The Epistemology of Connections
Barack Obama has a stated Middle East policy. He also has a set of foreign policy advisers. And beyond the relatively narrow group of people who’ve been Obama’s national security team from the beginning he, as the Democratic nominee, now draws on the advice of the wider circle of Democrat-aligned foreign policy hands. This is a group of more-or-less known quantities whose views are by no means uniform, but which fall in a fairly predictable range. One might think the best way to ascertain Obama’s likely approach to national security policy would be to think about these people and their views. The institutions where Obama’s advisers will be coming from — CAP, CNAS, NSN, CSIS — have all kinds of written documents about foreign policy issues that could be perused.
Or you could follow Stanley Kurtz and focus on the views of Rashid Khalidi a scholar and left-wing Arab nationalist who, according to Kurtz, was a supporter of Obama’s when Obama was a local politician in Khalidi’s neighborhood.
It seems tedious to even point this out, but the standard of proof being applied here couldn’t possibly be applied consistently. Consider, by contrast, Obama’s ties to Joe Biden. They’re both Senators and, indeed, if Obama becomes President then Joe Biden will become Vice President. Or Obama’s ties to General Colin Powell — Obama specifically sought and received his support for a presidential bid and has repeatedly suggested that he would be interested in getting input from General Powell on national security issues. Or Obama’s ties to New Republic editor Marty Peretz who has written positive things about Obama. But then again, so has Jeffrey Goldberg. And so has Spencer Ackerman. But those guys think different things about American policy to the Middle East.
Or consider John McCain. He’s been in politics a long time. And his views have changed over the years. And he’s had a lot of different kinds of political allies. Back when he was leading the charge for the McCain-Feingold bill, he worked closely with the heads of a lot of liberal good-government groups. Should we take that to mean that he agrees with the heads of those groups about abortion rights or foreign policy? His “ties” to them are much more substantial than anything between Obama and Khalidi.
The procedure just doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile, National Review doesn’t agree with the foreign policy views of the sort of mainstream Democrats who, unlike Khalidi, will actually wind up staffing an Obama administration and making policy in it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to expend time and energy attacking those people and their views? Conservatives aren’t going to like the real Obama, so they’d do well to focus a little bit on him instead of obsessively hounding this mythical figure they’ve created.
39 Responses to “The Epistemology of Connections”
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October 25th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Those cowards don’t have the nutsack to come out and say what they really want to say:
I am not being snarky. They actually think he is a terrorist but don’t have the manhood to come out and say it because deep down they know that they’d be laughed off the planet.
People who write at National Review are just racist assholes, appalled at the prospect of a black man with an Arab name as president.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
People who write at National Review are just racist assholes, appalled at the prospect of a black man with an Arab name as president.
More likely they are appalled at the idea of a liberal Democrat as president–with a Dem congress, no less–but have run out of actual valid arguments to make against him.
(Kurtz may be an exception, but I wouldn’t tar all the writers with this brush… I think they’re just getting desperate.)
October 25th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
It would be kind of nice to see the hawks produce a list of the Palestinian nationalist Arabs who don’t back right wing and hawkish Israeli policies who are acceptable to them. I bet it would be a very short list.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
NRO is about the most disingenuous bunch of hacks I’ve ever read. I don’t think they believe a word they write. It’s all about their circle and their benefactors. They get paid to write this crap. There are some very rich wackos with deep pockets to be picked.
Khalidi is a terrorist!-sounding name. They always pick the low-hanging fruit. It suits their standards.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Khalidi has been on NPR a bunch of times. Smart guy.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Rashid Khalidi is, to the extent I’m exposed to him via. my wife having been a graduate studentin his department for four years and the overlapping social networks this creates, a pretty sane and reasonable guy. He keeps a relatively low profile at the moment, I assume because he realizes that the payoff to sticking your neck out in the wider US public with the name Rashid Khalidi isn’t high enough. So he’s biding his time.
Meanwhile we rely on a foreign policy establishment, including the liberal Democratic one, where people cannot actually talk to people in Arabic and don’t have the experience or exposure to judge what sort of US policy is promising given the domestic constraints in Arabic countries.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Not to be irrelevant but THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH RASHID KHALIDI’S VIEWS ON MIDDLE EAST POLICY. This country’s political discourse is already frigging moronic. Why contribute to it by taking as given propositions that are tendentious and arguably even malicious?
October 25th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
The basic point here is that any unrepulsed connection with a arab or arab-american who dissents from our oil-and-israel democratic party consensus is like a red rag to a bull for those guardians of that consensus. So one Khalidi is enough.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
If they were smart, or intellectually honest, or even effective formulators of republican thought and strategy, then they wouldn’t be writing in the National Review. That place makes wingnut blogs look positively intellectual. Kathryn Jean-Lopez, an insane cat lady, is an editor, for god’s sake. Rich Lowry, a little boy, runs it. Their “financial expert” is a guy who writes that the market rises and falls based on political speeches given during primaries, and their expert on Iran, and issue that they certainly act reverent to, has never even visited the place. I’m just Joe Schmoe (MAX the White Collar Drone in McCains new parlance) but even I could round up my friends and have a more competent, worldly and expert magazine. The fact that NR is considered a magazine of record for the conservative movement is positively damning of the right wing’s current state.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
It’s the fundamental stupidity of guilt by association. Whatever McCain or NRO wants to make Obama to be by serving on a board with Ayers should surely reflect on McCain since McCain has worked with Obama in the US Senate.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Rev. Jer. Wright can make a better case tying Obama to Kurtz (via neolib/com overlap) than Kurtz can trying to link
Obama to Khaladi.
Once Wright links Obama to Kurtz - it is easy to link Obama to that nut case who should not have a security clearance Andy McCarthy.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Matt, I really like the way you write, occasional spelling errors notwithstanding ;-). You are just a FUN read.
Meanwhile, I agree with many of the commenters. The gang at NRO is very seriously loony. Probably from listening so avidly to Limbaugh, Hannity and their very own Mark Levin while at the same time deliberating seriously on Greek conservatism courtesy of resident Grecian pseudo-scholar Victor Davis Hanson. I think they are very close to critical mass for a major and debilitating nervous breakdown.
They’ve created a caricature of Obama that desperately hunts for more proof. Stanley Kurtz is a particularly loony nut. Actually I’ve begun to enjoy reading his lunacy for it’s sheer over the top paranoid connecting of the dots. Inspector Clouseau, meet Inspector Kurtz!
October 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
re NRs racism - that was probably a big reason Buckley left - Consider that McCarthy was pushing that hoax story about the girl being branded with a “B”
October 25th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Yeah, I’m not sure that Matt really knows who Khalidi is. “Left wing Arab nationalist”??? Marty Peretz has written nice things about Khalidi!
October 25th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
NR has Larry Kudlow telling readers oil was about to crash in price when it was 55 a barrell and just getting started rising. You had the preposterous Mark Steyn saying there was no way his pal Lord Black will be found guilty in Chicago
Rich Lowry is actually one of the better writers there - His anti Clinton book was written for the Palintariat, but he’s not a total drooler like VDH or some of the others.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Consider Kurtz - a few months ago he wrote at NRO that Germany was descending into a new age of barbarism and that
wild animals were beginning to reclaim major portions
of previous human settlements.
Consider Lisa Schiffren - (one of Dan Quales brains) - she wrote that Obama’s birth might have been part of
a communist plot because the only women she knew who disrespected miscegenation laws were communist women in NY who slept with black men for revolutionary purposes.
So obviously, Schiffren reasoned, Obama’s 18 yr old white mother from Kansas was being mighty suspicious when
she “fell in love” (hahahahawinkwink) with a black
man from Africa.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I read about 1/3 of RK’s Resurrecting Empire, but lost it in a move. Pretty bleak, though, given the subject matter. His next book is about the US’ role in the Middle East during the Cold War: Sowing Crisis.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
If, like MattY, you’re trying to out-JoeKlein JoeKlein for sheer sycophancy, none of it makes any sense.
But, if you put country before party, you gotta wonder why the LAT won’t release the video they’re holding on to.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
OMG! Someone might have a video tape of Rashid Khalidi saying Obama might be better than Bush Jr.! Quick! Call the media! We must stop this! Some nitwit is also pretty sure Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Tokyo Rose were all there too, chanting and praising Obama for being born in Kenya! OooOOOh!
October 25th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Well, if you want to engage on the substance of a person’s views this sort of guilt by association doesn’t make much sense, but if your main goal is simply to get elected, and you know that no matter how much you lie about your opponent the mainstream media won’t make a big issue out of it (at most, they might expose your lies, but they won’t start calling you a serial liar), then it makes sense to smear your opponent with any kind fo filthy lies, the more extreme the better.
Keep in mind that you don’t win by making your guy seem better then your opponent. You win by making your opponent seem like such an unbelievable disaster that peoploe MUST vote for your guy, no matter how bad he is. Besides, if you can make your opponent out to be an unbelievable disaster it will sell more air time and papers so you don’t have to pay as much for advertising.
No, I’m afraid this strategy makes a lot of sense to pursue.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
The same crowd of people who accuse Obama of being a terrorist will turn around and mock at those who support Obama by saying that Obama’s more conservative about x,y, and z than his supporters seem to think.
This isn’t a crowd to pay attention to. They’re attention whores and hacks.
October 25th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
The notion that it is somehow damning that people to the left of Obama would prefer Obama to McCain is a brand new level of stupid. People to right of McCain will of course prefer McCain. If I was actually a socialist and my two choices were McCain and Obama I would easily chose Obama. If I was a Klan member I would choose McCain.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I am a student of Khalidi and have had multiple conversations with him. One thing I, and many of my Columbia colleagues, can agree on is that he is no “radical”, for better or for worse. In fact, he consistently gets criticized by the left for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine or critical of Israel. To be sure, Khalidi’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are critical when compared to true believers in congress that would approve of nearly anything done by Israel, but in the real world, Khalidis views fall directly in the mainstream.
October 25th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I’ve read Khalidi’s work and I agree with Joel - he is not a radical by any stretch of the imagination. He is a considered and thoughtful intellectual who is bizarrely branded by an America that creates nasty stereotypes imposed upon anyone with an Arab name who says anything at all about the Middle East. As Powell said last week, the response to the claim that Obama is a Muslim should not be refuted simply with the truth - Obama happens to be a practicing Christian by choice (not upbringing)- but also with the emphatic statement that were Obama or McCain to be Muslim, that mere fact would not be relevant to whether or not one should support or oppose the candidates. Similarly, while it does not appear to be true that Khalidi is advising Obama, so what if he were? What would be wrong with thoughtful Arab and Arab American scholars providing information to the US government? In fact, it kind of sounds like a good idea.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Let me third it.
The notion that Rashid Khalidi is somehow “objectionable” company is in itself absurd.
I wish progressive bloggers would stop ceding ground and accepting these libelious and ridiculous characterizations of a rock solid Middle East scholar are somehow rooted in any semblence of reality. They simply aren’t.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
If they were smart, or intellectually honest, or even effective formulators of republican thought and strategy, then they wouldn’t be writing in the National Review. That place makes wingnut blogs look positively intellectual. Kathryn Jean-Lopez, an insane cat lady, is an editor, for god’s sake. Rich Lowry, a little boy, runs it. Their “financial expert” is a guy who writes that the market rises and falls based on political speeches given during primaries, and their expert on Iran, and issue that they certainly act reverent to, has never even visited the place. I’m just Joe Schmoe (MAX the White Collar Drone in McCains new parlance) but even I could round up my friends and have a more competent, worldly and expert magazine. The fact that NR is considered a magazine of record for the conservative movement is positively damning of the right wing’s current state.
Right-winger myself here and I entirely agree. Frum’s alright but that’s about it.
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