Marbury

american farce

The New York TImes has a great piece on the McChrystal affair that reveals the disarray in America's senior team. It's a comedy of backstabbing:

In one episode that dramatized the building animosities, Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, wrote to Ambassador Eikenberry in February, sympathizing with his complaints about a visit Mr. Holbrooke had recently made to Afghanistan. In the note, which went out over unsecure channels, officials said, General Jones soothed the ambassador by suggesting that Mr. Holbrooke would soon be removed from his job.

The Jones note prompted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to complain to Mr. Obama, and her support for Mr. Holbrooke has kept him in his job. In the article, which was posted on the magazine’s Web site on Tuesday, one of General McChrystal’s aides is quoted as referring to General Jones as a “clown.”

the mcchrystal question

It's this sort of stuff that makes me wonder about the general:

He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee.

I think Obama will put aside the immediate issues of insubordination. The crime itself - irreverence towards his seniors - is bad but not that bad. The question is, does this merely reveal a more intractable problem - that McChrystal is in the wrong job? Is he impossible for the rest of the team (Holbrooke, Eikenberry etc) to work with? Is there something in his personality that makes it impossible for him to work alongside anyone else in civilian authority?

The profile is excellent and not just because of the scoop. It paints a vivid portrait of the man. There's something of McCain about him: the son of a general who was an arrogant, irreverent party-boy as a young soldier who grew up and got better at politics, but who never really shook the bad boy self-image out of his system.

McChrystal is born to be a great general in so many ways: physically dynamic, brilliantly intelligent, fearless, creative, well-read, a commander who is revered and loved by his men. But at some point, when rebels become the authority they built their whole identity kicking against, they have to change the way they see themselves quite profoundly. That's hard. As we saw in the election campaign, McCain never managed the transition from "maverick" to plausible president. Maybe this incident suggests that McChrystal just isn't suited to the highest levels of command.

"The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price..."

Indeed.

fake it till you make it

It's budget day today, just one stop in the ongoing debate between the cost-cutters and the not-yetters. But is there a third way? In a blog for Prospect I make the (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) argument for a policy of dishonesty:

The optimal strategy for our government, and for all European governments, is to manipulate perceptions while inflicting minimum real world pain. Governments ought to pursue fake austerity programmes; to talk big about slashing costs and shrinking the state while, in reality, only making the most superficial of cuts. This would restore confidence amongst market-makers and consumers that the problem is being dealt with, while saving millions of people from the misery of unemployment.

obama's dull old speech may have worked

I suspected that the pundits were much too hard on Obama's address from the White House, on the oil leak. It wasn't a stunning speech, but it did the job of letting the nation know he taking it seriously and the government was doing all it could to help the victims. New polling suggests that - along with his "shakedown" of BP - it has increased the public's confidence in him.

mcchrystal does a john terry

General McChrystal, the commander of US operations in Afghanistan, has been in a political battle with Afghan ambassador Karl Eikenberry ever since the latter sent a memo to the White House last autumn calling into question the the general's proposed troop increase. Normally, such military-civilian tensions are kept private. But on Friday Rolling Stone will publish a profile of McChrystal, in which he and his aides cooperated, and it's full of juicy stuff like this:

“I like Karl, I’ve known him for years, but they’d never said anything like that to us before,” McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’”

There are also swipes at national security adviser James Jones, a glancing blow at Joe Biden and even a hint of contempt for the president himself.

McChrystal has already issued a grovelling apology, even though the piece isn't published yet. What happens next - whether he stays in post or not - we'll find out in the next 48 hours. Certainly, his position has been weakened.

McChrystal is an extremely intelligent, thoughtful man. So the question is, as Ambinder says, what the hell was he thinking?

As Fabio Capello will tell him, airing  your grievances is one thing; doing it to the press is usually a very big mistake.

does loyalty have a price?

Wayne Rooney's outburst at the fans on Friday night has been much debated. Some argue that he had every right to speak his mind, though most pundits say he should have kept his mind to himself.

People in the latter camp often made some form of the following argument: those fans paid thousands of pounds and gave up their valuable time to fly half-way across the world; if the England team plays as terribly as it did on Friday, they have every right to express their disapproval.

This made me think about a much cited study run by a couple of economists who worked with day-care centres to try and solve the problem of parents consistently arriving late to pick up their children after school. The economists came up with a brilliant idea: fine the parents for lateness. The result? The number of late pickups increased after the fine system was introduced.

The researchers concluded that they'd erred by introducing an economic incentive to an arrangement that ran (albeit imperfectly) on social conventions. Now that the fine was introduced, parents no longer worried about whether they would be upsetting the teachers by arriving late. In their minds, the fine became a way of paying for a bit of babysitting.

What's all this got to do with Rooney's tantrum? Well, it seems to me that he and the booing fans - and those supporting them - are working with two different models of football loyalty. The booing fans see the relationship between them and the team as transactional: we pay money and time to get here, you show us football we can get excited about. Rooney (along with many other fans) is working with a more traditional model of fanship, one that depends on ties of loyalty, kinship and values that transcend such transactions. For him, if you're not a fan when the team plays badly you're no fan at all. That's the whole point.

The slightly depressing coda to the school experiment is that when the fining system was abolished, the rate of late pickups didn't revert to pre-fine levels, but stayed as it was; once social ties are corroded by economic transactions, they're very hard to restore. If England play terribly against Slovenia on Wednesday, you can expect a lot of booing.

(h/t: IS)

why so?

So apparently, our use of the world "so" is changing. It's sneaking into the beginning of more and more of our sentences, where it can denote many things: a conclusion, a transition, a flash of insight. Anand Giridharadas speculates on the reasons for its rise:

To answer a ques­tion start­ing with “well” sug­gests you are still con­sid­er­ing it, don’t know fully but are get­ting there. To answer with “so” bet­ter suits the age, per­haps: A Google-glued gen­er­a­tion can look it up where their par­ents would have said “I don’t know,” Face­book and Twit­ter encour­age ordi­nary peo­ple and not just politi­cians to stay on mes­sage, and we grav­i­tate toward declam­a­tory blogs and away from down-the-middle reporting. “So” also echoes the influ­ence of a sci­ence– and data-driven cul­ture.

But that's just one explanation; there are others.

doing vs saying

Andrew Sullivan has a good post on Obama's often underreported habit of getting shit done:

The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs. This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech - his hands were moving too much! - than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday.

the best diagnosis of england's current malaise

What on earth is up with Rooney and co? Friday night's performance was staggeringly, mysteriously bad. The papers are full of theories. Many of the diagnoses are rooted in tactics: we need to play Gerrard in the centre or Cole on the left. There's also a lot of stuff about England's baffling attitude (or lack of it). Are they nervous? Cracking under pressure? Or just lazy?

Having not read or heard anything that convinced me I turned to James Hamilton, who blogs at More Than Mind Games. Hamilton is a true original. A sports psychologist, writer, and football obsessive he offers a vastly informed, idiosyncratic and often startingly acute take on sporting matters. His analysis of England's non-performance (anti-performance) against Algeria does not disappoint. It's by far and away the most convincing explanation I've read.

In his view, the players have been "on psychological strike"; that's to say, they've been playing badly as a half-conscious protest against a manager they've fallen out with. Capello's disciplinarian, distancing style of management worked well during the qualifying campaign because the team knew they had failed the country in 2008 and that a drastic corrective was needed. So they were happy to be "punished" by being made to fight for their places in every game. When the final squad was picked, they expected that to be over - they thought they'd passed the test, jumped through the manager's hoops, and would now be ushered into Capello's confidence. But when they got to South Africa they discovered that things were as they were before. Capello still seemed to thrive on their uncertainty, and would still barely acknowledge them as grown-up men. All of this was brought to a head by the appalling treatment of the popular Robert Greene, left to swing for a week before being cut down. And so, on Friday night, the players expressed their frustration with Capello in the most powerful way they could - by not performing for him. Perverse, self-destructive? Yes - but aren't we all from time to time? Hamilton concludes:

It’s not pressure. It’s not nerves. It’s not fear. It’s a message to Capello, and it reads f*** off.

The upside of this is that I suspect they've got this out of their system now. They will turn inwards, towards each other, and recognise that if they don't do this, it's not Capello who will suffer the most, but them. The parallel is with France, four years ago, who rallied around each other after falling out with their manager and went on to reach the final.

Let's hope so anyway.

(Hamilton's analysis should be read in full)

the best of biden

Texan Republican Joe Barton handed Democrats an unexpected gift last week when, amongst all the congressmen laying into Tony Hayward, he popped up to say he thought BP was owed an apology for being subjected to a $20bn "shakedown" by Obama. After a pummelling from all sides, including and especially GOP party bosses furious for messing up the focus on Obama's competence and reinforcing perceptions of the Republicans as greasy corporate monkeys (especially because it turned out Barton had taken money from a subsidiary of BP) Barton recanted. But too late. Anyway, all that is an excuse to show you this. Biden's garrulousness can so often get him and others into trouble. But here, his unbuttoned, ultra-sincere, passionate-verging-on-melodramatic style rises to the moment rather magnificently:

rahm slap

Tony Hayward elected to attend a yachting race around the Isle of Wight today; not the smartest thing to do for obvious reasons. Here's Rahm's comment, made during an interview with ABC:

“To quote Tony Hayward, he’s got his life back,” Mr. Emanuel said. “And I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR consulting.”

face dance

In this video Japanese artist Daito Manabe attaches electrodes to the muscles in four people's faces and makes them dance:

Via Mind Hacks.

the pain ray

According to Wired the Americans have developed a new battlefield weapon: a beam of energy which creates an intense burning sensation when directed at the enemy. I can't better Wired's take on it:

The U.S. mission in Afghanistan centers around swaying locals to its side. And there’s no better persuasion tool than an invisible pain ray that makes people feel like they’re on fire.

kettle's howler

Martin Kettle is one of my favourite political pundits. Unlike most columnists he actually knows stuff - about history, about European politics, about America - and roots his opinions in real analysis rather than just giving vent to whatever second-hand opinion has riled him up that morning. But one of the perils of the job is that no matter how good you are you're always going to have off-days (it's like goalkeeping in that respect). Today is Kettle's. His piece is about Obama and bipartisanship, and it reads like he wrote it half-asleep. This paragraph, in particular, is a stinker:

Democrats, meanwhile, were divided among themselves, as they were on healthcare. This speaks volumes, and not just about US politics. Political parties, not just in America, pay lip service to the consensus of putting the national interest above party. Parties of the left, however, find it much more difficult to define that consensus than parties of the right do. Perhaps parties of the left are more easily intimidated. Perhaps they are intellectually more reasonable. Perhaps in the end they care less. Perhaps many of the 55% of white Americans who did not vote for Obama are simply unwilling to defer to a consensus proposed by a black man.

First of all, it's just badly written and incoherent. I kind of sort of know what he's getting at when he talks about "putting the national interest above party" but it's far from clear. Then there's that "perhaps they care less". About what? If you're expecting the next sentence to help you out, you're in for a disappointment, because not only is it a complete non sequitur, it's egregious nonsense. There's just no evidence that "many" of the people who voted against Obama (and by many I mean any significant percentage) are now dissatisfied with him because he's black, and qualifying such a suggestion with a weasly "perhaps" doesn't make it worth including. The mention of "55% of white Americans" carries a suggestion of racism, but the fact is Obama won a higher percentage of that vote than John Kerry did. Kettle knows all this so why he's writing such stuff is a mystery. I'd like to see him given a break - let's give David James a chance next week.

from under the slush pile

A mean but funny blog:

Hi. Are you a visionary agent who wants to take the stagnant fiction literary marketplace to new heights?

           No. Not really.

I hope all is well with your business, nowadays. Indeed, books & media are an economic past-time today so I expect you are taking advantage of that angle of the biz.

           Oh, trust me. We’re taking FULL advantage of that angle of the biz….Wait. What are we                    talking about?

           Do you ever get the feeling that we are all machines being controlled by someone or                        something beyond our control?

           Katie Holmes, I’m just a literary agent. I can’t help you with your husband issues.