his ties to the establishment were strong, which is the worst of all worlds, since he built up his inner circle with longtime loyalists who shielded him from reality, but he also became more dependent on Washington fixtures for advice and did not have the preparation to be able to judge matters apart from their counsel. 

Something that seems to elude these discussions is the recognition that ambitious, new pols are not anti-establishment–they want to be the establishment, or a part of it, or else they are bound for long, disappointing, stagnant careers in the backbenches or the backwoods.  The basic truth about anyone competing at this level for high office is that they may not yet be of the establishment, but they are very much in favor of the establishment provided that they are an important player in it.  The real anti-establishment candidates are known by their marginalization.  Washington pols and their allies who run against Washington are having us on in the same way that the branches of the federal government con us by pretending to check one another while constantly aggrandizing more power for the central state as a whole.  Every wave of reform is stymied because Washington pols will never of their own volition yield power that Washington possesses, which gives the citizens less and less leverage over each succeeding generation of so-called reformers.  No one in the major parties calling for reform or change intends to alter this structure in any meaningful way. 

The flip side of Palin’s anti-elite rhetoric is the burning desire for validation and inclusion in that elite; the hostility to her by those who belong to the elite is that of the insiders who really do not like the new applicant.  Obama endures being mocked as an elitist, which is proof that he has already made it, which is why he is all the more careful not to challenge the status quo in any meaningful way.  As Lizza correctly observed, “Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”  I will leave it to psychoanalysts to ponder whether this was a calculated effort to avoid the embittered oppositional route his father took against Kenyatta.  Regardless, the relevant similarities between Palin and Bush, beside the slightly shared background as evangelical governors of oil-rich states in the West who know nothing about foreign affairs, are their inclinations toward decisiveness, stubbornness and perhaps lack of curiosity, which made for such a dangerous combination over the last seven and a half years.  Those are the similarities that should give us pause about Palin.  There is no reason to worry about her anti-establishment attitude, because she does’t have one.

The basic point here, I think, is that racism allows white people to be mediocre. ~Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates is referring to this article, which makes the case that white privilege explains why the records and qualifications of Palin and Obama are treated differently.  This strikes me as quite exaggerated, since by and large it is not white people as such who are flacking for Palin as a qualified candidate, nor is it even all conservatives who are doing this, but it is principally partisan hacks who are deeply invested in making a bad VP selection look better than it is.  This may be entirely obvious, but the difference in treatment comes mainly from Republicans who are intent on Obama’s defeat and McCain and Palin’s victory, which makes this a more straightforward case of absurd partisan opportunism.  

Were Palin still white but a Democrat, well, look at how Palin supporters view Hillary Clinton and you can just imagine the response.  Were Palin not white but a still a Republican, the mainstream conservative praise for her limited record would be, I submit, even more over-the-top as a result of combining the Republican tendency probably to overpraise prominent minorities and women who agree with them and a willingness to cut these allies more slack.  Taking nothing away from him, the boosting of Bobby Jindal for VP by a number of prominent Republicans was a good example of what I mean.  Jindal’s resume is not that different from Palin’s, though he has more experience in the federal government, and while you could argue that Jindal has a better grasp on policy he would still not be qualified to take over as President.   If McCain had chosen Jindal instead we would be seeing pretty much the same strained rationalizations and excuse-making that we are seeing now, because the main issue is not whether Palin or Obama is really qualified, but it is instead simply the party affiliation of each that governs how they are treated.

Ericka Andersen at C11 points us to this trainwreck of an argument by Lee Siegel, which doesn’t deserve to be refuted so much as it needs to be studied as a kind of intellectual disaster area, but she then makes an odd observation:

If the WSJ is right in claiming that “Republicans have the upperhand” in the culture battles, they are only right on one front. That is that, Republicans are usually conservative and cultural conservatives are the foundation of this country. The problem is that culturally liberal have the upperhand on the entertainment, publishing and media industry – reflecting a false image of American life and American values.

This needs to be taken apart a bit.  Siegel wants to claim that Republicans benefit from political fights over cultural issues (which I am taking here to be the fights primarily over regulation of sexuality, reproduction and marriage) because they are drawing on their organic cultural experience, as opposed to an artificial cultural experience.  However, as sympathetic as I am to Romantic distinctions between organic and mechanical life as applied to culture, we are going astray if we forget that culture is itself the product of artifice and the artefacts created by men are the cultural goods that we value.  There is still more confusion if we think that some cultural products are “merely” artificial, if we think that liberals “do” culture while conservatives “are” culture, or if we simply assert that “the entertainment, publishing and media industry” falsely represent American life and values when we, the culturally conservative nation (according to Andersen), consume and support the production of these false representations.  If these industries are offering false representations, a large part of the “foundation” of the country is buying into those representations for one reason or another, and we are at least to some extent what we consume. 

It is probably worth questioning how much of a culturally conservative nation we are (and not just because, as Kennan said, we are conservative at home and revolutionary abroad), since a principal reason why cultural conservatives exist as a distinct and politically mobilized group is that cultural conservatives have been losing for decades.  We have an explicitly cultural politics because traditional culture has been retreating or disappearing at a fairly rapid clip, so much so that conservatives are supposed to be excited by the idea that a political candidacy is more important than raising up a family.  The recourse to politics to repair cultural damage is, according to the dichotomy Siegel uses, a fundamentally liberal endeavor.  Meanwhile, in pursuit of a political agenda cultural conservatives have largely been willing to abandon or de-prioritize the work of creating and sustaining the culture they want to have, and they have become satisfied with the reassurances offered by an extensive apparatus of celebrities courageous truth-tellers who cultivate their resentment on a daily basis and console them with the empty promises of election victories.       

Ms. Andersen’s distinction and Siegel’s argument remind me of arguments that dissident medieval religious movements were more spiritual or more popular or more genuine than “elite” religion represented by the Church hierarchy and high-level theology.  According to the divide suggested above, folk religion and heresy would be the real, “organic” religion–even though it is a cultural product every bit as much as theological treatises and elaborate liturgy–and an established religion or orthodoxy would offer a false representation of that religion.  Perhaps GOP political writers and the modern rehabilitators of old heresies could get together and brainstorm ideas about the villainy of elites; the former’s paeans to the periphery and anger at the metropole would, in another context, endear them to many a cultural historian.  Christians especially should be wary of arguments that offer unqualified praise for the virtue of rusticity and alienation from the cultural elite, since a huge portion of the cultural achievements that make up our heritage was produced thanks to the patronage of elites. 

Obviously, the important thing in all of this is the content that is being produced and the attitudes towards family life, social order and community that are being reproduced, but it will do us no good to avoid responsibility by claiming that the disorder in our culture is simply something imposed upon us from the outside as if we do not participate in it.  There are exceptions, of course, and you can cite examples of many people who have almost entirely dropped out of mainstream culture, but their very withdrawal is an admission that the prevailing culture is not one that is very agreeable to conservatives.

This is just a small point, but an important one.  Most conservatives are falling prostrate at the feet of the governor of Alaska, declaring her to be our once and future champion, and comparing her unironically to Joan of Arc, but apparently I am the one losing his mind.  Okay, then.

There has been a video circulating around recently that dates from earlier this year in the primaries in which Romney hits McCain for lying about his record, which has caused some confusion, since McCain’s campaign has been issuing so many lies this year that it was a bit more difficult to pin down the proper context for Romney’s remarks.  If I remember correctly, this clip of Romney comes from the immediate aftermath of McCain’s egregious, absolutely shameless lie about Romney’s views on the “surge” and the war in Iraq.  According to McCain, Romney favored “surrender,” which is apparently what everyone who is not on the side of John McCain’s career advancement favors.  As I said back in July, McCain’s dishonest attacks on Obama will go largely unpunished and might even be rewarded with stronger support in the polls and on Election Day, just as he was basically rewarded in the Florida primary for lying about Romney’s record.  In the primaries, he was their preferred Republican candidate and no one cared about Romney anyway.  The difference this time seems to be that journalists and pundits will not forgive McCain as they forgave him for his obvious lying back then because he is no longer their preferred candidate, but it may be that the public expects such strong pro-Obama bias from the media that all criticisms will simply bounce off of him.  However, it probably wouldn’t matter even if the public trusted the media to be neutral: dishonesty has worked for McCain before, and it doesn’t seem to be hurting him now, which is why he keeps doing it.

One way that you could know that the video was old, though, was that it was Romney saying this.  Ever since he suspended his campaign at CPAC in February (to prevent “surrender” to terrorists that would surely come with a Democratic victory, he told everyone), Romney has been a good team player and worked loyally as a McCain surrogate.  Romney may be a fraud, but he is not one to break ranks.

From the land that has given you such giants as Ehud Olmert, a depressing observation:

With irony bordering on the painful, the journalist added, “Sarah Palin has restored my faith in Israel.”

Israel is far from a model of good government, wise policymaking and exemplary leaders. But here, at least, voters and the politicians they make it their business to know inside and out, relate to politics not as if it were a spectacular bowl game or a reality show.but for what politics really is, in America and Israel both: a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan argues that Palin is not a neocon.  In terms of her background, I am inclined to agree, since neoconservatives typically come from among East Coast journalists, think tankers and occasionally scholars, but when Mr. Buchanan says that the fight for her soul is not over a question comes to mind: who else exactly is fighting for it?  Then again, while she may not be neocon she seems to have already shared one of their obsessions.  How many other U.S. governors have Israeli flags in their offices?  Perhaps there are more than I would imagine, but you don’t normally expect to find them in Juneau.  Unfortunately, as I and others have noted, her religious background also may lead her to adopt positions concerning Near East policy that resemble John Hagee’s.  Of course, we were all reliably informed months ago that no one should worry about McCain’s links to Hagee, since McCain already held dangerous views about foreign policy in the region, but perhaps it might be time to revisit what Hagee and CUFI’s influence in a future McCain administration might be.  It seems that Palin’s evangelical background will probably predispose her to adopt the same overzealous “pro-Israel” view that Mr. Bush has held, and this will make her more susceptible to arguments for aggressive military action against any and all presumed enemies of Israel.  If the future Vice President will not be trying to push for attacks on Iran, as Cheney is now, neither will she likely be inclined to stop them.

Another thing to note: 2002 serves as an important date in Palin’s career.  This is the year when she ran for lieutenant governor.  It is also the year she left her Assemblies of God church in Wasilla for a less controversial non-denominational church and the year her husband dropped his Independence Party registration.  Some of the things that are invoked as reasons to hold out hope for the Palins are either already long gone, or they were dropped easily for the sake of making Palin more viable as a statewide candidate.  Now that she has reached the national stage, what else will she drop to accommodate herself to the demands of a McCain administration?

Palin was difficult to debate, Halcro added, because while she didn’t know the issues well, she was masterful at tap-dancing around questions and offering “glittering generalities” or populist “happy talk.” [bold mine-DL] Halcro told The Los Angeles Times that in a private conversation after a debate in Fairbanks, Palin questioned her opponent’s heavy focus on issue positions. “I look out over the audience, and I wonder: Is that really important?” Halcro recalled Palin saying. “Those of us who are policy wonks would say, ‘Hell yes.'” ~The New Republic

We now have legions of conservatives who are adopting Palin’s “is that really important?” standard when it comes to policy knowledge, and they then have the gall to claim that she understands the issues better than others.  This habit of relying on generalities and “happy talk” is something to watch for in the debate with Biden next month.