Do these two messages about terrorism add up?

Notice two messages we've been hearing a lot — often from the same people:

(1) When speaking about Islamic terrorists, it's considered appropriate to adopt this understanding tone — not that we're excusing the acts, but that we recognize that terrorism comes from being oppressed and disenfranchised, that people turn to terrorism as a last resort, etc. (I don't necessarily agree with those statements, but I've heard them countless times, from people who seem to feel very strongly about it.)

(2) We're told that the word "terrorist" is used too selectively, and especially that we should be more willing to apply it to white men and Christian men (e.g. the KKK, mass shooters, and those people who occupied the Oregon wildlife refuge).

Well, wait a minute . . . how oppressed and disenfranchised are white, Christian men?

"We got decimated. . . . We got killed."

Straight talk from Bernie Sanders.

Hillary Clinton is asked about her "white privilege"

I'm less interested in her answer to that question than I am in knowing when and how the word "privilege" started to take over virtually all discussions of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. It seems to have happened fairly recently — I'd say within about the last 10 years. When you hear the explanations of what it's supposed to mean, you can probably think of other words that would have been used in the past. But today, simply uttering the word "privilege" has become a signal that you're one of the enlightened ones.

I have some thoughts on what might be motivating the constant use of this word, but I'll have to get to that another day.

Why talk about "Islamic terrorists"?

Chris Matthews asks:

Why does [Marco] Rubio want to have this as a clash of civilizations? I though that was what ISIS wanted, what al Qaeda wants, to have the Islamic world fight with the Western world! Why would he want what they want — to see the world in a religious struggle? Why say "Islamic"? Why don’t we say "terrorist"?

I'd resist any suggestion that we should speak only in vague terms about terrorism/terrorists and constantly avoid mentioning the ideological underpinnings of those who have built an international network that threatens civilization as we know it. There are many other terrorists around the world with a variety of agendas, but we rightly don't put as high a priority on stopping them because they lack the global ambitions of groups like ISIL and al Qaeda.

It isn't convincing to suggest that the terrorists aren't really Islamic because they're evil, and Islam itself isn't evil. Using the adjective "Islamic" to apply to terrorists is not saying that all (or even most) Muslims are (or even support) evil. If you believe that, then to be consistent, you should object to describing the Crusades as Christian, or the Holocaust as German, etc. Well I'm sorry, but you're just not going to get anywhere by trying to erase the parts of history that make you feel uncomfortable. Someone else, who's in the habit of speaking or writing more bluntly, will always be able to come along and point out the truth in a more compelling manner than you have. If you believe in your message about terrorism — whatever that message is — you should want to communicate it in clear language that describes reality with precision. Instead of objecting to those who use such language when it's disturbing, we should be fighting against those who have made the use of such disturbing language necessary.

Harper's on Obama: "What Went Wrong"?

I can only read the first paragraph of this article since I don't subscribe to Harper's, but I'd just like to say that this sentence captures something I've often thought about Obama, which has seemed so glaringly obvious to me that I've wondered if I'm crazy or everyone else is missing this or not willing to say it:

He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other.

State of the Union

I can't believe I missed the chance to see Obama repeat the same proposals I've been reading about for weeks but with soaring rhetoric, a very determined tone of voice, and the occasional humorous aside.

State of the Union ad infinitum

"[A]n almost-plausible speech taking one sentence from each SOTU since 1961."

The War on Everything

The 12 most overlooked stories of 2011

The New Republic lists the year's "most overlooked stories," one of which is "Obama’s Failed Fireside Chat."

Historians may someday recall that on July 25, 2011, the bulk of the American people stopped listening to Obama when he spoke about the economy.

Matt Lewis Newt-ly calls out Bill Sher for failing to understand the appeal of Newt Gingrich.

Matt Lewis talks like Newt Gingrich while calling out Bill Sher for failing to understand Gingrich's appeal:




Here's the post Matt Lewis is referring to: "How to talk like Newt (in 7 easy steps)."

I noticed that in the last debate, Gingrich would qualify all his statements with "explicitly." By my count from searching the transcript, he used that word 4 times (and no one else used it at all). It's a way to sound intellectual without necessarily saying anything.

50 ways to mess with people's minds

Here's the list, which distills this book.

Highlights:

- You can get someone to go along with you by offering any rationale, even a meaningless one. In an experiment, researchers approached customers waiting in line to use a copier at Kinko's. If the researcher just asked the customer, "Can I go ahead of you?," the customer would let him do it only about a quarter of the time. If the researcher instead asked, "Can I go ahead of you, because I need to make some copies?," the customer would almost always let him do it -- even though that rationale made no sense, as everyone was in line to make copies. The post repeats the book's conclusion that the word "because" has a magic power, but the experiment doesn't seem to prove that; maybe any rationale added to a request has the same effect.

- A hotel sign that encourages people to reuse towels will be more successful if it says that guests who've stayed in that specific room reuse their hotel towels, than if it just says guests who've stayed in the same hotel reuse the towels, even though this makes no rational difference. There are many ways you could interpret this finding, but the post says the lesson is: "Introduce herd effect in highly personalized form."

- A waiter who parrots customers' orders will make 70% more in tips than one who doesn't. This has widespread application -- probably to almost any setting where human beings are verbally interacting. By paraphrasing someone's own statements back to them, you can signal that you're understanding them and taking them seriously.

- "People like the sound of their name, and that defines their vocation. There are three times as many dentists named Dennis as any other names." I guess Dwight Schrute was right after all (see the end of this post).

- "A faster-working brain under the influence of caffeine seems to appreciate good arguments."

Was Maliki misquoted on Obama's Iraq withdrawal timetable?

Well, as people always say, you need to look at the whole context. So let's look at it (the two sentences in bold are the ones that have been widely quoted):

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

So, when you look at it in context ... is there anything inaccurate about saying that Maliki endorsed Obama's timetable for withdrawal? I don't think so. And I think this is huge.

Of course he's not endorsing Obama as a candidate overall -- he'd have no business telling us who our president should be. I don't know of anyone who's claimed otherwise. The question is whether he's endorsed Obama's Iraq policy.

If there's any wiggle room here, aside from the minimal qualifier ("with the possibility of slight changes"), I'm not seeing it. Maliki said he agrees with Obama on the 16-month timetable for withdrawal. End of story.

McCain's whole candidacy hinges on Iraq (and by extension, terrorism, national security, foreign policy, etc.). If he can't trump Obama on Iraq, it's hard to see how he can win -- assuming the voters are going to cast their votes on substantive grounds.

So how can McCain -- whose spokesman has said we would withdraw if the Iraqis asked us to -- continue to depict Obama's plan for Iraq as dangerous and defeatist?

His campaign has released a statement. But really, it's just McCain's usual spiel on why he disagrees with Obama on Iraq, with a cursory reference to Maliki thrown in. So that's not much.

He might fall back on this pseudo-clarification from Maliki's aide:

Comments al-Maliki made to the magazine were "misunderstood and mistranslated'' and were not "conveyed accurately,'' al-Dabbagh said in the statement.

That's from a story with the headline: "Maliki Doesn't Endorse Obama Troop Withdrawal Plan."

Wait -- really? Maliki didn't endorse Obama's troop withdrawal plan?

Well, there are three problems with this:

1. The pseudo-clarification was given only under pressure from the United States.

2. There's very strong evidence that there was no "mistranslation." As the New York Times has reported, the translator of the original interview was provided by Maliki himself, not the newspaper. And the Times has now done an independent translation and confirmed the accuracy of the original translation.

3. The wording of Maliki's aide's statement is revealing. Ben Smith at Politico explains:

It's almost a convention of politics that when a politician says he was misquoted, but doesn't detail the misquote or offer an alternative, he's really saying he wishes he hadn't said what he did, or that he needs to issue a pro-forma denial to please someone.

The Iraqi Prime Minister's vague denial seems to fall in that category. The fact that it arrived to the American press via CENTCOM, seems to support that. It came, as Mike Allen notes, 18 hours later, and at 1:30 a.m. Eastern, a little late for Sunday papers; his staff also seems, Der Spiegel reports, not to have contested Iraqi reporting of the quote, even in the "government-affiliated" Iraqi press.

The notion this was a misquote also bumps up against Der Spiegel's standing by its reporting, and providing a long, detailed transcript.

This is a standard ploy for when you have to put on a show of disagreeing with someone, but you know there's nothing you can really say.

You need to say something. But you can't really say anything. So you figure out a way to say something without saying anything.

As a rule of thumb (which has plenty of exceptions), the test of someone's credibility is their ability to give convincing details to back up their general assertions. If someone who disagrees with you says, "That's not accurate!" but never gets around to specifying what exactly is inaccurate, that's a good sign that you can safely omit the "not" from their sentence.

It's similar to the many critics of Justice Clarence Thomas who don't know much about his work but want to vent their disgust with him. So what do they say? "He's not smart enough." "His opinions aren't well-written." It's very easy to make assertions like those, which are so vague as to defy being disproved. How can you prove that something is "well-written"?

It also reminds me of the custom of criminal defendants always making a pro forma "not guilty" plea at the beginning of a case. If you think that means the defendant isn't guilty, you're crazy.

Anyway, back to the campaign. I'm still waiting to see if McCain can explain his way out of this.

It's clear that McCain and his surrogates are going to hammer away at one argument: we wouldn't even be in this situation if it hadn't been for the surge! McCain was for the surge, and Obama was against it! Ha!

Well, is the election going to be about the past? Or is it going to be about the way forward?

If the election is going to be about the positions on Iraq that McCain and Obama have taken in the past ... then I can think of another decision I'd like the voters to focus on.

My hunch is that a "prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign" was correctly analyzing the situation when he said, in response to Maliki's statement:

"We're fucked."

UPDATE: Jaltcoh gives you tomorrow's MSM analysis, today! The day after I posted the above, Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:

Here's my schematic of the changed landscape. For years, the best argument available to supporters of George W. Bush's stay-the-course policy has been that we have to look forward. Critics of the war were engaged in useless arguments about the past, they said. The important thing wasn't to argue about whether the administration misled the nation into war, or to point out that Iraq hadn't quite become the Jeffersonian democracy that the hawks had promised. No one could change the past, however unfortunate it might be. The important thing was to look ahead and engineer the best possible outcome.

The important change is that now the look-forward argument is on the side of Obama and the advocates of setting a timetable for withdrawal. After all, that's what the U.S.-backed Iraqi government wants -- in fact, it's what the Iraqi government demands. Suddenly, it's the stay-the-course crowd that insists on fighting a battle that has already been consigned to the past. Obama and the Iraqis are looking to the future. The question isn't whether U.S. troops leave. It's how soon and how fast.

Someone might want to mention these developments to John McCain.