Political Ruminations

Quote of the Day

Yglesias, on the current “mission” of the U.S. Dept. of Defense:

“….the United States has a very ambitious national security strategy for itself. Rather than try to focus on credibly deterring a major power attack on US territory while maintaining the capacity to intervene military in North America, we try to focus on credibly deterring attacks on the US and Western Europe and Japan and Australia while maintaining the capacity to intervene militarily anywhere in the world. That’s an expensive mission.”

A mission that needs desperately to change, especially in light of the terms of the debt deal.

Bonus Quote III

Yglesias, emphasis mine:

“We’ve seen so much mockery of “11-dimensional chess” that I think people have gotten unduly reluctant to credit the idea that there’s a bit of regular old chess happening here where you have to think one or two moves ahead. In particular, if we had a clean debt ceiling increase, that wouldn’t change the fact that Republicans control the House and Republicans want spending cuts. All that would happen is we’d roll into September, when the current set of discretionary appropriations are set to expire, with Republicans demanding that any new appropriations deal feature spending caps, entitlement cut commissions, etc. In other words, the fight we’re having in July would be happening in September. I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether having the fight now is better than having the fight then, but I don’t think it’s by any means crazy for the White House to suppose that the current timing is more favorable to the progressive side or crazy to believe that they did, in fact, see two moves ahead and decide they preferred this outcome.”

Quote of the Day

The America John Boehner grew up in:

“I think John Boehner’s complaint that Barack Obama is “snuffing out the America I grew up in” was very telling as to what politics is really about. Back when Boehner was a kid, tax rates were much higher, gays were in the closet, women were in the kitchen, nobody listened to hip-hop, and a black man in the White House was a science fiction scenario. He feels nostalgic about it, and would probably be mad as heck if hippie locavores started planting vegetable gardens all over his neighborhood.”