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Charles Krauthammer says Obama is trying to stall Israel’s strike past the election.
It’s Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced this week to yet another round of talks with the mullahs.
This, 14 months after the last group-of-six negotiations collapsed in Istanbul because of blatant Iranian stalling and unseriousness. Nonetheless, the new negotiations will be both without precondition and preceded by yet more talks to decide such trivialities as venue.
These negotiations don’t just gain time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the International Atomic Energy Agency is issuing alarming warnings. They make it extremely difficult for Israel to do anything about it (while it still can), lest Israel be universally condemned for having aborted a diplomatic solution. …
… Yet beyond these obvious contradictions and walk-backs lies a transcendent logic: As with the Keystone pipeline postponement, as with the debt-ceiling extension, as with the Afghan withdrawal schedule, Obama wants to get past Nov. 6 without any untoward action that might threaten his reelection. …
Omri Ceren posts in Contentions on the intent of the administration.
Most pro-Israel president evuh:
“We’re trying to make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel,” said an administration official… he suggested that any Israeli strike on Iran before international oil and gas sanctions take effect this summer would undermine the tenuous unity the United States and its allies have built to oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Privately, White House officials say the coalition would explode with the first Israeli airstrike.
The Europeans have been ahead of Obama on the need to take a hard line against Iran, with French President Sarkozy fuming even during the election that Obama was “utterly immature” …
More on James Q Wilson. This time from Michael Barone.
Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.
His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the distinctive middle initial.
And I think a case can be made that that Q was a clue to the character of the man. To outward appearances Jim Wilson was an ordinary middle class American with middle class values and middle class tastes as unremarkable as those of thousands of other Jim Wilsons across the land.
But as a scholar, writer and human being he was one of a kind, with a probing mind, a capacity to sift and weigh evidence and an ability to reach conclusions that even the harshest of critics found hard to refute.
And one whose careful prose did not always manage to conceal a puckish sense of humor. A man as distinctive as the Q.
And John Podhoretz.
James Q. Wilson—who was this nation’s foremost political scientist, literally the author of the definitive textbook on the workings of American government, a writer of uncommon grace and clarity, and a man who believed more than anyone I’ve ever known in the power of the human capacity to reason to change things for the better—died this morning at the age of 80.
To my mind, his greatest and most enduring book in his oeuvre is The Moral Sense, in which this very practically-minded man carefully lays out the case for the existence of the title condition as an innate condition of humankind. But his signal contribution to American life over the past 30 years lies in his work as a criminologist, and his delineation (with George Kelling) of the theory of “broken windows,” about how social disorder and crime are in large measure the result of little transgressions in behavior and against the common weal, that, ignored and unchallenged, grow into ever larger ones. The expostulation of the broken windows theory literally inaugurated the revolution in consciousness in American policing and criminal justice that led to the astounding crime drop of the 1990s—a drop that continues to this day. …
As I promised earlier in my post about the death of the great James Q. Wilson, Commentary is making available the entirety of his 45 years of contributions to our magazine. You can find the James Q. Wilson Archive here. There is so much wonderful stuff it’s hard even to know where to begin, so let me start with the last words he published here, in our symposium called “Are You Optimistic or Pessimistic About America’s Future?” It will give you a flavor of the man’s unmatchable perspective:
“Many years ago, I confidently published an essay in which I made a prediction. It was hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong. Since then I have embraced the view that social scientists should never predict; leave that job to pundits. If you doubt me, make a list of the economists who predicted the 2008 recession, political scientists who predicted the Arab Spring, or criminologists who said that this recession would be accompanied by falling crime rates. A few names may make the list, but very few.
“Historians may do a better job than other scholars in making generalizations, but that is because the good ones never predict, they generalize from past experiences. Those experiences suggest that this country has been extraordinarily lucky, and they hint at some reasons for that good fortune: an adaptable government, an optimistic national character—and extraordinary good fortune …
In her She The People blog at WaPo, Melinda Henneberger tries to understand the moral equivalence of the left.
It’s hard to keep score in the still-escalating war on women, especially when the two sides in the fight have different standards of what’s insulting depending on who’s insulted.
The problem is that somehow, a sexist rant is only a sexist rant when it’s an attack on a woman in our own party. Otherwise, we call any comparison a “false equivalence” — and dream up creative ways in which conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut is not at all like liberal TV host Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a slut.
Watch and learn, aspiring parsers, as former Obama aide Bill Burton, founder of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama Super PAC to which HBO’s Bill Maher has donated $1 million, insists that Maher calling Sarah Palin what many women consider the most objectional slur is nothing like Limbaugh’s slurs against womankind.
As Burton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “the notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said over the course of his career and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said to sexually degrade a woman who led in a political debate of our time, is crazy.”
So Maher is a comedian, and Limbaugh isn’t — because Burton finds the one funny and the other a clown?
Michael Rubin wonders if there are worse places to live than Montgomery County, Maryland?
When I got married a few years back, I had wanted to stay in Virginia—where taxes were lower—but my wife wanted to live in Maryland, and so we compromised and moved to Maryland. Montgomery County, Maryland, is Democrat country. Lawn signs proliferate but, like elections in Cuba, they are all for a single party. Still, despite the high taxes and looming pension crisis, the school system is good and I figured, how much harm could a county government do? A lot, it seems. With little debate and even less coverage, Montgomery County passed a law to discourage disposable bags by imposing a 5 cent charge for each plastic or paper bag used. The charge applies not only in supermarkets, but in all stores: Home Depot? Bag charge. Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Bag Charge. Barnes and Noble? Bag charge. Take-out Chinese food? Bag charge.
While county officials justify the bag tax in kindergarten environmentalism, this is nonsense.