Dan Drezner and I discuss the war, the financial panic, and my white jeans on BloggingheadsTV. If you've ever wondered what I look like early in the morning and with no makeup . . . well, now you know.
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Bloggingheads link is wrong. FYI.
You know, Matt Yglesias gets called chubby in his comments all the time....
While I think you and Dan Drezner made the decent point that elected officials are elected precisely to make these kind of decisions and take accountability for them, I think the netroots critique surges out of the following frustration:
There is nothing unforeseen about our catastrophic failure in Iraq. Not the unwinnable nature of fighting against a determined anti-occupation insurgency, not the political intractability of Iraq as a single state, not Iranian desire for dominance, or the desire by the Shia for payback. All of these things were evident at the outset to be at least likely to happen, if not certain to happen. They were evident to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of Iraq, which means that they must have been blindingly obvious to those with deep expertise like, say, foreign policy experts at think tanks. So what's being asked for is an explanation of why none of these experts got on TV and raised the point that the chance of the Iraq adventure working was next to nil.
To some extent the foreign policy wonks got pulled into an alternate debate over whether preemptive war is a good framework for geostrategic action, and skipped pointing out that whatever the philosophical and moral merits of the invasion, the idea that this invasion would produce a stable, secular Iraqi state was preposterous. I don't think the current netroots tone of "these people are useless" is helpful for those who care about having a thoughtful foreign policy in the future, but some hard thinking is due about what role foreign policy wonks should play in the face of a set of politicians determined to push an evidently bad policy. And I have to confess that it is pretty infuriating for people to sidestep this question by saying, "well, I know now I was wrong". That's sort of like saying: "you know officer, I know I had 5 drinks and shouldn't have put the keys in the ignition, but it was snowing so hard and I was worried about getting home " - timely contrition. So in spite of disliking Atrios' and MY's tone, the call for serious reflection on how so many knowledgeable people got sucked into an self-evident mess is a fair request.
The guys at Sadly No! are certain to discover that your secret identity is Marie Jon'.
Gee, Megan, you're kinda cute.
I was going to watch, but I refuse to add the RealPlayer plugin. There's just too much spyware, adware, etc built into that #$%&*($% software.
I'll see if I can find a machine that's already infected.
Self-obsessed much?
Bloggingheads is the worst format ever.
Loved your BloggingheadsTV appearance and informative exchanges with Prof. Drezner. Your thoughts on Giuliani were most interesting, especially for an out-of-touch Midwesterner. But if it's ultimately Giuiliani & Clinton, what's a guy to do? Presently, is your concern with Giuliani's authoritarianism so overriding that it should drive us into the arms of Hillary's health care plan?
The Krugman column praised by Miss McArdle in the last ten minutes is a cheap piece of hack work obscuring the underlying theory. Unusually for Mr. Krugman the essential issues are evaded for the sake of rhetoric.
The essential point in the example is that prices (per hour of babysitting) cannot move to clear markets. The theory described is no more than old Keynesian price stickiness. Krugman labors to layer the essential point under invented currencies in order to hide it.