The judges who allowed same sex marriage in Iowa may lose their offices. But you know what? I still think they did the right thing. And I think doing the right thing is worth losing office for. The purpose of getting elected is not to get re-elected.

I’ve seen the claim that we have troops in 156 countries in numerous places, most recently Radley Balko’s awesome blog. But I have to take some issue with it. From my comments:

Not to [get] too deep into this, but that map of 156 countries with US troops looks very suspicious to me, and not just because their color coding is garbage — Europe is white while other countries are two tones.

I’ve looked over the CDI website and found the map source (http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/history/hst0609.pdf). Many of those 156 countries have single-digit or double-digit US personnel in them. For example, they list almost all countries in Africa, but only Djibouti has a significant presence. If you’re talking 10,000 or more, the list is Germany, Italy, UK, Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq.

What’s the comparison? Do the UK or China have similar “deployments”? Are these military personnel assigned to embassies? Maybe it’s just me, but having two military personnel stationed in Antigua does not seems like an extension of our Empire.

I don’t disagree that we should pare down our foreign involvements. But let’s have an honest debate. The US is not occupying 3/4 of the world.

I take an extremely dim view of attempts to psycho-analyze politicians. It’s tough enough opposing their policies. It’s a massive waste of time to sit back and try to figure out what motivates them.

Which brings me to the latest “conservative” stupidity. Dinesh D’Souza, who I used to like, has issued his latest ignorant screed trying to argue that Obama’s worldview comes from the father he barely knew. That’s he’s a secret Keynan marxist anti-colonialist who hates America. I’m not making this up. That’s pretty much what he says.

Ignore for the moment that D’Souza viewpoint is formed based on extremely selective reporting of various nontroversies about Obama. For example, he cites the speech — as many do — in which Obama said he believed in American exceptionalism just as Greeks and Brits believed in their exceptionalism. The Right Wing mouth foaming over this is not only weird, but stupid. They always elide the following lines where Obama vigorously trumpets American exceptionalism.

He also sites the nontroversy of Obama wanting NASA to forge international collaborations with Islamic countries, which turned out to be another overblown story. And then he turns to some selective quoting of Obama’s book to prove his point.

Even if you ignore the shitty reporting, the basic premise is garbage. Here’s Reason:

Sometimes things seem incredible because they are. Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama’s non-relationship with his father. The whole point of the book is that the author’s paternal heritage is delivered in fragments during brief and usually troubled encounters. While Obama goes on about his father’s misfortunes — many of them clearly self-inflicted — in Kenya, there is no evidence for the claim that the elder Obama bequeathed his son a coherent or even a partial political philosophy.

The book does track a foggy course through Obama’s political growth, toward one inescapable goal: Obama’s formation came through and in reaction to his mother, a New Deal leftist whose social views were slightly more advanced than those of her cohort. There’s no need to go to Kenya for the kind of indoctrination into Frantz Fanon and socialism D’Souza describes: It was widely available at Occidental and Columbia. In fact, the book’s literary interest — and possibly its biggest political misdirection — rests in Obama’s putative skepticism about the leftish consensus of the sixties.

This sort of crap is damaging. Frum, on Newt Gingrich’s disgusting repetition of D’Souza’s crap:

Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon “redistribution” and “reparations.” Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage, tighten bank regulation, and create government make-work projects it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) “a Luo tribesman.”

It is to vindicate this African tribal dream that Obama wishes to raise the taxes of upper-income taxpayers and redistribute money away from these meritorious individuals. D’Souza contends that Obama is acting to vindicate his father’s supposed dream of overthrowing the global order and ending the global domination of the white race over other peoples.

Obama’s ideas are consistent with those espoused by a long line of leftists from McGovern down. What is the point in dragging in the dad he barely knew to assert that his worldview is based on some pan-African Marxism?

It’s to make him sound sinister. Because “liberal Democrat” or “New Deal democrat” or “Illinois liberal” don’t sound nearly as sinister. In short, it’s to play the racial angle.

It’s bad enough that the Left constantly accuses Obama’s critics of being racist. Do we have to hand them this kind of ammunition to make their accusations stick?

Michael Lewis has an amazing look at what went on in Europe’s newest failed state. It’s a tale of corruption, influence-peddling, tax-evasion and populace spoiled rotten by a welfare state. Reading it, I can’t see any hope for Greece’s future.

Reading it, I’m also once again grateful that I live in this country. Greece is not unusual, it’s the norm of human history. Contempt for the rule of law, business through corruption and bribery have defined more countries than anything else. As bad a politics gets in this country, the corruption and influence peddling is small potatoes compared to what hit Greece. The Democrats may be selling us out to Big Labor and the Republicans may no clue about fiscal responsibility. But at least their honest about it.