Long day’s blogging into evening – pre-game festivities

Am about to disappear into Lakerdom – either a further descent into tedious misery, a temporary revival on the way to even deeper misery, or the Turning Point we’ve been waiting for and falsely identifying this whole desperately non-compelling season long.  (I’m now rooting for Phil to cap off his career by having the first NBA team to come back from 0-3 in a seven-game series, and, fitting my earlier definition of true basketball supremacy Laker-style, having them do it three times in a row.)

But some things I noticed:

p m carpenter’s commentary: To save the system: Sarah Palin (or some such creature)

As usual, PM Carpenter thinks a much-thought thought thoughtfully and elegantly (very rarely does anyone achieve much more than that, if you think thoughtfully about it):

It would seem that what the GOP needs most — and thus the health of the two-party system — is a near-lethal dose of its own medicine. Allow the GOP base precisely what it wants, let it heap more lunacy on lunacies, let it choke down a 50-0 state loss, let it approach its nihilistic deathwish, let it glory momentarily in an ideological mushroom cloud before concluding that a return to Reason and its ejection of lunatics just might work a trifle better.

A Romney, Pawlenty, Daniels or Huntsman nomination will only postpone the inevitable and necessary. What the GOP needs, what will reboot the integrity of the two-party system, what will reclarify voters’ fundamental choice between genuine conservatism and genuine liberalism, is nothing less than a thunderingly cathartic, pseudoconservative blowout: a Palin-or-some-such presidential nomination.

Eunomia » Obama the Hegemonist

In the process of sweeping some hogwash from Reuel Marc Gerecht to wherever hogwash goes, Daniel Larison explains why conservative attacks on the Kenyan Alinskyist Socialite tend all to be lame in the same way, and were so even before the OBL hit:

All of this comes back to Gerecht’s most easily falsifiable claim:

President Obama has certainly seemed sincere, if not Kennedyesque, in his intent to save the rebels in the eastern half of the country from the depredations of the most Orwellian strongman in the Middle East. But his sincerity rests in constant tension with the core tenet of a developing Obama Doctrine: American hegemony is not a good thing, either for the United States or for the world [bold mine-DL].

This is painfully wrong. There is no developing Obama Doctrine, and it has no core tenets, but if one wanted to describe a core belief of Obama about foreign policy this would not be it. Obama doesn’t believe “American hegemony is not a good thing, either for the United States or for the world.” It would be welcome and shocking news if he did believe that, because he has never once shown the slightest hint that he does.

This is why every Republican hegemonist attack on Obama lacks credibility, and why it is going to be so difficult for any of the candidates making these attacks to land any solid blows. They keep mocking him as if he weren’t one of them, but he is. Perhaps they think Obama is giving hegemonism a bad name, or perhaps it is mainly an expression of partisanship, but whatever the reason it helps to explain why hegemonists are desperate to describe Obama’s foreign policy as anything else than what it is, namely a largely hawkish center-left expression of the same hegemonism to which they subscribe. In this case, Gerecht would have us believe that this is the product of a union of the elder Bush and Fanon. There have been some similarities to the elder Bush in the past two years, but on the whole Obama really is much more aligned with hawkish neoliberals within the liberal internationalist tradition.

zombie contentions – Like I said, we’re no angels

Thanks for the additional thoughts, am thinking ’em over.

Why is Pawlenty On Stage With These Crazy People? | FrumForum

Mildly entertaining observations and recounting from the FrumForum’s unfortunate correspondents.  PM Carpenter’s take on the Evening of Thrills is more to the point.

The Mindset Of Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

Andrew Sullivan goes off – maybe a touch further than necessary – on the tactics used to squelch dissent against Israeli policy among American Jews.

Blog – Laura Novak The Immoral Minority: Just another visual reminder of how preposterous Sarah Palin’s pregnancy story truly is. Updated!

Rebirth of the other Birtherism?

xpostfactoid: A warning about Pakistan

Just how bad off and dangerous is Pakistan?  Andrew Sprung collects three different, worrying to devastating takes on the subject.

Mashaal: Bin Laden assassination an ‘atrocity’ – Israel News, Ynetnews

Just in case you thought Haniyeh’s blunder was a one-off – though these comments smell a little bit like possibly taken out of context.

Jerome Slater: On the US and Israel: Yet More Incompetence and/or Deceit from Ethan Bronner and the New York Times

Don’t tell Jerry Slater about that atrocity thing.

GoodShit » “Esquire’s 70 Greatest Sentences”

An old list, but still some great fun stuff, including that thing about the weird frog.

Yglesias » The Conservative Recovery Continues

Yglesias tries to make sense of the job numbers.

10 comments on “Long day’s blogging into evening – pre-game festivities

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  1. rooting for Phil to cap off his career by having the first NBA team to come back from 0-3 in a seven-game series

    would be perfect as Jackson has often put out his theory that the fourth game in a seven series is the pivotal one.
    would add some weight to a dubious claim.

  2. Actually the reverse is probably true, Nixon, the sensible candidate, by
    these lights in 1968, set back the cause of conservatism for a long time, and I don’t mean the penny ante little schemes of Liddy and Co, that give liberals the vapours, I mean the truly odious ‘wage and price controls’ the subsequent pump priming idiocy of Arthur Burns, the rush
    to put a tourniquet on our energy supplies,

  3. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. Despite Watergate, the Rs held the presidency for 20 out of 24 years from ’68 to ’92, and by the time they were done the needle in the country had been moved from definitively left of center to right. I wouldn’t pin it all on the Goldwater blowout, but others have come close to doing so, including conservative historian Steven Hayward, who declared the ’64 election the victory that the Democratic Party never recovered from.

    Different times now, of course. Carpenter’s criticism of the current conservative movement is much more fundamental than a few policy differences.

  4. Imagine if the Lakers really do win the next 4. You’ll have proof that you came up with the idea and then it happened. That would be too cool. NostracLeodus.

  5. Don’t know if you get Vescey out in the OtherWorld.

    This might very well have been the final live look at their homeys . . . and Jackson. You’d think some fan appreciation might be in order? In spite of the lousy result, you’d think the crowd, all of it, would’ve stayed to the end and applauded the Lakers long and loud for what they’ve accomplished over the last four seasons.

    It’s time to switch franchises and move back to Minneapolis . . . give L.A. fans what they deserve, a heavy, prolonged dose of the Timberwolves.

  6. @ fuster:
    Where’s that from? Doesn’t show up on a net-search.

    Vescey is partly right. The decadence of Laker nation and the twilight of the Laker gods are all part of the same decline. I think I’ll wait to write more extensively on the fall of the dynasty until they’ve finally handed the imperial purple over to the barbarians.

  7. @ fuster:
    I think the appreciation will come. After the disappointment, Lakers fans will take stock and be more positive. They’re a pretty positive community as sports communities go and that will come back. It’s just been painful to watch the decline. When the Lakers weren’t great, the Lakers fans were pretty good at supporting mediocrity actually, and who better to understand and appreciate decadence than Hollywooders? Sunset Blvd comes to mind.

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  1. […] weird frog pointed to observations from Peter Vescey written prior to yesterday’s destined finish to the least watchable season of Laker […]

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