Browsing PBH By Articles

Sinking The Conservative Ship To Save It

Posted on July 8, 2011 in Articles

The Article: The Tea Party’s Murder-Suicide Pact by Joshua Green at the Atlantic.

The Text: Congress cut short its July 4th recess and returned to Washington this week to try and reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling. Or, rather, some of its members are trying – a growing number of Republicans responsive to the Tea Party movement seem dead set again this. They not only claim that the United States won’t suffer any negative consequences if it doesn’t raise the ceiling, but that refusing will have the salutary effect of forcing the government to live within its means.

A lot is at stake here. Just about everyone besides these Republicans believes that a debt default would be catastrophic. And most of them, including President Obama, would accept trillions of dollars in spending cuts to avoid finding out.

Who Is The Biggest Loser Of 2011?

Posted on July 6, 2011 in Articles

The cows were the first to know.

200 Delphic bovines in Wisconsin died suddenly this January. Their passing followed on the heels of other mysterious animal deaths. Hundreds of thousands of fish floated belly up in Maryland and Arkansas waterways. 40,000 crabs washed up on England’s barnacled shores. Thousands of birds plunged from the sky over backwater Louisiana towns.

The mass animal deaths baffled scientists and smacked of an unfinished Kurt Vonnegut novel. But to dooms-dayers, it was the latest incontrovertible evidence: the Rapture was upon us.

Palestinian Self-Determination In The Arab Spring

Posted on July 5, 2011 in Articles

Albert Einstein once famously suggested that insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” With this definition in mind, what is more insane than Washington’s approach to the so-called “peace process?” Indeed, the same tired and regurgitated paradigms for negotiations remain dogma among American and Israeli officials. President Obama’s latest recommendation, no doubt influenced by the leading advocate of incrementalism Dennis Ross, is for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate borders and security now and worry about “emotional issues” like refugees and Jerusalem at a later date.

This strategy, much like the entire peace process itself, will allow Israelis to continue to effectively annex more and more of the West Bank by continuing with the illegal settlement enterprise, furthering the “Bantustanization” of the West Bank. In February, the Obama administration vetoed a UN resolution, comprised of language directly appropriated from US policy, declaring settlement activity to be illegal. The other 14 members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution. Is there anything else to call this but a “cowardly failure,” to borrow from Chas Freeman, on the part of the Obama administration?