July 31, 2009--While The Blue Dogs Were Barking
While the Democrat congressional Blue Dogs, more concerned about their reelection prospects than genuine healthcare reform, were nipping at the heels of aspects of the emerging bill in order to make sure that the insurance companies would continue to fare better than patients; and Republicans were doing all they could to bring down the Obama administration, paying more attention to his birth certificate than covering the uninsured; while all of this was occurring—including the co-called Beer Summit at the White House between Harvard professor Skip Gates, the police officer who arrested him, Barack Obama who really stepped in it, and Joe Biden (Joe Biden?); and the apparent resolution to the negotiations about the future custody of Michael Jackson’s children—around the world, substantially not covered by the media because none of it is equally sexy, a bunch of things were happening.
Let me in brief try to catch you up. All from the July 29th New York Times:
In Iraq—remember Iraq—commanders of the multi-national forces there have a looming nomenclature problem. As of today, July 31st, besides U.S. troops there will no longer be any other soldiers there from any other country. Thus, undercutting the meaning of multi. Sort of like in the old days when, also distracted by the sexy, we were confused about what the meaning of “is is.” Or more recently, the meaning of The Coalition of the Willing. As Karl Rove said about that—inspired undoubtedly by President Clinton’s parsing of the ontological meaning of is—“The truth is what we say it is.”
I suppose the good news is that Defense Secretary Gates recently said that since it is getting less safe for our soldiers to remain in Iraq now that they have agreed to withdrawn to their bases and get off the streets so that the Iraqi forces can take full control of their own country, this has made it somehow less safe for our men and women and thus we will be withdrawing them faster than previously planned.
Related to this, also from the July 29th Times, the top commander of the uni-national-non-coalition declared the other day that after all our troops withdraw, “The Iraqis will be unable to handle their own air defenses.” This not only is upsetting because by the time we are fully withdrawn we will have spent at least a trillion dollars of money we borrowed from China to invade and occupy Iraq and make them capable of governing and defending themselves, but also because I can’t think of who might be threatening Iraqi airspace. Weren’t we the ones who did that with our Shock and Awe raids? Or are we worried that Iran will invade Iraq as soon as we are no longer providing air cover? So this is both disturbing and perplexing.
Meanwhile, also in sort-of Iraq (I say sort-of because we and the Brits and the French created Iraq back in 1919 by literally drawing lines in the sand in order to protect our collective oil interests), a virtual country that includes in the north a portion of still-borderless Kurdistan, there is a new president of this semiautonomous region who just rejected a UN proposal to “resolve Iraq’s explosive internal border disputes,” because he wants to proceed with a move to create their own Kurdish constitution, effectively rejecting the one that we forced on all Iraqi factions four years ago.
That doesn’t seem to be working out; and after we leave, back to that, we can expect to see further moves by all of the region’s Kurds, very much including those in eastern Turkey, to declare themselves a separate country. Which, when you think about it, makes historic and cultural sense. Certainly more sense that what the map-makers concocted in Paris at the end of World War I, while downing many jeroboams of claret.
In the same Islamic world, in Pakistan, meanwhile, in the Swat Valley things are not going all that well. Remember the Swat was always in the news before Michael Jackson OD’d because the Taliban had pretty much taken control of it and were thus very close to and threatening the country’s capital, Islamabad? In a report from the Swat Valley the Times reported that a police constable who had been kidnapped last week was found beheaded near the town of Mingora. In Pakistan a single beheading rarely even makes the front pages of Pakistani papers. But in this case it did because it demonstrated that the Taliban are far from defeated there, as had been claimed by the government, and as a result most of the large landowners in the area—who are the source of virtually all economic activity there—have pulled out, leaving the people in desperate circumstances and likely to turn to the Taliban to take care of them.
On a brighter note, things are looking up with regard to Syria. Recall, before we got all involved with Skip Gate’s arrest in his own Cambridge home and that birth certificate business, the Obama administration was making nice to President Bashar al-Assad in the hope that by flattering him with attention (including dangling the prospect of an Obama visit to Damascus--don’t hold your breath) and appealing to his fear that Islamic militants in his own country would soon come looking for him (they should check for him at his flat in Paris), that by having Hillary Clinton and her team meet with him, we might be able to peel him away from his client relationship with Iran. As an indication that progress of this sort might be occurring, the Obama administration said Tuesday that it is taking “new steps to ease American sanctions against Syria on a case-by-case basis.” We will dribble this out to Assad and will expect him to reciprocate by taking a series of baby steps away from his patron. Of course, if this fails, there’s always the Right Bank.
Not entirely unrelated to this, we hosted a series of economic and diplomatic meetings earlier this week in Washington with our own patron—China. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Peter Geithner say glumly by (you need to look at the pictures of them on the Internet), the Chinese Finance Minister lectured them and us about our profligate ways. China of course has a keen interest in this and the larger U.S. economy since they hold $1.5 trillion (with a “t”) of our Treasury securities and they are more worried about our expanding debt than we. As Xi Xuren put it—in oriental passive-voice style—“Attention should be given to the fiscal deficit.” As the New York Times more directly put it, Clinton and Geithner being lectured in public “underscored a subtle shift in power between China and the United States, one in which the Chinese are showing a new assertiveness.” Indeed.
Finally, since Peter Geithner’s name came up, also this week he hosted a meeting of the nation’s leading mortgage lenders to beseech them to help people with troubled mortgages restructure them, using the billions the Treasury has set aside from the TARP appropriation for this purpose. While they squirmed in their seats complaining about all the paper work the government requires (yes, they are being asked to do a little due diligence, something they didn’t feel was important while inflating the real estate bubble by giving away no-doc mortgages to anyone who walked through their doors), while trying to wiggle off the hook as to why they weren’t moving more quickly while hundreds of thousands more homeowners are moving toward default, it was reported in the Times that the real reason they have been lagging is not because of the paperwork but because they make much, much more money by having people miss mortgage payments so that they can dun them for additional interest and collect penalty money. This predatory behavior you must read about yourself since I assume by now you are doubted my veracity. Thus, I have linked it below.
Indeed it had been quite a week. Now let’s get back to what Michael Jackson’s father claimed yesterday—that Michael has a fourth child. This one biologically his. How does Joe Jackson know—to sort of quote him, “He looks like a Jackson, he sings like a Jackson, he dances like a Jackson. So he’s a Jackson!”
As Uncle Walter would say, “And that’s the way it is.”
Let me in brief try to catch you up. All from the July 29th New York Times:
In Iraq—remember Iraq—commanders of the multi-national forces there have a looming nomenclature problem. As of today, July 31st, besides U.S. troops there will no longer be any other soldiers there from any other country. Thus, undercutting the meaning of multi. Sort of like in the old days when, also distracted by the sexy, we were confused about what the meaning of “is is.” Or more recently, the meaning of The Coalition of the Willing. As Karl Rove said about that—inspired undoubtedly by President Clinton’s parsing of the ontological meaning of is—“The truth is what we say it is.”
I suppose the good news is that Defense Secretary Gates recently said that since it is getting less safe for our soldiers to remain in Iraq now that they have agreed to withdrawn to their bases and get off the streets so that the Iraqi forces can take full control of their own country, this has made it somehow less safe for our men and women and thus we will be withdrawing them faster than previously planned.
Related to this, also from the July 29th Times, the top commander of the uni-national-non-coalition declared the other day that after all our troops withdraw, “The Iraqis will be unable to handle their own air defenses.” This not only is upsetting because by the time we are fully withdrawn we will have spent at least a trillion dollars of money we borrowed from China to invade and occupy Iraq and make them capable of governing and defending themselves, but also because I can’t think of who might be threatening Iraqi airspace. Weren’t we the ones who did that with our Shock and Awe raids? Or are we worried that Iran will invade Iraq as soon as we are no longer providing air cover? So this is both disturbing and perplexing.
Meanwhile, also in sort-of Iraq (I say sort-of because we and the Brits and the French created Iraq back in 1919 by literally drawing lines in the sand in order to protect our collective oil interests), a virtual country that includes in the north a portion of still-borderless Kurdistan, there is a new president of this semiautonomous region who just rejected a UN proposal to “resolve Iraq’s explosive internal border disputes,” because he wants to proceed with a move to create their own Kurdish constitution, effectively rejecting the one that we forced on all Iraqi factions four years ago.
That doesn’t seem to be working out; and after we leave, back to that, we can expect to see further moves by all of the region’s Kurds, very much including those in eastern Turkey, to declare themselves a separate country. Which, when you think about it, makes historic and cultural sense. Certainly more sense that what the map-makers concocted in Paris at the end of World War I, while downing many jeroboams of claret.
In the same Islamic world, in Pakistan, meanwhile, in the Swat Valley things are not going all that well. Remember the Swat was always in the news before Michael Jackson OD’d because the Taliban had pretty much taken control of it and were thus very close to and threatening the country’s capital, Islamabad? In a report from the Swat Valley the Times reported that a police constable who had been kidnapped last week was found beheaded near the town of Mingora. In Pakistan a single beheading rarely even makes the front pages of Pakistani papers. But in this case it did because it demonstrated that the Taliban are far from defeated there, as had been claimed by the government, and as a result most of the large landowners in the area—who are the source of virtually all economic activity there—have pulled out, leaving the people in desperate circumstances and likely to turn to the Taliban to take care of them.
On a brighter note, things are looking up with regard to Syria. Recall, before we got all involved with Skip Gate’s arrest in his own Cambridge home and that birth certificate business, the Obama administration was making nice to President Bashar al-Assad in the hope that by flattering him with attention (including dangling the prospect of an Obama visit to Damascus--don’t hold your breath) and appealing to his fear that Islamic militants in his own country would soon come looking for him (they should check for him at his flat in Paris), that by having Hillary Clinton and her team meet with him, we might be able to peel him away from his client relationship with Iran. As an indication that progress of this sort might be occurring, the Obama administration said Tuesday that it is taking “new steps to ease American sanctions against Syria on a case-by-case basis.” We will dribble this out to Assad and will expect him to reciprocate by taking a series of baby steps away from his patron. Of course, if this fails, there’s always the Right Bank.
Not entirely unrelated to this, we hosted a series of economic and diplomatic meetings earlier this week in Washington with our own patron—China. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Peter Geithner say glumly by (you need to look at the pictures of them on the Internet), the Chinese Finance Minister lectured them and us about our profligate ways. China of course has a keen interest in this and the larger U.S. economy since they hold $1.5 trillion (with a “t”) of our Treasury securities and they are more worried about our expanding debt than we. As Xi Xuren put it—in oriental passive-voice style—“Attention should be given to the fiscal deficit.” As the New York Times more directly put it, Clinton and Geithner being lectured in public “underscored a subtle shift in power between China and the United States, one in which the Chinese are showing a new assertiveness.” Indeed.
Finally, since Peter Geithner’s name came up, also this week he hosted a meeting of the nation’s leading mortgage lenders to beseech them to help people with troubled mortgages restructure them, using the billions the Treasury has set aside from the TARP appropriation for this purpose. While they squirmed in their seats complaining about all the paper work the government requires (yes, they are being asked to do a little due diligence, something they didn’t feel was important while inflating the real estate bubble by giving away no-doc mortgages to anyone who walked through their doors), while trying to wiggle off the hook as to why they weren’t moving more quickly while hundreds of thousands more homeowners are moving toward default, it was reported in the Times that the real reason they have been lagging is not because of the paperwork but because they make much, much more money by having people miss mortgage payments so that they can dun them for additional interest and collect penalty money. This predatory behavior you must read about yourself since I assume by now you are doubted my veracity. Thus, I have linked it below.
Indeed it had been quite a week. Now let’s get back to what Michael Jackson’s father claimed yesterday—that Michael has a fourth child. This one biologically his. How does Joe Jackson know—to sort of quote him, “He looks like a Jackson, he sings like a Jackson, he dances like a Jackson. So he’s a Jackson!”
As Uncle Walter would say, “And that’s the way it is.”
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:21 AM
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