Above is Ed Hussain, providing Fox an informed, calm perspective on the Muslim Brotherhood (aka, the right wing’s latest scary brown bogeyman). Below is Glenn Beck’s epic, irrational rant last night, which Fox also aired last night.
Lawrence Wright talks about the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt.
Fresh Air 2/8/11
But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s. Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.
— Bill Kristol, “Stand for Freedom”
It’s an article of faith among conservatives that the fundamental cause of the crisis was excess lending to poor people and minorities. It’s equally an article of faith among liberals that the lending had little if anything to do with the crisis. The conservative view faces 2 powerful counter-arguments: (1) after the year 2000, the real driver of subprime lending was the non-bank sector, not subject to the CRA; and (2) the subprime market was just too small to tank the US financial sector. Sub-prime lending only became a threat when sub-prime loans were packaged into derivatives. The CRA did not require anyone to do that. But the liberal view also faces a counter-argument: Sub-prime loans were the stuff of which the toxic derivatives were made, and it was not some idle whim or fancy of the bankers that led to the proliferation of sub-prime loans. For example, it was the pressure of the CRA that led to the invention of the concept of the “credit score” so as to diminish the discretion of lending institutions. Credit scores in turn became a driver of the expansion of credit to ever less creditworthy borrowers.
— David From on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report. Frum reads the crisis as argumentum in utramque partem. Awesome.
I don’t know anything, have no expertise… If there comes a point when I have something to say, I will.
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Yes, we shouldn’t speak about stuff we don’t understand.
Last night George and I were watching footage of the Cairo protests. At one point, a man went running across an open space and was suddenly kneecapped by a bullyclub-wielding police. George laughed and said, “That guy’s pretending to be a bad guy. The good guy pretended to knock him down.” Obviously, George was interpreting the scene from the insufficient background of an American four year-old: everything seemed like pretend; the sides were good v. bad. How different, then, are all these talking heads who talk about the protests in terms of liberal democracy and the Muslim Brotherhood? How different is President Obama who talks about a “universal” human right of assembly and speech but only if it’s peaceful? How different, in other words, are these Americans interpreting the scenes in the Western terms? Insufficient? With all the complexity of good v. bad?
In the best global economy we can imagine, the countries with the largest GDP are the countries with the most people. That’s not America. And that’s okay. We want America to have the most innovative and dynamic economy in the world, and we want living in America to be better than living anywhere else. But we don’t want everywhere else to remain poor. We can’t want that.
As I was awakening to the willful racial self-blinding of white Christianity, I also became aware of another blindness that was—if anything—even more inexplicable (racists did at least have, as a desperate warrant for their convictions, those passages of the New Testament that urge the subservience of slaves to their masters). Then in the South, and widely elsewhere, many churches effectively ignored the plight of the poor, as they go on doing today—as I still do, socketed as I am in the deluxe surroundings and tended by warmhearted and reliable family and friends.
— “Outlaw” Christian writer, Reynolds Price, 1933–2011 | via Joanna Brooks
“Ever been to an Irish wake? I’ve never been sadder and laughed harder in my life. And I got news for you guys, ‘Amen’ ain’t far from ‘Whoo-hooo!’”
