Skip to main content

Quote of the day

"And, indeed, as recently as 1988 one could have witnessed moderate Democrat Joe Lieberman successfully challenging incumbent liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker with the support of, among others, William F Buckley, Jr.


"But it turns out that Lieberman vs Weicker was something of a dying gasp of a political order that was rendered obsolete by the civil rights revolution. Twenty years later we find ourselves several congresses into a brave new world in which every single Democratic Party legislator is to the left of every single Republican Party legislator. In terms of partisan politics, in other words, we’ve become a normal country. But as Linz observed, the “normal” outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship.

"So far it hasn’t happened here. The 1998-99 effort to impeach Bill Clinton was sufficiently unpopular that moderate Republicans wouldn’t vote for it. Al Gore chose not to contest the legitimacy of the Supreme Court ruling that handed the White House to George W Bush despite the fact that the electorate preferred Gore. And by 2007-2008, Bush was so unpopular that the Democratic Party leadership felt the wisest course was to avoid provoking a crisis and basically just wait him out. But we live in interesting times…"  --Yglesias.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that...

Russiagate and the Left, Round II

Corey Robin has responded to my article arguing that the left should take the Trump-Russia story more seriously . I do appreciate that he considers me an ally, and I feel the same towards him. However I am not convinced. The points I want to make are somewhat disconnected, so I will just take them one at a time. What should be done? Robin complains that I don't give much attention to the question of how we should respond to Russian electoral espionage. As an initial matter, the question of whether a problem is an important one is logically distinct from what the response should be. There is a sizable vein of skepticism about Russiagate on the left, and the argument of the post was that skepticism was misplaced. Solutions can be worked out later. This point is rather similar to the centrist argument that you can't talk about Medicare for All unless you've got a fully costed-out bill detailing all the necessary taxes and regulation. However, I have advanced some pol...