Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

January 18, 2012 By Fausta

Patterico refutes Sullivan, and so does The Atlantic

More on the dumb Newsweek cover:
Patterico’s Karl posts When Andrew Sullivan is useful,

Insofar as his defenses parallel the likely narrative of Obama’s reelect campaign, it’s worth looking at his takes on criticism of Obama from the right (Sullivan also addresses criticism from the left, which won’t play much role in the campaign) on major issues:

The issues are

  • Jobs
  • Stimulus
  • Taxes
  • Spending
  • Obamacare
  • Foreign policy

For instance,

Foreign policy.  Sullivan focuses on the least controversial aspect of Obama’s record, claiming “Obama reversed Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course that eventually led to his capture and death.”  In reality, the key info to finding bin Laden was gathered from Operation Cannonball, launched during the Bush administration.  Sullivan also claims:

[W]here Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted.

Confidence in al Qaeda was declining for years in the Muslim world before Obama took office.  Then again, confidence in Obama has declined in the Muslim world from 2009-11 (the most recent Pew Global attitudes poll).  The latter was one of Sullivan’s arguments for electing Obama in the first place. Sullivan also argued that Obama could reduce the polarization in Washington.  Obama started poisoning that well three days into his presidency, becoming one of the most polarizing presidents in modern history.

Which brings us to Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus On Obama’s Dumbest Critics?
A major defense of the president exaggerates Obama’s accomplishments and misses the point: his scandalous transgressions against rule of law
, which starts with

After reading Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

and concludes with,

It isn’t that I object to Sullivan backing Obama’s reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so. But lauding him as a president who has governed “with grace and calm” and “who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name”? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don’t fit one’s definition of “scandal,” what does? If they’re peripheral flaws rather than central, unacceptable transgressions, America is doomed to these radical, illiberal policies for the foreseeable future.

That the second article comes from The Atlantic, not your hive of vast-right-wing-conspirators, is even more telling.

By the way, I’m not pleased to be giving importance to Newsweek, a worthless publication that doesn’t deserve any. The important thing about Sullivan’s article is that Sullivan is laying out the narrative for Obama’s re-election campaign. That’s why both articles above should be read in full.

UPDATE,
Linked by Obi’s Sister. Thanks!


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Filed Under: Barack Obama, politics Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Newsweek, The Atlantic

January 16, 2012 By Fausta

What’s with that lump?

A lot of bloggers are posting about the dumb Newsweek cover, and there’s even a Memeorandum thread by now,

Politics aside, if you look at the President’s neck, he ought to have that lump checked.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Newsweek

June 29, 2011 By Fausta

Newsweek’s Tina Brown sees dead people

Tina Brown is channeling Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense,

Newsweek photoshops Kate Middleton, late Princess Diana together on magazine cover

Daily Beast founder Tina Brown paid a tribute to the late princess by writing up a “Diana at 50” article, which describes what Lady Di would have been like had she not been killed in a Paris tunnel crash nearly fourteen years ago.

How do you spell p-r-o-j-e-c-t-i-o-n?

Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Al-Fayed’s hopeless unreliability. After the breakup I see her moving to her favorite city, New York, spending a few cocooned years safely married to a super-rich hedge-fund guy who could provide her with what she called “all the toys”: the plane, the private island, the security detail. Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She’d have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host, or a globe-trotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general, rumored to have links to the ISI, would have been a particular headache to the Foreign Office and the State Department.)

Well, at least we know who Tina would like to boink.

Where is Dr. McCoy when we need him?

She’s dead, Tina.

UPDATE
Linked by Instapundit. Thanks!

UPDATE, Thursday 30 June,
Ouch!:

But it’s worse than creepy. It’s highly derivative–pretty much the exact same idea as National Lampoon’s February 1977 cover, “JFK’s First 6,000 Days.”

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Filed Under: Princess Diana Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Newsweek, Tina Brown

November 12, 2010 By Fausta

Let’s hope there’s a prenup: “Daily Beast, Newsweek to Wed!”

Tina Brown giddily announces that Daily Beast, Newsweek to Wed! The offspring will be called The Newsweek Daily Beast Company.

Stacy wonders about The Weekly Newsbeast’s money flow:

The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.

Two things:
1. The Daily Beast’s code is such that, every time I have been to the site, it takes a couple of seconds for the text to ungnarl itself into readable form.
2. I can’t recall when was the last time I read Newsweek.
Perhaps it is a match made in heaven, after all.

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Filed Under: internet, media, news Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Tina Brown

July 12, 2009 By Fausta

Newsweek: “Is Obama more Catholic than the Pope?”

VATICAN OBAMA

Boldly going where no mag has gone before, Newsweek asserts, Without a Doubt: Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the pope does.
And you know it must be true because Kathleen Kennedy Townsend says so:

“The pope has a lot to learn about Catholic politics in America. Barack Obama can teach him.”

There you go.

h/t Meredith Jessup, who said,

As for me, I’ll be sticking with God and continuing to thank Him for term limits.

Do I hear an “Amen!”

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Catholic Church, Fausta's blog, Pope Benedict Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Newsweek

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