Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

There is room to cut defense spending, if it is done with prudence and innovation.

If you listen to defense industry lobbyists, hawks in Congress and the Pentagon, the sky is falling and with it, American security. It isn’t. The failure of the “supercommittee” to reach a deficit agreement is supposed to trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in federal spending over the next decade, nearly $500 billion of that from the basic Pentagon budget. Many Republicans, and some Democrats, are already talking about getting the Pentagon off the hook. Representative Howard McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has promised legislation to prevent the cuts from taking effect. We are no fans of the supercommittee process, but if the Pentagon’s spending is wrestled back into rationality, it will be progress. Walking away would be a blow to Washington’s financial credibility. There is room to cut, if it is done with prudence and innovation.

Maureen Dowd: Fire and Ice Fire

Will it be a blood match between one candidate whose blood boils over and another who is bloodless?

A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation’s patriarch.

The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.

One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who’s always veering out of control, one who’s too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.

One pretending to be a populist when he can’t drag himself out of Tiffany’s; the other pretending to be a populist when he’d like to be at Davos with Jamie Dimon.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Andrew Cuomo and the Spirit of Occupy

How Occupy Wall Street made Andrew Cuomo act less like Chris Christie.

For a few weeks last month, the main outpost of Murdoch-ism in the US-the New York Post-ran the same headline on its opinion page day after day: “Read Andrew’s Lips.” It was the Post’s way of reminding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of his “no new taxes” pledge, and the potential harm that would befall him if he reneged on it. [..]

Fast forward six months to today. The Post is in a rage, calling the Governor a “rate-fink” and-even more odious in their eyes-comparing him to his father, the first Governor (Mario) Cuomo. They’re fuming and frothing at Cuomo’s change of heart over the last week that resulted in a partial re-establishment of the millionaire’s tax. It’s almost as if after eleven months of governing like New Jersey’s Republican Governor Christie, he converted back to the Democratic principles of Connecticut’s Dan Malloy. For his part, Cuomo has cited the state’s worsening fiscal situation as the reason for the change of heart, and no doubt that played a part. But the deeper reason, and the more interesting reason, was Occupy. As the WFP’s Dan Cantor wrote recently, and as many others have likewise noted, the Occupy movement changed the conversation in America “from austerity to inequality.” And this new tax deal in Albany, which will manifestly improve the lives of many working and poor people, is a result of that changed conversation and atmosphere.

Vivian Gornick: Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street

This is the second time in living memory that an American movement protesting social injustice has embraced her.

One afternoon in mid-October a young woman-dressed in a white Victorian shirtwaist, long black
skirt and rimless glasses shorn of earpieces-stood up in
Zuccotti Park to announce that she was Emma Goldman and that she had traveled through time to tell those gathered in the park that she loved what they were doing. Nothing in the way of OWS street theater could have better invoked the spirit of the protest than the appearance of a principled anarchist, born nearly a century and a half ago, who never considered herself more American than when she was denouncing the brutish contempt in which capitalism held the feeling life of the individual.

“Feeling” was a key word for Emma Goldman. She always said that the ideas of anarchism were of secondary use if grasped only with one’s reasoning intelligence; it was necessary to “feel them in every fiber like a flame, a consuming fever, an elemental passion.” This, in essence, was the core of Goldman’s radicalism: a lifelong faith, lodged in the nervous system, that feelings were everything. Radical politics, in fact, was the history of one’s own hurt, thwarted, humiliated feelings at the hands of institutionalized authority.

Stephen N. Xenakis: Healers, Torture and National Security

In 2004, the news that Americans had committed abuse and mistreatment in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was shocking. Even more alarming, were the revelations that physicians, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals had assisted with interrogations that bordered on torture.

In the span of just two generations, the United States had drifted from condemning Nazi physicians at the Nuremberg Trials for their collusion with torture, inhuman experimentation and cruel mistreatment to justifying waterboarding in the pursuit of better intelligence.

As a retired brigadier general and Army psychiatrist, committed to a strong military and national defense, I find these scandals to be most disturbing. The complicity of psychiatrists and other physicians clearly deviated from the fundamental ethical principles of the medical profession and military medicine. My generation of soldiers, who had served during the Vietnam War, vowed not to repeat the misdeeds of the My Lai massacres and rampant indiscipline we witnessed.