by Cheryl Rofer
Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.
But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.
It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.
Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.
Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.
Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.
Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.
The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)