Retreading

Fred Kaplan, whose work I seldom appreciate, has got me here. He deconstructs the actual argument of the  Truscott piece I celebrated yesterday, about Petraeus, by a close reading and a simple inquiry: what is Truscott actually saying, rather than what's the emoticon equivalent of his tone?

I must confess that Kaplan seems to have nailed it, in his response. He still manages a careful critique of the war and its masters, but he shows that Petraeus wasn't really all that culpable, as far as Iraq is concerned.

I think there is FOP on my shoe.

General Fop-traeus

In today's NYT, this boffo piece that tells the truth our Serious People in D.C. would rather not admit about America's favorite philanderer, and, by extension, about our military and its efforts generally.

Didja ever wonder what the 30 and 40 year-old blondes with the hard bodies see in all those 60-something politicians and generals with expensive haircuts? It's the power, baby.

Take it from a sixty-something. I don't think it's my haircut.

Prognostications, After the Election

1.        Obama will preside over a gradually expanding economy with prosperity measurably improved by the end of his administration (although still shy of full employment). The same would have been true had Romney won. Presidents can influence the general state of the economy only by direct intervention, and then only at the margins. Bush did so, with his tax cuts and resulting deficits; Obama did so, with the stimulus bill and the auto bailout (which won him this election). Bush was much more influential in this regard than Obama, but in the long run this will have seriously damaged Bush’s reputation, and Obama’s influence will have enhanced his reputation.

2.       Taxes will rise next year.  The Republicans in the House will scream bloody murder, and their concern for the deficit will be forgotten. But to prevent taxes from rising, they will actually have to engage in negotiation, and they don’t know how.

3.       The Senate would be in Republican hands were it not for the Tea Party. This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, or of the “useful idiots” wreaking havoc against their masters.

4.       Obamacare will largely be forgotten within a year. It’s over, as an issue.

5.       Wall Street will stop (and soon) whining that the President looked funny at them, and that the resulting lack of business confidence is what is killing jobs and the recovery. If they don’t, truly punitive tax increases on them will be the result.

6.       The phrase “job-killing” will be retired. No one believes it, really.

7.       Within 5 years, gay marriage and legal marijuana will be over, as issues, because they will have become commonplace in an increasingly large part of the country.

8.       The Catholic Church will retreat, gradually, from its strident involvement in politics. Its opposition to Obama (he carried 52% of the Catholic vote) having failed, they will start to worry about more pressing concerns, like the revolt of the nuns, the jailing of bishops, and the accelerating departure of the faithful from the Church.

9.       The Republican Party will be embroiled, for the next several months, in fierce recriminations, on one hand, and soul-searching, on the other. They will face the demographic facts that they have worked so hard to ignore, and will either (1) cast out the loonies (who will form their own fringe party) or (2) will become a permanent minority, able to influence local and some state politics in small rural states but unable to compete nationally.

10.   Rubio and Christie qualify as potential national forces, but few others in the GOP are serious contenders (certainly not Ryan). However, Rubio and Christie will have to repudiate the Taliban element in the party if they are to appeal broadly enough to succeed.

11.   Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most popular person on the national stage (who woulda thought?) will be a serious contender for the 2016 Democratic nomination, with the enthusiastic backing of Barack Obama. Susan Rice will be nominated to replace Hillary at State, but the Repubs in Congress will prevent her from taking that office; and the Republicans will regret this.

12.   Although we have elected a center-right president (William Saletan called Obama a Republican president), the country is moving slowly leftward. This is not because anyone is changing his mind, but because the old white guys are shrinking in number.

13.   The Republicans will get serious about immigration reform, now that demagoguery on this issue has cost them their chance (which was never very good) to reverse Obamacare and Dodd-Frank –halfhearted though both those measures may have been.

14.   If Obama replaces Tim Geithner with Erskine Bowles, he will face a revolt in his own party, and lose his opportunity to resurrect the “Grand Bargain” with Boehner.

15.   Obama, having learned his lesson, will be disinclined to play nice with the Republicans in the House; as he starts calling them out on their duplicity, they will either (a) flounder and end up replacing the “Young Guns” with more reasonable leaders, or (b) lose their majority in 2014.

16.   My neighborhood will have four more years of sudden and unexpected closings of arterial streets.

17.   A slow but increasing movement to reform the electoral college will begin to form; it will go nowhere, but only after a long period of controversy, because reforming the Electoral College would call into question the premise on which the US Senate is based.

18.   Harry Reid should do away with the current filibuster system, as he should have done at the beginning of the last Congress, and which he could accomplish in the first session of 2013. But he won’t.

19.   OK, this one’s just an opinion: The intelligence of the American electorate (and therefore of the American public generally) may be abysmal (witness all those people on the call-in radio shows this morning complaining about how the networks awarded some state or another to Obama (or to Romney) when only a fraction of the votes had been counted). But the dumbing-down has been encouraged by people at the top who know better but who encourage know-nothingism because it suits their personal and political ambitions.