10 thoughts on “Some, Many, and Most

  1. Now I don’t think this is about Right vs. Left bias. Sure, those exist, but in conventional news outlets like the Times there’s a more dangerous prejudice at work, and that’s the bias toward establishment consensus, at least where matters of foreign policy are concerned.

    In practice – since, aside from a miniscule number of people, the foreign policy views get more hawkish the further right you go – following the hawkish establishment foreign policy consensus is right-wing bias. It’s acceptance of the paradigm set up by both the right-wingers and the ‘centrists’ and ‘moderates’ in the executive and legislative branches, who are all well to the right of most people – like Greenwald – who are willing to speak out against and protest against wars and warmongering.Report

    1. Not that it’s particularly small d democratic, but lumping Oman, Saudi Arabia, Baharain, and Kuwait into one big ‘tyranical’ bin is the same sort of thing that neo-cons do, and the very thing this post is protesting against.Report

  2. If you stack up Saudi Arabia and Iran, and start doing the math, I’d put Iran as more likely to attack than Saudi Arabia, power-broker for power-broker. It’s kinda like looking at Russia and Germany, and doing the math for who’s more likely to use those tanks. Merkel versus Putin? Putin all the way.Report

  3. The story gives uncritical voice to the Obama admin’s position. Nothing wrong w/that, although it’d be interesting to hit the archives and see how Dubya did, and how many of the italicized weasel words were inserted in the interest of balance then.

    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “center-left,” or the term has no meaning. Historically, there has been better consensus on foreign policy than anything else, and this all fits.

    Although in this particular instance, the admin may simply have been incompetent.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/united-states-and-iraq-had-not-expected-troops-would-have-to-leave.html?_r=3&hp

    If so, it was generous of the NYT to give the admin a chance to try and cover its ass, donchathink?

    Perhaps the story could have noted that on the extremes, Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul favor withdrawing our troops from everywhere and pronto, but that’s as unnecessary as writing about the sky and noting it’s blue.Report

  4. The perfect irony here is that of all the made up scandals and biased interpretations of policies launched by the right, this is a real issue that the GOP could, in theory, use to demonstrate the current administration’s hypocracy. The irony comes in the fact that they would never actually use it because this is one of the very rare times when they are completely in sync with their counterparts. Both sides view this region as frontier American territory. The only people in politics that do not share this view are the anti-war libertarians and the anti-war liberals and the latter in U.S. politics is a theoretical creature.Report

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