There is absolutely no reason to go to Reason magazine now that Radley is moving to HuffPo. Good luck at the HuffPo.
And speaking of Reason, I checked it for the first time in a while, and they are all opposed to the Libya operations. Suffice it to say, that, and the fact that Juan Cole is very supportive of the operation, is giving me considerable pause.
The Dangerman
I thought you were taking a nap? You sleep-blog?
Brachiator
Hmmm. Another reason never to read HuffPo.
Mary
You’re a much braver man than Andrew Sullivan then, who really went off the deep end and is not honest enough to tell us he is frog walking his position back, even though he is.
Martin
Good. That’s skepticism.
geg6
Maybe Radley can be honest now and tell us how much he hated being a Koch sucker. Or we’ll find out he’s as big an asshole as Nick Gillespie and all those who’ve defended him over the years will know they were wrong all along. Either way, it’s win/win.
I’m still uncertain what to think about Libya, but the Juan Cole stuff has made me cautiously and minimally supportive.
Zifnab
Remind me again what Reason’s position on Iraq was back in 2003?
http://reason.com/archives/2003/01/01/should-we-invade-iraq
Serious, considerate debate for me. Not for thee.
kindness
I find Huff-Po to be the National Enquirer version of TalkingPointsMemo. Maybe it’s just the layout that I find similar. TPM obviously makes more sense and is more consistent. But honestly, I don’t read either as much as I had in the past.
I’m curious John, what is it that is giving you pause?
Jules
Wait a minute…wait a minute…I thought you were Juan Cole. You mean there are two differen? people…?
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
HuffPo remains on my shitlist as long as Breitbart is a writer there. Sorry.
Comrade DougJ
The Reason crowd is against it because Obama is a Democrat.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think considerable pause should always be given to bombing another country. But Reason is opposed to Obama doing it. If Bush had ordered the bombing, they would have found a way to support it.
cyntax
Here’s a pretty interesting and informative post [via LGM]:
He [Galrahn] even provides what he sees as the backstory behind the kerfuffle of whether NATO should lead the coalition.
Tim, Interrupted
I used to read HuffPo at least twice a day. Then about ten days ago I discovered the Breitfart connection. Haven’t returned since.
Feels good to do my small, but important to me, part.
HyperIon
@kindness wrote:
TPM was the first blog I ever read. It was just Marshall then I think. Now it really has the look of a tabloid. I visit only occasionally and am amazed at how many stories they cover. He was really good on the US Attorney story. And Abramoff (sp) and Trent Lott.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Andrew Breitbart (spit!) is now a front-pager at Huffpo.
Screw those guys with a rusty chainsaw.
AnotherBruce
Suffice it to say, that, and the fact that Juan Cole is very supportive of the operation, is giving me considerable pause.
So you’re still jealous that George Soros accidently gave Juan Cole your check, huh?
kdaug
@Jules:
You are a very funny man.
Superluminar
@ Jules
There is not Juan Cole, there are two.
Rick Taylor
Both Juan Cole and Daniel Larison compare our actions in Libya today with Bosnia and Kosovo; Cole as a reason for supporting them, Larison for opposing them.
Freddie
Serious pause! How Very Serious of you.
Freddie
By the way, do you really want to play this game, considering who supports the war? Really? I mean if you’re seriously going to do the “look at who supports/opposes” thing, I can think of some other people you might want to mention. In the name of consistency.
kth
@Zifnab: very interesting. I actually gave them the benefit of the doubt on this; I didn’t read them in 2003, and for all I knew they could have been against that one, too. Should have known better.
John Cole
@Freddie: LOL. I earned that.
John Cole
@Freddie: Calm down, it was a jab at the glibertarians at Reason.
Cain
@Comrade DougJ:
They are against it because if it succeeds, Obama comes out smelling like a rose.. a real commander-in-chief. And.. cuz he’s a black man.
b-psycho
@Cain: Or maybe they’re against it because war is friggin expensive and we have no business being involved anyway?
gex
@Tim, Interrupted: One thing that I have come to realize is that BJ is becoming my primary news source. Read the FPers, read the comments, follow some links. Doing that will make you way more informed than just about everyone around you.
Ken J.
I think the intervention/war in Libya is one of those events that has knocked pretty much everyone’s default assumptions askew.
For me, the fascinating question is not Libya, but our best buds, the Saudis. Taking on Qaddafi doesn’t really require any overwhelming mental gymnastics — at best, in recent history, he’s been mildly useful and tolerant of the US, and in the not-too-distant past we were calling him a main supporter of terrorism.
But the Saudi royal family? The American elite has been in bed tight with the Saudi royals for what, 60-70 years?
But if the Arabs continue to rise up against the autocrats and tyrants, then the Saudi royals have to be on the to-do list. So, does America support people-power everywhere except Arabia?
You know who else had the goal of toppling the Saudi royal family? Osama bin Laden. So, when push comes to shove, is America on the same side as Osama, or are we on the side of kings who rule by the divine right of God and kill their subjects when things get hot? (We’ve already seen how the Saudis support playing the game in Bahrain.)
I honestly don’t know how this plays out — I think this would have the possibility to shake America to its core. (Especially when you add in the likely effect on energy prices!)
Omnes Omnibus
@b-psycho: I would accept that reasoning from honest thinkers. From the crowd at Reason, I tend to look for baser motives.
Superluminar
@ Cain
I don’t think they’re particularly racist over there, it’s not about Obama per se, but they are anti-Democrat and of course successful action by a government agency to prevent a bad outcome rather undermines their entire philosophy.
kth
@b-psycho: those are good reasons, but they wouldn’t be Reason’s reasons. For obvious reasons.
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax:
I’m sure they have extra complaints on hand. In a case. Marked “Break glass in case of unanticipated success.”
agrippa
Is a there reason why I should be interested in either Reason magazine or Juan Cole?
I read Reason magazine twice ( first time and last time) and found no reason in it. It was, from front to back, an insult to common sense.
b-psycho
@kth: People you usually disagree with have to have ulterior motives even when they side with you on one?
lllphd
@Tim, Interrupted:
yeah, there was a whole epiphany thread on all that here a few weeks ago, and i also went cold turkey. have not looked back, though i did visit long enough to send a scathing blast of WTF!! BREITBART, ya gotta be kidding me? SINCE THE GET-GO???
at the same time, i stopped visiting sully, for different reasons. i’d discovered his writing skills and – i thought at the time – his principled political perspectives back in the 90s when he wrote about the republican takeover by fundamentalists, etc. since then, i tried to balance his expressed courage at reversing on the iraq war, blasting torture, dogging palin, all that good stuff, against his craven ideologies on economic matters, which always seemed to smack of blatant hypocrisies, what with his catholicism and all.
and, admittedly, his site is truly top notch, quick paced, and varied, which i found – evidently – addictive enough that i just could not quit him, no matter how i tried.
but with the huffpo epiphanies, i realized sully had become my token reasonable conservative, so i could say i read a conservative thinker, one i could stomach. but truth is, i honestly could not stomach him. he may not be quite as hypocritical as the rest of them, but he is hypocritical nonetheless.
at the risk of submitting myself to a progressive echo chamber, i have deleted his site from my menu bar, and voila! those grinding headaches he tended to promote have miraculously vanished. it’s bad enough to get exposed to all the insanity out there without having to wade through someone’s convoluted attempts to justify the edges enough to keep the conservative pitch alive. but now that i have apparently successfully kicked the sully habit, i am a far more peaceable and calm individual.
life without that infernal internal arguing with a lamppost is relatively blissful.
FlipYrWhig
Juan Cole and, IIRC, Human Rights Watch. People and groups with some credibility and no obvious association with the O-bot Hordes. Which is why it was frustrating that in comments here the knob went from eleven to umpteen so damn fast.
Cain
@b-psycho:
Ya think the guys at Reason are against it because it’s expensive? Yeah.. and they applied that logic so well to Bush. The guy who changes his reason for going to war with Iraq constantly.. naw.. they don’t like the man. Conservatives are always playing identity politics.
cain
Freddie
OK. Calming down.
Cain
@Superluminar:
The black man comment was unfair, and I retract it. It was a bit of snark, but probably in poor judgement.
cain
Raenelle
IMO, there are always several reasons not to go to war, and they don’t all apply to all wars equally. One of the best reasons not to go to war is because we have just preemptively decided to thump our chests and let enemy x know they can’t fuck with us. That’s Iraq, I guess, and that was one fucked up war. One of the low-level reasons not to go to war is, even if it might be a nice thing to go help out there, we just can’t be everywhere every time, and we just have other more important priorities. To me, that’s Libya.
Plus, in terms of misplaced priorities, I think the good ol’ USA finds it very easy, virtually knee-jerk, to war war, to pick up the trusty war machine and go drop some bombs; other problems that require intelligence and patience and wisdom, not so much our forte.
Valdivia
Great find on the McCain Libya hypocrisy on The Twitter:
http://mobile.twitter.com/senjohnmccain/status/3331878099
How is that this man even gets asked questions by the media?
kth
@b-psycho: see the link in #6 above, and contrast their hand-wringing over the far-less-justifiable Iraq War to the bright line they draw when someone opposed by the Koch brothers is in the White House.
The glibertarian community has never had a consistent message regarding war, so one is led to conclude that their chief criterion is: whatever might politically lead to more tax cuts and less regulation of industry. Really that’s all it comes down to with the likes of Reason. The rest is window-dressing.
(added) and not to go quasi-Godwin, but the KKK is probably against the bombing of Libya, on the grounds that the enemy of you-know-who is their friend. Not that Reason is anywhere near as loathsome as the KKK, just that you indeed do sometimes have to question the motives of people who agree with you.
SteveinSC
@Superluminar:
No, that would mean there is a Dos Coles?
lllphd
a just in general note, JC –
to my mind, there is nothing more ironic and bassackward on the planet than the fact that libertarians claim their rag’s title as reason.
socrates, plato, and aristotle, just for starters, are spinning in their graves.
to assert that all your thought issuing from the most bizarre, selfish, greedy, blinkered myopia premises can be called reason just because it keens to the built-in logic thereof would be laughable were it not so damn scary.
that these people are given any credibility whatsoever – especially in light of their connections to the birchers (why is the koch brothers’ father’s affiliation never mentioned?) is beyond me.
until i’m reminded by the attention given bachmann, gingrich, palin, huckabee, bolton, DONALD TRUMP, for gawd sakes.
if the three greeks are rolling in their graves, i do hope it’s at least in part from a good laugh.
D-Chance.
Congratulations, Radley!
A truly good man, and hard-working blogger who puts out quality material day after day after day. If ever someone deserves the big move up, it’s Balko and the Agitator.
This is a solid acquisition by the Huffers.
Mnemosyne
@agrippa:
Juan Cole is probably one of the best and most insightful writers about the Middle East. He had a huge amount of valuable analysis of our Excellent Iraq Adventure and why it was going to go horribly wrong. Among other strengths, he actually knows Arabic, unlike a lot of “experts,” and was able to analyze a lot of the reporting coming from non-English speaking sources.
He has no connection with Reason magazine, so you can continue not to care about them.
Ken J.
to agrippa: Juan Cole merits attention because he is a scholar of the Islamic world (professor at the University of Michigan) and (in particular) he speaks/reads Arabic so he is working from primary sources, not just from whatever American news media say. He’s not just some blogger with an opinion.
He is, as they say, reality-based.
Katie5
@Tim, Interrupted: I too am trying to kick the HuffPo habit. Haven’t been back since Breitbart. It’s hard though (I actually visited Daily Beast today–horrors). Is there a good substitute, particularly for tech and entertainment? TPM is good for politics, although it often strains credibility to appear non-partisan.
geg6
@Rick Taylor:
Just one of the many reasons Larison is NOT, despite what so many BJ front pagers desperately claim, a reasonable conservative. He’s an asshole like all the rest of them.
geg6
@b-psycho:
The Reason crowd? Seriously? Worried about the expense and whether or not we have any business there? Again, seriously?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
lllphd
sheez, i’m so mixed on this ‘operation.’ (odyssey dawn?? um, that was a very looooong journey, someone should be reminded.)
on the one hand, save the people from their merciless dictator, sure. with a more than eager UN coalition (well, 10/15 is not great, but ok).
plus, if i’m reading obama closely, he saw this as an opportunity to present a bold statement the muslim people in the region could point to that moved against our historical support of dictators. that’s i think a good thing.
problem is, what will we do about yemen and bahrain and syria and possibly algeria and perhaps even tunisia is not over, then iran and of course, saudi arabia itself.
sticky wicket all around. stepping away from the leadership role so quickly is a very good thing. relying on the air force that has taken a back seat (except for the drones, ugh) for a while doesn’t cut deeply into the other theatres. etc.
there is logic there, both strategically and politically. still, tho, it just sucks. why can’t we just (as jon stewart so eloquently exposed) to in to save ivory coast and sudan, etc.? the difference between oil and sand, as ever.
Citizen_X
@Superluminar: He is known to some as Juan, to others as John. But to all, he is…the most interesting man in the world.
lllphd
@HyperIon:
don’t quite get the ‘tabloid’ comparison. like you, have been a josh fan since the get-go. and i’ve been excited for their success and impressed with how he’s kept things very focused on the news. we don’t hear about lohan or the kardashian’s there, though there is the reference to palin and bachmann and trump and bolton and huckabee and all the other wingnuts.
but these days, how the hell would one report without posting that stuff? that’s just about all the right has to offer anymore.
it really is that crazy.
so, josh is still my go-to guy. he’s got a very good staff, it’s well-rounded and balanced (sheez, can hardly use that word anymore, fox has so thoroughly tainted it!). and his perspective is serious without being wooden.
BruinKid
Juan Cole also got his Ph.D. from UCLA, so that just makes him that much more awesome as well. 8-)
BTW, I find it ironic that the header right now for this site says “We Survived Breitbartocalypse”, given the comments above about him getting a perch at HuffPo.
lamh32
wrong thread…
boomshanka
eh, not surprising that reason is against the war in libya. i feel like most of their writers have been pretty consistently against military action even when bush was in office.
i think john just wanted to bait radley one more time before he moved to huffpo.
kth
@geg6: I wouldn’t go that far, but the alignment of people like Larison and Bacevich with paleocon creeps like Pat Buchanan is definitely the mirror image of Balko’s association with Reason. Fair is fair.
piratedan
@SteveinSC: next you’re gonna tell me there is more than one Equis too I suppose
Tim, Interrupted
@Katie5:
I have been giving Daily Beast a try, ever since dumping HP as my aggregate go-to site. So far, so good. I’m kind of grossed out that Sully is going over there though. I have a fatal attraction to his bullshit; I’ve been reading it since 2000 and I hate a lot about him but I go there every day to be tortured. Nevertheless, I would like to see him fail. :P
John Cole
@boomshanka: I thought I was wishing him good luck at the HuffPo.
jfxgillis
John:
Do me a favor and read Conor Foley over at Crooked Timber:
Resolution 1973, Intervention, and International Law
Libya – the case for intervention
Interventions – humanitarian or liberal?
Katie5
@Tim, Interrupted: I’ll stick with DB then, even though the GUI reminds me of Buzzflash (like the content; never liked the site design).
ABL
@Valdivia: That’s fantastic.
Cris
You have your Reason characters mixed up. John’s a Balko fan. It’s Fonzie who he baits.
boomshanka
@John Cole:
yeah, i thought you were doing both.
radley is the one who gets offended at your swipes at reason and jumps to its defense. i know you’re a fan of his work, but i imagine you take pleasure in getting under his skin. all in good blogging fun, of course.
John Cole
@boomshanka: Honestly, this time I wasn’t trying to do that. I read his announcement, and thought “Haven’t read the Fonz lately, wonder what they are up to?” Saw all the war of choice stuff, and then tossed up a quick post congratulating him and taking a jab at Reason. I really wasn’t trying to goad him.
I did already get an email from him calling me a jerk and pointing out that I am an asshole because most of the Reason writers back in the day opposed the Iraq war while I was being a mindless cheerleader. Whatever. Life goes on. He still does good work even if he hates me. His problem, not mine.
Clark
@geg6: Really? At best, that’s a pretty weird standard of reasonable non-asswholeness.
losingtehplot
@Tim, Interrupted: what put me off was reading that AdriHuff and Wendy Deng (Murdoch), co-hosted a party at the 2011 Oscars.
Clark
@kth: Bacevich, who voted for Obama, and contributes to pubs such as the Nation, as well as TAC; isn’t really aligned with Buchanan in a meaningful way.
AAA Bonds
If they were libertarians in favor of wars of choice, they’d have better gigs than Reason.
The best thing to do when libertarians agree with you is to ignore them. Otherwise you end up second-guessing yourself or even trying to ally with them.
geg6
@Clark:
Larison is a dick. He’s got all of you liberal fanboys fooled. But I don’t know many AAs or women who think he’s any different than any other conservative asshole. He just hides it better for those who do not wish to see, so desperate are they to find a
unicornreasonable Republican.gex
@geg6: That “reasonable” would require so many asterisks that I’d need a new keyboard.
Clark
@geg6: A: I’m not a “liberal fanboy. I was a reader of Larison and a contributor to TAC (http://www.amconmag.com/search.html?v&m=0&search=clark+stooksbury&start=0&end=25) long before I became a fan of Balloon Juice.
B. I met Larison once and he seemed like a nice guy. Not a Dick at all. (You, I’m not so sure about.)
C. If you think that Larison is any kind of Republican then you’ve never read Larison at all.
Allan
@Valdivia: Well, in fairness to McCain, he does possess expertise on some military topics.
The other day, CBS sought out his insights on the fighter jet crash in Libya.
Anya
Breitbart and now Radley, this means Huffington is gearing up to go on full attack mode against President Obama.
Kristine
@gex:
BJ has become an important source for me as well, along with Steve Benen. I do like GOS’ Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up and Midday Round-Up as well.
I had reached the point where I stopped watching KO well before the show went pear-shaped, and I confess that I only watch Rachel once in a while. And I love Rachel, but I was reading most of the same information 12 hours earlier on the blogs.
virag
@Jules:
awesome. i think that at least once a week myself for years!
virag
@Ken J.:
reality-based, but not exactly an independent observer or commentator. he’s one of those folks whose income depends on a certain level of credibility of the u.s. position, and you have to know it and understand that if you’re used to cashing those checks.
his top 10 list seemed mostly like bullshit to me, as if he wanted to justify his ability to maintain his cred on both sides of the glory of our violence of liberty.
FlipYrWhig
@virag: Yes, that’s just like Juan Cole, a careerist trying desperately to appeal to the Liebermanish vital center who would never stick his neck out and jeopardize his precious “career.”
Oh, wait, I’m thinking of Bizarro Juan Cole, the guy who does everything the exact opposite.
b-psycho
@kth: I personally think the Kochs are sleazy rent-seeking hypocrites. But to attribute to them influence over foreign policy critiques…
bob h
A report on NPR this morning says there may be an effort by the Republican House to defund the Libya effort.
salacious crumb
Not a fan of Juan Cole anymore. Sure I like his well reasoned support of the Palestinian cause, but I cant say I agree with his decision to intervene in Libya. we as Americans cannot afford another war and this intervention is headed towards war, no matter how much dressing we are try to put over it to disguise it. The city of Benghazi and other vital areas are running out of food, electricity and other vital supplies..who is gonna supply it to them without military intervention?