OMG Policy !! vol. 1 made its debut this weekend. Early demos encouraging. Those who missed the launch will get other lulz ahead.
Full length Justin Bieber Keynote below . . .
The Imperial City And The World
OMG Policy !! vol. 1 made its debut this weekend. Early demos encouraging. Those who missed the launch will get other lulz ahead.
Full length Justin Bieber Keynote below . . .
What to say, what to say? How odd to see the NY Times write up McCain and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Not that McCain isn’t riding IRI as a presidential platform. When he arrived at IRI and began his purge many of us at the time believed that was the whole point. A signal about his ambitions.
Another strobe light flashing his leaning over car windows working the posh but more discrete street corners of Vice City. Great mental imagery. And on top Charlie Black et al.
The netroots focused a while ago on his use of IRI for ‘soft’ participation in the Imperial City money machine. A universe away from blatant influence peddling or coercive punishment ala the Hammer. But in politics, you know what they say, when you are explaining you are losing.
Still, festooning medals on the corporate dime? Informational discourse only in the most debased QVC-esque universe. Which is what D.C. is. *Our* kvetch is the NYT ignores or obscures the reality of our political economy. Lobbying and suborning virginal governance via influence are not so simple. Or always the same.
The Times’ justified reply? ‘Hey, Stiftung, it’s not our job to make every article a precis for political science 405.’ So let’s skip all that. And just drill down to the fun stuff.
Picking up on the earlier comment thread re T.P.M.B (always forget that ‘M’)’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” banalities, tonight we offer instead a concise, substantive rumination by Douglas Macgregor in AFJ.
MacGregor’s a retired Army colonel, thorn in the side of the Army’s status quo and a decorated Persian Gulf War combat veteran. Many of you probably know he’s put out several books on modern warfare and military reform. That he is at the Straus[sic] Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. is purely coincidental.
Washington’s war
. . .
The U.S. needs a new national military strategy, a strategy designed to enhance America’s role as the world’s engine of prosperity, making the American way of life attractive, not threatening, to others. However, for a new, more effective national military strategy to emerge that can rationalize the structure and content of the armed forces for operations in the aftermath of Iraq, both policymakers and the flag officers who command our forces must reorient their thinking to a strategy that exalts economy of force in expeditionary operations and rejects plans to optimize the Army and Marine Corps for any more misguided occupations.
This is a strategy that deliberately limits the commitment of U.S. military resources to attainable goals and objectives consistent with U.S. strategic interests and avoids the kind of open-ended ideological warfare that nearly destroyed Western civilization in the 20th century. . .
In time of peace or war, civilians who command America’s defense establishment must not allow the nation’s military leaders the freedom to develop military strategy in isolation, to define their own programs and priorities, control their own funding lines, and then rate their own effectiveness. Clemenceau’s dictum, “War is too important to be left to the generals,” applies with equal force to the conduct of military operations and, in particular, spending for military modernization.
We suspect that if you read to the close it’ll be clear why we selected this item as of possible interest to you. Pass it along, as they say.
We wrote a while back about Djilas and how he might analyze our current situation. Would he declare a new “Pundit Class”? What would be its characteristics? A more fully considered post on that awaits another day. But we offer a quick follow-on tonight limited to one famous D.C. suburb, replying in part to recent comments here.
Our sense is that many (but not all) outside the Beltway perceive the “Inside the Beltway” Pundit Class (loosely defined — and for our purposes tonight in existence) the only way they can — via television, Talk Radio, print or now increasingly in the pundits’ own awkward migration to the blogosphere. These impressions, however, are more realistically ephemeral imagery, fragmentary intellectual burps. The true nature of the class must be seen and observed in the social rituals and environment in which it operates, much like the old Soviet nomenklatura elites used off limits beriozka stores to buy Western ‘luxuries’ with illicit valyoota (hard-currency).