Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Matthew Yglesias: The Future of Israel

Matthew Yglesias: I'd been dimly curious as to what explained the paranoid attitude that seems to prevail in Israeli circles with regard to Iran, and yesterday's New America event crystallized one possible explanation. Basically, from Mustafa Barghouti's perspective, the Israeli side side has basically lost interest in achieving a final-status agreement. They basically see themselves as having nothing to lose from the status quo continuing more-or-less indefinitely, though obviously if some kind of Palestinian quisling leadership emerges that's willing to accept less than what was offered at Camp David were to emerge, they would listen to those guys. But basically the Israeli's feel no urgency about this....

Not really being knowledgeable about Israeli politics, this seemed remarkable to me, because the logic of the situation seems to me to be that Israel should regard the demographic tipping point issue as a question of great urgency.... [W]e're close to the point when Palestinians are going to start acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over all the land from the Jordan Sea and demanding rights — equal access to roads, equal access to education, equal share of water rations, voting rights, etc. — rather than a separate state and that's going to be the end of the idea of a sovereign Jewish democracy.

Meanwhile... on the table right now [is] the very promising "Arab Initiative" for full recognition of Israel in exchange for full withdrawal to the armistice lines. Israel isn't merely rejecting this offer, but the Israeli government is refusing to deal with it until they can get an unrealistic guarantee of 100 percent assurance of perfect security from rejectionist attacks... but since refusing to negotiate doesn't provide perfect security and does risk throwing the entire Zionist project away by letting the window of Palestinian interest in a two-state solution close, this seems like an odd attitude to have...

Matthew Yglesias on the Washington Post: Beneath the Bottom of the Barrel

Matthew Yglesias: Sometimes I wonder, can the Washington Post's editorials get any worse? The answer -- always -- turns out to be "yes." Today we learn not only that the Bush administration's drive toward war with Iran is in fact an effort to avoid war, but also that up is down, ignorance is strength (and Fred Hiatt is a very strong man) and that when the war does come we'll all need to blame war opponents:

If this diplomatic offensive fails, President Bush or his successor is likely to face a choice between accepting Iran's acquisition of the means to build nuclear weapons and ordering military strikes to destroy its facilities. That's why it is senseless and irresponsible for those who say they oppose military action -- including a couple of the second-tier Democratic presidential candidates -- to portray the sanctions initiative as a buildup to war by Mr. Bush. We've seen no evidence that the president has decided on war, and it's clear that many senior administration officials understand the package as the best way to avoid military action. It is not they but those who oppose tougher sanctions who make war with Iran more likely.

Have I mentioned that war is peace?

Completely missing from the Post's analysis of the issue is the idea that the US has any non-coercive tools in our toolkit. Maybe part of our diplomacy with Iran should be a willingness to put them returning to the NPT fold in the context of a broader warming in US-Iranian relations? Maybe part of our diplomacy with Iran should be a willingness to put them returning to the NPT fold in the context of our own willingness to return to the NPT fold? Maybe there's something we could do in terms of our relations with Moscow and Beijing that would make them more amenable to playing a helpful role on the Iran issue? Like maybe pushing a missile shield policy that Russia views as unacceptably threatening isn't a good way to get them to help us on the Iran front?

Meanwhile, the child-like confidence in the good sense, good faith, and competence of the Bush administration is just staggering.

Josh Marshall: Podhoretz v. Zakaria

Talking Points Memo | Podhoretz v. Zakaria: As I've argued in other contexts today, Iran is the issue facing the country today. Some readers have warned me off this formulation, claiming I'm buying into the right-wing 'frame' by doing so. Nonsense. As long as George Bush is commander-in-chief of the US military and he and his advisors are intent on getting the US into a shooting war with Iran, Iran is the issue.

Tonight on The Newshour, Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisor and godfather of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz debated Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria on the question of whether or not to go to war with Iran. It's perhaps an apt commentary on the rightward, lunatic turn of this country's foreign policy that Fareed is taking what I guess must be called the left (?) in this debate. In any case, I really urge you to give this a look. And note a few things: one is the denigrating tone Podhoretz takes toward Zakaria. It's curdled and bitter. It jumped out at me and I wonder if it does for you as well. Second are the constant references to Hitler and the Munich agreement. Hitler has become such a throwaway reference or comparison for whatever penny-ante dictator we're up in arms about at the moment that the reference has been drained of much of its meaning and horror. But with the Munich agreement and how 'time is not on our side' and so forth, this is beyond nonsense.

It's almost an insult to what the world faced in the late 1930s. Germany, industrial powerhouse, with arguably the most powerful army in the world, at the forefront of technology, overawing and invading neighboring countries. Iran, minor economic power, second or third-rate military power, which may get a couple of small nuclear-weapons compared to the couple hundred high-end nuclear warheads in Israel's arsenal (plus, a robust second strike capacity, as Fareed notes) and the many thousands we have -- and our blue water navy, satellites, air force. Please. Time's running out for us? We're going to look back on this fifty years from now and see the non-podhoretz-loons as the Chamberlains of the day? I don't know what to say. Just watch ...

Paul Krugman: Fearing Fear Itself

Fearing Fear Itself: In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then. Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.” Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan. Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits. Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals. Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda — an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world. And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction. Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general. And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.

Manifest Density: I'm going to blow this thing wide open

Manifest Density - I'm going to blow this thing wide open: Yglesias prompted me to read David Brooks' column on Mike Huckabee. America America aw shucks apparently-not-diabolical. Fine. But what's this?

[Huckabee] tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. "There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation," he jokes. "I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap."

He's right about one thing: Lava soap is pretty rough. My dad often had some of their products around the house for cleaning grease off of his hands, and it was definitely not something you'd use without noticing. But that's because it's supposed to be that way — it's got little bits of pumice mixed in.

Anyway what's this bullshit about it being cheap? Lava is a highly specialized utility soap, and one would expect it to command a premium. Clearly, this calls for some internet research. I compared prices for Lava versus Irish Spring — a nice, middle-of-the-road soap used by right-thinking Americans such as myself. A NOTE ON METHODOLOGICAL RIGOR: Lava is mostly sold as single bars. On the web, Irish Spring tends to be sold in 3-packs, so I've divided its prices by the number of bars. Surely a hardscrabble, cost-conscious family like the Huckabees would've bought in bulk.

Drugstore.com: Lava: $1.99; Irish Spring: $0.88
Amazon: Lava: $1.40; Irish Spring: $0.81
CVS: Only sells patriotic soap; Irish Spring: $0.83
Rite-Aid: Only sells body wash, apparently.

The best price I could find for Lava was on Amazon — if you buy the 48-pack you can get it for $0.89/bar. But that's still more expensive than retail amounts of Irish Spring, and the package is suspiciously green. If you're really looking for budget soap you can do considerably better than that. Or you could simply pass horse urine through straw and mix with lard. You do slaughter your own pigs, don't you?

So what can we conclude from all of this? I think there are two possibilities. Either Mike Huckabee is a compulsive liar and therefore completely unfit for office; or the Huckabee family has some sort of hereditary economic disability. The latter could perhaps account for his otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm for raising taxes sometimes, slightly. Either way, it's important that he be exposed for the confused old man and/or transparent fraud that he is. Has anything been done with the word "Huckster" yet?

This is the most obviously despicable campaign trail behavior since John Kerry's 2004 cheesesteak pandering. I expect the next Youtube debate to feature AT LEAST one soap-related question.

Marc Lynch: Iraq: tactics vs strategy, revisited

Abu Aardvark: Iraq: tactics vs strategy, revisited: Yesterday I spoke on a panel about Iraq to an audience of retired diplomats (DACOR), along with Christopher Kojm and Jim Planke (both of whom served on the Iraq Study Group).  My basic point was simple, and reflected the same frustration which came out of my conversation with Tom Friedman that turned up in the Times last week.   During the Petraeus-Crocker hearings six weeks ago, American public attention to Iraq peaked.  Then the moment passed, and everyone pretty much stopped talking about Iraq once it became clear that Petraeus had given wavering Republicans the cover they needed.   Fine - nobody really expected anything else.  What bothers me more is what has happened since then.  With the immediate domestic political moment past, the post-hearing period could have become a moment of real reflection about American strategy in Iraq. But it hasn't.  Instead of reflection, we've gotten relaxation and a change of topic (along with the opening of the new front between Turkey and the Kurdish zone).

That's a shame.  Because so much of the Iraq debate has now turned into exactly what we once promised to avoid:  political arguments about body counts, while completely ignoring the political dimension which the Petraeus counter-insurgency manual recognized as so crucial. We need to stop falling into the trap of arguing about the momentary success or failure of tactics.  3 fewer US soldiers died last week than in a similar period last year - we've won!  Iraqi insurgents launched 157 attacks last week compared to 163 in a similar period last year - they've lost!    Even worse, it seems like the US is committing the cardinal sin of once again falling victim to our own propaganda, believing our own spin, and substituing domestic public opinion management for hard thought about where we're heading. The relatively uncritical approach to the good news narratives now coming out of Iraq is eerily reminiscent of so many earlier periods of "good news from Iraq".  Forget Iran - even in the coverage of Iraq it's as if we've learned nothing from the last four years.

Body counts are only one small part of a much larger puzzle.  What I want to know is not the day to day casualty trends, or good news stories from some carefully selected hamlet, or the latest assassination of an Awakening shaykh.   I want to know:   does the devolution to the local level make strategic sense, even if it reaps short-term tactical sense?  Towards what endpoint are the tactics leading?   Do we want to see a unified Iraq with a sustainable political accord - the official goal of American policy, as Undersecretary of State Nick Burns reminded the DACOR audience yesterday?  If so, are American political and military tactics encouraging or discouraging such an outcome?   Those are questions that we could be discussing in this moment of relative American political respite, but there's really not much of it (a moment of self-criticism here:  I suppose I should give credit to the Biden partition/federalism resolution effort, even though I strongly disagreed with it, for at least trying to raise such issues.) 

Maybe that's because there is no possible winning strategy anymore, just better or worse tactics leading nowhere in particular.   I understand the logic of the bottom-up reconciliation strategy quite well, thanks.  I just see no evidence whatsoever that it is working: whether public opinion surveys, continuing refugee flows, or sectarian and confrontational political discourse.   Yes, Ammar al-Hakim went to Ramadi, which is encouraging - but his mission failed... and if you look at what he was actually trying to sell to the Sunnis, you'd be less encouraged than some people have been by the atmospherics.  Yes, Tareq al-Hashemi went to Sistani with his National Compact, but the Compact has gone nowhere.  And so on.  The national political level remains completely deadlocked, and the politicians seem to have lost whatever sense of urgency they felt back in August and September.   And all of those politicians behave according to the logic of moral hazard that the US has created - since the Bush administration can't credibly threaten to escalate and won't threaten to withdraw, it has no leverage over any of them while protecting them from the consequences of their decisions.  And even if those politicians did somehow magically come to agreement, their ability to deliver on any such agreement declines by the day.

I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session conversations) about where Iraq was heading:  towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state. 

As I've argued repeatedly, this is the most likely effect, intended or otherwise, of the Petraeus-Crocker tactics.   The US is empowering local actors at the expense of the national level, while both communities are fragmenting at a remarkable rate.  The Sunni side is divided among the various insurgency factions (their efforts at forming a Political Council notwithstanding), the various Awakenings (which are themselves internally divided, bickering over power and personalities), tribes and local leaders looking out for their own, and an al-Qaeda movement which peaked last fall when it launched its abortive and self-defeating bid for hegemony with its ill-fated Islamic State of Iraq project.   On the Shia side, the UIA has fragmented, the Mahdi Army has fragmented (though reportedly Sadr has used the ceasefire period to try to sort things out), Badrists and Sadrists are fighting in the streeets, Sistani has lost influence and his aides are being murdered at an alarming rate, and as Jon Alterman has pointed out there are some 144 competing militias in Basra alone. 

This kind of fragmentation might help the US in its tactical maneuvers at the local level, and buy local stability in the short term.  But it is absolute anathema to any kind of national deal.  As Jim Fearon, one of the leading political scientists working on civil wars, recently put it, "a power-sharing deal tends to hold only when every side is relatively cohesive. How can one party expect that another will live up to its obligations if it has no effective control over its own members?"   It also deeply complicates any neat ideas about partition, of course, since there are no unified blocs to which one could easily devolve power.

Tactics working against strategy - that's been the concern I've been expressing for many months now. I haven't been reassured.  Instead of getting sucked into debates over body counts, or clutching at whatever good or bad news crosses the headlines each morning, the national debate should be looking at the big picture.  It isn't about how we are doing day to day - what are we trying to achieve? 

Is a warlord state an acceptable or desirable destination for American policymakers?  Whether such an outcome, if combined with a local Sunni power structure hostile to al-Qaeda, would pose a threat to American national interests is a debate worth having.   It would certainly mean a major climbdown from initial American goals, but, then, a lot has happened over the last four years and it's quite clear that the US doesn't have the power to achieve its original goals.  And it would hardly be optimal for Iraqis, since they would be condemned to live in a Hobbesian environment, and the refugee crisis would likely never be resolved.  Should the US simply acknowledge the reality of the institutional and political environment it has created in Iraq, or maintain its current radical disconnect between its stated objectives and what it is actually doing? 

Even if this is  a conversation which nobody really seems eager to have right now, it beats having to have the same conversation two years from now, or five years from now, or twenty.

UPDATE:  one of the commenters below brings up the point that the sheer magnitude of oil resources in Iraq makes control of Baghdad so valuable that an Afghan or Somali style warlordism is unlikely.  That's a good point, which actually did come up in the DACOR panel discussion, made by Jim Planke I believe.  The upshot is that the model for Iraq's future may most plausibly by Nigeria.  So, as before it's worth thinking about whether a Nigeria outcome (as opposed to Somali or Lebanese or any other outcome) is compatible with US interests (and Iraqi aspirations) and worth the expenditure of US resources to achieve.

Jonathan Chait: Fear Factor: Entitlement hysteria grips the capital

Fear Factor: The beginning of the fall season brought to Washington another periodic upsurge of entitlement hysteria. Newcomers were alarmed, but those of us who have witnessed the spectacle were able to take it in with some patience. Entitlement hysteria pops up all at once, sometimes prompted by a discrete stimulus, such as a report of the Social Security Trustees, but other times seemingly at random. Affected parties tend to furrow their brows and scold politicians in particular, and Americans in general, for our myopia in the face of the demographic tidal wave of retiring baby boomers who will drown the federal budget with unsustainable benefits.

It is unclear exactly what brought the latest episode upon us. A few weeks ago, Fred Thompson began winning plaudits for his gravelly voiced warnings about the entitlement menace. "No politician wants to face up to it," he warned. Soon, NBC's Tim Russert was subjecting the Democratic presidential field to a series of glowering demands that they produce a solution to the entitlement crisis. A Washington Post editorial flayed Hillary Clinton's lack of specifics on the issue as an "irresponsible dodge."

Those afflicted with entitlement hysteria are identifiable not by the realization that big social programs will need a fix--which is widely understood-- but by the urgency and gravity of their pleas. Entitlement hysterics' favorite statistic is the retiree-worker ratio. In 1950, they will explain in somber tones, there were 18 workers for every retiree. But, by 2030, there will be barely more than two. Absent reform, they warn, we will all be wage slaves, toiling away as our languid baby-boom masters while away their declining years on cruise ships and RVs.

There's some truth to their analysis, but it misses the point in a crucial way. The two largest entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, are in very different shape. The Social Security Trust Fund is scheduled to last until 2042, at which point we'll have to hike up taxes or trim spending a bit. Medicare, on the other hand, faces a day of reckoning in 2019. Yet one of the oddities of the entitlement hysterics is that they are far more obsessed with the minor problems of Social Security than with the massive problems of Medicare. Indeed, if you look closely at their dire proclamations, they inevitably follow the same pattern: They begin with an ominous summation about entitlements--thus lumping together Medicare with Social Security--then swiftly proceed to demand that Social Security be shored up forthwith.

Russert's recent harangue at the Democratic presidential debate was a classic example. He began by warning of the crisis faced by "Social Security and Medicare" but proceeded to ask no fewer than 14 questions about Social Security, and zero about Medicare. It's as if he began fulminating against crime in the greater New York area and then immediately began demanding a large new police deployment in Chappaqua. Should they stop being hysterical about Social Security and start being hysterical about Medicare? Well, that would be a start, but it would still elide the deeper problem. The reason Medicare is in such worse shape than Social Security is that it has to account for exploding health care costs. Their focus on demographics and greedy baby boomers is entirely misplaced. Indeed, the "entitlement problem" is mostly--three-quarters, to be precise--a function of rising health care costs.

Since you can't solve the entitlement problem without solving the health care problem, one might think that the entitlement hysterics would have gradually moved on to becoming health care hysterics.... Four days after his debate inquisition, Russert boasted to an NBC colleague on air, "I tried to get these candidates to take positions on Iraq, on Social Security, on the big issues." They didn't, of course. But noble failure in the face of complacency and cowardice is the entitlement hysteric's perpetual burden.

Invisible Inkling: Ahead of the game

From <>:

Invisible Inkling » Ahead of the game: Some journalism school students have reason to worry. They’re a few months away from graduating in 2008 with a print-and-A1-photo skillset circa 1988. But five clips and a smile won’t get you much of a competitive edge these days in an increasingly crowded job market for reporters with straight-ahead text skills. Mindy McAdams drives that point home in this advice for J-School students:

If you have not taken any online skills courses at all, and spring is your final semester, and the intro online course conflicts with one of your required courses that you waited until now to take — sign up for the online course, and delay your graduation. Do you want to graduate? Or do you want a job?

Sound advice.

Back to the lede: Some journalism students have reason to worry. Others are Kyle Hansen. Kyle, an SJSU student, is working on his second internship at the moment; it’s at LoudonExtra.com working for Rob Curley under the washingtonpost.com’s umbrella. Say it with me, kids: That’s awesome. But Kyle still has questions about whether he’s made himself marketable enough for a job in online news and what he should learn next.

Five quick answers:

• From the sound of your internships, I’m betting you’re learning a particularly rare specialty: Community management. If you can successfully drive readers/viewers to participate in the news, there will be job opportunities for you. *A photography class sounds like a good way to get some practice editing photos, thinking visually, and doing some basic stuff in Photoshop.
• What acronym you want to learn next greatly depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. At your next job, you might not have anything to do with code and you might not want to. Like arguments over which video camera you should buy (and I’ll get to that), discussing which (if any) programming language you should learn next becomes a moot point if your job is generating, editing, and managing content. That said, if community management is on the horizon, I recommend you learn Drupal. *Unless you’re going to learn how to feed data into Flash, a bit more like what you see the New York Times doing a lot of, don’t spend your time on it. (That’s a recommendation for Kyle. If you’re a multimedia shooter who already has plenty of Soundslides experience under your belt, then go nuts, learn to make beautiful Flash packages.)
• There are no fancy cameras or software suites necessary to learn how to shoot and edit video. If you have a point+shoot still camera with a video setting, use it. Practice telling little stories, even if they’re about your cat. Practice using a variety of shots. Edit using the home movie editing software that came with your computer: Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. That’s the way to learn the basics; if you arrive at your next job and find a fancy HD camera and Final Cut, great, you’ll learn how to push the right buttons to accomplish what you learned how to do with a sub-$200 camera and free software.

That’s all. Anyone else have any wisdom to impart on the class of 2008 as the thought of registering for next semester begins to creep out from under general ed midterms and past-deadline multimedia projects?

Ed Kilgore: Virginia Republican Lemmings

Democratic Strategist: Old Dominion Death Wish: In Virginia earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, who's has been carefully planning for years to run to succeed Sen. John Warner, announced with some visible bitterness that he would not run for the Senate now that Warner has finally retired. The bitterness flows from the immediate cause of his abandonment of that long-cherished dream: a decision by the Virginia Republican Party to hold a convention rather than a primary to choose the candidate to face Democrat Mark Warner next November. A convention, as everyone in the state understands, will be dominated by conservative activists who are almost certain to spurn the relatively moderate Davis in favor of former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who's already announced for the gubernatorial contest.

Davis, mind you, is a prodigious vote-getter and fundraiser from Northern Virginia, the area where recent Democratic statewide victories have been based, while Gilmore is a failed governor, failed RNC chair, and most recently, a failed presidential candidate, who will not have a prayer against Mark Warner. Moreover, Gilmore represents the hard-core culturally rigid, fanatically anti-tax wing of the state GOP, which has now lost two straight gubernatorial bids and a Senate contest, and whose primary challenges to moderate GOP state senators this year are endangering a GOP majority of that chamber previously thought to be impregnable.

This deliberate decision to hand Gilmore the Senate nomination can only be understood as an act of self-deception, under the bizarre theory that Virginia Republicans have been losing because they are insufficiently conservative, or as the expression of a death wish, reflecting a determination to hold onto intraparty power at the expense of real governing power. Virginia is only the latest example of this phenomenon, as explained by Ron Brownstein in a column today. What he calls an "ideological inquisition" in the GOP is reflected in other primary challenges of party heretics, and indeed, in the behavior of the GOP presidential field (with the arguable exception of Rudy Giuliani). The CW on this subject remains that both parties are under the control of their activist "bases," and that moderates in both parties are being hunted to extinction. But as Kevin Drum accurately suggests in his commentary on Brownstein's column, this equivalency argument is just wrong:

Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party's liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out. This year, though, we're in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.

And Virginia offers a good illustration of the relative moderation of Democrats, even those on the intense Left. After all, there are plenty of Democrats, in Virginia and elsewhere, who probably think Mark Warner is an unprincipled Clintonian triangulator whose constant talk of bipartisanship makes him a sell-out (viz, Matt Stoller's description at OpenLeft of Warner's announcement statement for the Senate as "disgusting" and "Liebermanesque"). But you don't see anyone trying to deny him the nomination, at the cost of a precious Senate seat.

Neil Gaiman: What Do Authors Know?

Neil Gaiman - Neil Gaiman's Journal: the flowers of romance:

Neil--

In Ross Douthat's recent column in the Atlantic Monthly concerning the J.K. Rowling press of late (http://tinyurl.com/yq2wz2), Douthat suggests that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this". It seems odd to me that ulterior motives are so quickly suspected -- she was an author answering a question with additional information not previously known. Do you find yourself withholding information during Q&A if it's not already contained in the story? Why or why not?

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

Sometimes even the author doesn't know for sure. (I used to wonder about Lucien the Librarian in Sandman. On the one hand, I strongly suspected he was gay; on the other, he seemed to have a small unrequited thing for Nuala going on. And if it had ever mattered in a story, I would have found out for certain, but it never did, so I didn't.)

And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

As for withholding information... before the Internet, I'd tell anyone anything they wanted to know. ("Who's the missing member of the Endless?" "Destruction." "Oh.") After the Internet, I would try and avoid answering some direct questions because it might spoil things for people. "Why did Delight become Delirium?" "Who's the Forgotten God?" -- they're questions I would happily have answered for anyone who asked at a signing 20 years ago, because it wouldn't have gone any further, not in any way that mattered. Not any longer, because one day I may tell those stories. (If I knew for sure I wouldn't tell them, then I'd happily answer people now.)