Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Reclaiming narrative

By Fester:



James Joyner has an interesting recap of the changes that Defense Secratary Gates is imposing upon the Air Force; namely he wants the Air Force to focus on its actual mission and not on the expensive, fun and operationally less important fighter bomber things that its culture venerates and values.  The new Chief of Staff is a transport/logistics/special ops guy and the new AF Secretary is a logistics guy.  Neither of them flew fighters which is a significant break from the past.  And these are good moves on both an operational level and a budgetary level.  However I have to disagree with James' hope for Gate's future career in a potential Obama administration:

Unfortunately, time�s running out on Gates, unless he�s kept on by the next administration.

The problem is optics.  A functioning and healthy democracy needs multiple parties that are seen as credible on defense policy.  The liberals and Democrats ceded defense thinking and policy to conservatives and Republicans for most of my life and implicitly accepted the framing that Democrats can not and should not be trusted on national defense policy.  Bill Clinton reinforced this frame by bringing in Republican Bill Cohen as his SecDef in his second term. 



The Republican defense policy bench is split between the crazies, nationalists, neocons, pragmatists and realists.  Gates belongs to the combined pragamatist/realist faction.  This is a good thing and he has done good work.  And if McCain was to win the general election, I hope that Gates would be the SecDef.



However the Repbulican foreign and defense policy establishment is bundled with the Republican Party and the colossal screw-ups of Iraq and the failures in Afghanistan.  Obama selecting Gates as SecDef implicitly concedes that even with these expensive and unpopular failures, Republicans are still superior to Democrats on national security issues.    And that is not acceptable.  I have no problem with Obama creating a cabinet with Republicans in it; but those Republicans should stay in second and third tier departments or on special assignments such as nuclear non-proliferation work if possible, but not at one of the three premier posts (AG, SecState, SecDef).   



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

1 comment:

  1. Jim Et AlJune 11, 2008 at 6:56 AM

    I whole heartedly agree that Gates should go for the important reasons that you mentioned but also to make certain that the moles implanted by Rummy are dug up and disposed of in the proper manner. Nothing worse than having some agenda driven saboteur monkey wrenching the clean break...

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)