News Nuggets 665

A view from the Cenotes underwater sinkholes on the Yucatan Peninsula.  From National Geographic.

The Drawdown Debate in Afghanistan from Foreign policy Magazine
"Jon Huntsman may have been a no-show at the first 2012 GOP debate, but his comments about the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan made the most news. FP asked three Afghanistan experts to weigh in."

The End of America's Affair with Pakistan (David Ignatius) from RealClearPolitics
"It's always painful to watch a love affair go sour, as the unrealistic expectations and secret betrayals come crashing down in a chorus of recrimination. That's what's happening now between the U.S. and Pakistan, and it has a soap-operatic quality, in Washington and Islamabad alike. "How could they treat us so badly?" is the tone of political debate in both capitals."
Ignatius definitely captures the mood here.

Losing Saleh, Saving Yemen (Mark Katz) from the National Interest
"Don't fall for Saleh's PR campaign. Civil strife and tribal warfare are not inevitabilities of Yemeni regime change."

Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Critic from the New York Times
"A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him."

Underground and in the Closet: The State of the Gay Middle East from Foreign Policy Magazine
"In most Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a criminal offense, though laws are enforced to varying degrees. And the Arab Spring, which many gay-rights organizations hoped would bring greater acceptance, has proved to be an ambivalent blessing. The real gay men and women in Damascus -- and Dubai, Cairo, and Amman -- are facing more serious problems than confused Internet identities."

Does Foreign Policy Matter? (Roger Cohen) from the New York Times
"I see Americans torn. There’s a quasi-isolationist urge. They’re tired of wars. They want jobs. They see problems piling up on the home front that they want fixed ahead of any foreign adventures. At the same time something rankles when they hear talk of American decline and the end of the American century and China rising. They want a president to stand tall for American greatness if only to anaesthetize them against day-to-day hardship. Republican wannabes sense all this."

The commentariate are all over the place concerning the GOP's connection with the real world.  Some of the more interesting columns follow:
How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality (Fareed Zakaria) from Time Magazine
"Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve. Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition."

Republicans Return to Reality (Peggy Noonan) from the Wall Street Journal
"All of this had the sound of the Republican Party inching its way back from 10 years of un-Republican behavior, from a kind of bullying dreaminess about the world: "Everyone wants to be like us." Actually, everyone doesn't. There are days when even we, with our political paralysis, financial collapse and coarse culture, don't want to be like us."

Republicans for Retreat? (Marc A. Thiessen) from the Washington Post
"Romney explained that the lesson he had taken from our experience in Afghanistan is that “our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.” Does this mean that Romney thinks the United States should not have sent troops to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven by removing the Taliban from power in the first place? Even more telling is the fact that this was the extent of the discussion on Afghanistan in the entire two-hour presidential debate."

Outsiders vs. Insiders: The Struggle for the Soul of the GOP (Joe Klein) from Time Magazine
"Romney has the advantages of money, a smart managerial résumé, mainstream conservative economic views ... and, well, he sort of looks like a Republican President should. And yet there is a jittery sense among Republican savants that Romney is a straw man, ready to be toppled, because the party has changed irrevocably."

The GOP's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Debate (Robert Shrum) from The Week
"The Republican Party's slate of presidential candidates put on a remarkably poor show in New Hampshire this week."

Conservative Legal Luminaries Concede The Individual Mandate Is No Unique Threat To Freedom, After All (Simon Lazarus) from the New Republic
"..these unequivocal statements, by two of conservativism’s most eminent legal luminaries, that the ACA individual mandate is not a unique threat to Americans’ liberty after all, surely drain much of the juice from opponents’ legal case, and, ultimately, from their political case as well."
Sadly, I have concluded that the "constitutionality" of the Health Care legislation will ultimately hinge on partisan politics as it has increasingly come to be expressed in the judiciary.  More and more, legal arguments are simply tools to reach partisan ends.  Long-established, carefully argued legal precedent will have surprisingly little relevance.The only question now is the extent to which this broadly observable condition will have reached into the mind of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  

Those Manly Men of Yore (Sara Lipton) from the New York Times
"The conventional answer is that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of man, no matter how intelligent, doesn’t think at all; he just acts. ... This conception of masculinity is relatively new, however. For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery."

No Escaping the Obvious: Weiner Had to Go (Eugene Robinson) from the Washington Post
"For all his dazzling smarts, for all his New York savvy, Weiner was both ignorant and naive about the Internet. There are certain things about the cyberworld, and about human nature, that anyone tempted to make a hobby of “sexting” really ought to know."