Obsidian Wings

"We Will Bring Our Troops Home"

by hilzoy

I find it hard to express how happy this makes me:

"Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

As we carry out this drawdown, my highest priority will be the safety and security of our troops and civilians in Iraq. We will proceed carefully, and I will consult closely with my military commanders on the ground and with the Iraqi government. There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments. But our enemies should be left with no doubt: this plan gives our military the forces and the flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners, and to succeed.

After we remove our combat brigades, our mission will change from combat to supporting the Iraqi government and its Security Forces as they take the absolute lead in securing their country. As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping, and advising Iraqi Security Forces as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35-50,000 U.S. troops.

Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned."

It's worth reading the speech in its entirety, because there are other very good things in it. President Obama addressed the people of Iraq directly, and I thought that both what he said and the fact that he spoke to them were very good. I was moved by his words to the men and women who have served in Iraq, and by this promise: "You and your families have done your duty - now a grateful nation must do ours." I was also very glad that he mentioned the nearly five million Iraqi refugees:

"Diplomacy and assistance is also required to help the millions of displaced Iraqis. These men, women and children are a living consequence of this war and a challenge to stability in the region, and they must become a part of Iraq’s reconciliation and recovery. America has a strategic interest – and a moral responsibility – to act."

But the announcement of a date certain for the withdrawal both of combat troops and of all troops means more to me than anything. This horrible mistake of a war has cost so many people so much. It should never have been started. It will not be over for the Iraqis in 2011. But it will, at last, be over for us.

Sometimes a cigar is only a cig .... ahh, what the hell, it's penises all the way

by von

Look, I can be sensitive -- perhaps oversensitive -- when it comes to race.  I can also be stunningly obtuse.  Still, at the risk of being obtuse here, I don't get Professor Althouse's take on Bobby Jindal's prime-time meltdown.  Indeed, though the following bit of Alhousia may be inspired, it's more likely completely insane:

3. Comparing Jindal to Kenneth of "30 Rock" is not a nice indicator of Americans' ability to see beyond skin color. Quite the opposite! Instinctively repainting him white is — I would say — presumptively racial. To strip away his racial identity — to stereotype him as an especially white white man — is a powerful racial move. This is not nice at all. I would really like to know what makes white people so sure they are being nice about racial things. This confidence in niceness is misplaced, yet very very common....

What the hell?  Could it be that comparing Jindal to Kenneth of "30 Rock" is neither colorblind nor "presumptively racial"?   Yes, Jindal and Kenneth are of different races.  Good eyes.  But that's not remotely relevant to any issue here.  We're not casting Othello.  There are no larger backstories or themes for this joke.  Race is present; it's always present.  But that doesn't mean that every joke or comparison involving folks of different races must either be colorblind or presumptively racial.  Whatever "power[]" this move against Jindal has, that power has nothing to do with Jindal's or Kenneth's race.

There may also be something of a generational thing here.  (I'm Gen-X; I'll peg Althouse as late boomer or Jones.)  A lot of Althouse's discussion seems lost in a kind of critical studies exercise that now seems quaint and/or focuses on the Indian-as-nerd-stereotype.  If critical studies had a moment of relevance outside of academia, that moment is slipping.  And Indian-as-nerd is definitely a stereotype, but it isn't the first racial stereotype that leaps to my mind vis-a-vis Indians.  Maybe I just hang around a different group of folks from the subcontinent -- hey, it's a big place! -- but my initial stereotypes were of the I-A-P (Indian American Princess), stoners, and the Patels (hotel owners).  And none of these stereotypes have ever come to mind when I think about Jindal.  He doesn't even strike me as a nerd.  Student council president, maybe, but not nerd.

Yeah, that doesn't exactly make me the paradigm of post-racialism.  I'm trying.  But the "nerd" stereotype was a distant fourth for me .... undoubtedly contributing to yet another episode of "What the heck is Ann Althouse thinking?"

p.s.  Yes, I know Althouse engages in what she sometimes calls blogging as performance art.  ("Look at me!  I'm provocative!")  Don't know if she's doing that here and don't care.  To be an interesting provocateur, she has to accept that her provocations will be taken at face value.

p.p.s.  I'd say that it's the eager-student-council-president aspects of Kenneth that really resonate with Jindal, rather than any nerd qua nerd.

Michele Bachman: Keeping It Real

by hilzoy

From CNN, via TPMDC:

"As he concluded his remarks, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann -- the event's moderator -- told Steele he was "da man."

“Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man,” she said."

Dat Michele Bachmann is sho' nuff hep to da black man's lingo. She down with Malcolm and the Panthers. Any moment now she gwine get wise to da special secret code words like 'bling' and 'bitch' and 'chill' and 'whack'. 

She keep conversatin like dis, black folks gwine realize dat Barack Obama ain't the only hep cat on da scene.

Now That's What I Call Toxic!

by hilzoy

During the past year or so, I have sometimes wondered exactly how toxic all those toxic assets really are. It's hard to tell, since they differ from one another, and are not traded that often. However, the Financial Times (h/t) has some answers:

"In recent weeks, bankers at places such as JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia have been quietly sifting data trying to ascertain what has happened to those swathes of troubled CDO of ABS. [Ed.: collateralised debt obligations of asset-backed securities.]

The conclusions are stunning. From late 2005 to the middle of 2007, around $450bn of CDO of ABS were issued, of which about one third were created from risky mortgage-backed bonds (known as mezzanine CDO of ABS) and much of the rest from safer tranches (high grade CDO of ABS.)

Out of that pile, around $305bn of the CDOs are now in a formal state of default, with the CDOs underwritten by Merrill Lynch accounting for the biggest pile of defaulted assets, followed by UBS and Citi.

The real shocker, though, is what has happened after those defaults. JPMorgan estimates that $102bn of CDOs has already been liquidated. The average recovery rate for super-senior tranches of debt – or the stuff that was supposed to be so ultra safe that it always carried a triple A tag – has been 32 per cent for the high grade CDOs. With mezzanine CDO’s, though, recovery rates on those AAA assets have been a mere 5 per cent.

I dare say this might be an extreme case. The subprime loans extended in 2006 and 2007 have suffered particularly high default rates and the CDOs that have already been liquidated are presumably the very worst of the pack.

Even so, I would hazard a guess that this is easily the worst outcome for any assets that have ever carried a “triple A” stamp. No wonder so many investors are now so utterly cynical about anything that bankers or rating agencies might say these days."

If I'm reading this right, within four years of being issued, two thirds of these CDOs are in default, and their recovery rates are very, very low. That's just staggering. It's actually hard to understand how the banks managed to do this badly: you'd think they could have done better hiring people off the street and paying them to put all those nice little loan documents into piles at random, or tossing mortgages down the stairs and bundling them based on how they landed. They certainly didn't need to hire people with advanced math degrees and pay them seven- or eight-figure salaries to get these kinds of results.

And how about those ratings agencies? They would have done a better job using a Magic 8-Ball to rate the CDOs. ("Signs point to junk!") I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain.

The column ends with a very important observation:

"Those American officials who are implementing flashy new “stress tests” of banks would do well to take note."

Word.

Took You for Granted, I Thought that You Needed Me More

by Eric Martin

One of my favorite up and coming analysts, Michael Hanna, really drives home the points I was trying to make in a recent post on the tendency on the part of US analysts (and leaders) to ignore the constraints of the SOFA, and Iraqi public opinion,when discussing possible timelines for withdrawal.  As if the latter two facets of the story are ancillary concerns, if that.

With President Obama likely to announce a 19-month timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in the coming days, debate over the form, sequencing, and extent of the withdrawal has gathered momentum. But much of the discussion is being conducted from a Washington-centric perspective that ignores how radically the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed by President Bush late last year, has altered the landscape for U.S. military forces operating in Iraq.

As part of the SOFA, the United States is required to withdraw its military forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and from the country entirely by the end of 2011. Though some critics think this timeline is too fast, there is a good chance that the U.S. may be forced to withdraw even sooner: In order to coax reticent parliamentarians into approving the agreement, the Maliki government has agreed to hold a national referendum in July of this year to ratify the SOFA. If the SOFA fails to pass, the United States would have just one year to withdraw all its military forces from Iraq.

Beyond forcing an expedited withdrawal, a failed referendum would likely cause even U.S. allies among Iraqi politicians to ratchet up the level of nationalist demagoguery against the U.S. military presence to position themselves for their parliamentary campaigns. In such a heated atmosphere, insurgents could also prove more likely to step up their activity against withdrawing U.S. troops, radicalizing the environment for parliamentary elections and further complicating the redeployment of U.S. troops. Whether or not a future U.S.-Iraqi military relationship is advisable beyond the terms of the SOFA, such a scenario would likely preclude the Iraqi government from seeking support for it. Opponents of the United States would also frame a withdrawal under these circumstances as a repudiation of the United States and a defeat for U.S. policy in the region.

Further, the Obama administration would be making a mistake were it to delay all but a nominal withdrawal of troops until after the December elections - as alluded to in this New York Times piece from today.  Hanna explains why:

In this context, significant drawdowns in upcoming months will become a litmus test for the credibility and seriousness of the Obama administration in respecting public commitments to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. While the exact timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces is less important, if no significant redeployments occur prior to the national referendum, Iraqi public opinion could very well conclude that Washington is determined to maintain a significant military presence in Iraq regardless of the public pronouncements and treaty obligations to the contrary.

Better that the U.S. begin withdrawal now, on its own terms--and in the process, enhance the chances that the SOFA will not be rejected by the Iraqi people. At the same time, President Obama would project an unmistakable message to the Arab world that the United States is serious in recalibrating the nature of its engagement with the region.

In some quarters, it is widely assumed that Iraqis' rhetorical opposition to the U.S. military presence belies a begrudging acceptance of U.S. troops as the price of preserving recent security gains. However, gambling on Iraqi support for a continuing foreign military presence would seem to be a risky policy-planning approach that could create the conditions for a hasty withdrawal on highly unfavorable terms.

On these matters, I'll take Hanna over O'Hanlon and Pollack any day of the week.

Al-Marri Will Face Trial

by hilzoy

Good news:

"Federal prosecutors are preparing to charge Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri with providing material support to al-Qaeda terrorists in a groundbreaking move that would put the alleged sleeper agent under the jurisdiction of the U.S. court system, according to sources familiar with the issue.

Indicting Marri in a federal court marks a significant change from the policies of the Bush administration, which had argued that al-Marri should be tried in a military tribunal proceeding and that he could not use American courts to contest his legal status.

Marri is the last remaining "enemy combatant" in the United States and has spent 5 1/2 years in a military brig in South Carolina. The criminal charges, which sources said also could include conspiracy, will be among the most early and critical signals about the Obama administration's approach to handling alleged terrorism suspects."

One more person moved out of legal limbo and into our normal court system. One less person about whom people could argue that he somehow must be tried under a whole new legal system, those that have served us well for over two centuries being somehow inadequate to his case. And one less blot on our commitment to the rule of law. 

***

UPDATE: Jane Mayer reports that al-Marri has been indicted, and adds:

"An indictment would signal a major shift in legal policy from the Bush years. It would also fulfill President Obama’s campaign pledge to restore traditional American legal practices by treating terror suspects as common criminals, rather than stripping them of standard legal rights and classifying them neither as criminal defendants nor prisoners of war."

On January 20, We Shall Commence The Bed For Scraping

by von

I disagree with President Obama on a great many things.  I justified my vote for Obama in the last election in part because I thought he would be unwilling - and perhaps unable - to deviate from a McCainesque strategy in Iraq.  Indeed, I thought that Obama's and McCain's plans for Iraq would be functionally identical (July 21, 2008):

The real story is simpler but less evident.  The real story is that viewpoints on Iraq are converging.  Obama and McCain have different talking points and different emphases, but they are saying essentially the same thing -- and it's nearly the same as Maliki's most recent position [at the time, that US troops need to be out of the country in 2010, but could stay longer if needed].

....

At bottom, is "yes, but" really different from "but, yes"?  Are these contrary positions, or  variations on the same theme?  Seems to me the latter. As Commentator Model 62 notes, "Everybody's finally on board with the ISG Report." 

Today, I got some confirmation that maybe, just maybe, my bet on Obama will pay off.  Andrew Sullivan -- who was betting the other way -- writes of the development:

Surprise! There's an ominous detail in the 19-month Iraq withdrawal plan that the president is apparently signing off on this week. Withdrawal will barely happen at all this year, as US troops become a kind of last-resort guarantor of order until the December elections. Today, we get the now regular op-edfrom O'Hanlon and Pollack telling us that success is just around the corner but that we have "no choice" but to stay for the indefinite future. Plus: Obama will keep up to 50,000 troops in Iraq for ever anyway, so the empire will not end, as it never does.

....

He is ramping up the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he is not moving any serious forces out of Iraq for a year; Iraq's economy is crumbling again because it has no economy but oil; the Kurdish question is alive again; leading Iraqi politicians are suspected of plotting murder and mayhem, and someone is protecting them. Well: just look at what the Brits had to deal with in the 1920s and 1930s. But at least they got the Iraqis to shoulder some of the financial burdens. If the British analogy holds, the US will be in Iraq until 2016 at the earliest. Or until economic collapse makes withdrawal not a matter of choice.

I'm only slightly more sanguine than Sullivan regarding our chances in Iraq.  I think that there's more progress in Iraq than Sullivan gives credit for, not the least of which is another successful election.  On the other hand, I'm no longer measuring success by ... umm ... whether we are successful.  Yes, one side effect of Rumsfeldian incompetence is circumlocution:  one can now have success without success.  Huzzah and all that.  I'm not hoping to "win" in Iraq by leaving troops there longer.  If we do, great.  But I'll be happy if we just stave off catastrophic failure. 

Yup, I'll take bad over worse -- particularly when bad is the best on offer.

(Source for title.)

UPDATE:  Perhaps I'm wrong.  But I'm willing to be, SOFA or not, there will be US troops in Iraq after 2011.  Call them advisors, trainers, contracters, whatever .... they will be there.

More Audaciousness

by publius

The good news is that it's pretty much official -- health care reform is ON this year.  Obama is carving out a big chunk of money for it -- and we wouldn't be reading these stories if they weren't serious about it.

There will of course be many posts to come as that debate unfolds.  But what's fascinating to me is how politically ambitious the proposed funding allocation is.  He's not merely trying to pay for health care -- he's trying to drive a stake through the heart of the Reagan coalition by isolating the wealthy.

I first saw this argument in the excellent NYT Magazine article by David Leonhardt (which I posted on a few months ago).  Essentially, Leonhardt argues that "Obamanomics" aims to break the Reagan coalition by severing the rich from the lower-income classes.  To achieve this goal, Obama is cutting taxes for everyone but the top 5%, and then using those tax hikes to pay for ambitious progressive legislation.  Here's Leonhardt:

Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.

To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit.

And that's exactly what he's doing here with the proposed health care funding.  Obama is pushing for national health care reform -- the crown jewel of the progressive legislative agenda -- while simultaneously trying to break down the modern political coalitions that Nixon and Reagan built.

This guy is swinging for the fences -- and swinging hard.

A Change Of Pace

by hilzoy

Yesterday, the House passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, which would make it illegal to "import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce" any nonhuman primate. (Humans are covered by the 13th Amendment.) This is one of those small-bore but really, really good bills that I've been rooting for for years. I wrote about it back in 2005; since I rather like my original post, here's a compressed and updated version, rather than a whole new one.

Owning primates as pets is a bad idea. Unlike dogs and cats, who have had thousands of years to adapt to us, nonhuman primates have the psyches they need to survive in a jungle or on a savannah, not in a human home. Most people buy them when they are cute little babies. At this point, like infants of most (mammalian) species, they are tractable and submissive. However, this (predictably) doesn't last. When they hit puberty, many of them become aggressive, and try to start dominance fights with members of what they think of as their pack (i.e., your household.) Sometimes they start with the pack's weakest members (i.e., your children.) Since most apes and monkeys are very strong, and have vicious bites, this is not pleasant.

Moreover, they are agile, athletic, clever, inquisitive, and have opposable thumbs. As someone who has owned cats and dogs, I have often been very grateful that they had neither the intelligence nor the opposable thumbs required to do things like open cupboards and turn doorknobs. Monkeys do. And they love to tear things apart for fun -- the contents of your pantry, your tax files, your clothes, the curtains, whatever. From the owner of a Capuchin monkey, which is a small primate:

"You see, monkeys are very smart. He can unlock windows and would open them all of the time, which is fine with the bars but not fine for my electric bill. So I rigged them shut. Well, he figured that out and broke the windows completely. So I had to get a screened-in patio that cost me 11 grand so that the mosquitoes would not infest his room and my house. The electric bill stays at a ridiculous rate.
He managed to pick at the walls enough until he could get his hands into it and then eventually tore giant holes around his room. He pulled out all of the insulation and the wiring. I had to contain him for a week while construction workers came in to rebuild the walls with a cement board, which, fortunately, he hasn’t been able to destroy yet."

More fun: when you're up in the trees, you don't need to care where you pee, so most nonhuman primates don't. You can put diapers on them, but they can take them off again. Consider the implications for a monkey-owner's carpeting, furniture, etc. Consider the fact that almost every animal gets diarrhea sometimes. Yuck. 

Third, they are not very trainable. Lots of people confuse intelligence with tractability, but the two are very different. Apes and monkeys are smart, but not tractable, except when they are young. Most of the chimps you see on TV are (in chimp terms) young children; by the time they get anywhere near adolescence, they are generally unusable as performers, since (understandably) they are more concerned with things like establishing dominance over other primates than with pleasing us.

For these reasons, nonhuman primates make really, really bad pets. They are destructive and at times vicious, and, as I said, they bite hard. As a result, most people who own them end up keeping them in cages. This is really dreadful for very intelligent, very social, emotionally complicated animals. And it's even worse when you consider that nonhuman primates tend to live from fifteen to thirty years; chimps in captivity live until around sixty. That's a very long time to be in prison.

Besides that, they are also a public health hazard. As I said earlier, primates bite:

"It is not reasonable to expect that you will never be bitten by any monkey. The relatively docile youngster eventually turns from play-aggression to the serious aggression of an adult. Proper management techniques go a long ways in coping. The larger the monkey, generally speaking, the bigger the problem. Yet it is hard to prepare someone for the onslaught of mature aggression in a monkey. Have you ever seen a rabid dog in the throes of an attack--the pursuit of an angry bull in a bull ring, the vicious ripping power of a lion's canine teeth? A mature monkey, even one who was hand-raised, can attack a friend or stranger with equal vengeance. An angry monkey has the cunning and dexterity to leap into the air and accurately take a swipe an the human eye, or to bite the human body in the most vulnerable places, the jugular vein, the veins of the wrists, the nerve-filled fingers of the hand. It almost takes the discipline of a professional trainer to deal with the personalities of some individual monkeys in a constructive way as they mature."

This is a danger to members of one's household, and to anyone a primate encounters if he or she escapes, since biting is one of their normal reactions to stress. (And they are very good at escaping. Here's a partial list of incidents involving escaped primates. And here's an article on someone who was attacked by chimps a few years back, with a picture of what remains of his face over sixty surgeries later.) 

Besides the bites themselves, monkeys and apes also carry diseases. Since they are a lot more like us than cats or dogs are, they are susceptible to many more human diseases, and we are susceptible to more of theirs. Here is an article on all the diseases one can get from nonhuman primates, including ebola, Marburg, monkeypox, viral hepatitis and all sorts of delightful things. One that's particularly worth noting is Herpes B, which is widespread in many species of macaques. They tend to be asymptomatic, but when humans get Herpes B, they usually die. (And ask yourself this: how would a human doctor even know to look for a disease normally found only in macaques?)

So, to summarize: owning nonhuman primates as pets is bad for the owner, really bad for the primate, and bad for public health. Bad, bad, bad. And what do you do with your pet primate once you've decided you don't want to care for him or her any more? If you're lucky, you can find a sanctuary that takes them in, but there are very few of these, and they are generally full. You certainly can't reintroduce them into the wild after bringing them up as a sort of peculiar and hairy human child and expect good results. Most often, people either keep them in cages for the duration, abandon them, or euthanize them. All told, it's a sad, sad story.

Which is why the fact that the House passed this bill is a very, very good thing. The Humane Society reports that Sens. Boxer and Vitter plan to introduce it in the Senate soon. Write to your Senators and ask them to support it.

***

Postscript: Does anyone have any idea why Democrats voted for this bill 247-2, while Republicans voted against it 76-93? I didn't realize that this was a partisan issue.

Oscillate Mildly (at least)

by Eric Martin

Even frickin' David Frum gets it (via):

A federal bank takeover is a bad thing obviously. I wonder though if we conservatives understand clearly enough why it is a bad thing. It’s not because we are living through an enactment of the early chapters of Atlas Shrugged. It’s because the banks are collapsing. Obama, Pelosi, et al are big-spending, high-taxing liberals. They are not socialists. They are no more eager to own these banks than the first President Bush was to own the savings and loan industry – in both cases, federal ownership was a final recourse after a terrible failure. And it was on our watch, not Obama’s, that this failure began. Our refusal to take notice of this obvious fact may excite the Republican faithful. But it is doing tremendous damage to our ability to respond effectively to the crisis.

The problem with the modern GOP is that it takes an absolutist position on the role of government in terms of providing services to the people: government is the problem, and never the solution.  Bobby Jindal even went as far as to critique disaster prevention provisions in his rebuttal last night!  The lesson from Katrina being, according to him, that we can't expect the government to perform such functions.

Democrats, at least the modern variation thereof, do not take the inverse position, however: that government is always the solution in every context.  Quite the opposite.  The modern Democratic Party (especially since Clinton) crafts policies under the presumption that the private sector works best in most settings.  The Dems are rather corporate friendly - with a healthy appreciation for free trade, tax cuts and other big money items.

This is a huge advantage: Because the Democrats aren't tied to an absolutist ideology with respect to the public/private dichotomy, they can pick and choose which approaches work best in different contexts: private sector in most instances, public sector for health insurance, social security, education, environmental protection, disaster prevention, etc.  The GOP, on the other hand, can't even conceive of a situation - such as the provision of health insurance - in which free market incentives lead to less than ideal outcomes in terms of providing health care to individuals (insurance companies look to limit coverage and reimbursement to their customers because such expenditures impact the bottom line).  Instead, we get the simplistic suggestions that the panacea known in the abstract as "the market" will somehow produce the ideal outcome. 

Similarly, most Republicans (save the heretics) can't appreciate the fact that - as Hilzoy pointed out - while pre-privatization of the failing banks may be a government solution, it's one that is based on, and one that seeks to preserve, market principles.  At least, more so than the other proposed government solution that the GOP has rallied behind: straight taxpayer subsidies. 

With this in mind, it would seem that the GOP's fortunes do not hinge on its ability to re-brand its rigid, inefficient approach.  They'd be better off accepting the fact that their simplistic worldview can lead them to some wrongheaded, counterproductive and ineffective policy proposals and, then, you know, tinker a little. 

[UPDATE: Even frickin' David Brooks gets it:

[For Jindal] to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism. It's just not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is. There's an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he's making that case. I think it's insane, and I just think it's a disaster for the party. I just think it's unfortunate right now.

Most.]