Former GOP Senator Alan Simpson tells Fareed Zakaria that Republicans “like to give the saliva test of purity and then they lose and then they just bitch for four years. It’s an amazing party.”
ZAKARIA: Senator, when I was growing up and coming of age, I remember you were thought of as a pretty conservative guy. I mean you were representing Wyoming, after all. And to listen to you now, you sound like a moderate. Have you changed or has the Republican Party changed?
SIMPSON: Well, I think the Republican Party changed. But where - where - what happened with me is, I always felt that abortion is a hideous and terrible thing.
Let’s all admit that. But it’s a deeply intimate and personal decision. Here’s a party that believes in government out of your lives, the precious right of privacy and the right to be left alone. Well, then what are you doing in this issue? Partial birth abortion is not an emotional issue, it’s a medical issue. It’s to free the birth canal for a - hopefully, a later child. I mean it’s madness.
Gay-lesbian issues, we all have someone we know or love who’s gay or lesbian. What the hell is this all about? Madness. And if we’re going to get trapped in that we’re headed for some more strife.
Frank Gehry Really, Really Regrets His Guest Appearance on The Simpsons:
FAREED ZAKARIA: So this – the famous story that you took a piece of paper and crumpled it and looked at it and that was the Disney Hall in L.A.
GEHRY: But that’s a famous story because the Simpsons had me do that.
ZAKARIA: But in fact, it was a long, long -
GEHRY: No, no, no, no. That was just a fun – fun thing. But it has – it has haunted me. People do – who’ve seen “The Simpson’s” believe it.
Fareed Zakaria speaks with Sharif El-Gamal, the real estate developer who came up with the idea of the “Ground Zero mosque”:
Fareed Zakaria: When did you realize that this was turning into a controversy? What was the first inkling?
Sharif El-Gamal: Well, in May of last year, we voluntarily at that point when we finished our road trip with all the local elected officials, decided voluntarily to go into the community board. And we went into the community board voluntarily and shared with them this idea of building a community center. And on that first meeting, 16 people voted unanimously in favor of this project and these are all non-Muslim people, and they were excited that Muslims were going to build a community center in Lower Manhattan to serve all – all New Yorkers and all of Lower Manhattan, which was the intention behind this project.
We then followed that up with another full board meeting of 50. And when we went into that room, you know, at that next community board meeting, I invited my wife down to come. And I got there a few minutes after her and she was just in tears. And when I saw her in tears, I said what happened? And she goes, Sharif, you’re not going to believe what’s going on in that room. The people thought that I came here to protest against the Muslims, because they didn’t realize that she was a Muslim because we don’t fit whatever stereotype people have of Muslims. And when -
Fareed Zakaria: What was going on in that room?
Sharif El-Gamal: When I walked into that room, there was close to 700 people that were protesting what we were doing, and for the first time in my life – I – I had never seen, I’d never been discriminated against. I’d never seen that hate or that fear or that ignorance. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life, and I was – I was scared.
And at that point, we made a commitment – you know, personally, I made a commitment that I would do whatever it took as a – as a businessman, as a human being to make this project a reality.
And, you know, this past year for me has really been about listening, has really been about listening and – and going back to basics and trying to understand that – that there’s so much work ahead of us, that there’s so much misconceptions about who we are as Muslims, what our faith, what our practice, what our belief system is. Criminals have stolen our identity almost in a way, and they’ve defaced our – our faith.
Fareed Zakaria: So you got out – get out of that room with the 700 angry people. And at that point, it just snowballs and it gets latched on to by all kinds of political figures. Were you – were you prepared for that kind of an onslaught?
Sharif El-Gamal: No, no. I’m a New Yorker. This is my city, and all we wanted to do was we wanted to build a facility that is based on who we are as Muslims, as Americans to give back to our city, to create jobs, to create hundreds of construction jobs, to create hundreds of full-time jobs once the facility is open, to create over 500 part-time jobs. We were thinking of a way of revitalizing our neighborhood, creating, stimulating our economy, and providing services to our neighbors.
“Conservatism is true.” That’s what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will’s basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.
Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.
Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?
Video version here.
Iceland Rewrites Their Constitution Using Suggestions Through Twitter:
Fareed Zakaria spoke today on his CNN show about how he was intrigued by Iceland’s decision to throw out their Constitution and create a new governing document for the nation. Even more exciting and unique, was Iceland’s decision to accept suggestions for the new Constitution through social media applications like Twitter and Facebook, from all of its 320,000 citizens.
Zakaria was not only impressed with the transparency of the process, but the willingness to engage in the process at all. By contrast, in America, Zakaria noted “any talk of revising or revisiting the American Constitution is of course seen as heresy.” Yet Zakaria believed our Constitution could use some modernizing, particularly Amendments addressing the Electoral College and the unfairly disproportionate representation of Senators.
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.”
Tom Shales must still be having difficulty getting laid if he’s getting this desperate:
Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable “In Memoriam” segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of “all of those who died in war” in that period. Did she mean suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?
Only if you’re Trig, I suppose. I know it’s not really the American way, but God forbid we mourn all loss of life. Empathy, after all, makes you a Nazi (according to Glenn Beck, I mean). Sullivan and Krugman were among those who pointed out Shales’ back-asswards logic back in March, although I thought Glenn Greenwald put it best:
So here we finally have a prominent journalist with a half-Persian background — in an extremely homogenized media culture which steadfastly excludes from Middle Eastern coverage voices from that region — and her national origin is immediately cited as a means of questioning her journalistic objectivity and even opposing her as a choice to host This Week (can someone from Iran with an Iranian father possibly be objective???). Could the double standard here be any more obvious or unpleasant?
Wolf Blitzer is Jewish, a former AIPAC official, and — to use Shales’ smear-campaign formulation — has frequently “been accused” of pro-Israel bias; should CNN bar him from covering those issues? David Gregory is Jewish, “studies Jewish texts with a top Jewish educator in Washington,” and has conducted extremely sycophantic interviews with Israel officials. Should his background be cited as evidence of his pro-Israel bias? The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is routinely cited as one of America’s most authoritative sources on the Middle East, notwithstanding numerous accusations of pro-Israel bias and, even more so, his choice to go enlist in the IDF and work in an Israeli prison where Palestinians are encaged; do those actions (far beyond his mere ethnicity) call into question his objectivity as a journalist such that The Atlantic should bar him from writing about that region? Jake Tapper — who Shales suggests as an alternative to Amanpour and who I also previously praised as a choice — is Jewish; does that raise questions about his objectivity where Israel is concerned?
Long live Christiane, I say. I suppose if Shales wants to continue pandering to the tea-baggers but covering up his lack of luck with the ladies, he’ll be assailing Fareed Zakaria next.
“Well, hey, I’m an economist, right? They don’t call it the dismal science for nothing.”
Fareed Zakaria on Iran.Watch this. now.
“It’s possible, but not likely.”
I stayed up until three or so on Frday night/Saturday morning finishing Fareed’s book. My quick-capsule review would be that it’s an incredibly easy read (the type felt large, so the pages sort of flew by) and Zakaria’s well-argued “rise of the rest” concept struck me as feeling incredibly more optimistic than the usual sky-is-falling, America-in-decline fare.
From the “When the hell did I buy this?” archives, I’ve decided that this will be one of the books I get through next weekend when I’m in Oregon (Illinois, not the west coast … unfortunately).
“Some of us—especially those under 60—have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books. Well, this is it. We’re now living history, suffering one of the greatest financial panics of all time. It compares with the big ones—1907, 1929—and we cannot yet know its full consequences for the financial system, the economy or society as a whole.”
“This crisis should put an end to false debates about government versus markets. Governments create markets, and markets can exist only with regulation. If you want to be truly free of regulation, try Haiti or Somalia. The real trick is to craft good regulations that allow markets to work well. No regulatory structure will be perfect, none will eliminate risk, nor should they. At best they can tame the wildest gyrations of the market economy while maintaining its efficiency.”
Fareed Zakaria, Big Government to the Rescue | Newsweek.com (via squashed)
This is a perfect example of my justified “man-crush” on Fareed.
