 |  |  |
| 0:00 | -1:07:19 |
At long last, infrastructure week is here! The gang contemplates what the bipartisan plan and Democratic reconciliation package mean for the country and the economy. Also, how would Sen. Goldberg vote on the bipartisan bill? Then the discussion turns to what should be done about the latest damning climate report. Plus, everyone’s worst fears about Afghanistan from a few weeks ago seem to be coming true. And finally, for dessert, Andrew Cuomo.
Show Notes:
-Uphill’s latest update on infrastructure
-Pentagon press secretary John Kirby
David has a point on Afghanistan, but that is undermined by hawks' own refusal to be honest about exactly what they want to the general public, which gives the impression that they keep moving the goalpoasts. So the public gets fed up and just stops caring or say "enough with everything". The issue is mixing up at least 3 different goals of American military presence in Afghanistan: the original war against the Taliban regime; the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism campaign against the Taliban; nationbuilding to improve living standards of regular afghans.
The first was successful, no doubt. The second goes to David's point, but it depends on whether public opinion shares his parameters. But the third is where the issue lies. First, hawks shoot themselves in the foot if they keep expanding the goals to prevent a pullout. It might sound smart to claim goal X to go in and then goal X *and* Y (the human rights, women's rights angle) to get out, but the public will learn from this, which makes selling new interventions harder even if their goals were more modest.
Second, you can't credibly claim that there was actual progress in the human rights front if that was totally contingent on the military presence of a foreign power. It's like claiming you fixed the hole in the dam by having someone keeping their hand on it for years. That is, unless the US accepted the fact the it would like to be some sort of neoneocolonial power and be responsible for Afghanistan like a custodian. But hawks never bothered to ask the public whether they accept that role, let alone to actually persuade them.
Oh man this is so rich: they spend all this time talking about the dark hallway with a pit somewhere but nobody knows where metaphor as it relates to public debt, but then talk about how we've always innovated our way out of existential threats, seemingly not realizing that the exact same metaphor applies! Yes, we've always innovated our way out without going extinct, just like we've always been able to raise the debt ceiling without being unable to find more borrowers for our debt. Maybe there is a pit somewhere further down the hall in both cases! Or maybe there isn't a pit in either case? Who knows, but it's the exact same issue of looking at the past and present and making guesses about an unknowable future.
To be clear I agree entirely with Sarah on this, and I'm entirely an "eco modernist" as David describes (though I didn't know that term before this), but I just thought this was pretty ironic.