That waste of oxygen Kristol typed a POS called “Someone Else’s Alex,” in which he opines that the people at MoveOn.org have moved on to express contempt for all who might choose to serve their country in uniform. To call him a horse’s patoot would be to insult horses’ patoots… Mr. Cohen writes about “The Fight for Turkey,” and says it’s easier to don a veil than take it off. Reversibility is not Islam’s forte. Mr. Krugman, in “Home Not-So-Sweet Home,” asks why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway? Here’s that disgrace Kristol:
The people at MoveOn.org have a new Iraq ad that is, if they do say so themselves, their most effective ever. Then again, for the group that brought us the “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad last September, that might not be saying much.
Nevertheless, the organization boasts on its Web site, “This isn’t your average political ad — it lays out the truth about McCain’s Iraq policy in a personal and compelling way.” MoveOn also claims, “We just got the results back and polling shows that voters found it to be more persuasive than any other ad we’ve tested before.”
I’m not persuaded. Having slandered a distinguished general officer, MoveOn has now moved on to express contempt for all who might choose to serve their country in uniform.
Their new and improved message is presented in a 30-second TV spot, “Not Alex,” produced in conjunction with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. It’s airing for a week on local broadcast stations in markets in the swing states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, and on two national cable channels, with a reported buy of over half a million dollars.
The ad is simple. A mother speaks as she holds her baby boy:
“Hi, John McCain. This is Alex. And he’s my first. So far his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”
Take that, warmonger!
Now it might be pedantic to point out that John McCain isn’t counting on Alex to serve in Iraq, because little Alex will only be 9 years old when President McCain leaves office after two terms.
And it might be picky to remark that when McCain was asked whether U.S. troops might have to remain in Iraq for as long as 50 years, he replied, “Maybe 100” — explaining, “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world. …”
In other words, McCain is open to an extended military presence in Iraq, similar to ones we’ve had in Germany, Japan or Kuwait. He does not wish for, nor does he anticipate, a 100-year war in Iraq.
But it is surely relevant to point out that the United States has an all-volunteer Army. Alex won’t be drafted, and his mommy can’t enlist him. He can decide when he’s an adult whether he wants to serve. And, of course, McCain supports the volunteer army.
All of this is pretty much par for the course in political advertising. And I’m of the latitudinarian school when it comes to campaign discourse; politics is supposed to be rough and ready. So, why, I wondered after first seeing the MoveOn ad, did I find it so … creepy?
I was having trouble putting my finder on just why until I came across a post by a mother of a soldier recently deployed in Iraq, at the Web site BlueStarChronicles.com.
Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:
“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? … Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”
This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.
We do, however, live in a free country with a volunteer army. In the United States, individuals can choose to serve in the military or not. The choice not to serve should carry no taint, nor should it be viewed with the least prejudice. If Alex chooses to pursue other opportunities, he won’t be criticized by John McCain or anyone else.
But that’s not at all the message of the MoveOn ad.
The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.
And the sole responsibility of others.
Tell me again which branch of service you were in, you useless piece of crap. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Let’s talk Turkey. A war is on for the country’s soul and everyone should be watching because the little matter of Islam and democracy depends in large measure on its outcome.
Turkey was not made for Bushworld. The polarizing labels of his Manichean global struggle — us-or-them, good-or evil, for-us-or-against-us — do not work for a nation of nuances, Muslim but not Islamist, religious in culture but secular in construct, of the Occident and the Orient, bordering the West’s cradle in Greece and its crucible in Iraq.
Here, in this bridging country, a NATO member long served the diet of mild bigotry that has held it not quite European enough for the European Union, a struggle has been engaged. It pits proud secularists against pious Muslims in a battle to establish the contours of state and mosque.
The West should not be impatient, or complacent, in contemplating this fight. Hundreds of years, countless wars and myriad dead were required before church and state elaborated the legal architecture of their separation. Islam is the youngest of the world’s major religions. Its accommodation to modernity is a virulent work in progress.
Nowhere more so than in Turkey, a conservative country fast-forwarded to Westward-looking secularism in the 1920s by the founder-hero of the modern republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and now grappling with the place in that republic of an ascendant political Islam.
I like this fight. It has its crude, misleading labels — the “secular fascists” of the Kemalist establishment in one corner against the “Islamofascists” of the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party in the other — but it is open and vigorous. The crisis of Islam could use a broader dose of Turkish give-and-take.
The latest round came this month when Turkey’s highest court rebuffed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AKP leader and an observant Muslim with an Islamist past, on a matter of high symbolism.
It ruled that Erdogan’s legislation, passed in February, allowing women attending state universities to wear head scarves in observance of their Muslim beliefs violated secular principles enshrined in the Constitution.
My reaction to this is twofold. First, women of college age should be allowed to wear what they like in accordance with their personal convictions. In that sense the court’s ruling is unacceptable.
Second, the secular foundations of modern Turkey have been essential to creating this most permissive of Muslim societies; they should not be compromised without a fight, especially in a Middle Eastern environment where democracy is rare and Islamism potent. In this perspective, the court’s ruling is a salutary challenge to the AKP to keep proving its liberal credentials.
On balance, I side with the court. I’m confident that in the medium-term, Turkish women will win the right to wear headscarves wherever. I’m less confident that the creeping Islamization fostered by the AKP is accompanied by an unshakeable commitment to secular democracy, as Erdogan insists.
Let the party pay its dues, if necessary in repeated confrontations with the court. Turkey is a laboratory of a moderate Muslim democracy; do not rush the experiment. It’s easier to don a veil than remove it. Reversibility is not Islam’s forte.
Erdogan and the AKP are popular in Washington and Europe, while the military-judicial secular establishment has not had this hard a time since Ataturk. But in high posts in education, the health department and elsewhere in public service, Islamic credentials that pass muster with the AKP are increasingly a sine qua non.
Subtle changes in mores have accompanied this shift in power, where getting the right job or right husband can involve new demonstrations of piousness. Head scarves are more common. Advertisements aimed at women have been photoshopped by newspapers to lengthen sleeves and skirts for conservative Muslim sentiment. The head-to-foot swimsuit known as a “hasema” is making its appearance on Turkish beaches.
I don’t believe Shariah law is coming to Turkey or the AKP has Iran in mind. Islamofascists they are not. But nor do I believe the party is without its strains of radicalism at odds with the nation Ataturk forged.
The same court will rule soon on a case that would ban Erdogan and 70 other party members from politics on the grounds they are dismantling secularism. In that the party won 47 percent of the vote last year, such a ruling would fly in the face of democracy.
The court should refrain from the ban. But I’m glad the threat of it exists. And if it came, I’m sure a successor to Erdogan, and perhaps the AKP, would quickly emerge.
The fight for Turkey’s soul is not about to abate: it’s salutary as long as it remains open. The West should do all it can to safeguard that openness — and that may involve an occasional dose of “secular fascism.”
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
“Owning a home lies at the heart of the American dream.” So declared President Bush in 2002, introducing his “Homeownership Challenge” — a set of policy initiatives that were supposed to sharply increase homeownership, especially for minority groups.
Oops. While homeownership rose as the housing bubble inflated, temporarily giving Mr. Bush something to boast about, it plunged — especially for African-Americans — when the bubble popped. Today, the percentage of American families owning their own homes is no higher than it was six years ago, and it’s a good bet that by the time Mr. Bush leaves the White House homeownership will be lower than it was when he moved in.
But here’s a question rarely asked, at least in Washington: Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?
Listening to politicians, you’d think that every family should own its home — in fact, that you’re not a real American unless you’re a homeowner. “If you own something,” Mr. Bush once declared, “you have a vital stake in the future of our country.” Presumably, then, citizens who live in rented housing, and therefore lack that “vital stake,” can’t be properly patriotic. Bring back property qualifications for voting!
Even Democrats seem to share the sense that Americans who don’t own houses are second-class citizens. Early last year, just as the mortgage meltdown was beginning, Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who is one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, warned against a crackdown on subprime lending. “For be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage.”
And the belief that you’re nothing if you don’t own a home is reflected in U.S. policy. Because the I.R.S. lets you deduct mortgage interest from your taxable income but doesn’t let you deduct rent, the federal tax system provides an enormous subsidy to owner-occupied housing. On top of that, government-sponsored enterprises — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks — provide cheap financing for home buyers; investors who want to provide rental housing are on their own.
In effect, U.S. policy is based on the premise that everyone should be a homeowner. But here’s the thing: There are some real disadvantages to homeownership.
First of all, there’s the financial risk. Although it’s rarely put this way, borrowing to buy a home is like buying stocks on margin: if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake.
This isn’t a hypothetical worry. From 2005 through 2007 alone — that is, at the peak of the housing bubble — more than 22 million Americans bought either new or existing houses. Now that the bubble has burst, many of those homebuyers have lost heavily on their investment. At this point there are probably around 10 million households with negative home equity — that is, with mortgages that exceed the value of their houses.
Owning a home also ties workers down. Even in the best of times, the costs and hassle of selling one home and buying another — one estimate put the average cost of a house move at more than $60,000 — tend to make workers reluctant to go where the jobs are.
And these are not the best of times. Right now, economic distress is concentrated in the states with the biggest housing busts: Florida and California have experienced much steeper rises in unemployment than the nation as a whole. Yet homeowners in these states are constrained from seeking opportunities elsewhere, because it’s very hard to sell their houses.
Finally, there’s the cost of commuting. Buying a home usually though not always means buying a single-family house in the suburbs, often a long way out, where land is cheap. In an age of $4 gas and concerns about climate change, that’s an increasingly problematic choice.
There are, of course, advantages to homeownership — and yes, my wife and I do own our home. But homeownership isn’t for everyone. In fact, given the way U.S. policy favors owning over renting, you can make a good case that America already has too many homeowners.
O.K., I know how some people will respond: anyone who questions the ideal of homeownership must want the population “confined to Soviet-style concrete-block high-rises” (as a Bloomberg columnist recently put it). Um, no. All I’m suggesting is that we drop the obsession with ownership, and try to level the playing field that, at the moment, is hugely tilted against renting.
And while we’re at it, let’s try to open our minds to the possibility that those who choose to rent rather than buy can still share in the American dream — and still have a stake in the nation’s future.
