Michael Totten at The City Journal: ‘A Real Downside To Any Deal With Iran‘

Will the relatively weakened Sunni coalition try and use ISIS fighters as a proxy against Tehran, Damascus, Hizbollah and the government in Baghdad?

‘The U.S. hardly supports the malignant Assad, but all of Washington’s air strikes have landed on Sunni jihadist targets even after President Obama accused Damascus of deploying chemical weapons in civilian population centers. Like the government in Baghdad, the House of Assad is firmly in the Iranian camp. The state, along with the ruling family, is heavily packed with members of the Alawite minority, adherents of a heterodox religion that fuses Shia Islam, Christianity, and Gnosticism.’

Well, it’s nearly impossible to do deals with Sunni Ba’ath fascism, nor Saudi funded Wahhabism, but you can do deals with the mullahs in Tehran and the post-1979 crowd, desirous of deliverable nukes and working alongside Damascus, Hizbollah etc?

If there’s any one place on Earth right now where a nuclear arms race would be a bad idea, this is it.

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Ross Douthat at the NY Times: ‘Caesarism Without Apology‘

‘…A given move is a success if the opposition fails to find a way to block it, the hemmers and hawers are proven wrong if the president isn’t impeached, and the state of your party doesn’t really matter because an unbound presidency is all that progressivism really needs.’

If, as this blog does, you don’t see too many limiting principles on much of modern liberalism, (i.e. how does one ever know how much equality, economic regulation, central planning, tolerance, democracy etc. is enough?), then progressivism and activism is a much trickier beast: Ideologically predisposed towards vast expansions of federal and executive power through activism and majoritiarian populism.  This, quite aside from the executive-heavy trends we’ve been seeing in Washington the last generation or so.

Politicians aiming for the White House love controlling messages, and images, and Obama is no exception.  In fact, being a relative unknown in 2008, he was particularly reliant on analytics, social media, and the promotion of an image of himself.

All those promises of transparency, hipness, coolness and pop culture work against many realities of politics, and the job itself.