Your humble blogger has returned from vacation with a sunburn to a rude awakening from the New York Times: 

The New York Times Company said on Monday that it was planning to rename The International Herald Tribune, its 125-year-old newspaper based in Paris, and would also unveil a new Web site for international audiences.

Starting this fall, under the plan, the paper will be rechristened The International New York Times, reflecting the company’s intention to focus on its core New York Times newspaper and to build its international presence.

Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, said in a statement that the company recently explored its prospects with international audiences, and noted there was “significant potential to grow the number of New York Times subscribers outside of the United States.”...

The announcement is part of the company’s larger plan to focus on its core brand and build its international presence, the spokeswoman said. On Feb. 20, the Times Company said it was exploring offers to sell The Boston Globe and its other New England media properties. Last year, the company sold its stake in Indeed.com, a jobs search engine, and the About Group, the online resource company.

As a business strategy, I get that the Times is sacrificing a minor brand to boost its primary brand. But if I could be nostalgic here for a second, I will mourn the passing of the minor brand. 

For me, the International Herald-Tribune was always a small luxury to buy when I was a very budget-conscious undergraduate/graduate student/postdoc/assistant professor travelling outside the United States. It's not that it was a great paper or anything -- truthfully, it was always overpriced and relatively thin in content (except for the wonderful weekend edition, which had the Sunday NYT crossword). It was, however, a very American newspaper in places that were decidedly not the United States. In the pre-Internet days of travel, it was the only place to get two-day old baseball scores. Furthermore, before the Times pushed out the Post, it was also an effective combination of two great broadsheets of American journalism. 

It was also a great name -- certainly better than The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim The International New York Times, which is ungainly in the extreme. 

I suspect the Times will do well in propagating its core brand overseas. But for my generation of travellers, hearing this news evokes a lost memory of grabbing an IHT and a baguette and sitting in a park somewhere digesting a simple lunch and news from home. 

It's nostalgia, pure and simple -- but that doesn't mean I won't miss it. 

Dear Mr. Hiatt (and Mr. Pexton),

Sorry to be writing to you in such a public format.  I'm also sorry to bring up the rather touchy subject of your attempts to find a competent and authentically conservative blogger for the Post.  But can we talk about Jennifer Rubin for a second? 

As I blogged yesterday, Rubin demonstrated incompetence, laziness and/or mendacity in her "hackstabbing" of Robert Zoellick.  In particular, she seemed unable to understand the meaning of the "responsible stakeholder" language that Zoellick started using in 2005, and her weblink to that language wasn't even close to accurate. 

Today I wake up to see that she has offered a follow-up post on Zoellick and an update to the controversial post from yesterday.  Let me just reprint that update in full. 

UPDATE: To clarify, Zoellick in 2005 delivered a speech in which he encouraged China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. From 2005 to the present in speeches, articles and interviews (asked in 2009 in Financial Times interview about China’s “scorecard” on acting as a responsible stakeholder he said “I think China has come a long way”), Zoellick repeatedly praised China’s conduct, despite ample signs China was anything but “responsible” and widespread criticism of the policy Zoellick had championed. Given Mitt Romney’s “take China to the WTO” stance and his unsparing criticism of China’s human rights abuses Romney could not be more different in his view of China.

Now this is a bit of an improvement.  Rubin has accurately described what Zoellick was saying in 2005 (as opposed to how it still appears in  her original post).  She also suggests that that Zoellick rubs some neoconservatives/China hardliners the wrong way on positions like human rights abuses.  That's a genuine policy disagreement. 

Still, there are some issues.  One problem is that even in the update, she's still screwing up her evidence.   Her quote from the FT interview of Zoellick is a somewhat out of context -- it seems more like Zoellick was talking about China's economic development in that particular phrase:

Zoellick:  I think China has come a very long long way. I have a special perspective because I was living in Hong Kong in 1980. I went to Guangdong province right after Deng Xiaoping started the reform process. All you have to do is compare the China of that era and the China of today. It’s so startling. 

As for her embedded links:  Rubin's URLs for the "widespread criticism" portion go to two different articles.  The first one is accurate, but, alas, Rubin only bats .500.  The "criticism" link goes to a paper by Jonathan Czin entitled "Dragon Slayer or Panda Hugger?  Chinese Perspectives on 'Responsible Stakeholder' Diplomacy."   Here's Czin's conclusion: 

Zoellick attempted to move U.S. thinking beyond the wholly inadequate dichotomous roles of friend and enemy to define the grey conceptual space that China occupies. To say that China is neither a friend nor an enemy of the United States is not only a truism; it has also become a cliché.  Neither China nor the United States wants to see China become part of a “hub and spokes” alliance system in East Asia. Yet the claim put forth by strategic thinkers such as John Mearsheimer that the changing material balance of power will inexorably and inevitably lead to Sino-American conflict is over-deterministic and threatens to engender a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, it runs counter to the premise of U.S. China policy since Kissinger. Strategically, Zoellick’s “Third Way” offers the most reasonable and palatable option.

I do not think they anyone would characterize this as "criticism" of Zoellick's policy formulation.  I read through the whole article, and couldn't really find any criticism of the policy.  Between you, me and the lamppost, I suspect Rubin saw the "panda-hugger" headline and just put it in.  But I concede that's pure speculation on my part. 

Look, this is tedious stuff, and I don't like descending into the weeds all that much.  Still, if Rubin can't correct her earlier screw-up without making yet another screw-up, doesn't that suggest that something is seriously wrong here?  And don't you, as her publishers, bear just a wee bit of responsibility for this kind of mendacity and laziness? 

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner

Over the weekend WikiLeaks pulled a pretty silly prank.  Through a combination of some savvy Web design and hacking, the organization managed to convince some people that former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller had written an op-ed column.  In the fake column, fake Keller claimed the Times was under threat of a financial blockade for publishing the Wikileaks cables -- a blockade that Wikileaks itself is experiencing (hence the motivation). 

The prank managed to fool some of the people for a short time, including the New York Times' chief technology reporter.  Just as quickly, however, the fact that the column was a hoax also spread.  For Glenn Greenwald, this is evidence that the Internet is actually a superior fact-checking entity than the traditional mainstream media used to be:

[E]rrors and frauds have a very short life-span on the Internet. The power to tap into collective knowledge and research is so much more potent than being confined to a single journalistic outlet. The ability to have one’s work take the form of a mass dialogue, rather than a stagnant monologue, is incredibly valuable. It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do....

For anyone who still believes that traditional journalism is inherently more reliable than the Internet, just follow the excellent suggestion this morning from Alexa O’Brien: just compare the duration and seriousness of the frauds and fakes enabled by the model of traditional journalism. Long before the Internet — in 1938 — a dramatized radio broadcast by Orson Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) of Martians landing on Earth spawned mass panic. More recently, consider the fraud of Iraqi WMDs and the Saddam-Al Qaeda alliance propagated by the nation’s leading traditional media outlets, or the fraudulent story they perpetrated of how grateful Iraqis spontaneously pulled down the Saddam statue,, or the fraudulent tales they told of Jessica Lynch engaging in a heroic firefight with menacing Iraqis and Pat Tillman standing up to Al Qaeda fighters before they gunned him down. And that’s to say nothing of the Jayson-Blair-type of rogue, outright fabrications.

Those frauds were vastly more harmful than anything the Internet has produced. And they took far longer to expose. That’s because they were disseminated by stagnant, impenetrable media outlets which believe only in talking to themselves and trusting only government sources. Nobody can get away with that on the Internet. The voices are far more diversified, the scrutiny is far more rigorous, the feedback is much more rapid, and the process is much more democratized. Yes, the Internet enabled a fake Bill Keller column to fool some people for a few hours, but — through the work of journalists, experts, and anonymous, uncredentialed users alike — it also immediately exposed the hoax, documented how it happened, and drew rapid lessons from it. The prime lesson is not that Internet journalism is more prone to errors; it’s that it is far more adept and agile at detecting and banishing them.

I've made arguments like this one in the past on the blog, so I'm pretty sympthetic to Greenwald's thesis that the Internet snuffs out "errors and frauds" just as quickly as they are created.  I'd also agree than in a pre-web era, the negative ramifications of mainstream media errors were far greater. 

There is another category to consider, however, which is "myths" -- and here the Internet has juuuust a bit of a problem.  Despite copious amounts of evidence, for example, a disturbingly large number of people believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States -- and the web is a friendly place for their beliefs.  The same could be said with arguments about whether global warming is a hoax or vaccines cause autism.  Furthermore, simple rebuttals aren't always so simple.  Consider this Conservapedia entry on Barack Obama: 

Obama claims to have been born in Hawaii to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. - who had married just six months prior - on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii.^[11] Some contend that this story is a complete fabrication. After many leading conservatives including the leadership of this site and Donald Trump called for Obama to release his birth certificate he did on April 27. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona conducted an investigation of the Obama's eligibility and alleged that the "birth certificate" was a fake; however, no charges have been filed. Obama was reportedly assigned a social security number whose area code was assigned to applications coming from zip codes in Connecticut.^[12]

Barack Obama Sr. was not a citizen of the United States. At the time of Obama's birth, Kenya was a British colony, meaning that Obama Sr not only held British citizenship, but passed it on to his son. When Kenya gained independence, Obama and his father both lost British citizenship and gained Kenyan citizenship. Barack Obama was a dual citizen of the United States and Kenya until his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired in 1984, as he had failed to renounce US nationality and swear loyalty to Kenya. Despite having been born with US citizenship through his mother, it has been argued that as he was born with dual nationality, he is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and thus constitutionally ineligible to become President.

Now, to my knowledge, there is nothing factually incorrect with those two paragraphs.  Rather, it's factually incomplete -- there is little discussion of facts in evidence that prove Obama is a natural-born U.S. citizen.  It's simply written in such a way to allow those individuals predisposed to believe Obama is not an American to draw that conclusion.  This is consistent with Cass Sunstein's argument that the Internet allows people to selectively filter the information they acquire such that their ideologies do not face a rigorous challenge. 

This kind of information problem existed before the internet, as anyone familiar with Ron Paul's newsletters could tell you.  What the Internet permits is an amplification of conspiracy theories that can attract pockets of people that otherwise would never bother to organize.  In a traditional mainstream media environment, it was possible to shoot down any zany conspiracy theory that bubbled up to the surface through more authoritative reporting.  Some people were likely to persist in believing the myth -- but they were less likely to articulate those beliefs to a wide audience. 

I suspect -- and let me stress that this is nothing more than an untested hypothesis -- that speed of transmission is the key variablesthat determines whether the Internet acts as a myth buster or a myth booster.  For "facts" that spread like wildfire, the Internet should work well as a fact-checking engine.  In these moments when there is a great demand for verification, the information ecosystem responds to the "fire alarm" by taking the data point and examining it to within an inch of its life.  The more pervasive the "fact" appears on the web, the greater the supply of people who can likely fact-check it. 

The problem comes with slower-moving facts -- those arguments or statements that are so "out there" that no significant online media would bother to check out until and unless it attracts a large number of devotees.  Myths and conspiracies that spread unchecked for a significant period of time are likely harder to root out.  If myths are given time to grow, then devotees to those myths can also develop defense mechanisms to rebut attempts at fact-checking.  Paradoxically, this kind of myth is more likely to take root if it spreads slowly, requiring a "police patrol" of the Internet to find it.  By the time it is doused with "the truth," there are people who have bought into the myth with sufficient psychological investment that they can tolerate a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. 

So , to repeat myself, I agree with Greenwald that the Internet snuffs out "errors and frauds" just as quickly as they are created.  The problem isn't with the fast-moving memes, however -- it's with the slow-moving ones.  

What do you think? 

I think it's safe to say that the vampire squid Goldman Sachs brand has taken a few hits in recent years. To add to the calumny, Greg Smith, an executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is leaving Goldman today after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times explaining why he's leaving.  It's not pretty:

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

Man, that best-of-luck office party is going to be awkward. 

The fact that this op-ed has already spawned its own satire suggests that it's not going to have much of an effect on the larger debate on Goldman Sachs. Which is a shame, because such a debate would be pretty useful when thinking about Big Finance (though see Gabriel Sherman's excellent New York essay on this topic from a few weeks back). Indeed, this is a teachable moment for how to compose a memo, or a mission statement, or an op-ed that will provoke a deep debate over corporate culture.  Let's see where Smith went wrong: 

1)  He made it all about himself. The ostensible point of this exercise is to shine a light on a shady corporate culture that values sins over virtues. In these instances, the following paragraph should never appear: 

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.       

See how that was ostensibly about Goldman Sachs but was really about the author?  Not a good sign. 

2)  His job apparently required him to burrow out and reside in a large soundproof hole in the ground. Let's take a look at what Smith said about the halcyon, early days of his Goldman Sachs tenure -- i.e., when he started in 2000:

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients....

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence. 

Excuse me for a sec, I need to do this for a spell. 

Look, Smith should know the Goldman Sachs culture better than I do, but as an outsider, I am fairly certain of two things:  A)  Before Smith's op-ed, the terms "humility" and "Goldman Sachs" never appeared in the same sentence.... ever; and  B)  Making money was always how people got promoted at Goldman Sachs. 

There's been enough written about Goldman Sachs to know that by 2006, the firm had recognized that it was badly overexposed in the subprime market and decided to dump their holdings onto their clients. We know that in 2007, the firm went so far out of bounds that the SEC actually brought a civil suit against them, securing a $550 million settlement more than 18 months ago. And now Smith notices something is amiss??!! While the Wall Street Journal suggests Smith's role at Goldman wasn't pivotal, this kind of naivite requires a special kind of willful blindness. 

If you're going to be a whistle-blower, you need to acknowledge upfront your complicity in any malfeasance, be it legal or ethical. Smith's op-ed doesn't come close to doing this. 

[Note to readers: Because Dan was upgraded to business class on his trip to Beijing, he was exposed to a serious viral infection in the food called metaphoricus overloadus, known more commonly as Friedman's Disease. Rest assured, it is far from fatal -- it usually passes after 24 hours of no travel. As near as we can determine, all the facts in the blog post below are accurate. While suffering from Friedman's Disease, however, side effects do include rapid-fire, over-the-top metaphors. Remember: You've been warned!! --ed.]

To truly understand the phenomenon that is China, you need to fly into Beijing's airport and then try to get into the city. That's it; that's all you need. Just that adventure alone will tell you all you need to know about the contradictions of the Middle Kingdom.

First you enter a glittering, modern airport, with helpful signs in Mandarin and English. It's sheer scale and modernity telegraphs the ways in which China has already entered modernity. The monorail from my terminal to baggage claim was a pointed reminder of how much the United States lags behind in infrastructure investment in recent years.

And yet, there's the traffic. Summer in Beijing is a confusing miasma of traffic and smog and traffic. As my compatriot and I clambered into our taxi at Beijing's immaculately clean and modern airport, we knew that the ride to the hotel could take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes depending on the traffic. Just as we Americans don't know when exactly China will catch up, the Chinese are not sure how long it will take to get there.

We might like to think that driving in a New York City taxi is as exciting as a carnival ride, but that's nothing compared with a taxi ride on a Beijing superhighway. In New York, there's always that sense that, in the end, the taxi driver won't risk an actual collision. On the road to Beijing, however, I witnessed at least two last-minute swerves and road rage that would have made Los Angelenos blush. Using an accent that an old-style New York cabbie would have admired in its sheer swarthiness, my cabbie kept honking for at least two minutes after a car viciously cut him off.

It's a fantastical engineering problem, getting so many cars and motorcycles and trucks and buses to merge and move in the same direction. And that's when it hit me like a thunderbolt -- China itself is like this superhighway. It's massive in size, 10 lanes easy. It's filled with an array of vehicles determined to get ahead. The problem is that when you combine all the vehicles together, the real possibility of a two-week-long traffic jam in which everyone wants to go somewhere but nobody gets anywhere is clearly a possibility. Predicting China's future is like predicting the traffic:  You know there will be some stop-and-go, but you just don't know how much of it there will be.

When we got to the hotel, I paid my cabbie and he signaled that I owed him four more yuan. I was suffering from ATM disease, so I took out a single U.S. dollar bill and a 100-yuan note, looked at him, and said, "You choose." He paused, and then took the yuan note and made the necessary change. Clearly, all of us participating in this hyperaccelerated, globalized economy are going to have to make the necessary change soon enough.

In Sayf-Al-Islam's rambling speech last night on Libyan State television, he blamed the current unpleasantness in his country on, as near as I can determine, crazed African LSD addicts. 

This isn't going down as well as Sayf had intended, and Libya seems less stable than 24 hours earlier.  Indeed, Sayf's off-the-cuff remarks managed to make Hosni Mubarak's three speeches seem like a model of professionalism, which I would not have thought was possible a week ago.  

Indeed, it is striking how utterly incompetent leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have been at managing their media message.  Speeches are announced, then never delivered on time, and then delivered with production values that woulds embarrass a public access channel in the U.S.  It's like political leaders in the region have discovered blogs just as the young people has moved on to Twitter or something.  [Er, no, that's the United States--ed.]  Oh, right. 

Having just finished a week of intense media whoring, methinks that one problem is that most of these leaders have simply fallen out of practice (if they were ever in practice) at personally using the media to assuage discontent.  I've been on enough shows on enough different media platforms to appreciate that there is an art, or at least a tradecraft, to presenting a convincing message in the mediasphere.  Authoritarian leaders in the Middle East are quite adept at playing internal factions off one another.  That's a different skill set than trying to craft a coherent and compelling media message to calm street protestors no longer intimidated by internal security forces. 

Indeed, as I argued in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, bureaucratic first responses to novel situations are almost uniformly bad.  Sayf pretty much admitted this last night, as he acknowledged that the Libyan armed forces were not trained to deal with street protestors.  I suspect the same is true with the state media outlets -- they excel at producing tame, regime-friendly pablum during quiescent periods, but now they're operating in unknown territory. 

I also argued that bureaucracies should be able to adapt their organizational routines over time, if a regime's domestic support does not evaporate.  Readers are encouraged to predict which regimes under threat in the Middle East are the most likely to be able to adapt.  My money is on Iran -- not because that regime is more popular, but simply because Iran's leaders have had eighteen months to adapt and they are therefore further down the learning curve. 

Developing....

There are many peculiar rites of passage for each incoming U.S. administration: the first scandal, the first resignation, the first broken campaign promise, and the first botched use of force. 

Add to this list the first Bob Woodward book of an administration. Like a debutante's coming-out party, there are highly formalized rituals -- the press leaks about the good stuff in the book, the Sunday morning talk show commentators obsessing over the more controversial bits and pieces, the inevitable meta-essays on Woodward himself. As a young foreign policy wonk, I remember looking forward to the latest Woodward tome the way others looked forward to the latest Stephen King novel. 

That was then, however -- with Obama's Wars, has Bob Woodward demonstrated that he's about as irrelevant as the debutante circuit? 

Woodward is operating in a very different media environment now. What used to be his bread and butter -- the political and bureaucratic machinations of presidential administrations -- is no longer his exclusive province. Beyond the Washington Post and New York Times, media outlets as varied as Politico, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and the New Yorker now generate monthly weekly hourly revelations that Woodward used to be able to hoard for his books. As my old dissertation advisor used to say, "is there anything new here?"

Let's see what Steve Luxenberg's preview in the Washington Post has to say: 

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward....

Among the book's other disclosures:

-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.

-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.

-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."

-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

Hmmm.... there is some interesting stuff, but it's more in the details (Karzai's depression, the CIA's paramilitaries) than in the overarching narrative. Obama feuded with the military on Afghanistan? There was bureaucratic dissension on Afghanistan? Well, blow me down!! 

This ain't how it used to be. In The Commanders, for example, Woodward showed that JCS Chairman Colin Powell was much more reluctant to attack Iraq than previously known. 

Now it's possible that this is simply a function of me being more cynical older than I used to be. But the fact is, I just don't look forward to a new Bob Woodward book anymore. 

Question to readers:  has Woodward jumped the shark? 

Dear Peter Schweizer,

First off, thanks for writing.  Believe it or not, this is precisely this kind of exchange I was hoping for when I called Big Peace "unadulterated horses**t" in my last post.  I respect and admire writers who are not put off by a healthy use of Anglo-Saxon terms, as opposed to Latin, academic-y obfuscation. 

You raise some issues with my post, so let me respond in kind. 

First, you note that, "Drezner seems to have made a habit of coming to Mr. Soros’ defense," linking to a blog post from a few years back.  I wonder, however, if you read the entire blog post.  Here's how I closed it: 

I have very mixed feelings on Soros. The man is and was a first-rate philanthropist. That, said, having read The Bubble of American Diplomacy, I've concluded that Soros is a political loon of the first order. It is ridiculously easy to attack George Soros without ever discussing his religion.

....while Blankely was, to repeat, clearly way out of bounds, the Republican decision to go on the offensive against Soros is perfectly legit. He's dedicated large sums of money to attacking the Bush administration. According to the Post story, "Soros has said in interviews that he has concluded that ousting Bush is the most important thing he can do with his life." The trigger for the Hannity & Colmes discussion was Soros' statement comparing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to the 9/11 attacks. In Bubble of American Diplomacy, Soros admits that he's become "quite rabid" in his political views. He's entered the political arena -- which means he's opened himself to political attacks.

Trust me when I say that this post didn't win me many friends on the left.  If this amounts to me "sucking up to a billionaire philanthropist," as you put it, well then, gee, I really stink at it.  If you think this still amounts to "sucking up," then I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree.  To reiterate -- going after Soros' ideas is just fine.  I'm sure you'll agree, however, that going after him for being a Jew is both inflammatory and extraneous. 

You then go on to argue that Soros has influenced Obama, and provide links to stories in the Wall Street Journal and Time to back up this point.  Hey, this is great!  You have linked citations to back up your argument!!  That's what I like to see when an online article makes a non-obvious factual assertion.  Now go back and re-read Moriarty's column -- did he have any hyperlinks backing up any of his assertions linking Soros to Obama?  No?  Wouldn't some links on that point have been useful?  Indeed, dare I suggest that pointing out the need for evidence is kind of an editor's job? 

As for your cites, I'm afraid thay're not convincing at all.  Both of them are from November 2008, when there was speculation over who would influence then-President-elect Obama.  I haven't seen much since then about Soros' direct influence over Obama.  Soros is at best ambivalent and at worst disappointed with Obama's performance.  On the issue in which Soros has been the most outspoken -- financial regulation -- Obama willfully ignored Soros' recommendations.  So I'm not seeing a lot of influence here.  I'm seeing nothing that even approximates the overt and tight relationship that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon shared during the latter's administration (which is what Moriarity stated in his essay). 

I could be persuaded otherwise on this point -- Obama and Soros probably do have some kind of relationship.  But I need to see the evidence, the unvarnished truth, if you will.  If you have any, please provide it and link to it.  

Finally, you sarcastically note my impending zombie book, concluding, "Wow. Serious stuff. Scholarly material. Certainly not horses***t." 

Well played, sir!!  Yes, I am indeed writing a semi-serious book on zombies and world politics.  I'm not sure I follow your line of argumentation, however.  Are you suggesting that writing on something frivolous (but pedagogically useful)  like zombies somehow diminishes my ability to analyze politics and international relations?  If that's your argument, then you're impeaching an awful lot of writers and analysts who dabble in hobbies like fiction-writing on the side.  It's a good thing you haven't done anything so frivolous as write fiction.  Oh, wait....

If you want to directly critique my writings on international relations, please feel free -- there's a lot of them.  Implying that the two months I spent writing Theories of International Politics and Zombies disqualifies me from more serious musings is... wait for it.... unadulterated horses**t. 

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner

----

Dear Michael Moriarty. 

First off, again, thanks for writing.  Second, let me just say that you're a highly underrated actor.  Courage Under Fire is one of my favorite post-Cold War films, and I thought you were terrific in it -- an understated performance that deserved Academy Award recognition. 

 Now, to the matter at hand.  You write in your response: 

You say, “Seriously, I see no evidence of Soros’ alleged influence over Obama, nor do I see any evidence of Soros’ desire to bring down the United States.”

Dragging the United States, kicking and screaming, into the economic quick sands of not only Far Left false promises but, for example, handing the American Gulf oil market over to Brazil’s own predominantly offshore drilling is not a recent headline … of sorts?

Isn’t Mr. Soros a close friend of Brazil’s leadership and an actual investor in Brazil’s oil explorations?

Forgive my hyperbole, but isn’t a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, imposed by an American, Presidential friend of George Soros going to help Brazil … and therefore George Soros … EXPONENTIALLY?

But then again, you can’t even see a shred of “influence” from Soros to Obama (emphases in original).

Now I assume you are referring to this allegation with respect to Soros' investments in Petrobas and the links between Petrobas and the Obama administration.  I'm not sure, however, since once again, you failed to provide any links to back up your arguments.  On this matter, I suggest you peruse this FactCheck.org post about the issue, as well as this Bloomberg story about Soros' dealings with Petrobras.  

There's a phrase that I like a lot:  correlation does not equal causation.  It is probably true that a moratorium on offshore drilling would help Petrobas, which would in turn help Soros.  I seriously doubt, however, that this is what led to the moratorium in the first place, just as I find most conspiracy theories implausible.   The moratorium does not appear to reflect Obama's long-term preferences on the issue, given that he indicated he was open to drilling during the 2008 campaign and then announced an expansion of such drilling just a few months before the BP imbroglio.  Finally, a six-month delay is not really going to enrich Petrobas all that much. 

So no, the word "exponentially" doesn't hold up here.  Neither does the comparison you made between Nixon/Kissinger and Obama/Soros in your initial post -- those two pairings are apples and oranges, and there's nothing from your original post nor your follow-up letter that is persuasive on that point. 

You also write, "The rumor I’ve received about your publication, Foreign Policy, is that it is not just Left but Far Left."  Hey, why listen to received rumor?  Why not go for the unvarnished truth?  Check out Foreign Policy for yourself!!  I'm sure there will be plenty of content that you and your Big Peace readers will find to be on the left.  On the other hand, distinguished conservative writers ranging from Robert Kagan to Walter Russell Mead to Dov Zakheim have published here.  Even some less distinguished conservatives, like Peter Schweizer's business partner Marc A. Thiessen, have found their way onto Foreign Policy.  Read the whole thing!! 

One final, friendly suggestion from one writer to another:  bolded and italicized fonts have their place in making a point.  But bolded and italicized text, in and of itself, does not constitute evidence. 

Do keep checking out my blog -- I, for one, would welcome a whole new set of critical readers. 

Respectfully,

Daniel W. Drezner

Your humble blogger is back in the USA, and will be posting with gusto later today about everything he learned while in Europe. 

However, I can't resist commenting quickly on Goldman Sachs' settlement with the SEC.  Some financial bloggers are already describing it as a huge win for Goldman.  Ordinarily, I don't like this kind of frame:  settlements should be win-win, because both sides avoid litigation costs.  That said, this paragraph from Sewell Chan and Louise Story's New York Times write-up did catch me short: 

Though Goldman did not formally admit to the S.E.C.’s allegations, it agreed to a judicial order barring it from committing intentional fraud in the future under federal securities laws. 

Really?  Really?!  REALLY?! 

Goldman Sachs requires a judicial order  to not commit intentional fraud?  If that judicial order wasn't drawn up, fraud is part and parcel of Goldman Sachs' standard operating procedure?  Does this mean that, prior to this settlement, defrauding customers was part of its overall corporate strategy? 

I can just picture Goldman Sachs' prospectus to investors: 

Goldman Sachs has become the world's most profitable institutional investor through an integrated three-part strategy:

1.  Maximizing the profit opportunities from financial globalization;

2.  Optimizing the core research strengths of Goldman Sachs' legendary research arm;

3.  Scamming the living s**t out of investors stupid enough to think that we have ethics. 

Seriously, what the f**king f**k?  If this counts as a Goldman Sachs "concession," then they just pulled off the best piece of financial statecraft I've ever seen.  It's almost as bad as the old Number Six.

Am I missing anything? 

UPDATE:  Ah, this comment by A.S. does provide some useful context for this provision.  Still, writing it up as a Goldman Sachs concession  seems like poor reportage.

How does your humble blogger engage in debate when he's still coasting on his vacation tan?  Now's the opprtunity to view this natural experiment in the latest bloggingheads diavlog.  Henry Farrell and I debate the foreign policy effects of health care, the U.S.-Israel relationship, the Frumble in the Jungle, the abuse scandals in the Catholic church, and what the hell is happening in the European Union.

 Enjoy!!

[Um... what does Mel Brooks have to do with this?--ed.  Henry said something when we were talking about the Catholic church scandals that reminded me of this.] 

Steve Walt effectively vivisects Adam Lawther's op-ed yesterday on the alleged positive externalities that an Iranian nuclear bomb would have on the Middle East and American foreign policy.  Rather than dogpile on, I'm going to go meta again. 

I'm intrigued by what op-ed editor David Shipley is trying to do on the Iran debate.  Lawther's op-ed is hardly the first strange op-ed on Iran to appear in the past few months.  We've also had Alan Kuperman's analysis for why bombing Iran is such a good idea, and the Leverett's pay-no-attention-to-the-protestors-behind-the-curtain argument for enhanced engagement with the current Iranian leadership. 

As the links above suggest, I'm not a fan of any of these arguments.  That said, I am a fan of having these arguments inserted into the public discussion over Iran.  Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a common lament has been that was no public debate about the wisdom of different policy options.  Both foreign policy mooseheads and scholars have highlighted this pre-invasion consensus.  These analyses might be somewhat exaggerated, but I think it would be difficult to deny that in the opinion pages of the major newspapers, the deck was somewhat stacked in favor of military action. 

My hunch is that Shipley is thinking:  "Won't Get Fooled Again"  He wants as heterogeneous an array of views as possible as the Iran situation develops. 

There is something laudable about this if it's true -- it's exactly what the Times op-ed page should be doing as a foreign policy crisis unfolds.  My only concern is the caliber of reasoning in these op-eds.  They are, as Walt put it, "silly arguments."  On the other hand, if these ideas are vetted and then shot down, maybe the foreign policy community actually knows what it's talking about this time around. 

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of Jon Stewart's verbal skewering of Crossfire in particular and the whole genre of left-right cable gabfests in general.  Stewart said these kind of shows were "hurting America" because of their general blather and failure to ask politicians good, sharp questions. 

Stewart's appearance on Crossfire generated quite the navel-gazing among the commentariat, and played no small role in the eventual disappearance of Crossfire, The Capitol Gang, Hannity & Colmes, and shows of that ilk.  

So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask -- did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air? 

If you're expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you're going to be disappointed.  My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement?   

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  Nowadays, if you're looking for that kind of exchange, you either have to fast all week until the Sunday morning talk shows, or go visit bloggingheads. 

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the most batsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

Again, you have to discount this as a half-assed blog observation, but it seems to me that shows like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann are now sucking up the available oxygen in the cable newsverse that programs like Capitol Gang use to breathe.  Is that really a good thing? 

So, five years later, I'd like to ask Mr. Stewart a question -- was your rant good for America? 

UPDATE:  Two quick responses.  First, this commenter argues that the Glenn Becks of the world are far worse than the Keith Olbermanns of the world, and that this post has a "plague on both houses" quality to it. 

OK, let's stipulate that the bulk of the output that I'm decrying in this post comes from the right rather than the left.  I'll even further stipulate that Rachel Maddow represent the best of this kind of format.  So stipulated. 

Feel better now?  Does that stipulation in any way affect the argument I made above?  No, I didn't think so. 

Second, James Joyner responds with this observation:

Contra-Tucker Carlson, I actually believe shows like Stewart’s “Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report” do a better job of illuminating issues than the screamfests did.  But that’s a rather low bar. 

Well...... maybe.  When Stewart is on his game, he is quite the interrogator.  But Carlson was correct about one point -- politicians had a clear incentive to duck the screamfests in favor of "soft news" formats like the morning network shows, late-night talk shows, "fake news" shows like Stewart's or SNL, or even Oprah.  How many politicians now choose to duck Stewart's show entirely for even softer news outlets.  And, to repeat -- what replaced the left-right screamfests?  Ideologically pure screamfests. 

Thanks, but no thanks. 

I've blogged before about the awesome and misplaced power of headline editors.  They can erroneously move markets and piss off bloggers who don't read through to the end of an article -- confuse readers. 

Well, USA Today let me down.  Google News sent me to this USA Today story (really a blog post) with the headline, "Obama says nation needs more nerds."

And I thought to myself, "Yes!!!  Finally, we can expand our power from out current base of Hollywood comic book movie franchises and start to dominate the real corridors of power." 

Alas, there's nothing in the actual story to suggest that Obama said those words.  Indeed, there's nothing in the fact sheet on the Cyberspace Policy Review report where Obama says that either. 

Now I must go back to my regularly scheduled work, while adding another headline editor to my list. 

Oh, yes, there's a list. 

I'm 50% convinced that Paul Krugman's op-ed today is correct, and the moderates wound up damaging the stimulus more than they improved it. 

The thing is, I'm also 50% convinced that Krugman is to Keynesians as Richard Perle is to neoconservatives.  When an embittered ideologue derides his political leader for demonstrating a willingness to compromise and "negotiating with yourself," well, one does get the sense of deja vu. 

The rhetorical parallels between neocons and Keynesians are increasingly disturbing.  Martin Wolf argued late last week that "shock and awe" is required to stimulate the global economy -- a point seconded by Krugman.  Critics of the Keynesian approach are summarily dismissed as wingnuts. 

Not all Keynesians are acting in this manner.  Brad DeLong has provided substantive rebuttals to critics of the stimulus. 

I'm in the Ken Rogoff camp on the economy -- I'm somewhat dubious about the ability of any stimulus package to really jumpstart the economy, and very wary about the long-term costs of this strategy (for one thing, Bretton Woods II still needs to be unwound).  But I also don't have a better idea and "the situation is so dangerous it has to be tried."

But I also know that when I hear anyone using rhetorical tropes that remind me of Richard Perle, I run like hell in the opposite direction.  And Krugman is increasingly sounding like Perle. 

UPDATE:  See Clive Crook and Will Wilkinson on this point as well.