Obsidian Wings on the pitfalls of basing your grand strategy for spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Muslim world on an appeal to morality (when your base doesn’t seem to like muslims very much)

However, there are underlying contradictions that limit the effectiveness of using this facade of idealism and, in the end, the rhetoric itself can serve to box-in its purveyors and/or accentuate the hypocrisy. Take, for example, the pervasive anti-Muslim bigotry amongst the population that Bush draws his support from - a demographic reality that co-exists, uncomfortably, with the fact that Bush’s policies are sold, at least publicly, on the basis of bestowing the gifts of freedom and democracy on various Muslim nations at great cost to the American people.

Along these lines, Neoconservatives seem to have a tough time deciding if Muslims are uncivilized brutes, congenitally incapable of embracing democracy, or if, to the contrary, they are so ready for American-style governance that simply conducting airstrikes on Muslim nations will cause pro-American democracy to spring up organically like shoots through bomb-tilled soil.

Obsidian Wings on the pitfalls of basing your grand strategy for spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Muslim world on an appeal to morality (when your base doesn’t seem to like muslims very much)

However, there are underlying contradictions that limit the effectiveness of using this facade of idealism and, in the end, the rhetoric itself can serve to box-in its purveyors and/or accentuate the hypocrisy. Take, for example, the pervasive anti-Muslim bigotry amongst the population that Bush draws his support from - a demographic reality that co-exists, uncomfortably, with the fact that Bush’s policies are sold, at least publicly, on the basis of bestowing the gifts of freedom and democracy on various Muslim nations at great cost to the American people.

Along these lines, Neoconservatives seem to have a tough time deciding if Muslims are uncivilized brutes, congenitally incapable of embracing democracy, or if, to the contrary, they are so ready for American-style governance that simply conducting airstrikes on Muslim nations will cause pro-American democracy to spring up organically like shoots through bomb-tilled soil.

You know what would be a nice idea for a Wordpress plugin…

As a blogger, I want to reduce the number of clicks it takes to quote and cite an article so that I can blog more efficiently.

Here’s how it might work:

1. I am reading a New York Times article that I want to quote.
2. I highlight a section of the text.
3. I alt-tab over to my Write Post window
4. I hit alt-shift-Q (or whatever) and WordPress shows a little dialog allowing me to choose from among my open browser tabs (extra credit for guessing that I want the one with a block of text selected)
5. I type a little preamble, say “Paul Krugman is on form today”
6. And WordPress creates a post like this:

Paul Krugman is on form today.

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place.

Krugman is on form today

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years. Now that the “Bush boom,” such as it was, is over, we can see that it achieved a dismal distinction: for the first time on record, an economic expansion failed to raise most Americans’ incomes above their previous peak.