I usually would rather have  dental work than read Tom Friedman’s column. But this time he interviewed President Obama, and I liked this part:

Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction.

No victor/no vanquished almost sounds Zen.

At the end of the day, the president mused, the biggest threat to America — the only force that can really weaken us — is us. We have so many things going for us right now as a country — from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy — but, he said, we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together.

However, as I explained in the last post, this can’t happen. Too bad.

Juan Cole’s assessment of the bombing in Iraq is that ISIS was about to overrun Irbil, which has a U.S. consulate, and he’s trying to avoid another Benghazi!®. William Saletan (yeah, I know, it’s William Saletan) wrote,

War-weary critics say Obama’s intervention will lead to all-out American military engagement. Hawks protest that he has no vision and that his limited intervention won’t defeat ISIS. Both sides complain that he has no end game.

They’re wrong. Military intervention doesn’t have to fit into a strategy for military victory. It can make sense on more modest terms, as part of a larger political process that is moving in the right direction and is driven by other players. When miscreants such as ISIS endanger that process, a timely use of force can contain the damage and preserve the momentum. We don’t have to wage a larger war in Iraq.

He then presents ten reasons why the bombing in Iraq will not turn into a wider war, and I have no idea whether Saletan knows what he’s talking about. Combined with the interview, though, I don’t believe the President will get us sucked into Iraq War II.

Juan Cole provides some perspective on the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, adding,

Obama’s hope that the so-called “Islamic State” can be stopped by US air power is likely forlorn. The IS is a guerrilla force, not a conventional army.

But one thing is certain. A US-policed no fly zone or no go zone over Iraqi Kurdistan is a commitment that cannot easily be withdrawn and could last decades, embroiling the US in further conflict.

Much of the old Chickenhawk Brigade is clucking that this proves they are vindicated! Flaming worthless idiot Paul Wolfowitz actually is claiming the U.S. won the Iraq War in 2009. I by “winning” you mean “conceding that further action is pointless and we will now extricate ourselves ourselves in a gradual manner” is “winning,” well, okay. By those standards we sort of won the Vietnam War, too.

The Chickenhawks also are doing their usual song and dance about how liberals don’t understand evil, and that people like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will never stop and will come after the U.S. sooner or later, so we need to destroy him now.

Here’s some background on what might be fueling Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. See also “The Debacle of the Caliphates: Why al-Baghdadi’s Grandiosity doesn’t Matter.” Bottom line, the certainly is a nasty piece of work. Whether he could export his movement beyond Iraq is highly speculative, however.

What the Chickenhawks don’t get is that U.S. bombs aren’t the answer to all problems, and indeed, usually just cause more problems. That doesn’t mean letting a bunch of civilians die of thirst and starvation is the answer, either. The world is a messy place. Sometimes there are no actual solutions. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But in Real World Land there are all kinds of powers beside Paul Wolfowitz and Hugh Hewitt who are keenly interested in keeping Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi contained, if not eliminated. Iran is one. I strongly suspect the Sunni leaders of other countries see a whackjob who thinks he leads a “Caliphate” is not their friend, either. Juan Cole thinks the “Caliphate” is doomed.

So it seems to me the question is not whether the U.S. will do nothing about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or will unilaterally wage war on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The question is whether we might take smart action or stupid action. Seems to me the smart thing to do would be to contact the heads of other Muslim countries — even Iran, IMO — and say, tell us if you need help getting rid of this guy, but you have to take the lead on this. This has to be the Islamic world’s issue, not America’s.

He’s not turning into a card-carrying leftie, assuming we carried cards, but Thomas Ricks writes that he realizes the country is just plain not working and he finds himself leaning toward center-left ideas.

I have again and again found myself shifting to the left in major areas such as foreign policy and domestic economic policy. I wonder whether others of my generation are similarly pausing, poking up their heads from their workplaces and wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it.

And then he lists several areas of policy and social issues in which he feels the “conservative” approach just hasn’t worked, or made things worse, and now a more left-ish approach seems more harmonious with reality. Do tell.

One might ask, Why didn’t you notice this before? Because the U.S.Right has been crazy extremist for years. Is it that it’s just now sinking in that the country is dysfunctional? Is it that their own finances are hurt? Is it that the Right’s famous ability to cover over the craziness with correct messaging has been slipping?

Please also read Digby’s Texas gun nuts’ scary ritual: How hatred of a president turned profane. She begins by taking us back to November 22, 1963 —

The morning of Nov. 22, the Dallas Morning News featured a full-page ad “welcoming” the president to Dallas. After a preamble in which they proclaimed their fealty to the Constitution and defiantly asserted their right to be conservative, they demanded to be allowed to “address their grievances.” They posed a long series of “when did you stop beating your wife” questions asking why Kennedy was helping the Communist cause around the world. Here’s an example:

WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?

WHY have you banned the showing at U.S. military bases of the film “Operation Abolition”–the movie by the House Committee on Un-American Activities exposing Communism in America?

WHY have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?

WHY has the Foreign Policy of the United States degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communists Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated.

WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the “Spirit of Moscow”?

MR. KENNEDY, as citizens of the United States of America, we DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW.

You get the drift. And you probably recognize the tone. The subject may have changed somewhat but the arrogant attitude combined with the aggrieved victimization is a hallmark of right-wing politics even today.

Digby brings this up because the Texas Open Carry herd has been staging regular demonstrations at the cite of the assassination.

Travelers from other nations who come to Dealey Plaza to pay their respects are undoubtedly startled to see yahoos carrying guns and passing out extremist literature very much like the literature that was distributed in Dallas in the fall of 1963. In most places in this world such contempt for national hallowed ground would be frowned upon by decent people. But in America, armed men and women marching around spouting hatred for the president at the very spot where a former president was assassinated is business as usual. We are “free” here to carry guns in public and dare others to argue with us. But that doesn’t make it any less vulgar and profane to do it in a place of national grief — and what should be a monument to right-wing ignominy.

I was only 12 years old when President Kennedy died. I know there were people who didn’t like JFK and especially did not like Bobby Kennedy. But I honestly had not remembered his being accused of being soft on Communism.

I’m not sure exactly how these articles go together, but I feel that they do.

I want to call your attention to Obamacare in an import-export regional economic modeling view by Richard Mayhew at Balloon Juice. It begins:

Obamacare is many things. One of which is an interesting natural experiment in determining whether states shooting themselves in the foot makes it harder or easier to walk than states that don’t shoot themselves in the foot.

He then goes on to explain in a wonderfully wonky-snarky way that the states denying Medicaid expansion are hurting themselves financially.

Unsurprisingly states that expanded Medicaid are seeing uninsured rates drop dramatically as well as more robust local economy as they are now receiving an “export” cash flow of .5 to 1% of gross state product from the federal government. That will spin out to four or five local jobs in “secondary” industries from each job in healthcare that is being created or sustained by Medicaid expansion. Non-expansion states are seeing cash outflows in increased taxes or lower Medicare Advantage payment rates without any corresponding cash inflow. Their hospitals are still seeing high numbers of uninsured patients as other compensating funds have been cut. They are in trouble.

He also says,

Finally, if Halbig is upheld by the Supreme Assholes, we’ll quickly see half the states that would be screwed do the Gaba two-step of buying a new web domain name to use as a splash page and then getting the summer IT intern redirecting visitors from that splashpage to Healthcare.gov. These states would see no change, while the Confederacy and Great Plains Republican base states would take multi-billion dollar hits in order to save $200 for a domain and a redirect.

this was interesting to me, because a guy at the Washington Examiner predicted something else–

The (currently delayed) requirement for larger businesses to purchase insurance for their workers or pay penalties is triggered in cases in which at least one employee obtains government subsidies to purchase insurance. In states where subsidies cannot be distributed, the penalties won’t apply. Therefore, a ruling against the government in Halbig could set up a scenario in which businesses want to flock to states with federal exchanges as a way of getting around the employer mandate.

I don’t doubt that some states actually would refuse to set up a domain, and would then sit back waiting for all these employers to stampede across their borders on the promise of cut-rate employees. Whether that would actually happen I do not know. I am inclined to think that a business that would go to the expense of relocating just to go cheap on employees is not necessarily the kind of employer who will help build a better future for your state, but that’s me.

There was a time the word liberty actually meant “liberty.” Y’know, as in “the state or condition of people who are able to act and speak freely,” or “freedom from arbitrary or despotic control,” as it says in the dictionary. Between the baggers and the randbots, however, it now seems to refer to maintaining power over others, especially in the sense of being the despot in a despotic state or the privileged class in some feudal system.

For the dim, this new usage of liberty is, of course, a grand bait-and-switch. You might have heard of those guys in Germany several years back who called themselves the “national socialists” even though they hated socialism. Socialism was popular; co-opting the label was a good marketing strategy. Now liberty is the logo being used to package plutocracy, and it has been working pretty well.

Via Annie Laurie, see Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: San Francisco’s tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference is a cesspool by Mark Ames. Reboot is a tech-valley conference sponsored by the Koch boys, and Ames finds it remarkable that one of the keynote speakers is Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

Since coming to Congress, she co-sponsored a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, voted against bills that would protect the LGBT community from hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, against the equal pay bill for women, against federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and she opposes legal abortions in the case of rape or incest (unless the mother’s life is in danger). The Pensacola Christian College grad did, however, co-author a bill “recognizing Christianity’s importance to Western civilization.”

By the old definition of the word, nothing at all in Rodgers’s background says “liberty.” Liberty, to the American founding fathers, was about empowering people to throw off the shackles of despotism, which is “a system of government in which a ruler has unlimited power.” Liberty in the Koch boy’s world, however, is the concentration of power in some dominant class, so that it freely may exploit everything and everyone else for its own enrichment.

Ames, for example, found some pretty nasty things lurking in old back issues of Reason:

And then there’s the uglier, darker side of the Kochs’ libertarianism on display in Reason’s archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela’s release, when they finally dropped it.

In May 1976, just before the Soweto Uprising when South African police slaughtered hundreds of black youths — Reason’s South African correspondent, Marc Swanepoel repeated a common theme in Reason’s pages: libertarianism and the white race are one and the same:

“Let the people who advocate immediate majority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia take note. It would be very nice to have a minimal libertarian government and that is what South African libertarians would like to achieve. But as long as the choice is between being governed by a relatively informed white minority and a Socialist black majority, ‘apartheid’ in South Africa will stay.”

Throughout the 1970s, Reason’s pages dripped with racist justifications for apartheid, on the racial-economic theory that whites stood for free market libertarianism and individual liberty, while blacks were genetically predisposed towards socialism and looting. Therefore, libertarians could not support majority rule, which was merely a trick to destroy libertarianism.

To be fair, it should be noted that many of the commenters accuse Ames of cherry picking and misrepresenting Reason. However …

There are different threads of libertarianism, of course. The Koch boys are mostly updated McKinley-era Gilded Agers. I’ve said before that Ron/Rand Paul libertarianism, or what might be thought of as the populist wing of the movement, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. President Eisenhower’s sending of troops to enforce a school desegregation order pulled all kinds of triggers in people who were not just racists and segregationists. These were people who had grown up listening to Grandpappy expound Gone-with-the-Wind revisionist history of Reconstruction, when Ulysses S. Grant sent troops (including colored regisments!) into the South to force white people to eat radishes (out of the gardens they still owned) or starve. The hardened attitude that “government oppression” is something only the federal government can do, while rooted in old “states’ rights” theory, lives and breathes today mostly because of the post-Brown v. Board of Ed period. This I have seen myself.

And then there’s this (emphasis added):

For Reason’s libertarians and pro-apartheid whites, this was the great tragedy that loomed: the loss of their free-market paradise, their “liberty,” to black majority rule. Majority rule and socialism were one and the same; for Reason, apartheid was the only thing safeguarding “liberty.” The logic was insane; but it was accepted as a matter of faith in the pages of Reason.

It’s important to never forget that libertarianism is, ultimately, anti-democratic and opposed to representative government, which some of us think of as the foundation of liberty. As Erik Kain wrote awhile back:

I don’t want to live in Libertopia. And while libertarians may say they don’t want to live in my welfare state either, at least I can say “Then go vote against it.” In Libertopia no such option would exist. That doesn’t smell like freedom to me.

The Ames article is a Part I, and the Part II promises to be more about whether Koch-style libertarianism and Silicon Valley libertarianism really are that close of a match.

But while I’m on the subject …

I’m sure I complained about it at the time, but one of the most surreal things I ever found in Reason was a 2010 article titled The Truth About Tibetan Buddhism. If one did not know the real truth about Tibetan Buddhism one might think the author, Brendan O’Neill, had a point. Basically, O’Neill went to Lhasa and noted that Tibetans there didn’t seem happy, and assume this was because of Buddhism, not Chinese oppression.

He recounted an interview with a monk without noting that the monk would have been supplied by the local Communist Party. The interview couldn’t have happened otherwise. Indeed, any monk who was not a good Party member was rounded up and shipped out of Lhasa back in 2008. The monk repeats standard Chinese Communist Party revisionism about the role of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, which O’Neill accepts at face value.

He describes the temples in Lhasa as “golden Buddhas surrounded by wads of cash,” without mentioning that the these days the temples essentially are run by the Party as tourist attractions, and the monks are employees who run the temples under Party direction and live on stipends from the Party. (For the real truth about Tibetan Buddhism, see “The Disneyfication of Tibet” by Pearl Sydenstricker.)

For something like this to be in the allegedly anti-Communist Reason is, as I said, surreal. What’s actually going on in Tibet is big-government oppression on steroids, yet the words “China” or “Communist” did not appear in the piece at all. If Tibetans are being oppressed, it is only Buddhism oppressing them, O’Neill says.

Granted, O’Neill is a professional troll who writes really stupid things. But Reason published this. Reason allowed itself to be a conduit of Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Is this because they are so insulated from real oppression they no longer recognize it? Or is it because in their hierarchy of causes, weird Asian religions are worse than a totalitarian government that has been pretty good at making money in recent years, after all …