But where was that in 2009?

Missed opportunities under the bridge, I guess. Obama squared every circle and appears 20 times the hominid as any of his rivals. Absent any vicious deus ex machina that destroys the economy, Obama will win. Perhaps the Conservatron implosion will be complete enough to give him another congressional majority……

The problem with the NYT so often is that they won’t call it like they see it.

The whole meme that the GOP establishment badly wants to beat Obama is true. They want to beat him up. They don’t want to win more than they want to beat him. If they wanted to win, a guy like Romney or Huntsman would have been carrying big majorities in the polls leading up to the primaries. Instead, the latest candidate to throw the biggest bombs has surged into the lead each time. Now that the alternatives are milquetoast-might-win Romney and the Attack Newt, who do you think they prefer?

They want red meat. They want anger. And they want these things more than they want to win.

This is such a basic, simple observation about the GOP electorate right now that the presumed paper of record is scared to make because it might get called “biased” that it is continuing to render itself irrelevant.

They even go to the lengths of feigning confusion over South Carolina voters thinking Newt is “electable.” They don’t mean “everyone will like him.” They mean “he will bring holy vengeance upon Obama.” Why is this so hard for the so called liberal media to understand? Why are they so wedded to portraying angry voters as angels? Why are the minority of people who live in empty spaces considered “real Americans” and the rest of us who live among our fellow citizens not?

It seems pretty undeniable to me that at this point, the biggest winner of tonight’s GOP primary in South Carolina was Barack Obama. Mitt Romney seemed very vulnerable this week on issues that will matter to voters in the general election—issues that Mitt would have to win on to convince the electorate to throw Obama out, specifically, the economy. Any notion that Obama can be attacked on defense issues simply ignores one thing: Osama bin Laden. (Also, for the 5-10% who are unapproving of Obama at the moment from the left, he gets to say we’re out of iraq.)

It still seems to me that Romney will be the nominee, but after a bloody battle that only mires him deeper in accusations of being a bigwig insiderish “vulture capitalist” (thank you, Governor Perry) because in the end, it will probably be money and the GOP establishment that help him pull this off. And those resentments can be used by Democrats to either flip voters or keep them home. And it will cost him money to do so.

Of course, if Gingrich is the nominee, we can start talking about “50 state strategies.”

In the classic 1956 work When Prophecy Fails, social psychologists study a reclusive UFO cult in Chicago. When its doomsday prophecy fails to come true, the group suddenly seeks publicity and converts. The study is about cognitive dissonance and it leads you to adopt a seemingly paradoxical conclusion about human behavior: the less a group believes in something the more they proselytize. The theory is that people need a new group of believers either to comfort them in their loss, or, perhaps, to give social proof to refute their doubts.

So, when a candidate attracts a group of mostly young, mostly secular, and mostly white and male people into a years’ long affair, you start to wonder. The reason shouldn’t be that surprising. Whatever else it may be, our public schools teach an ideological history, especially of America. American history is seen as a clash of ideals. Sure, this is partly true, but this is mostly left unexamined. Did these ideals deliver on their promises? Were there ulterior motives for preaching them? This kind of critical thinking is not well presented.

So, your typical butthurt dweller type left without a regular religion adopts a kind of worship of the free market, which promises its followers relief from the unfair oppression of social interactions where their “intelligence” isn’t rewarded with friends, sex, or followers. If only society would break down to this level, a messianic age of no wars, a strong economy, and a recognition of the Galts of this country would dawn.

And of course today, their prophet is Ron Paul. The first dissonance you have to deal with is that Paul is a Republican. This does not fit with the “rules don’t apply to me” speeding-in-a-school-zone and doing-coke-in-the-privacy-of-my-own-home ethos of the typical young Jedi libertarian. But they just decide he’s a maverick, even if he does vote for John Boehner for Speaker.

For the most part, as long as Paul remains a fringe candidate, this is just fine. They can exchange apropos quotes and dream about the future where reading comic books will get you all the chicks in technoutopia.

But once Paul began to rise in the polls, the media turned its gaze on his record. The Prophet was pretty quickly revealed to be a false one, and this was a critical moment. If you remain true to the religion of free markets and “liberty,” how could you support this man, who, ended up being a standard Republican after all, just of the 1920s type? With a nasty touch of Bircher and white supremacist too! Race and sexuality aren’t supposed to play into the perfect Logos of the Free Market!

Those who believed in the religion more than the Prophet would abandon him on this evidence, but that wasn’t to be with most. Instead, attacks on the character of the reporters, the witnesses, and other outright denials ensued. Articles started pouring forth on how and why Paul will win the election, why he is the best candidate in the modern era (best as in campaigner, not as in best ideas) despite the fact that Mitt Romney has just about sewn the GOP nomination up as of the date that article was written.

It’s a painful thing to believe in something so much and to see it as a salve for the pain of your life and times to break down as a lie. But, for those who seem to think “logic” and “intelligence” should play such a great role in things, they are utterly human after all and subject to the same psychological quirks as the rest of us.

Ron Paul will be forgotten, but I doubt his psuedo-religion of libertarian delusion is going away any time soon, partly because it will never been falsifiable in its “pure” state, but partly because it’s conclusions have been falsified over and over again, giving even more fervor to its believers.

Because Private Jones from Flint, Michigan’s life isn’t worth shit and the elites, even of enemy societies, are sacred and protected by “International law” the media wags its fingers at the apparent assassinations by foreign governments of Iranian nuclear officials. They act like there is some sort of alternative where nothing happens.

The left is somewhat correct to be suspicious of another Middle Eastern war, but they should consider whether the need to stop nuclear proliferation isn’t more important. The right is incorrect to want to invade Iran and try and remake its government from without the way we did in Iraq. So where does this leave us?

With sanctions, diplomacy, and covert operations being a fairly good alternative.

But, sure enough, folks like Juan Cole are calling it “terrorism,” mostly to scold the right for calling everything terrorism, not because I think he believes it and MJ Rosenberg is calling it “an act of war,” and today’s NYT piece has experts saying that such acts violate international law.

That’s all nice in theory; the reality is that the alternative, whatever it should be, is a full-scale war, where the soldiers and marines can get “assassinated” at every turn. But that kind of killing doesn’t violate “international law” so it’s ok.

If you stop and think: a well placed bomb might have killed Saddam Hussein and ended the Iraq war before it began. And many of these folks were left to face their arguments as reductiones ad absurdum when they tried to argue the killing of Usama bin Laden was against “international law.”

If computer viruses, explosions at military compounds, and the targeted killing of nuclear scientists—not exactly a work-a-day Tehranian—can get the job done, then let it be so.

I think some of these scholars and journalists think that some kind of world order preserved by these rules helps people and they are advancing their points in good faith. But they have apparently stopped asking why these laws exist in the first place and what function they are meant to serve. If an orderly, rules based conduct of wars like that in Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands are just fine and this isn’t, then something is wrong.

We now have a stronger basis for invading Iran than Iraq than now. Of course, we don’t have a basis for regime change there, necessarily. We can just go wipe out these bases.

I wondered why, if we were fighting the war on terror, why we weren’t more interested in Iran. (I also argued against lowering interest rates which would just inflate another bubble.) Somehow, my stupid ideas never got heard by anyone and we fought a stupid war and killed the middle class.

Five years ago, I put this into the context of nuclear proliferation. And, as an aside, I also argued contra Rachel Maddow that Obama is not adopting the “Bush Doctrine” because the Bush Doctrine is not what it says it is. The real Bush Doctrine is an ill-conceived war of choice to line the pockets of cronies. The purported Bush Doctrine of preemptive war is not really all that controversial if coupled with an imminent threat, but Bush fraudulently convinced us of an imminent threat which didn’t exist.

The IAEA is telling us loud and clear that the Iranians are enriching Uranium beyond the point of peaceful uses. The EU is also imposing sanctions on them. There is no Hans Blix telling us he can’t find anything there. There’s stuff there.

The reason Iran can’t have the bomb isn’t that I don’t want smelly olive skinned Muslims to have nukes. I’m pretty sure that, coupled with lost property by big corps, is why the Republicans want to attack them, but it has nothing to do with me.

I’m worried about nuclear proliferation. Even if Iran only had a few weapons, it would trigger proliferation in the world’s most conflict-ridden area, probably forcing the Saudis, Turks, and Egyptians (at least) into producing nuclear weapons, and would force the Israelis to increase their arsenal, so too with India and Pakistan.

This is not good.

It’s true that we lived with the Soviets pointing thousands at us for decades—but how many different times do you think the Cold War could have been gone through that cleanly? There were times where only sheer luck prevented a nuclear exchange. Why is that proof of anything?

So, Michael Moore is now calling on the New York Times not to “lie us into another war.” And I agree, they should not. I agree that the facts must be solid, the international consensus must be strong, and there must be no occupation. Diplomacy must run its course, but there can be no nuclear Iran.

Invading Iraq and continuing the occupation in Afghanistan long beyond its freshness date have seriously impacted our ability to pull this kind of thing off both operationally, financially, and politically.

The tale of the boy who cried wolf is why you do permanent damage to a country’s security when you lie it into a war. When an entire generation cannot remember a major war that didn’t have bullshit as its basis, how do you fight the war that is real?

And I certainly don’t think nuclear proliferation is about oil, either. We all think terrorism is a problem, or the Israel/Palestine problem, or whatever. But we won’t think that when there’s a new nuclear cold war because the obvious facts are that since 1945, humanity has had the power to destroy itself in a fiery nightmare and we’ve walked on the knife edge too many times in that regard.

There’s so much to say about the Republican field that it really boils down to this: it’s wide open. The primaries both have a way of quickly snapping into focus and confounding prognosticators.

Romney, while not looking inevitable, still looks like the most likely to win. But while many have written about electability, one factor that is coming into play is the President’s rising popularity. The more likely Obama’s reelection seems, the more likely I believe many voters are to vote their ideological preference instead of voting tactically. Romney is the ideological preference of almost no GOP primary voters. He has never been able to get above the roughly 30% no matter what insane clown was the alternative flavor of the minute.

Would a brokered convention be in the cards? Anything is possible. But right now it looks like an unenthusiastic GOP base won’t turn out enough to put Romney over the top in the fall and Obama will be reelected.

Protests are absolutely pointless in America. In fact, they may be counterproductive.

1. The theory behind the modern mass movement is that, basically, it wins by its size. In a democracy, in theory, this should win. But no mass movement in a very long time has done anything to change anything without the use of television or other media, and this is more or less because in a country this size, this diverse, the millions of people required to do anything are virtually impossible to assemble without the use of media. And even then, you aren’t really assembling a mass at all. You are trying to get voters to vote a certain way.

In fact, this is a good thing. This means the vast majority of people do not actually feel, regardless of what they say, that the system is really broken. If they did not feel this way, these movements would be bigger because fewer people would believe their grievances could be redressed through the system, or, by voting.

2. The two parties are basically each a food with a complex flavor that the electorate knows well. Historical events call us to recall these flavors a certain way. And depending on whether what’s on people’s minds at the time, they may lean toward one flavor or another. But the parties know they have to be able to build a winning coalition, so they can only keep a combination of flavors that’s likely to win, very rarely completely lose that flavor (or issue) to the other side. A great confluence of events, more or less luck, can heavily favor one or the other. This changes over time, but it’s part of how our two-party system works.

Right now, a winning electoral coalition can be assembled out of an awful lot of different pieces, but there are only two alternatives, and I don’t think they are the only two.

Democrats have limited themselves over the years by making a few key decisions: (1) ceasing to be the labor party (having a labor wing, but also a corporate one); (2) emphasizing social progress as a key domestic and national theme over economic issues; (3) a further alienation from labor by the transition of business interests from alignment with protectionism to alignment with free trade; and, (4) a disconnect from non-elites through a preference for technocratic government over ideal-driven government, including in defense policy.

This is why there is no populist moment against Wall Street.

The voters don’t know the flavor of Democrats on the economy because they lost their strong identification as the labor party, they think Democrats care more about identity politics more than preserving the middle class partially as a result of that being true, partially as a result of no one understanding how they help John Q. Public if they’re not for the unions and protectionism or for killing terrorists all the time and so on. Stipulating to exhaust monetary policy and then provide a fiscal stimulus means jack shit to most people. Even people who understand why that should, in theory, help the economy have really no goddamn idea what it really means will happen to them in six months or a year.

3. So even if you could assemble a giant mass movement against Wall Street, what would it coalesce around? The President? The Republicans? Some bizzaro-Tea Party faction of Congressional Democrats? There’s just no grain of sand in that oyster. No pearl will come out of it.

But you can’t assemble a mass movement by street protests. The Tea Party was not a spontaneous group of people yelling on TV or at town halls. It was a well coordinated, well funded operation from the start. It was able to create a critical mass of voters through media, not through any direct mass movement. And it won the 2010 election.

What would a mass movement in America look like? Maybe something like the civil rights movement in the 1960s in the south. For the most part, in the rest of the country, the civil rights movement came about through TV. There are many places that the civil rights movement did not touch except through broadcast.

For better or worse, we live through media in this country in 2011. And that requires messaging (which requires ideals) way more than it requires a feeling of membership in a large group or the ability to show up.

So unless occupying Wall Street is likely either to excite a revolutionary mass movement, it has to become part of the formula for a winning electoral coalition. I just don’t believe that people who by definition believe the system is not worthy of a revolution, and so will express themselves politically by voting, are moved by a mere gathering at all. If the medium is the message, and an inchoate mass of people foaming at the mouth is your medium. your message is an inchoate mass too.

It literally, actually, truly means nothing.

Let me explain. What’s centrist? If you simply define yourself as being halfway between Republicans and Democrats, then one party only needs to become more ideologically polar to move you. If it means compromising, then I don’t understand how Obama doesn’t work for you. But say you want to borrow a few ideas from each side. Then it’s ridiculous.

You could have (literally, mathematically) millions of possible centrisms by mixing just a few positions from each side that have no positions in common. You could be right wing on terrorism, liberal on progressive taxation, believe in global warming, and be anti-abortion. Or any combination of those and you would have a definitive issue that put you at odds with any other “theoretical” centrist party.

That is why Tom Friedman and Matt Miller are full of shit, as Ezra points out in a slightly different way. He more or less says Obama already is the compromise candidate. He’s very right. The fact that a number of people are confused by the moustache of globalism into thinking Obama is left wing shows the truth of my first contention—that radicalization by one party undermines the ability to be “centrist” in a “purple state” way.

Somehow I think some people want an Obama administration with a white face. Some people want an Obama administration with a spine. Finally, and I think this is most Americans who have soured on the President, are just sick and tired of this era in our history and, for right or wrong, Obama is associated with it.

I now believe the conventional “two-state” model for Palestine is not only dead, but an abused corpse. Look at a map of the West Bank and Israel. Then notice Gaza discontinuously off to the west. Even under the best of circumstances, with some kind of Berlin-access-type corridor between Gaza and the Hebron area, Israeli cooperation would be required if the two areas are to be part of one state.

What makes it worse is that the West Bank is not nearly as contiguous as it appears, either. Even if you use the security fence as a starting point, this still leaves the even more patchwork problem of the greater Jerusalem area.

But, as the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If it were as simple as declaring a Palestinian state, there would not be much of a problem. Yet this doctrine of “the 1967 borders with agreed upon swaps” is only laying out the territorial arrangement. The Palestinian state as already imagined in most people’s minds would be fairly unconventional.

For one thing, there will be all sorts of security guarantees. Palestine won’t have an army. So, I suppose, Israel has to defend it against external threats? I’m sure all of these things are spelled out in different formulas in different proposals, but they are, to me, more or less nonsense.

From the Israeli perspective, they’re buying a pig in a poke. Two states, even if it became real, is no “solution” any more than the lowering of the French flag in Nigeria “solved” the problem of colonialism, the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the US “solved” the race problem here (or the legacy of slavery) and so on. People at a loss to explain the plight of Africa these days tend to blame colonialism’s legacy—and we’re getting close to 50 years since that era ended. Yet most African states have a fighting chance that Palestine lacks in their natural resources. I don’t think selling faux shards of the true cross to Christian tourists is a natural resource. Tourism will only work if the place isn’t a dump and if its revenues can be fairly distributed. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that over a century of preaching hate against Zionists will simply disappear in the afterglow of such an agreement. It won’t make Israel safe. It may not harm its interests, but this “solution” will at best give some Muslim majority countries breathing room in diplomacy and not much else. It won’t restore the comity of the Golden Age in Cordoba.

But that doesn’t matter much to Palestinians, some of whom live in diaspora and some of whom live in a bizarre quasi-state. They also suffer under divided leadership one branch of whom is a masturbatory and corrupt committee leaching funds from other Arab states… or a terrorist organization.

A further problem is the creation of a Palestinian state at all. Arguably, many Arab countries only have the exterior trappings of a state, but actually lack the power to function as such. For better or worse, the fragility of these governments was shown over the course of this past year. Most of these governments simply lack the legitimacy, the ability to provide for the rule of law, or the power to carry out the decisions of the government throughout huge portions of their territory. This is actually a problem world-wide. Most Arab states were created out of whole cloth out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, or out of other Imperial powers in the case of the Maghreb countries. We think of many of these countries as crushing dictatorships. Certainly, the places people have in mind are places where western notions of freedom are limited. Rule can be arbitrary, but it is actually quite finite. This, again, was shown in stark relief over the course of this year.

I doubt that the Israel-Palestine dispute admits of any solution outside of a broader solution to the dreadful condition of governments in the Arab world at large. But it is theoretically possible that a legitimate and effective government in Palestine that could deliver the rule of law could come about on its own. But the PA is nowhere close. Any agreement ultimately is only as good as the de facto existence of both parties as effective states.

I think a creative constitution is called for. One that sees a slightly different model of state and sovereignty—one which is currently based on territory, population, and so on. I’m not entirely clear, first of all, why Gaza can’t be one independent state and Palestine another—they’ve been on a divergent path for 5 years now.

Two models that come to mind are that of the co-principality of Andorra and the former British dominions. In a modified version of the former, the Palestinian state(s) could elect a parliament whose prime minister would be the head of government, and which would exercise normal functions of sovereignty. A designee of Israel and another body (the UN, the Arab League, whoever) could serve as co-presidents, who would have the power to veto certain laws affecting certain issues, such as foreign relations and security.

Another model is the British Dominion model. Marketing this idea might be hard for historical reasons, but the basic framework can be called whatever. In this model, Palestine is granted home rule, and even conducts foreign relations on its own, but certain constitutional functions are exercised by a Governor-General, leaving technical “sovereignty” with the “sovereign,” here, as it is now, Israel. This would simplify a number of issues where the two have to cooperate without creating a multiplicity of entities or requiring a treaty every time the road between Gaza and Hebron needs to be repaved.

With a clever conflict of laws provision embedded in it, the latter model could even work to provide Palestinian rule over whatever exclaves may be agreed to, or even to persons outside the territory. (For example, two Palestinian citizens involved in a dispute over an incident that occurred in one of their houses in Israeli land could seek to have their disputes resolved in a Palestinian court, could vote for the Palestinian parliament but would not be entitled to do so if they resided outside of Mandatory Palestine—this would essentially allow for an approximation of a binational state without undermining the Jewish majority within Israel—you might even be able to get a similar arrangements for Israelis living in settlements that do not get included within Israel’s borders.)

These are just a couple of thoughts that sprung to my mind while thinking about the unlikely resolution of this matter any time soon while thinking about some of the anomalies in comparative law.

Whether or not any of this comes to pass doesn’t matter. But what does matter, I think, is that if there is to be any edifying progress (even if not a solution) it will require new and different ways of thinking about states so that such coinages as “two-state solution” will ultimately be misnomers.

It might even show the way to a broader solution to some kind of stability to the broader and many-peopled Arab world.