They fight over Obama. They fight over Israel. They still fight over Bush. They really fight over food. No, it’s not your extended family mucking it up over Christmas dinner. It’s the Atlantic bloggers, who form their own diverse and makeshift kinship. They’re not all ideological siblings, but that only makes the conversations more interesting. Here is a look back at some of the most significant shouting matches between Atlantic Voices in 2009.
When Barack Obama nominated Charles "Chas" Freeman to a top intelligence post, he set off a wide-ranging debate about Freeman’s opinions on China and Israel.
Jeffrey Goldberg : “Jon Chait did a fine job dismantling the realist-run-amok Charles
Freeman in the Washington Post yesterday, and highlights his most egregious
belief, that the Communist regime in Beijing was within its rights to order the
wholesale slaughter of students in Tiananmen Square.”
James
Fallows: “This
job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not
going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the
questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of. ... I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who
know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front
are a crock.”
Andrew Sullivan: “The Obama peeps
never defended Freeman. ... There is no possibility of change on the
Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have
in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply
forbidden.”
James Fallows : “After learning something
about the now-resigned Chas Freeman, ... I have received enough pro-Freeman letters from his working associates
in the last two days to make we wonder: is there anyone who actually dealt with
the man who considered him a crackpot, an anti-Semite, a menace—terms thrown
around by his critics
Jeffrey Goldberg : “What was bothersome about
Freeman was not his criticism of various Israeli policies. What bothered me
most was his accusation that 9/11 was brought about mainly by American support
for Israel, an accusation that seemed designed to deflect attention from Saudi
Arabia, whose king is a patron
of Freeman’s think tank.”
Should the government have an obesity policy? Our bloggers chew it over.
Megan
McArdle: “Look at
the uptick in stories on obesity in the context of health care reform.
Fat people are a problem! They're killing themselves, and our
budget! We must stop them! And what if people won't do it
voluntarily? Because let’s face it, so far, they won't. ... Every
intervention you can imagine on the voluntary front, and several involuntary
ones, has already been tried.”
Marc
Ambinder: “McArdle
approaches obesity as if it were a Foucauldian construct: a category invented
by the government to justify an exercise of power. ... McArdle is right that it
it’s not fair for government to lecture people about weight loss
and exercise, but she’s right for the wrong reason: policy choices—ag
subsidies, zoning laws, education and budget priorities—create a flow that,
absent any intervention, are sweeping many young kids, particularly poorer kids
of color, into obesity. Government’s role isn't to scold; it’s to make better
policy choices.”
James
Fallows: “I am 100% with Ambinder on this one, and would be 1000%
with him if that term weren't assumed to be sarcastic.”
Marc Ambinder : “The
relevant question for policy-makers is not whether there is a mono-causal
explanation for obesity, it is whether policy-makers can and should do
something about it.”
James Fallows : “UPDATE: I will go 1001% with Marc Ambinder’s second-round post.”
Megan McArdle : “So it seems that James Fallows and Marc Ambinder and I all agree that the increase in
obesity in the American population is environmental, though they seem to think
I disagree, despite my having made this point several times, and have thus
spent a fair amount of time disproving a point no one has made.”
Andrew Sullivan : “Fallows sides with Ambinder. Like
Megan, I have a visceral dislike of being told by government how to live my
life.”
In October the New York Times reported that New York City’s calorie-counting laws were not changing customers’ habits. Megan McArdle and Corby Kummer slugged it out.
Megan
McArdle: “A couple
of times, I've noted that while I'm at least theoretically in favor of
requiring calorie counts on menus, I was pretty skeptical that this was
actually going to work. Now the first study of New York’s labeling program is
out, and the results are ... nothing.”
Corby
Kummer: “Getting
individuals to recalculate calories at the cash register was never the main
point of the rules, and isn't now. Calorie labeling has already had remarkable
impact on the foods that fast-food companies make and serve. Yuppie avatar
Starbucks immediately changed its default milk from whole to 2 percent, so it
wouldn't have to admit that a Frappuccino could amount to practically as many
calories as you should eat in a whole day.”
The Fort Hood massacre was a Rorschach test for our bloggers. Did it hold lessons for Islam in America? Or military screening? Or did it mean nothing?
James
Fallows: “In the
saturation coverage right after the events, the ‘expert’ talking
heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the
following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories, too.
Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never
mean anything.”
Megan
McArdle: “This guy
was some form of lunatic or psychopath, and it seems pretty clear to me at this
point that he was inspired by terrorists. But there’s no evidence that he
was a terrorist—that is, that he was hooked into some organized network.”
Jeffrey
Goldberg: “When an
American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of
his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States
is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over
time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell ‘Allahu
Akbar’ while murdering his fellow soldiers.”
Ta-Nehisi
Coates: “Jeff asks
what we'd say if a devout Christian had attacked Planned Parenthood. Fair
enough—we have a pretty good corollary in George Tiller. I could be wrong, but I don't recall a lot of ‘media
elites’ trying to divine what Tiller’s death said about Christianity
itself.”
Jeffrey Goldberg: “One of the lessons of this shooting,
alas, might be that the military needs to become more aware of the possibility
that at least a few of America’s Muslim soldiers might succumb to the same
impulses that apparently set Hasan on a violent path, and screen, and monitor,
accordingly.”
President Bush’s prescription drug bill, or Medicare Part D, was bashed as a pharmaceutical hand-out. But what are the implications for Obama’s own expensive health care plan?
Andrew
Sullivan: “Unlike
many of these tea-partiers and their supporters, I actually took on the Bush
administration’s big government tendencies, fiscal recklessness, and massive
expansion of executive power at the time. I opposed the Medicare prescription
drug benefit as unaffordable—and no one can argue that what looks like the
current healthcare reform would cripple future finances as profoundly as that
Bush entitlement.”
Megan
McArdle: “Call me
‘no one,’ then: I don't see how you even could argue that this
bill will cost less than Medicare Part D. I mean, we don't have a bill,
so technically, who knows. We have a series of statements that Obama
wants to do a bunch of stuff that does not really sum to the $900 billion he
promised.”
Andrew Sullivan: “The Medicare prescription drug
entitlement almost immediately was projected to cost $1.2 trillion over ten years—more than Obama’s
cost-projections. The CBO’s estimate of long-term spending in the program is $8.2 trillion. Unlike Obama’s healthcare plan, which
focuses on the younger uninsured working and middle class, Bush’s massive bribe
was directed at seniors, a demographic set to grow very fast in the near
future.”
Megan McArdle:
“These are not quite the right comparisons to make. For starters, those
figures aren't really the right ones. As the web page from which Andrew
picked that Washington Post figure notes, the CBO’s estimate of the ten year
cost was considerably lower at the time. Also, the $8.1 trillion is a GAO
report, not a CBO report, and it’s from 2004. Also, the Bush OMB was fond of
issuing hysterical projections so that it could wow us with a
‘surprisingly’ low deficit number every mid-term review.”
What does it mean to be “pro-Israel”?
Andrew
Sullivan: “My own
definition of pro-Israel would simply be, I think: support for the existence of
a secure Jewish state in Palestine. That’s my position, and it is as deeply
held as it is open to all sorts of arguments about what is best for its
security and the interests of the US. I think it should easily be enough to
earn one’s credentials as a Zionist, as I proudly and passionately remain.”
Jeffrey
Goldberg: “People
who don't like Israel very much hold it to a special standard, created for one
scapegoated country alone. On this count—and only this count, so far as I
can tell—Andrew sometimes fails the test. There are times lately when he
seems to single out Israel for special excoriation, and times when he holds
Israel to a double-standard.”
Andrew: “Why should we continue to enable the
Israelis' persistent desire to seize more Palestinian land, evict more
Palestinian families, and create yet more facts on the ground that make any
final deal more and more outside our reach? These actions have been designed in
part to humiliate Obama.”
Jeffrey: “I'm simply arguing that the
focus of negotiations, and of American policy, should be on creating a viable,
contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. This means,
among other things, pressuring Israel to make concessions on West Bank
settlements.”
Should we cut Bush a bit of slack for the deficit he ran up as president?
Megan
McArdle: “Any
president would have done about what Bush did—some combination of spending it,
and cutting taxes. The American public was not going to happily pay an extra 6 percent
of its income to Uncle Sam so that we could pile up some massive wad of cash.”
Andrew
Sullivan: “Is she
actually saying that any president would have cut taxes heavily and
also increased domestic spending heavily and added a new (unfunded) crippling
healthcare entitlement—as he launched a $3 trillion war on two countries? Is
she saying that Al Gore was proposing this in 2000?”
Megan: “No, I didn't say that any president would
have spent on the specific, often stupid things that Bush did. They would
have found their own specific, often stupid things to spend on.”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/blogger-vs-blogger/7821/
