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So Give Me the Scoop on this CPAC Thing
I’m guessing there’s no better group of people to ask. I want to know what really happened at CPAC. Remember, I wasn’t there. Missed the party. Wasted my weekend on the news about Boris Nemtsov being blown away on the streets of Moscow. No, of course I don’t know who killed him, but I’m not yet at that zen state where I look at that news and think, “Political assassination in Moscow, Kremlin critic lying dead just outside the Kremlin’s walls, who cares, how could that possibly affect the world.”
So after freaking out completely, I turn my attention back to the US to scan the news from the other superpower, the last, best chance of –well, “my country,” as I quaintly think of it. I read, variously, that CPAC is freaking out the Nation because it seemed “disturbingly sane,” and that 25.7 percent of the 3,000+ attendees–half of whom identified as between the ages of 18 and 25–think Rand Paul’s the man for the job.
If I were just casually skim
ming the news, didn’t know all that much about America, my takeaway would be that CPAC made itself look “disturbingly sane” to the Nation–and I’d be confused: Shouldn’t CPAC just look “disturbing” to the Nation? What does CPAC look like to our nation, as opposed to the Nation? What about the world–did CPAC just make our nation look sane, insane, or “disturbingly sane?” I hope people at CPAC were sane enough to be really freaked out by that news from Moscow–were they?
Ricochet is on the CPAC beat and it’s been there all weekend. Looks like we’ve got 21 podcasts from CPAC and lots of people who were there. Which one should I listen to if I want to know, “What really happened at CPAC?” I figure I have a better chance of figuring that out than figuring out who killed Nemtsov. I want reassurance that CPAC is sane, not “disturbingly sane to the Nation,” or “totally insane, full stop.” So I want to know if lots of people there were thinking, “Who killed Nemtsov,” and worrying about the things sane people worry about when that news clatters across the transom.
Or, maybe I could just focus on the really important part. The key metric. It sounds like there were a lot of Washington critics in Washington. All alive and accounted for, as I understand it. I myself find that undisturbing and entirely sane. Unlike that other superpower I could mention.
But yes, I’d find it weird if you told me, “No one there was at all concerned about Kremlin.” It’s one thing to look so sane it confuses the Nation, another thing to be insane, like the Nation. 
Basically, I don’t think Americans are insane. I reckon if you offer them Rand Paul, my fellow citizens will still be the Americans I know, so unless I’ve completely lost the plot, they’ll give you Jim Webb.
Frankly, he makes a lot more sense to me on national security. Or at least, he seems to be in basic contact with reality. So yes, given that awful choice, I’d vote Webb. My loyalty–and my duty–isn’t to the Republican Party. It’s to the United States of America. If I think the American conservative party has gone nuts, I’ll vote for the least-nuts Democrat. I reckon–I hope–that many Americans do share my view. But you’re there, I’m not. Do you?
Published in General
It seems the crowd prefers simmering disasters to change. Jim Webb represent the same old foreign policy of US “leadership” where we spend our children’s lives, give away money to our enemies and prop up regimes who hate us to our very core while our ‘friends’ mock us for being so stupid. However we do create massive employment for foreign policy bureaucrats and journalists who have those bureaucrats in their rolodexes along with amazing chances for graft for political donors.
I would look for a candidate who does not race to every hotspot or react to every media-sculpted crisis but instead stops being stupid. If we intervene, intervene to win or not at all. If we spend money, we will get something tangible in return. The main reason Americans grew to hate the Iraq war is they all assumed we went to war for oil and did not get any damned oil.
I doubt Rand Paul is that candidate, but I fear more people are afraid of trading the rolling disaster we know for one that is very different.
And let us not forget that Yushchenko- one of the pillars of the Orange Revolution – was poisoned and permanently disfigured as he struggled to curb Russian influence on Ukraine and to strengthen ties with the U.S.
Webb voted for Obamacare and wants to expand it, is pro-choice, supports SSM, is a protectionist, wants more taxes and government programs, opposes school choice and supports teachers unions, opposes positive entitlement reform, engages in class warfare with Huckabee like enthusiasm, has terrible Constitutional views, is generally more isolationist than Paul (although both are misrepresenting their past views right now), is an environmentalist whacko, and wants to socialize the economy.
I guess the question is “What’s right with Sen. Webb?”
This is easy to google. When that happens, I expect to hear retractions from those who think that ex-pats don’t pay taxes. I hope that I don’t hear the non-standard meaning of ex-pat (ie, someone who does not merely live abroad, but also gives up citizenship) and an argument that their only paying massive new taxes once is insufficiently socialist.
If you read more, you’d find more evidence of conservatism. I also wish that Franco were less partisan, but he’s absolutely right about Webb. Claire’s suggestion that she’d be a single issue voter is a reasonable position, but Franco’s position is also sound.
He attracts a fair number of conservatives. You’d be surprised how many conservatives find his combination of youthful appeal, energetic earnestness, pro-life advocacy, government cutting aggression, and efforts at things like civil asset forfeiture reform appealing. He’s far better than previous semi-Republican libertarians at working with others to further conservative and libertarian ends (albeit less effective than fully Republican libertarians like Sen. Sununu).
Claire, I’d think you would not be so worried if you realized CPAC is the political nerd’s equivalent of ComicCon, and Paul supporters are the equivalent of Star Trek groupies.
Killing political opponents and critics is a sign of weakness, not of strength – otherwise why bother? It’s possibly a sign that sanctions are having a huge impact and that the impact is likely to get worse.
I think that scares me a heck of a lot more than Putin or about the assassination of some no-name in Moscow.
But, I probably shouldn’t be scared because his father also used to win straw polls at CPAC every year too.
Kids, will vote for kids.
Impossible! I’ve heard here on Ricochet, repeatedly, that there are no serious sanctions on Russia, and nothing is happening. Pay no attention to the crumbling economy!
Since humanity has yet to discover any objective measures of economic performance, then it’s just your word against theirs Zafar.
Nemtsov died on Friday, with the news being clear after most of the relevant speeches went out. I didn’t go to the Russia speech, but a girl who did talked about Nemtsov. The people I was chatting with on Saturday were mostly talking gossip (personal stuff that happened over the weekend, like my introducing Fred to Gary Johnson, Jim Geraghty winning the journalism award), or history (Churchill got a good hour and a half, and a guy who’ll be returning to Ricochet gave us a rundown on Federalist 40’s argument that the Constitution was procedurally sound in its initial implementation), speeches we’d enjoyed or not enjoyed, and such. There wasn’t a lot of news checking.
I got home afterward and had a conversation about Nemtsov, but most of CPAC is about stuff at CPAC. The conversations we had about non-CPAC things were mostly because we had Hillsdale students with us who were recently studying Churchill and the Federalist Papers.
I don’t think it’s abnormal or concerning for conversations not to be dominated by the news cycle. I do think it’s good to be aware of things that are going on, and I agree that Nemtsov is important, but it seems fine to me for reactions to Nemtsov to come out over the weeks, months, and years from now. If we forced important people to give prompt responses, they’d be tied to their responses given on little information. Some people have to respond immediately, but that’s not really the best kind of response.
Claire, you are right on the money (the ruble) in your comments about the murder of Nemtsov. I was in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. A candidate, running for Premier was poisoned.
“Yushchenko—running on an anticorruption, anticronyism platform—emerged as the leading opposition candidate, but his campaign was prevented from visiting Yanukovych’s stronghold of Donetsk and other eastern cities. In September Yushchenko’s health began to fail, and medical tests later revealed he had suffered dioxin poisoning (allegedly carried out by the Ukrainian State Security Service), which left his face disfigured. ”
His face looked like the aftermath of a track meet. Hard to look at. Poison is the drug of choice in the Russian political sphere, but it seems a gun down could be an alternative technique. Yeah, it’s for real in that part of the world.
As to Jim Webb, I assume you are joking. Webb is in no way connected to reality. I’ve watched this guy off and on since he ran for office. His behavior is totally unpredictable. Hey, I’m all for carrying a concealed weapon, but trying to pass through security at Congress is pushing the 2nd Amendment a bit far. That’s just one freaky incident. He’s flat nuts.
Rand Paul is quite sane. It’s his old man who’s borderline. Be assured he won’t enter the White House armed. He’s not getting the nomination anyway, so who cares.
I agree with this, but I don’t think it’s super reassuring. As AIG suggests, our view of sanctions’ impacts are hard to support accurately and objectively, but the combination of sanctions and oil prices certainly makes life harder. The escalated support for international intervention in Syria makes it more likely that Assad will be ousted. Life’s just generally bad for Putin right now.
The concern is that life may get very bad for Putin but not so bad that he’s ousted. An unhappy Putin isn’t necessarily better than a happy, content, rabid bear. In the long term, the breaking of Russia is almost certainly helpful, but the long term is quite a ways off. In the meantime, there are a whole lot of short and medium term threats that an insane dictator in charge of a large and nuclear power can present when he panics, and he could easily be panicking for decades.
Well, I was actually being sarcastic in my comment. We can know the effects of the sanctions. They’re pretty severe.
Nobody in the West had ever heard of this guy prior to him being killed, so what’s there to talk about?
Normal day in Russia.
Well lets hope he doesn’t get the nomination. Lets hope he doesn’t run too, cause we don’t need another Paulite to turn the debates into a circus show.
As for him being sane, well, you can judge a man by his followers. That’s all I got to say about that.
I think that your sarcasm was clear, and I agree with you that it’s clear that the answer to how much impact is “a significant amount”, but it’s hard to quantify beyond that, and hard to demonstrate beyond a priori beliefs and correlation. If it read like I was intending to be ambiguous about the impact of sanctions, I mishandled my comment.
There were many non-Catholics who had not heard of Oscar Romero. That didn’t mean that his death wasn’t a big deal. The Jordanian pilot who got burned wasn’t the first guy ISIS killed and wasn’t a guy anyone had heard of. “Many people don’t understand why this is a big deal” is a very different statement to “this is not a big deal”. People I know who are into this stuff (including, apparently, Claire albeit not including, apparently, AIG) overwhelmingly think this is a big deal.
The thing about that guy right there that the left doesn’t get at all is that he doesn’t give a good GD what they think of him. I was just thinking today that if Obama wasn’t president I would have zero interest in what he thinks about anything.
There is no way in hell I would vote for *any* Democrat, much less an arrogant putz like Jim Webb. I would vote without hesitation for Rand Paul, a man who has proven his love for America and its civil liberties.
Moreover, I have no loyalty to the Republican Party either, having left it two years ago. My loyalties are to Texas and the United States of America. In that order.
Claire, I think the Nations separation from reality was finally concluded on July 17th. That was the day that the Other Superpower shot down a Malaysian Passenger jet over the Ukraine. What you say? It was those nasty separatist that shot it down. Oh really! Let’s see, the plane was flying at 33,000 feet well beyond the range of shoulder fired surface to air missiles . It was taken down by a full fledged SAM. Interesting things these full sized SAM’s. They use radar for ranging and targeting (requires trained crew), they use power plants to drive the radar (requires trained crew), has team that actually fires the missile (requires trained crew), and must be serviced so that it can be in a ready state (those nasty chemicals must be handled by, you guessed it, a trained crew). So we’re not talking about packing up some greased up AK-47’s, sending them to a bunch of “freedom fighters”, and telling them to “have at it”. No, this required trained Russian tech’s to bring it down. And our Nations response: Mheh, no worries.
Meh. Neither are a big deal. Normal day in El Salvador or Iraq.
Normal day in Russia.
Things aren’t a big deal, if that’s what you already expect to happen. Who doesn’t expect that Putin’s enemies won’t be killed or jailed? No one.
This guy wasn’t a big deal in Russia either.
The problem when someone in the US or the West gets into a local issue with little knowledge, and of little significance, is that they run the risk of making fools of themselves. Normally, the US doesn’t do this. Thankfully. So no need to start now.
Everyone already knows Putin is a murderous dictator. On the other hand, if some US politician makes a “martyr” out of this guy, you run the risk of making “martyrs” out of some rather unpleasant people. Putin’s opponents aren’t angels either. There’s few, if any, “good guys” over there.
Yeah, no it wasn’t.
Whoo hoo! Go LBJ!
Maybe Texans understand Putin’s mindset more than anybody else in the US? An independent state forced to cede territory. A fragile oil based economy. A fierce loyalty to a lost state. OK feel free to ignore me or disagree with me.
Wrong on all three counts. Coming from a denizen of the failed socialist state of California, this is beyond hilarious.
Emphasis mine.
I’m intrigued. Which Democrat who has not left his party would you prefer to vote for? I’d have thought Webb was about as good as it gets for your positions.
I’m not meaning to question or criticize your admirable and plausible opposition to actively voting for Democrats, just what makes Webb worse than the rest of his party.
Before ISIS killed Al-Kassasbeh, air strikes had been relatively desultory. They’ve become significantly more effective, and support for ISIS dropped. I’d be just as surprised by a future history of ISIS that failed to devote significant space to him as I would be by a history of the Salvadoran Civil War that fails to pay attention to Romero. If you could find me a history of the Salvadoran Civil War that overlooks the assassination, that fails to treat that day as abnormal, I will acknowledge your research instincts.
It’s true that people knew that Putin was murderous, but the shade of gray matters. Putin isn’t Obama, and there’s a lot of points between them, but he also isn’t Stalin, and there’s a lot of points between them, too. The news here may be that Putin is moving towards the Stalin end of the spectrum, which would be important, and unpleasant. If it turns out to be true, Nemtsov will also get a prominent place in the writeups of that transition. If things work out OK, he won’t be so important, but even a potentially critical day is not normal, or something to be overlooked.
Very true, but shouldn’t it at least be unsurprising?
The oligarchs know he’s going to lose them a lot of money, and he knows that they know.
How did we think he would react? True to form he’s knocking off internal critics more and more blatantly. It’s what every dictator does – when challenged externally they kick it up a notch at home. Not so?
Some dictators don’t. Lee Kuan Yew and Pinochet went out of office peacefully. In Russian history you have Gorbachevs as well as Stalins.
It is likely that more bad things will happen, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be news when they do. After the first Indo-Pakistan War, it was likely that there would be another, but there’s an important difference between likely and certain, and the fact that the subsequent wars took place is a tragedy that cannot be dismissed as unimportant because some people predicted it beforehand.
Almost all historical events are plausible outcomes from the events that precede them, but lots of stuff in history is important. There are many outcomes possible from the current circumstances, many of them highly plausible and even probable, but that doesn’t diminish the horrors that may befall the world or the pleasures that may await us (maybe things will go well; as the non-nuclear ending to the Cold War’s string of near catastrophes shows, sometimes the predictable with hindsight answer is a happy one).
That is certainly not the case. I guess, that’s only the case if you’ve not heard of the thousands of airstrikes carried out before, Kobane etc etc.
I’d be surprised if it even gets a footnote when history is written.
A war which is itself less then a footnote in history. About as inconsequential as it gets.
And that’s kind of my whole point. Inconsequential events that aren’t worth more than a boilerplate “we’re opposed to this sort of thing” response by any US politician.
This is by far not the first Russian politician killed by Putin, or the last. And any US politicians knows as much about Russian politics, or this guy, as they do about…vaccines, or…whatever else Rand Paul is totally ignorant about (long list)
Well yeah, but they were ours and they had pretty smooth succession plans in place. (Or at least thought they did.)
Compare and contrast with some of ours who didn’t (eg Mubarak) or some who weren’t ours at all (Qaddafy) – they lashed out like rats in a trap, and the first people who got it were internal dissidents – because they were a real threat.
It’s true that the US puts out numbers about thousands of sorties, but those numbers tend to include a lot of things that aren’t airstrikes, meaning that the numbers “with at least one weapon release” are smaller. In terms of the daily strikes, I’ve not seen a post Jordan summary of the numbers, but I’m told that it’s a significant hike. Would you care to bet that the difference is less than 20%?
I agree that Kobane was important, but Mosul is dramatically more so.
I was very confused by this until your next comment.
Sure, if it’s a short history of the global century as a whole, neither Romero nor Al-Kassasbeh are big deals. To describe a day that changes the course of El Salvadoran history as a normal day in El Salvador, though, on the basis that El Salvador isn’t a big deal, is to confuse the scope of the question. If I say that the day that Susan caught Brian cheeting on her and set about divorcing him a normal day for Susan and Brian, my statement doesn’t become any less absurd because a history of their state probably wouldn’t mention either of them for any reason.
It’s certainly true that unless you care about Russia, there’s no reason to care about Nemtzov. Claire’s right that we should care about Russia if we care about international affairs, but it’s completely reasonable not to care about world affairs.
I endorsed the lack of major response about Nemtsov at CPAC, but I think that the Nemtsov killing will probably feature in the top one hundred political events of 2015, and should probably feature in the discussions of educated people who talk about more than one topical issue in a typical week. Such as Ricochetti and many CPAC attendees.
Are you confident that Putin doesn’t have smooth succession plans in place? I thought the Medvedev thing was pretty smooth. I agree that if Putin is going to go out like an African dictator, this is predictable, but I hope that that’s a pretty big if. If that’s true, this would only be an early entry in a number of horrific escalations. I’m of the view that all of those would be important.
No, I guess I dont know about his succession plans. And I would have agreed that he was more Pinochet than Mugabe – until his foreign policy started to tank their economy. I imagine that would change a lot of things, not least the support for succession plan and comfortable retirement. I think it’s reasonable. Though if I knew that, wouldn’t he have as well?